This article originally appears in the June 2016 issue of ELLE.

It was nearing midnight, and the scent of grease still clung to Ardelia Ali's Burger King uniform as the city bus wheezed to a stop on Detroit's 7 Mile Road. It had been a long, lumbering ride in from the suburbs, where she sold Woody and Buzz Lightyear puppets with Kids Club meals all afternoon, and her head was ringing: Howdy, pardner. She stepped into the November chill, turned up the hood of her coat, and hurried over the cracked sidewalk, meaning to make it to her grandmother's warm bungalow before the cold sunk too deeply into her bones. It was only about a block from the bus stop, and when she turned the corner, she saw the yellow house lights shining, waiting for her. At first, the thump of his steps was muted by the shrieking traffic over on Gratiot Avenue. But from the streetlight, she saw his shadow rise above her own. He was moving quickly, so Ardelia stepped aside onto a patch of grass to let him pass by. He didn't.

What he did was grab her by the back of her coat. "Bitch, walk." The shock of it stopped her voice. He clicked open a switchblade and put it to her right temple. Her eyes darted past his face, shaded by the hood on his jacket and his ball cap, to the lit-up house. She willed someone to step outside: her grandmother, her mother, an uncle, please God, anyone. He loomed behind her as they walked right past the house and into a vacant field of overgrown weeds, broken glass—the sort of aggressive detritus that reminds you that no place is ever really empty. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of her blue uniform, feeling for what he could find: seven crumpled dollars. Then he pushed the small of her back, forcing her to bend over, and she shuddered as he unzipped his blue jeans and yanked the pants of her uniform to her ankles.

It was a Saturday evening, November 18, 1995. At 18 years old, Ardelia had never had a boyfriend before, or slept with anyone. She was still shaking and bent when he told her to keep her head down and count to 20 while he ran off. One. Two. Three....

She made it to 15 before tugging up her pants and running toward her grandmother's house on Alwar Street, yelling and weeping. Before she got there, her Uncle Damon, who'd just left his mother's, caught sight of her. He slowed his car to a stop and rolled down the window to ask what had happened. Raped. I just got raped. He told her to climb into the car and drove her the rest of the way. When the door opened back at the house, there was her grandma, the soft-voiced woman Ardelia is named after, who moved toward her, who hugged her. Ardelia's skin was cold. Her breath: She just couldn't seem to catch it. They tried to make sense of what she was saying. "Who? Who did this to you? Do you know who it was?" She didn't know. In fact, it would be 20 years before she'd learn his name.

By the summer of 2009, not many people came through the police warehouse in Detroit's Poletown East neighborhood anymore—a gray concrete and red brick building tagged with graffiti and surrounded by a chain link fence, crowned with barbed wire. But one day in August, assistant Wayne County prosecutor Rob Spada was taking a tour, guided by local police officers.

Clean-cut and clean-shaven, Spada has prematurely silver hair, giving him a kind of Anderson Cooper vibe. His office had learned of serious problems with ballistics testing at the city crime lab, and they were planning on reviewing evidence from old cases to determine whether new trials were necessary. The warehouse air was hot and musty. There were tall racks of silver steel, row upon row of them, each crowded with white cardboard file boxes. Some were sealed but others yawned open, exposed to the elements. Spada pointed. "What are those?" he asked. Rape kits, one of the officers answered.

Every kit was sealed—and untested.

"Rape kits! What are all these rape kits doing here? How many?" "We don't know."

"Tested or untested?"

The officers shrugged.

Spada yanked four bins to the ground and rifled through them. Every kit he saw was sealed—and untested. He took out his cell phone and dialed his boss, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy.

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Kym Worthy, the first woman and first African American to serve as the county prosecutor, keeps her graying hair in a tight ponytail, revealing her smooth, regal forehead. She wears rectangular glasses and pairs her loose-fitting pantsuits with clogs. She talks in a quick, flat clip. You could call her brusque—hurry this conversation up; she has somebody better to talk to—or you could say that she has calibrated her voice to the frenetic pace of the busiest prosecutor's office in Michigan. More than 80,000 cases move through here each year— more than half the state's total.

Worthy first came to public notice in 1993 when, as an assistant prosecutor in the office she now leads, she tried the Malice Green police brutality case. The national fervor over the Rodney King verdict was still simmering when Worthy, then 36, won a conviction against two white police officers for the beating death of the 35-year-old black steelworker. The three-month trial was broadcast nationally on Court TV. Ebony magazine featured Worthy in a profile that touted her 90 percent conviction rate, crediting her knack for explaining complex topics in simple language. It also took note of her courtroom tactics: "withering glances, combative cross-examinations, and numerous charts and graphs." She had a level of self-confidence that some called arrogance. Worthy told the magazine that was just a sexist interpretation of her courtroom behavior.

Her best-known battle came in 2008, when, five years after she was elected as the top prosecutor, she filed charges against then Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. The indictment set off a chain of events that eventually handed Kilpatrick a 28-year sentence for racketeering, perjury, and other crimes. In August 2009, however, Worthy was still unraveling the full scope of his misuse of power. At the same time, she was trying to ascertain how many cases she'd have to retry because of the crime lab's failures; it had gotten so bad that the lab had permanently closed a year earlier. And now Rob Spada was on the phone telling her that, after a quick scan, it seemed like there were as many as 10,000 untested rape kits in the warehouse, sitting in boxes and furred with dust. Ten thousand! She tamped down the bolt of anger that surged through her; her orderly mind clicked forward. She told Spada to finish his work at the warehouse while she, on the twelfth floor of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in downtown Detroit, got on with her own business of the day. That five-digit number never stopped itching in the back of her mind, though. As a lawyer and former judge who'd spent her entire career in and around the city, Worthy had seen plenty of cases where sexual assault evidence wasn't handled properly. But this many seemed impossible. Ten thousand is the population of a town, for God's sake.

Kym Worthy talks with Ardelia Ali

It was many long hours later when Worthy finally got home. She checked in on her then adolescent daughter, Anastasia, whom she'd adopted the year she turned 40. Anastasia is a gifted ice skater, strong and graceful, but she suffers from sickle cell disease that must be carefully monitored to prevent attacks. Anastasia was fine that night, so Worthy sat down and typed "10,000 rape kits" into her computer. A litany of headlines scrolled before her, the figures numbing.

Because there are no consistent federal requirements for law enforcement to track rape kits that haven't been tested, it's impossible to know the exact size of the national backlog. Sitting at her computer, Worthy learned that Detroit wasn't the first municipality to confront the issue: New York City had a backlog of 17,000 kits in 1999, but after the local government spent $12 million to process them, it was cleared by 2003. Federal money was issued to dozens of jurisdictions in 17 states between 2004 and 2008 to reduce DNA-evidence backlogs, but much of the money had gone unspent, according to a November 2008 investigation by ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times, even when many kits remained untested. The following spring, Human Rights Watch documented a backlog of more than 12,500 kits in L.A.

Because there are no consistent federal requirements for law enforcement to track rape kits that haven't been tested, it's impossible to know the exact size of the national backlog.

As Worthy clicked through the links, it dawned on her that there was no blueprint for what to do. Neither her office, nor the police, nor any entity in notoriously decimated Detroit had access to an infusion of cash, nothing like New York's $12 million. Only a few months earlier, GM and Chrysler had filed for bankruptcy. A new mayor with no political experience, Dave Bing, had just been sworn into office to replace the one who'd robbed the city. Detroit's jobless rate was at 22 percent, and Wayne County was broke in part because property tax revenue, which funds public services, had plummeted during the nationwide housing crisis. The median home price in Detroit was $7,000.

From the little house on Alwar Street, Ardelia's grandmother and Uncle Damon called her mother, Ona, who lived with her daughter and her five other children a few blocks away. They also called 911. Even in her shock, Ardelia noticed the tears in her uncle's eyes. It was the first time she'd seen a man cry.

An ambulance arrived, which then screamed over to Saratoga Hospital with Ardelia lying on a cot. Her mother and another uncle, named Darius, accompanied her. Under the bright lights of the exam room, Ardelia waited through the hours it takes to complete a meticulous sexual assault kit: the swabbing of every opening in her body, the saliva samples, the blood samples, the scraping of her fingernails, the fine-tooth combing of her pubic hair.

At the hospital, two police officers interviewed her, according to public records.

Do you know your attacker?

No.

Had you ever seen him before?

No. You know when you're catching the bus, you don't really pay much attention. He said he had been watching me.

Near 2 a.m., a third policeman took a detailed witness statement from Ardelia in her exam room at the hospital. Before he and the other officers left, they told her and her mother they'd be in touch.

In the hush of the early-morning hours, Ardelia returned home. She slept in the next day and spent all Sunday inside, except for when she "ran to my grandmother's house because she was close by," she says. Ardelia's mother and sister stuck by her. "They just comforted me."

Shed'd changed. And she wanted to peel that change off herself as if it were an oily costume.

Ardelia moved through the following days in a thick, sickening fog. She kept quiet, mostly. Her younger brothers and sisters stared at her, bewildered at what had come over her. She'd changed. And she wanted to peel that change off herself as if it were an oily costume. Her mother called her Burger King manager and told him what had happened. He agreed to transfer Ardelia to a location closer to home. One week later, she returned to work.

In January, two months after the attack, a fourth police officer, newly assigned to Ardelia's case, picked up her rape kit from the hospital and put it in evidence storage, along with her old uniform. That same month, police reports say that officers stopped by Ardelia's home and spoke to her about setting up an appointment to review mug shots of her potential attacker. As planned, the officers returned with the photos at 9 a.m. on February 1, 1996, but no one answered the door, according to records. "Case deactivated," the fourth police officer wrote. "Completely uncooperational [sic], will not assist in further investigation of the case."

Except Ardelia says that none of this ever happened. After the hospital interview, she says she never heard from the police again. Even if she had at some point missed a visit from an officer, she lived with a stay-at-home mom and five siblings. "Somebody was always home," she says. "And they did have my work location, and they never tried to come up there."

When your rapist is no one, he becomes everyone.

Over the next six months, Ardelia avoided leaving home as much as possible. She and her mother called the police to check in on the case a couple of times, she says, but to no avail. Neither Ardelia nor her mother was sleeping well. Ona kept picturing the knife against her daughter's head; she worried that she'd get HIV. One day in February, Ardelia noticed a strange odor coming from her body. She was soon back at the hospital for treatment of trichomoniasis, a sexually transmitted infection. "You're going to have to tell your sexual partner," the doctor advised her. Ardelia stared at him.

Her Uncle Damon periodically drove through the streets, with Ardelia next to him in the passenger's seat, hoping to spot her rapist. Damon figured that if the police weren't doing anything, it was his responsibility to find him and make sure he didn't get away with it. Maybe he lived in the neighborhood. Why else would he have been there that night? Maybe he was a friend of one of her uncles, Ardelia thought. For her, the uncertainty made every step outside an act of terror—and bravery. The man next to her on the bus: Was that him? The man in the second aisle at the supermarket: Was that him? The grumbling fellow who put a warm pile of dimes and nickels in her hand to pay for his Whopper: Was that him?

When your rapist is no one, he becomes everyone.

What Kym Worthy did next with the untested rape kits would eventually earn her nationwide accolades. "She absolutely started a movement," said KC Steckelberg, the public affairs director for the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan. "She led the charge to discover the root causes of the problem and to develop policy and procedures to make sure this doesn't happen again—in her jurisdiction, in our state, nationwide." Or, as U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who sponsored legislation in 2004 to increase funding for rape kit testing, put it: "Kym Worthy demanded action. She knew the problem couldn't be ignored, even if drawing attention to it might make the city look bad."

Worthy's first move upon learning of the kits was to write to then Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans requesting a meeting to discuss how to proceed. Having heard that the police were conducting an internal audit of the kits, Worthy warned Evans that "the lack of involvement of an independent entity presents a huge problem for us, the bench, and other parties of the criminal justice system." When she didn't get a response, she wrote Chief Evans again, adding, "It is imperative that your Department move on this as soon as possible." Again, nothing. (Evans declined to be interviewed but through a spokesman said he'd been new to the job at the time and was "shocked" by the backlog; the spokesman wasn't aware of the unanswered letters but pointed to the internal audit as an indication that Evans took the problem seriously.)

Worthy's case for an independent investigation was soon leaked to the media (though, she's said, not by her: "It's not that I wouldn't, but I didn't"). "Rape Evidence Shelved?" read the front page of the Detroit Free Press on September 22, 2009. Over the fall, police officials objected to the prosecutor's use of the word "discovery" with regard to the kits—it implied that they were lost, or intentionally hidden, when neither was true, they insisted. The department also quibbled about numbers. A police spokesman told CBS News that there were actually only about 7,000 kits in storage and that more than a thousand of them had been tested. As for those that weren't, he added, there were good reasons for that, according to a sample audit the department had conducted. In some cases, there was already a known assailant, making testing redundant; in others, there was insufficient evidence a crime had occurred.

Worthy put together a plan for her office to take the lead on testing the kits, but then Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano, who controlled her budget, shot it down. The county simply couldn't afford it, he said, and it was really a problem for city hall and the police, not the county. "You have to go back to the agency that had responsibility for testing to get them to live up to their obligation," he'd later contend.

Never mind do the right thing by the thousands of women who'd had the fortitude to come forward, only to have their cases systematically abandoned.

Worthy was incensed. It was her statutory mandate to respond to all violent crimes—she couldn't just dismiss everything that had happened before 2009. She was convinced that Ficano would have been more supportive if the newly discovered evidence was for something other than sexual assault—a crime whose mostly female victims historically have been doubted, or even blamed. "If this were a homicide, nobody would be talking about 'Why are you testing the gun?' " Worthy said.

She had a personal reason to be sensitive to this issue: She had been raped her first year as a law student at the University of Notre Dame, attacked during a late-night run. She informed school administrators about the assault but never went to the police, she said, fearing that the case would derail her studies and future career. Worthy says she later regretted that she hadn't reported the crime and was haunted by the thought that her rapist might have harmed others. How could she ignore all these rape kits—this chance to go after men who still might be dangerous, never mind do the right thing by the thousands of women who'd had the fortitude to come forward, only to have their cases systematically abandoned?

Worthy needed a larger audience for her effort: "I could scream and yell to whoever I think is responsible, but the bottom line is that doesn't get you anywhere." So in May 2010, at the invitation of U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), she testified about the backlog before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. "When I was an assistant, I had to prosecute many rape cases without the rape kit," she declared. "We were told by the police department that often they were lost, they couldn't find them, they were denigrated—all kinds of things.... At the end of the day, the judges and the prosecutors and the other witnesses and the police go home. But the rape victim, or the child molestation victim, lives with it for the rest of their lives."

Worthy with actor-activist Mariska Hargitay in Detroit in March 2014

Later that year, the research arm of the Department of Justice gave Worthy and her partner agencies a grant to test 400 random kits, to provide a statistically significant snapshot of what was at stake, and then in April 2011, the agency followed up with a $1.5 million grant to address the backlog. By this time, Law & Order: SVU's Mariska Hargitay, who'd appeared before Congress the same day Worthy had, also signed on. Hargitay's organization for sexual assault survivors, the Joyful Heart Foundation, contributed $75,000 and staff support so Worthy could launch a task force to map the way forward. "Kym's testimony that day inspired me so deeply that I promised her that we would do everything we could to test every last kit in Detroit," Hargitay said.

And the task was massive, as Rob Spada had predicted when he stumbled on the kits. Now with the Detroit Police Department's blessing, Worthy enlisted members of her staff and volunteer law students to get an accurate count of what was in the warehouse, and in summer 2011—two years after Spada's discovery—the tally was in: 11,341 kits, some more than 30 years old.

To test all of them, Worthy estimated she'd need about $17 million (the lab work ran $1,000 to $1,500 per kit). On top of that, she intended to investigate every single case, even those that didn't end up having meaningful forensic evidence. But she had only three sex-crime investigators on her staff, the police department had as few as six— down from 24 a decade earlier—and more than 300 new sex crimes were reported in the county annually. (By comparison, the NYPD then had a sex-crimes unit of about 190 investigators and supervisors—two and a half times more manpower than Detroit, accounting for the population difference between the two cities.)

Sheryl Sandberg donated an unsolicited $25,000 to the cause.

In the wake of Detroit's declaration of bankruptcy in July 2013, fundraising for Worthy's project took on the feel of a grassroots revival. The nonprofit Detroit Crime Commission—which, on behalf of Worthy's office, had negotiated the cost of testing down to $490 per kit—joined with the Michigan Women's Foundation to launch what organizers believe was the first-ever crowdfunded campaign for a government program, called Enough SAID (Sexual Assault in Detroit). A local canasta club started donating the pot from its weekly game; the Galentine's Book Club kicked in $525. In October 2015, a coalition of African American businesswomen held a fundraiser that leveraged the rivalry between the University of Michigan and Michigan State football teams to net more than $30,000. Sheryl Sandberg donated an unsolicited $25,000 to the cause. To date, Enough SAID has raised $1.5 million in private contributions.

This widespread philanthropic support created pressure for government to step up, and by the beginning of 2016, $8 million had been allocated to Enough SAID by public bodies ranging from the state attorney general's office to the Michigan legislature. Meanwhile, the Detroit Police Department embedded six officers in Worthy's office dedicated to rape kit investigations. Ficano, the county executive, lost his reelection bid in November 2014 to, of all people, Warren Evans, the police chief who hadn't responded to Worthy's letters. But she'd endorsed Evans's candidacy nonetheless, and a year after he took office, he gave Worthy $1 million from the county's delinquent tax fund for the rape kit campaign. Evans also installed the prosecutor's task force in new offices at the top of the Guardian Building, a colorful Art Deco skyscraper downtown.

At 38, Ardelia is pretty and bright-eyed, a stay-at- home mom who speaks in low tones and shows deep dimples when she smiles. She lives a few miles from where she grew up, and her three children—two sons, ages 17 and 13, and an 8-year-old daughter—go to the same public schools she attended. Her oldest, due to graduate from high school this year, plays football; she likes to watch him from the bleachers. She's protective of her kids, she says, too protective. "I don't let them go nowhere or do nothing."

Ardelia struggles with her weight. It's not easy for her to find joy in her body. For a long time, friends and family thought she was gay, she says. "I don't really like having sex that much." Her longtime partner, James, whom she started dating at 22 and who is the father of two of her three children, has been "real patient. But it's just hard when someone wants you to do something you do not want to do." In recent years, their relationship has cooled to something more like a close friendship. By 2014, when she had gastric bypass surgery, it had been more than 18 years since the rape.

Ardelia started having nightmares the way she did after she was raped.

Early the next year, in January, Ardelia was getting in her Chevy minivan after picking up dinner from a local fish fry when a man, who apparently had been crouched on the ground in wait, climbed in beside her. "Bitch, give me the van," he ordered, pulling out a handgun and demanding her purse.

Ardelia screamed, but by the time her brother—who works at the restaurant—had run across the parking lot to see what was going on, she was standing alone, watching the man speed away in her van. She reported the carjacking to the police, and it made the local TV news, she says, but the van was never recovered. Ardelia started having nightmares the way she did after she was raped. She called her mother, crying, hating the self-pitying sound of it: Why do bad things keep happening to me, and why do they keep getting away with it?

Spring thawed the ground of 2015's hard Michigan winter, and one day in May, James went by the house where he and Ardelia used to live. He caught sight of a tiny, cream-colored business card perched lightly on the knob of the door. Strange—the house was now vacant. He picked up the card with contact information for Detective Mark Farrah. "I wonder what this is about," he said later, handing it to Ardelia.

In 2011, Detective Mark Farrah retired after 25 years with the Southgate Police Department, in his hometown, 14 miles south of Detroit. In the next few years, he worked as a car salesman, got elected to the city council, and won a national Lowe's Home Improvement contest for a kitchen renovation. Then, in 2014, the now 55-year-old former cop got a call from the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office asking if he'd join the rape kit task force. "I thought it was a great opportunity," Farrah says. "Once you're in law enforcement, it's kind of in your blood."

Farrah, who has deep-set brown eyes and an avuncular demeanor, quickly learned the special protocol Worthy's task force developed for victims who were being contacted 5, 10, 20 years after being assaulted. First rule: No false hope. So it was only after Ardelia's kit had been tested, and the prosecutor's office had money to investigate it, that Farrah started to look for her. The DNA in her kit had been matched to a man named Marshall Alan White. Farrah found two addresses for Ardelia, and he drove to each and knocked on the door. One house looked empty, but Farrah left his card anyway.

"You better call and see what that's about," Ona told Ardelia when she mentioned the business card James had found. And so one day she did.

"I'm contacting you about the incident," Farrah said when Ardelia reached him.

"The carjacking?" she asked.

"No, we've had a DNA hit in your case, and were wondering if we could please meet with you."

"Oh, you're talking about the rape?"

In May 2015, Farrah, another detective, two victims advocates, and Wayne County assistant prosecutor Lisa Lozen went to Ardelia's mother's house to talk to Ardelia. (Another new rule: The first prosecutor the victim meets stays with her throughout the case.)

What did Ardelia remember about the man? they asked. How had the rape affected her? Did she have questions for them? Her attacker was actually locked up for something else, they told her when she inquired. The DNA testing showed that he'd assaulted at least two other women. "Don't worry, Ms. Ali, we're going to get through this," Farrah assured her.

The hospital has an 11-year retention period; her records had been destroyed.

Ardelia was initially cautious with Farrah and his colleagues, fearing "they'd treat me like a number," she says, "but they embraced me." She means that literally and figuratively. "Some people, they're afraid even to touch me or hug me [when they find out she was raped]. But they let me know that they care. They talked to me and let me know that what he did was not okay." Ardelia agreed to testify against her assailant. She gave the investigator permission to access her medical records from her rape kit exam. This, though, turned out to be a dead end: The hospital has an 11- year retention period; her records had been destroyed.

In 1995, Marshall White was living with his parents in senior housing in Detroit's New Center neighborhood. But he often stayed with his girlfriend, whose home was near Ardelia's. He was in a bad way, according to a report from the Michigan Department of Corrections. White had diabetes; he suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, though he was years away from being diagnosed and treated. And he couldn't seem to stay out of trouble. Robberies. Crack. Assaults.

Worthy and Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette at a 2013 press conference

The oldest kit connected to White was tested in November 2014—he'd pulled a knife on a 15-year-old girl in 1991 and raped her. The second had been tested in June of that same year, tying him to a 1995 assault of a 45-year-old woman who was walking home near Henderson Park alongside the Detroit River. He fled with her gold earrings in his pocket.

Three months later, he eyed the girl who got off the bus in her Burger King uniform.

White was serving a 5- to 20-year sentence for two bank robberies at a state penitentiary when Farrah and another detective interviewed him in June 2015. While in prison, he'd earned his GED and gotten treatment for mental illness. Fifty-three years old, he'd been interviewed only six months earlier by the parole board in anticipation of an early release in May. (That opportunity was eliminated when prison officials learned he was a suspect in a sexual assault case.)

When the investigators asked White (who declined to be interviewed for this story) about Ardelia's rape, he said it didn't happen. They also asked about the rape of the woman near Henderson Park. (They couldn't pursue the third case because the 20-year statute of limitations had expired.)

"It takes you back, to that day or time that it happened to you. It takes all your emotions. It drains you."

The Henderson Park rape didn't happen either, White said. He was emphatic, even when the detectives informed him they'd found his DNA. He wrote a statement: "I, Marshall White, deny any involvement in either case that Detective Farrah and Detective Muscat spoke to me about. I voluntarily will submit to a polygraph...."

Before the detectives left, however, they used their warrant for his DNA and swabbed his mouth.

Less than six weeks later, on the afternoon of July 30, 2015, White was arraigned for Ardelia's rape. The other woman opted not to prosecute. "I see why someone would not go forward," Ardelia says. "It takes you back, to that day or time that it happened to you. It takes all your emotions. It drains you." After deciding to press the case, she says, "I cried every day, or almost every day."

She trusted Farrah and victim advocate Bobbi Dixon, though, who took the time to come out to see her, who apologized, who picked her up or called a cab when she needed a ride. And she trusted her family: Her grandmother was dead, but they'd prayed together that this day would come. Her mother and her step-father accompanied her to the courthouse; James too. Diamond, her younger sister, told Ardelia that to reach this day after so many years, "It's like something out of a movie. Do you know how favored you are?"

White pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the first degree. This was the first time Ardelia had gotten a good look at him: heavyset, six feet tall, the patchy hair on his head and chin threaded with gray. When asked to describe the events of November 18, 1995, White replied, "I actually can't remember that, what actually happened, but I do believe I did rape her."

Two weeks later, Ardelia and her family returned to court for White's sentencing. First, Judge James A. Callahan asked Ardelia if she'd like to say anything. She would. Her long gray-and-black-patterned dress swished around her legs as the court deputy guided her to juror seat number one.

How had the assault affected her? the judge asked. "I was a young girl, 18 years old, coming home from work. Mr. White took my innocence from me. I was helping my mother. She was a single mother. I was coming home from work. He put a knife to me, forced me into the [vacant lot] and sexually assaulted me, took my virginity. He did a lot of stuff to me. And, you know, for this—I'm thankful for the Wayne County prosecutor.... He should never be out again. You don't—you know, it's certain stuff you just don't do to people, and this has affected my life a lot.... But I didn't want him to get away with it, and he wasn't getting away with it."

"Good for you," the judge told her.

Next, White's lawyer told the judge that his client was remorseful: "He's a different man now than he was 20 years ago. I know that doesn't make it right."

"It's difficult to put the egg back together once you've broken it," the judge observed.

"You know, he didn't put the victim through having to testify.... He waived his exam rights."

"And to that I give him some credit. It indicates to me that he has had a change in his life, and he's going to lead a much better life. Right, Mr. White?"

White spoke up: "Yes, sir."

"Okay," the judge said. "You want to say anything further to me?"

"Actually I wanted to say something to the young lady," White replied. "I'm sorry what happened. I don't know what came over me 20 years ago, but I'm striving to be a better person in life, to do the best I can. I apologize."

Ardelia was silent, her face impassive; she didn't know what to feel.

"I hope at some point in time in her life she can forgive you," the judge said. "I'm sure that the psychological injuries that she has expressed to me are real. That was a terrible thing that you did." Callahan sentenced White to 15 to 30 years in prison. His earliest chance for parole is in 2027.

The failure to address serious crime begets more criminality.

From the Broadest perspective, what happened with the rape kits in Detroit is part of what reporter Jill Leovy, in her pathbreaking 2015 book, Ghettoside, diagnosed as a persistent under-enforcement of laws in black, poor pockets of our country. These are places where up to 70 percent of murders, never mind rapes, have been left unsolved. This failure to address serious crime begets more criminality, Leovy persuasively argues, as bad guys are left untouched; as the vacuum in law enforcement leaves people like Uncle Damon to take the law into their own hands, setting up cycles of revenge; as people who live in these communities become so cynical and despairing about the government's ability or will to keep them safe that they give up on the police. "To assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception," she writes. "But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of the same coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts, but is exposed as a coward before murder...."

And rape, Leovy could have easily added. Because Detroit has hardly been alone: It was, as Rep. Maloney says, "emblematic of what we see across the country." In the past half-dozen years, backlogs of untested rape kits have been discovered in Memphis, 12,000; Cleveland, nearly 4,000; Tulsa, 3,783; Milwaukee, 2,655; Dallas, 4,144; San Diego, 2,873; Miami, 2,900; Honolulu, 1,500. Smaller cities are not immune, either. Kansas City, Missouri, had 1,324 backlogged kits; Tempe, Arizona, more than 500; Flint, Michigan, 246. "It's a problem in every single jurisdiction in the country," said Julie Smolyansky, the founder of Test400K, a nonprofit that lobbies for a national policy to address the rape kit backlog. "And each state is operating independently, which makes it hard to share best practices and have a uniform policy around it."

What's remarkable is that under Worthy's leadership, Detroit saw the nation's most ambitious—and effective—response to its backlog. After all, despite recent, much-publicized signs of revival, the city is barely out of its nadir. An emergency manager assigned by the state is still running the school system; another emergency manager ran city hall for 18 months, ending only in December 2014. On the same day as White's sentencing, Wayne County narrowly avoided following Detroit into bankruptcy by agreeing to operate under state oversight.

Last year, the National Institute of Justice published an exhaustive study detailing what went wrong in Detroit, starting with its "chronic resource depletion." Like the police department with its six sex crimes investigators, the Detroit crime lab typically employed no more than three DNA scientists, compared to, say, Dallas, which had three laboratories. Other highlights, or lowlights: the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the national data bank that allowed cities to systematically search for assailants using DNA material, went online in 1998, but Detroit couldn't access it until 2002 because the city hadn't fulfilled FBI accreditation requirements. Indeed, Detroit only had partial accreditation until 2006, after which kits were tested more often, but by 2008, the lab was closed because of its high error rate.

Then there was the issue of police officers ignoring kits because they'd concluded that a "real" rape hadn't occurred—claiming, for instance, that the victim was lying, working as a prostitute, or trying to avoid getting in trouble for another crime—according to the NIJ researchers. And remember the internal audit of untested kits that the police spokesman said in 2009 proved that proper procedures had been followed? In 71 percent of those cases, the NIJ report found, the kit wasn't submitted for testing because of "a statement about the victim's behavior or an overall judgment of the victim's credibility." In others, the kit went unprocessed because the victim, like Ardelia, supposedly "failed to show up for scheduled appointments" or "refused to cooperate."

It's impossible to assess how much the officers' views were influenced by race and class bias, wrote lead author Rebecca Campbell, a Michigan State psychology professor, since the vast majority of the victims were poor and black. "At the very least, the police appeared to have no compunction expressing such opinions about African American sexual assault survivors," she said.

So Worthy hasn't just had to rustle up money; she's had to transform the "entire culture of law enforcement," as her deputy Spada puts it. In his 20-plus years at the prosecutor's office, he says, "I've seen a change in how police approach sexual assault victims. That's been brought about by Kym, in how she attacked the problem and let it be known publicly that society had certain kinds of assumptions about what a victim would act like or be like."

Worthy also has spearheaded the push for concrete legal and procedural reforms. Michigan law, enacted in 2014, requires that rape kits move through each level of law enforcement according to a mandated timeline—three months from start to finish—and both police and healthcare professionals must notify victims about their right to obtain information about their own kits. Twenty other state legislatures have passed, or are considering, a similar law, and last September, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the DOJ announced that they'd jointly give nearly $80 million to 52 jurisdictions nationwide to tackle their backlogs.

Perhaps the most-heralded reform in Detroit is the 10-year-old forensic examiner program, run by a nonprofit called Wayne County SAFE. Specially trained nurses work at five clinics throughout the county to do all rape kit exams, as well as offer counseling and other support services— all free of charge. And last August, local billionaire Dan Gilbert, the founder of Detroit-based Quicken Loans and the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, persuaded UPS, his company's shipping partner, to pilot a system to track rape kits the way Quicken tracks packages, tracing them from SAFE sites to the police to the lab. The hope is that one day, victims will be able to go online to follow the path of their kit, the same way they check on a package delivery.

Roughly 10,000 rape kits had been tested in Detroit as of March 2016, with 750 "hits" in 41 states: matches to people who've already been convicted or charged with sexual assault—"serial rapists" in CODIS parlance. The most appalling of those was Shelly Andre Brooks, who though already incarcerated when identified, raped eight women in Detroit, murdering six of them. Four of those rapes, and three of the murders, happened after a kit with his DNA was left on the shelf in August 2002.

As for Farrah and his colleagues on the backlog task force, they've conducted 239 investigations and procured 41 convictions; 1,339 cases are awaiting investigation, whenever enough funding becomes available. "I've got to say, these last couple years doing this have enlightened me to a whole new kind of respect for these victims," Farrah says. "We see through even our own eyes what we did in law enforcement, how—I don't want to say badly—but how some of these people were treated. I see the change in myself dealing with these women."

Ardelia can't shake the frustration that it took 20 years—more than half of her life—for justice to be done. She obsessively watches forensic shows on the Discovery Channel, and she still has crying spells. A psychologist she's been seeing diagnosed her with depression, she says, and she can't stop herself from checking out the window to see if her car is still there.

That said, Ardelia thinks confronting her rapist has made her more assertive, less self-effacing. She doesn't automatically say yes these days when relatives ask for rides, babysitting, or other favors. She's contemplating a lawsuit against the city, the county, and the state. She's also trying to raise money to pay for therapy, legal aid, and expenses so that she can move her family outside the city after her son graduates—he'd be the first man in her family to do so. She also wants funding so she can train to help other survivors. "I want to be an advocate," she says.

Ardelia often thinks back to the day in the courtroom. "I knew I wasn't going to let him see me cry. And I didn't cry in front of him. I wanted him to see that I don't do drugs, I don't drink. I was proving a point to him. I was standing up to him."

Her lawyer told her that courtroom apologies like the one White made are rare. "I might be, like, one of the 10 percent of people who get an apology," she says. "It felt good, like vindication for me. I knew I wasn't crazy." It made her feel lucky—almost.

To learn more about Ardelia, click here.