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Skip to main content. Turn off Animations. Turn on Animations. Make a Gift. For instance, he referred to Crowell as "a year-old virgin" although there was no evidence to support such a claim, which, it ultimately became obvious, was not true.
He proclaimed that the state "wouldn't have put Mr. Dotson on trial if in any way we knew he hadn't done the crime. Unable to shake the alibi witnesses, Garza told the jury that the testimony simply was too pat to be believed. There invariably are inconsistencies in sound alibi testimony, he explained, and the lack of any in the witnesses' accounts rendered them unworthy of belief. Foxgrover, failed to challenge Dixon's false testimony, he did object to most of Garza's prejudicial arguments and to the exaggerated contention concerning the hairs.
However, the trial judge, Richard L. Samuels, without exception, overruled Foxgrover's objections. Foxgrover also failed to exploit obvious inconsistencies in the prosecution case, several of which were glaring: Crowell had described the rapist as clean-shaven, but Dotson had a healthy mustache when he was arrested just five days after the alleged crime. She claimed that she had scratched the rapist's chest, but Dotson bore no scratches. And neither Dotson nor any of his known acquaintances had a car matching the description Crowell provided.
There was, additionally, an even more telling inconsistency, although to have discovered it, Foxgrover would have needed an independent forensic analysis, which he had neither the funds nor, apparently, the desire to obtain.
It was not until , after the victim's recantation, that Edward T. Blake, a Berkeley-educated Ph. What Blake discovered was that the concentration of spermatozoa in the stain on Crowell's underpants was two to three times greater than the concentration of spermatozoa on the vaginal swab made at the hospital only a couple of hours, at most, after the presumed rape. Spermatozoa are metabolized in a vagina, reducing their concentration. In a stain on a garment, although the sperm die, the concentration is not reduced.
Thus, had Crowell been raped at the time she claimed, the concentrations in the stain and on the swab should have been roughly equal. Blake's finding, which was confirmed by Henry C. Lee, a well-known Connecticut State Police scientist retained by the state, could only mean that the sexual encounter presumed to have been a rape shortly before the vaginal swabbing in fact had occurred much earlier. Bottom line: Crowell had not been raped, at least not in a manner consistent with the story she was telling.
Blake's finding, on the other hand, strongly corroborated her eventual admission that the stain had resulted from a consensual sexual encounter with her boyfriend the day before she claimed to have been raped. Based on the evidence presented in court, however, the jury found Dotson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge Samuels sentenced him to 25 to 50 years for rape and another 25 to 50 years for aggravated kidnapping, the terms to be served concurrently.
On appeal, Dotson's appellate defender was unaware of the problem with the forensic testimony and did not raise the issue. Instead, the appeal focused on Garza's improper conduct and the various known inconsistencies in the evidence. The Illinois Appellate Court ignored the problems, upholding the conviction in People v.
Dotson , 99 Ill. In early , Cathleen Crowell Webb, as she was now known, told her pastor, the Reverend Carl Nannini, that she was riddled with guilt because she had fabricated a rape allegation that had sent an innocent man to prison. She said she had invented the story because she feared that her boyfriend at the time, David Bierne, had made her pregnant, and she thought she needed a cover story if that turned out to be the case.
She added that she had inflicted the superficial cuts on her stomach and had torn her clothing to fortify the false claim. McLario thought it a bizarre but simple case. When he contacted the Cook County State's Attorneys Office, however, he found the prosecutors unresponsive.
Gibbons broke the story of the recantation on March 22, The next morning's Chicago Sun-Times devoted most of its front page to the story, but the Chicago Tribune deemed it worthy of only a small inside story. The Tribune story included a sentence that set the tone for much of the paper's ensuing coverage of the case: "A source close to the investigation called the woman 'unstable'.
Samuels acted in response to a petition filed by Warren Lupel, a commercial lawyer who had taken on the case as a favor to a client for whom Dotson's mother worked. Lupel's petition, which asked that the conviction be set aside, raised eyebrows among members of the criminal defense bar because he filed it under the Illinois Civil Practice Act, which automatically sent the case back to the original trial judge. Just as easily, Lupel could have filed the petition under the Illinois Post Conviction Act, which would have sent the case to a different judge.
Samuels appeared to be on the verge of going further on April 4, vacating the conviction and ordering a new trial.
Had he done so, practically speaking, it would have been the end of the case. In the face of the recantation of the complaining witness and the problems with the forensic evidence, there is little chance that the prosecution could have tried Dotson again.
However, the prosecution asked Samuels to delay his ruling. Scott Arthur, the supervising assistant state's attorney in the Markham branch court who had taken over the case from Raymond Garza, told Samuels that the prosecution had located Webb's former boyfriend, David Bierne, and wished to conduct new forensic tests to be sure that his blood type was consistent with Webb's recantation.
Samuels acquiesced, setting the next hearing for April 11, The tide began to shift against Dotson on April 10, the day before the scheduled hearing, when the Chicago Tribune published a front-page story stating that new forensic results cast doubt on Webb's claim that the semen in her underpants was David Bierne's.
The article, written by reporters Ann Marie Lipinski and John Kass, quoted unidentified sources as saying that "recent blood and saliva samples taken from [Beirne] do not match the evidence police found on [Crowell] in when she first claimed to have been raped. The leak on which the story was based relied upon a incorrect assumption. The reporters apparently had fallen victim to the same sleight of hand with which Timothy Dixon had deceived the Dotson jury a decade earlier: If Dixon had been correct that the semen could have come only from a B secretor, it could not have come from Bierne.
The new tests ordered by the prosecution, and leaked to the Tribune even before being shared with Dotson's lawyer, determined that Bierne was an O secretor. Thus, contrary to the Tribune report, the test included him among possible sources of the semen in the underpants. The false story was of little concern to Warren Lupel because the prosecution-ordered new forensic report substantially corroborated Webb's recantation.
Although the report, which had been prepared by Mark Stolorow, chief forensic serologist of the Illinois State Police, was written somewhat cryptically, it clearly acknowledged the error of Dixon's claim that the semen could have originated only from a B secretor — such as Dotson.
And, the Tribune article notwithstanding, the Stolorow report confirmed that the semen could have come from, among others, O secretors — a group that included David Bierne. At the April 11 hearing, however, Warren Lupel made an unfortunate tactical error. In an ill-conceived effort to reinforce the already-strong alibi, which was a matter of record from the trial, he called one witness who had not testified previously. The witness was Bill Julian, Dotson's best friend.
Julian's testimony contradicted the other witnesses on the question who had been driving the evening of the crime, when the group dropped in at two parties. At the trial, the witnesses unanimously stated that one of the young women had been driving, but Julian now claimed that he had been the driver.
The truth was that Julian had been driving. The trial witnesses later acknowledged outside of court that they had lied about the fact initially out of fear that the truth might get Julian into trouble because he was driving on a suspended license.
Lupel was taken by surprise when J. Scott Arthur declared in his closing argument at the April 11 hearing that the inconsistency proved the old adage, "If you give a guilty man enough rope, he'll hang himself. The prosecution, having branded the alibi as unworthy of belief at the trial because it lacked inconsistency, now branded it so because an inconsistency had emerged.
Lupel saw the irony of the situation, but could not respond. He had been blind-sided. He did not learn the truth until after the hearing, when it was too late. Ignoring the exculpatory new forensic evidence, Judge Samules announced at the conclusion of the hearing that it seemed to him that Webb's trial testimony was more credible than her recantation.
He revoked the bond he had approved one week earlier, sending Dotson back to prison. In the following days, the Tribune increased the tempo of its prejudicial fusillade, including a Sunday front-page piece reinforcing the notion that Webb might be unstable. At last, a source was quoted by name — Assistant State's Attorney Margaret Frossard, who had cross examined Webb at the hearing before Samuels two days earlier.
She seemed calculating, evasive, and manipulative. Despite the pro-prosecution spin of the Tribune coverage, however, significant public sentiment seemed to remain on Dotson's side. Petitions were circulated demanding his release and, for days running, several local and national radio talk shows were devoted almost exclusively to the case. Thompson for clemency.
The timing could not have been better. The high-profile case was just the thing to distract attention from a controversy over the Thompson administration's handling of a massive salmonella outbreak that had begun on March Although the source of the poisoning was immediately suspected to be a dairy operated by Jewel Food Companies, the Thompson administration had allowed the dairy to continue operating until it voluntarily closed under public pressure on April 9, just two days before Dotson was sent back to prison.
By then, the outbreak had become the worst in U. Kirkpatrick, a Thompson crony with no background in disease control, left the country on a vacation of his own on April 3, at the height of the outbreak. Thompson did not find out that Kirkpatrick was gone until April Thompson then fired Kirkpatrick "for not having any common sense. No Illinois governor had ever presided over a clemency hearing. Normally, the governor just receives a report from the Illinois Prisoner Review Board.
But Thompson announced that the interests of justice demanded his personal attention in this case. The three-day hearing, from May 10 through May 12 was an international media spectacle.
It was held in the main auditorium of Chicago's recently completed State of Illinois Building, soon to be renamed the James R. Thompson Center. The Illinois Supreme Court had reinstated Dotson's bond on April 30, making it possible for him to appear in person.
His testimony was carried live on several television stations, as was Webb's. A huge image of her stained undergarment was projected onto an overhead screen at the front of the auditorium.
The stain, 11 inches long, was the object of a great deal of attempted humor among the audience, which comprised scores of reporters from Chicago and around the world. In the end, the Prisoner Review Board voted unanimously to deny clemency and, after taking the matter under advisement for several minutes, Thompson announced to assembled media that Dotson's trial had been fair. In fact, he said, the evidence of his guilt was stronger now than originally. Nonetheless, Thompson said, he had decided to commute Dotson's sentence to time served, in effect proclaiming Dotson popular but guilty and proclaiming the Illinois criminal justice system sound and pure.
What commuting the sentence actually meant was that Dotson would be on parole, which meant, in turn, that any violation of the norms of society could be and, as Dotson soon learned, would be punished without the rigmarole of formal charges or a trial. What would be left unsaid by the mainstream news media was that Thompson had stacked the deck: He approved all of witnesses, studiously avoiding any that stood to embarrass the forensic operation of the State Police, and would not permit cross-examination.
Edward Blake, for instance, who had reliable scientific results discrediting the original allegation and corroborating the recantation, was not called. Nor did Thompson permit the testimony of Charles P. McDowell, who had conducted the most comprehensive study of false rape allegations ever undertaken. McDowell, a Ph. Of the reported cases, were proven genuine, false, and were not resolved. The case became the focus of national attention four years ago when Webb publicly declared that a rape had not occurred in Webb, who was a high school student in the south suburbs at the time, said she panicked after having sex with her boyfriend amid fears that she was pregnant and had made up a story about being abducted and assaulted.
He was released from prison on bond. An extraordinary, televised hearing directed by Gov. James Thompson was held to re-examine evidence in the case. As a result, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board revoked his parole and ordered him returned to prison. A year ago, he was ordered to enter an alcohol counseling program for inmates run in a north suburban center.
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