PHILADLPHIA - A former Philadelphia Police Department lieutenant can't rely on the wind to blow her problems away, a judge has ruled in lawsuits over a disgraced detective found guilty of rape and other crimes.
Philadelphia federal judge Jerry Pappert on Feb. 26 granted the motion to compel the deposition of Anne Myers, who was responsible for investigating allegations of sexual misconduct by Philip Nordo.
Lawsuits surround Nordo's actions. As a homicide detective, he was found guilty of sexually assaulting witnesses and informants and was sentenced to up to 49 years in prison.
These actions compromised his cases and led to exonerations. One such plaintiff is Sherman McCoy, a man with an intellectual disability sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder thanks to a confession obtained by Nordo.
Enter Myers, who was part of a PPD that failed to act on complaints, plaintiffs hope to show. She specifically is alleged to have ignored DNA evidence that proved allegations of sexual assault in 2005.
Twelve years after she found the complaint unfounded, an internal investigation into Nordo suggested otherwise. Plaintiffs say had Nordo been fired earlier, many subsequent acts of misconduct wouldn't have happened.
Earlier this year, plaintiff lawyers attempted to serve Myers with a subpoena that would compel her testimony at a deposition. The process server said Myers stayed behind a glass door and refused to accept the subpoena.
"Leave it in the wind to blow away," she allegedly told the server, who placed it under a doormat and took a picture.
Though that strategy might work with a parking ticket, it didn't fly with Judge Pappert.
"Ms. Myers' refusal to physically accept the subpoena upon learning of its nature does not negate delivery," Pappert wrote. "Rather, she 'in effect' received the subpoena in-hand."
A grand jury alleged in 2019 that Nordo groomed male victims to make them more susceptible to sexual assault. He targeted gay men recently released from jail, the grand jury found.
In 2022, after a two-week trial, he was convicted of rape, sexual assault, indecent assault, official oppression, stalking and other crimes. Nine lawsuits against the City have been consolidated before Pappert, with the earliest having been filed in 2019.
The latest was filed by Dwayne Handy, whose 2013 murder conviction was vacated in May 2022. Nordo accused him of killing two people and during the interrogation told him he could not leave until Nordo got something on paper.
He also asked Handy if he masturbated or had sex with his cellmate during a previous incarceration.
"Nordo eventually told Handy that he wanted to have intercourse with Handy and for Handy to participate in pornographic movies produced by people Nordo knew," Pappert wrote last year.
"The implication was that Handy would be allowed to leave once he signed a false confession, and Nordo would thereafter ensure Handy's freedom so that he could reunite with Nordo to have sex and film pornography."
The confession was used against him in the first trial. It wasn't include in a retrial, which led to an acquittal verdict.