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GREENSBORO - After 27 years on the city police force, Bob Walters said he took the obvious step when he suspected a detective in his squad was not working her cases and was lying about it: He told his bosses.

What surprised him was the response , coming one month after former police Chief David Wray took office in 2003.

The veteran sergeant was sent back to patrol, and he says he was pressured to downgrade his disciplinary recommendation for the detective and admonished for failing to be "a team player" in the matter. The detective, meanwhile, was put in command of the sergeant's old squad and given a

5 percent raise, an inquiry by the city legal staff concluded.

The incident is mentioned in passing in a lengthy consultant's report that led Wray to resign in January amid allegations of racial profiling and internal corruption probes directed by former Deputy Chief Randall Brady. In contrast, the sergeant's story is one of a dozen examples the consultant's report cites of alleged intimidation by Wray's command staff and corresponding favoritism toward officers with ties to Wray.

The detective, Cpl. Cheryl Cundiff, is married to retired Capt. Gary Cundiff, whom the report by the city legal office said was a friend of Wray's.

Cpl. Cundiff said in an interview last week that she knew of no preferential treatment in her case and that she had carried out investigations appropriately. She joined the force in 1982 and is one of the department's two most senior sexual assault investigators.

In 2003, she was assigned to the southern bureau, a sector that includes the city's most depressed and high-crime neighborhoods.

According to a series of internal memos and e-mails obtained by the News & Record, Walters had been brought in on temporary assignment that spring to find out why the squad had personnel problems.

After his first week, the sergeant told then-Lt. Annie Stevenson in a March 2003 e-mail that Cundiff spent an inordinate amount of time on personal phone calls and errands, and that this created friction for fellow detectives with much heavier case loads.

In July 2003, Walters accused Cundiff of failing to investigate, or even contacting victims, in reported rapes and robberies assigned to her. All follow-up reports by detectives are entered into the computer system, but Walters could find no action on the cases since they had been assigned.

"We had victims out there that had suffered some pretty serious crimes. Who do you call? You call 911," Walters said in an interview. "They were just ignored by the system. I had a problem with that."

Cundiff, who is on leave for foot surgery, said last week that she could not access her notes or case files while on leave, but that as a rule, she would have tried to contact victims in any case assigned to her.

"There are a lot of times where people just will not call back or respond," Cundiff said. "We have people flat-out tell us, ‘I don't want to talk to you.' "

According to Walters' administrative review, Cundiff acknowledged being behind on her cases and said she had been spending time on a special assignment to re write procedures for responding to rapes. Walters said there was no such assignment, though Cundiff said last week that the issue was "documented" but she would not elaborate.

Walters, who has since left the department to coordinate a criminal justice program at GTCC, told city attorneys last fall that Brady intervened on behalf of Cundiff, a 25-year veteran, saying that Wray had expressed concern about how the investigation was going.

At the same time, Stevenson, now an assistant chief, told city attorneys that Brady ordered her to write a milder rebuke for the detective's file and sign Walters' signature, according to a report by Risk Management Associates. The consultants concluded that the incident constituted intimidation and forgery.

A lawyer for Brady said the former deputy chief "categorically denies" giving such an order.

Stevenson declined to comment this week on what she said is a "continuing investigation," as have attorneys representing Wray.

Brady's lawyer, Seth Cohen, said his client barely recalled the Cundiff disciplinary matter and knew little about it at the time except that Walters' accusation that Cundiff lied had "fallen apart." Cohen argues that Brady and Wray are now being blamed for matters in which they had no role.

What a confidential RMA report given to the city manager last winter never spelled out is what was at the center of the complaint against Cundiff: That is, three rape cases and a robbery assigned to Cundiff from May to August 2003.

Walters wrote in a memo to his commander that computer logs, which track supplemental reports on criminal cases, showed Cundiff did no follow-up on the initial reports taken by patrol officers who answered the 911 calls.

Standard procedure, according to Capt. Gary Hastings, is for the assigned detective to call the victim as soon as possible after the crime and arrange an interview. Failing that, Hastings said, the detective would leave a business card at the victim's address and, finally, mail a letter asking the victim to get in touch with the investigator.

Hastings said that in the case of an alleged kidnapping and rape reported July 28, Cundiff did write in a supplemental report that she interviewed the victim. But Cundiff's computer-dated report was not submitted until Aug. 19 - three weeks after the alleged rape and the same day that an e-mail shows Cundiff requested a meeting with Internal Affairs to discuss her sergeant's complaints.

However, when the alleged victim was contacted by the newspaper in recent weeks, she said Cundiff never called, visited or wrote her at the public housing address where she still lives. (The News & Record does not identify victims of sexual assaults.)

Attempts in March to locate the victims in the two other rapes and the robbery appeared to bear out Walters' suspicions:

In a Southside rape reported June 15, 2003, Cundiff filed a report saying she had tried to contact the victim and spoke to the victim's mother.

The mother denies this.

"I guarantee you, she did not call me," said the mother, whose daughter now lives out of state. "If a detective came to my home or called my house, I would have called her back."

In an east Greensboro rape reported Aug. 3, 2003, Cundiff wrote that the alleged victim made an appointment to give a statement but never showed up. The young woman at the time lived with her mother, who told the newspaper that Cundiff had never tried to call or visit her daughter.

In a May 18, 2003, robbery near her room at Homestead Lodge, a budget motel off Interstate 85 , Anshivetta Whitsett gave uniform officers a detailed description of two men who held guns on her, and she also got the tag number on their van.

Whitsett said last week that she had stayed at the motel for another month and repeatedly called the police to check the status of the case, but she never heard back. According to an internal memo, Cundiff deactivated the case Aug. 19 because the victim could not be located.

Walters concluded in his administrative review:

"Although it is unknown if suspects could have been arrested had the cases been addressed in a timely manner, any and all opportunities for a proper and timely investigation were lost due to the failure to address the cases."

Cundiff, who has been assigned rapes and homicides for 19 years, said Friday that she would have made every effort to contact the victims.

From a prosecutor's point of view, the three alleged rapes would not have gone to court in any event, Assistant District Attorney Al Hubbard said.

Hubbard, who handles about half the rape cases tried in Greensboro and has at least one pending case with Cundiff, said the cases would have been unwinnable because the alleged victims appeared to be on drugs, gave inconsistent statements and, in one case, refused a hospital exam.

"I would have told (a detective) to bag it right there," said Hubbard, whose office is piled high with files of some 100 pending cases.

"At some point, you've got to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's sort of like triage in the hospital."

Walters, Cundiff's former supervisor, agreed that detectives with staggering case loads need to prioritize.

However, internal memos from summer 2003 suggest that Cundiff had as few as eight assigned cases at the time, compared with fellow detectives who were carrying 30 to 60 open cases, including burglaries. Cundiff said she did not recall her case load from that period.

Though Cundiff insisted she followed up on her cases, Walters alleged that the cases took low priority because they happened in poor neighborhoods and the victims were unlikely to complain.

"It's not our job to decide who's going to get the ‘A' treatment and who's going to get the ‘C' treatment," Walters said. "If you get raped, somebody ought to find out who did it."

In the Southside case, the alleged victim was a drug user who left home and moved away.

For her mother, the possibility that the case was never investigated brought regret.

"I remember (the daughter) going to the hospital and telling me she had been raped. But when I never heard anything from the police, I wondered if she'd fabricated it," said the mother, her face tightening as she read the report.

"My daughter was one of those statistics."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com