Fred Leslie Edward Shreves appeared Wednesday in Clark County Superior Court on suspicion of second-degree rape. His bail was set at $60,000. An arraignment hearing is scheduled for Feb. 10.
A Vancouver Police Department detective began re-examining the then-17-year-old case in March after the test kit was resubmitted due to advances in DNA testing, according to an affidavit of probable cause.
The kit was originally tested at a Washington state lab and semen was detected, but no DNA matches were found. That changed in February, when swabs were tested and resulted in a match to Shreves, according to the affidavit.
Police reports taken at the time say the 17-year-old victim reported being sexually assaulted while attending a high school party at an unknown residence in Vancouver with some friends. She did not know many of the people there, she said.
She and others drank alcohol. She fell asleep but woke up and ran to the bathroom to vomit. She fell unconscious once more and was awoken by someone sexually assaulting her, according to the police report.
The morning after the assault, the girl told two friends and her mother she’d been raped. Her mother took her to a hospital to have an exam. At that time, the victim told an officer she believed a male named “Fred” raped her, based on sexual comments he’d made at the party, the police report says.
The case was assigned to a detective but “later suspended based on the initial lab results and (the detective’s) inability to contact” the victim, court records state.
Reached by phone in March, the victim told police that as a teenager she was scared about the situation and other students finding out what happened. She said she was unaware anything could still be done about the rape and decided to help in prosecuting the person responsible, according to the affidavit.
Detectives also recently contacted a friend of the victim who corroborated her initial account to police, court records say.
When the detective switched his efforts to tracking down Shreves, he discovered Shreves was a convicted felon who was already in custody at the Clark County Jail for a still-pending 2019 child rape case. Shreves had been released pending trial in the case, but he’s since been taken back into cu
