The story started when a grandmother called the Belleville News-Democrat in Southern Illinois. Her 14-year-old granddaughter had been gang raped, she said, but no one had been arrested, and no one had been prosecuted.
By the time News-Democrat reporters George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer started looking into the assault in 2010, five or six months had passed. The case had gone cold for law enforcement. But for the pair of investigative reporters at the mid-size McClatchy paper near St. Louis, Missouri, it was just the beginning of a three-year odyssey to find out why this and so many other rape and sexual abuse cases in southern Illinois were never prosecuted.
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