Doug Schneider

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Green Bay police didn't charge him with second rape because he'd been sentenced in another attack

Among crimes where Allen was a suspect: Rape in Ashwaubenon, killing of a teenager in North Carolina

Allen's friends told police he was a "power-hitter" with a voracious appetite for crack cocaine



While Steven Avery sat in prison for a 1985 rape he didn't commit, the real rapist remained free — and police say he likely committed multiple assaults on women in the Green Bay area.

A city police captain said a brutal knife attack and sexual assault in 1993 was almost certainly the work of Gregory Allen, then 39. DNA tests would ultimately link Allen to the attack that sent Avery to prison for 18 years. Avery was exonerated in 2003.

Related: 'Making a Murderer' coverage, archived stories, more

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The 1993 rape on South Platten Street "was almost identical" to a 1995 assault for which Allen was sent to prison, Capt. Jim Runge said. The rapist entered the home on Green Bay's west side through a window in the middle of the night, terrorizing his victim and threatening harm if she looked at his face or called for help. Police records show Allen lived on South Fisk Street at the time, just blocks from the woman's home.

"Investigators concluded that the subject who attacked (the Platten Street victim) was Gregory Allen," Runge said this week.

He said investigators reached that conclusion after Allen had been convicted in 1996 for another middle-of-the-night attack on a west-side woman.

But police, after consulting with the victim, didn't seek charges in the 1993 attack because Allen had already been sentenced to 60 years in prison, Runge said. Allen is eligible for parole this year.

In addition to the Platten Street rape, nobody was charged in two other incidents that bear similarities to other crimes by Allen. A USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin review of files maintained by the Brown County District Attorney's office found that local police detectives also looked at Allen in connection with these attacks:

►June 7, 1994: A teenage girl was in a driveway in the 900 block of Green Bay's Langlade Street at 2:37 a.m. when a man emerged from the shadows, exposed himself and attacked her. She fought off the man, burning him with a cigarette.

"It sounds like (Allen)," Runge said. "That's how he did his thing."

That house is less than two miles from the Green Bay business where Allen worked. It is within blocks of the house where he would commit the 1995 rape that would send him to prison.

►Oct. 15, 1995: A man broke into a home in the 2000 block of South Broadway in Ashwaubenon about 3 a.m. Over the next two hours, he repeatedly raped a woman who had been asleep in the home, telling her "Don't look at my face or I'll kill you."

The victim said the rapist spoke with a southern accent — something that Allen's acquaintances said he did at times. He claimed to have been watching the woman for several years.

Ashwaubenon Public Safety Investigator Diana Lawler said she could not discuss the case. She referred questions to Capt. Jody Crocker, who was out of the office.

District Attorney David Lasee said he could not be certain if Allen had been a prime suspect in the case.

Allen's name is back in the headlines because of his connection to the case of Avery, the Manitowoc County man who went to prison for a brutal 1985 attack on a jogger on the Lake Michigan shoreline near Two Rivers. Avery's imprisonment, exoneration and subsequent arrest for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach was the subject of the blockbuster Netflix documentary, "Making a Murderer."

A key element of the documentary is that Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department officials apparently ignored information that a criminal suspect had told police he had committed an assault in Manitowoc County, but "someone else was in jail for it."

The information, in a 1995 phone call from a detective in Brown County, referred to the Avery conviction. The suspect was likely Gregory Allen.

The file at the DA's office does not make reference to that call. Manitowoc County Sheriff's Sgt. Andrew Colborn briefly documented it — but not until September 2003, the day after Avery was released from prison for the 1985 rape for which Allen avoided prosecution. Colborn wrote that he gave the caller the telephone number of a Manitowoc County detective, and might have tried to transfer the call.

Other hints that Allen might have been a suspect were ignored, according to Penny Beerntsen, the survivor of the Manitowoc County rape. Beerntsen, who identified Avery as her attacker from a photo lineup that did not include a picture of Allen, has since become a vocal advocate for legislation designed to prevent wrongful convictions.

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin attempted to contact Beerntsen through her attorney, but she did not respond. But in an essay published in January by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit group that studies the criminal justice system, Beerntsen wrote that Manitowoc police called her a few weeks after the attack and said they "had another suspect in mind."

"They didn’t give me a name, but it turns out it was Gregory Allen," wrote Beerntsen, now 67. "I hung up and I called the sheriff and said, 'What’s this about another suspect?' I was told, 'Do not talk to the police department, it will only confuse you."

Allen, it turns out, had tried to sexually assault another woman in Manitowoc County, almost two years to the day before the Beerntsen rape. The intended victim: A woman walking along the shore in Two Rivers.

By the time DNA evidence collected from the Beerntsen assault implicated Allen in 2003, it was too late to charge him.

The statute of limitations had expired.

Police investigating the Green Bay assaults during the 1990s interviewed a number of people who knew Allen: An ex-girlfriend. A co-worker who had paid Allen $50 per week to share an apartment. A southern Wisconsin prison inmate who knew Allen from when they were both imprisoned at Sanger B. Powers Correctional Center in Outagamie County.

None had much good to say about Allen, according to records reviewed by USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

Friends and acquaintances describe him as a heavy drug user with a voracious appetite for crack cocaine. A girlfriend of one of Allen's friends described him as a "power hitter" — which police said is someone who would smoke as much of the powdered cocaine as he could get his hands on.

"This is a really bad man," said Runge.

Police following him once he was under suspicion for the 1995 rape painted a picture of someone who might have been hunting for other victims, but whose behavior appeared somewhat paranoid. A Green Bay detective's report describes trying to follow Allen's car through the west side of Green Bay late at night as Allen alternately sped up and slowed down, sometimes driving with his headlights off.

And records show that police at some point believed Allen was involved in the killing of a teenage girl in North Carolina.

Media accounts published online say Donna Marie Emmel, 15, was last seen leaving an arcade in Newport, a town of about 4,500 near the Atlantic Ocean, on a June day in 1975. She was found a day later in a woods near her house, dead of strangulation.

Police say Allen lived in North Carolina in the mid-1970s. State prison records show he was sentenced in 1976 to 18 to 24 months for felony narcotics possession. After 364 days, he was released.

Records from Brown County indicate that police here questioned Allen about his potential involvement in the girl's killing, but that he was uncooperative. Police in Newport did not return a telephone message.

The June 27, 1995, attack for which Allen was ultimately imprisoned bore similarities to some of the others in which he was suspected.

Entry through a window. Threats of violence. A petite victim in her mid-30s, attacked as she slept. A sexual assault. An escape into the darkness.

Four months after the crime — and after the Ashwaubenon rape — Green Bay detectives had pieced together enough evidence to charge him with five felonies.

On July 22, 1996 — almost exactly 11 years after the Two Rivers rape for which Avery wrongly was convicted — a Brown County jury convicted Allen of the three most serious charges. Judge William Atkinson sentenced him to 60 years in prison.

Forty years for kidnapping. Ten for second-degree sexual assault. Another 10 for burglary.

Allen is now 62 and an inmate at New Lisbon Correctional Institution in Juneau County. He is eligible for a parole hearing Oct. 24.

dschneid@greenbaypressgazette.com and follow him on Twitter @PGDougSchneider