A portrait of a young man with curly hair sitting in a room with plants and other objects in the background.
Source: Fox 32 / Screenshot

Sexual assault, rape and child molestation are crimes that are horrific, damaging and depraved enough that there should never have been a statute of limitations on them in any state, and this is perfectly illustrated by the heartbreaking story of a Black woman in Chicago, who, for several years, was raped and assaulted by her teacher, who will never be brought to justice.

Nancy Alexander recently sat down with Fox 32 Chicago to open up about her experience at John Farren Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side during the late 1970s and early ’80s, when she had the misfortune of encountering Richard Neff, the teacher who her school assigned to provide her with extra help reading, as she suffered from epilepsy, making reading a difficult task. But instead of giving her the help she needed, Neff gave Alexander a lifetime of trauma, suffering, and self-harm, as well as a special needs daughter conceived from the abuse.

From Fox 32:

Instead of a safe haven, the classroom became a place of terror. What began as inappropriate touching escalated into years of repeated sexual assaults inside empty classrooms and school closets at John Farren and Parkman Elementary.

“He would tell me I would have to stay behind. ‘Oh, you need to take a spelling test,'” Nancy recalled, her voice heavy with the pain of those memories. “I was repeatedly raped over the years.”

When the abuse left her pregnant at just 15 years old, her abuser used cruel, racist threats to ensure her silence, telling her that no one would ever believe “a Black little girl from the projects.”

Terrified and isolated, Nancy was forced out of her home at 16. She kept the secret locked deep inside her heart, working tirelessly to survive and raise her daughter alone. 

In fact, Alexander said she stayed quiet about the horrors she endured for some 40 years, during which time she tried to end her life three times. Then, in 2022, a DNA test confirmed with near certainty that the father of her child is, indeed, Neff, who is now 79-years-old and living in North Carolina.

So, what led to Alexander deciding to have this DNA test performed?

Well, around the time of the test, she had suffered and survived a dangerous brain hemorrhage, bringing her face-to-face with her own mortality, and around that time, her adult daughter began asking questions about who her father is.

“I was bleeding at the brain, then my daughter got sick,” she told Fox 32. “I thought, ‘I’m dying… my daughter needs to know who her people are.’ And then I thought about it. If he raped me, he’s going to do the same thing to her.” 

So, in October 2022, Alexander went to the Chicago Police Department to file a formal complaint. Soon after that, she and her daughter embarked on a mission to track Neff down, using Ancestry.com to find his family. Eventually, they found his other daughter.

More from Fox 32:

They dialed phone number after phone number from morning until night, desperate for a connection. Finally, someone answered: Neff’s adult daughter, who goes by “M.”

When Nancy spoke with M, she shared a specific memory that chilled M to the core. Nancy remembered that whenever Neff was going to abuse her, he wore a specific beige suit jacket.

“My father had this closet full of brown suit jackets… [He] was a very methodical person… He never deviated,” M remembered. “I just knew from that detail that she was telling me the truth.”

M was dealing with her own painful, recovered memories of childhood abuse by her father. Knowing she held the key to helping Nancy, M got behind the wheel and drove more than 1,300 miles from Montana to Chicago to submit her DNA to police.

The test results brought emotional clarity to 43 years of pain: a 99.79% probability that M and Nancy’s daughter are half-sisters.

In 2019, the state of Illinois passed HB 2135, which eliminated the statute of limitations for sexual assault. Unfortunately, the new law can’t be applied retroactively to cases where the time limit expired before 1986. Neff’s abuse of Alexander ended in 1982.

It’s difficult to imagine what it must have felt like for Nancy Alexander to find the courage to track down her abuser after all this time and all she had suffered. To reopen a wound that had never come close to healing. But she put herself through it for herself and her daughter, who, up until 20222, she raised without burdening her with the knowledge that her father is a monster.

“He should go to jail,” she told Fox 32, when asked what justice would look like after all this time.

But, following the revelation of the DNA test, Chicago police have officially marked the case “Exceptionally Cleared Closed,” which means authorities have identified their suspect, but are powerless to arrest him.

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office released the following statement, acknowledging the situation:

It takes immense courage for survivors of child sexual abuse to come forward, and we are committed to seeking justice for this deeply traumatizing crime whenever the law allows. Unfortunately, there are cases in which prosecution is not legally possible because the statute of limitations has expired.

In every case, we assess whether prosecution is legally viable and consider any extensions to the statute of limitations that may have been in place at the time of the offense.

In this case, we could not move forward with any prosecution, and the investigation was not referred for a review due to the statute of limitations.

Again, for certain crimes, there should be no such statute, and there should never have been. The new law eliminating the statute of limitations would have come too late, no matter when it came.

According to Mother Jones, in 2014, 34 states and Washington, D.C., still maintained statutes of limitations on filing rape and sexual assault charges, ranging from three to 30 years. According to more recent data, as of 2020, more than 30 states have amended their laws to extend or eliminate those statutes. Hopefully, that trend will continue until all 50 states no longer have such statutes.