Nation Debates Jailed Man’s Innocence : Recanted Rape Case Stays in Spotlight

A month ago, Cathy Webb was a happy, 23-year-old housewife and mother. She, her husband and their children, 1 and 2 years old, lived quietly in a flinty New Hampshire town.

She did not watch much television: The house does not even have a set. But she reveled in her household chores--cooking, cleaning and playing with the youngsters--and she regularly attended Sunday services at Pilgrim Baptist Church.

In Illinois, meanwhile, Gary Dotson, 28, was a man without hope and without much reason for hope. Asked to name his family’s new puppy, he suggested “Freedom.” But it was wishful thinking.

Dotson was in the maximum-security prison at Joliet, Ill., in the sixth year of a 25- to 50-year sentence for raping a 16-year-old girl in the Chicago suburbs. His first parole hearing was three years away.

Today, the names of Webb and Dotson are known around the nation.

Webb is holding press conferences, flying to New York for network talk shows and being sought after by Hollywood producers. She refuses to discuss her early life, citing an agreement with People magazine, which plans to put her on the cover this week.

Dotson, after a brief taste of freedom and hopes of walking away from jail for good, is back in prison dungarees.

Theirs is a peculiar tale of lies and truth, of deception and conscience, and of a country captured in a debate over whether one jailed man is really innocent.

It was the assured testimony of Webb, then 18-year-old Cathy Crowell, that convinced a jury in 1979 to convict Dotson, a long-haired, 22-year-old high school dropout, on charges of kidnaping and raping her two years before.

But last month, six years after that trial in suburban Chicago, Webb proclaimed through her attorney that Dotson was an innocent man. She had lied, she said. She was never raped, she insisted, but made up the story because she had had sexual relations with her boyfriend, was worried that she might be pregnant and was too ashamed to admit the indiscretion to her parents.

Now, she said, she wanted to set the record straight. And she was willing to sign an affidavit, testify again in court and even risk a perjury charge to see that Gary Dotson went free.

Brief Freedom

Dotson did, indeed, go free--after posting bond--while he awaited a decision by Cook County Circuit Judge Richard Samuels on a motion to erase his conviction. He arrived home to a house flooded with yellow welcoming ribbons. He ate a big ham dinner on Easter with his family. He paced the house, getting used to the windows and open spaces of life outside prison walls.

Last week, Dotson was in handcuffs again, and Webb was screaming to reporters: “He’s innocent!”

Samuels had ruled that Webb’s new story was not as believable as her old one and that other evidence still indicated she had been raped by Dotson. The original conviction stood.

Today, Webb is still in the media spotlight, vowing “to see his (Dotson’s) slate wiped completely clean. Every day that man is in prison is terrible.” She even agreed to take a lie detector test that her attorney says shows she is telling the truth.

Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson, besieged by citizens urging him to free Dotson, has promised to quickly review an application for executive clemency, which Dotson’s attorney filed Friday.

The governor called a news conference later Friday to announce that, if he decides that no further investigation is needed, he will sit down with the prison review board in special session, perhaps as early as this week, to consider the case.

Release Supported

Bernard Carey, the former state’s attorney whose office prosecuted Dotson, supports Dotson’s release because he fears the growing public controversy could damage the credibility of rape victims and the credibility of the criminal justice system itself.

“If he did commit the crime, he has served enough time; if he did not, then, obviously, he should be released,” Carey said. Dotson has already served six months longer than the average jail time in Illinois for a rape conviction.

“Free Dotson” petition drives have begun, with thousands of names collected at Chicago taverns and in Dotson’s neighborhood. Lawyers for Dotson and Webb have received hundreds of offers of assistance from other attorneys, and public pressure to release Dotson has been mounting across the country.

As the Chicago Sun-Times noted in an editorial last week: “Legal subtleties are irrelevant in the court of public opinion . . . “ It applauded Americans for caring so much about “a possible miscarriage of justice committed in the name of the state.”

Apologized on TV

Was it a miscarriage of justice? At first, when Webb came forward, it seemed that a horrible mistake had been made. She apologized tearfully on the “Today” show to Dotson’s mother, saying she was willing to accept the consequences of her action.

But as prosecutors reinvestigated the case, as Webb’s original, convincing story was replayed and as the medical testimony was brought forward again, the truth was not so clear.

It all began on a Saturday night, July 9, 1977. Cathy Crowell, then a high school junior, left the Long John Silver’s Seafood Restaurant where she worked and began walking home. Two hours later, a policeman found her walking beside a local park, bloodied and crying, clothes torn and disheveled.

She was taken to a hospital where a doctor examined her, finding what appeared to be the letters “DULL” carved on her stomach, scratches on her chest and vaginal trauma, indicating sexual intercourse had occurred. Tests on her underpants indicated the presence of semen; tests on a hair found there indicated it was not hers.

Cried Hysterically

Officer Anna Carroll remembered seeing the young girl huddled in a corner at the police station, crying hysterically. Cathy said she had been grabbed by three young men and forced into a car as she walked home from work. One of them raped her while the others laughed and drank beer, she said.

A police artist drew a sketch of her assailant from her description, and Cathy went through hundreds of mug shots at several suburban police stations. Finally, and without hesitation, she pointed to the picture of one man.

He was Gary Dotson, whose picture was there because of his arrest a year earlier on suspicion of stealing a television set.

Dotson was put in a lineup, and Cathy identified him. She also said she thought another man in the lineup might have been in the car, but she was not sure. That man turned out to be Dotson’s best friend, who had been with him that Saturday night.

‘Convincing Witness’

At the trial two years later, Cathy was “an extremely convincing witness,” recalled Katherine M. Swanson, 30, the jury foreman at the trial. “None of the jurors had doubt in their minds.”

Asked on the witness stand how close her face had been to Dotson’s during the incident, Cathy responded firmly: “Oh, he was very close. I will never, ever forget him.” Later, she said again: “I can never forget that face.”

Dotson’s lawyer did not dispute that Cathy had been raped--only that Dotson had done it. Dotson’s friends paraded to the stand as alibi witnesses. He was with them all evening, they said.

Taking the stand in his own defense, Dotson denied knowing or ever seeing Cathy. He said he been drinking a lot of beer that night and, at one point, passed out in his friend’s car while the friends were socializing inside a house. When he woke up, he was home, he testified.

“We never questioned that that young lady was raped,” defense attorney Paul Foxgrover said in his closing arguments that day. “She was attacked. It is a tragedy. An absolute tragedy.”

The prosecutor, Raymond Garza, summed up this way: “Is that young lady ever going to forget that man’s face, looking at him eyeball to eyeball for two hours?”

He noted that while Cathy had been positive about Dotson in the police lineup, she had acknowledged she was not positive about her identification of Dotson’s friend. That, he said, indicated “Miss Crowell is an honest, God-fearing young lady who would not make a misidentification of a man she was not sure about.”

At his sentencing, Dotson declared: “I am innocent . . . That will be that until the day I die.”

The jury took just 96 minutes to render a verdict of guilty.

Cathy Crowell was then a senior at Homewood-Flossmoor High and living with foster parents. Her natural parents had divorced when she was 4. Her father won custody of her, but he remarried and placed her in a foster home.

Her experience there “would make the hardest heart weep,” said her attorney, John McLario.

He declined to elaborate in an interview, saying an agreement Webb made with People magazine prohibited discussing her childhood. But, he said, she was subjected to mental abuse, rather than physical or sexual.

She was sent to another foster home, where she was happy. Her new parents, however, were morally strict and, she says, that was why she feared telling them about her relations with a boyfriend.

Moves to New Hampshire

Cathy later met David Webb at her high school; they were married and moved to Jaffrey, N.H., a New England community of 2,000. David found a job as an ironworker, and Cathy gave birth to their two children.

Three years ago, she had a religious conversion that prompted her to want to make up for what she now says was the lie that put Gary Dotson in jail. But it was not until last month that she shared her secret.

She confided in Bonnie Nannini, wife of her minister at Pilgrim Baptist, a fundamentalist church in Jaffrey. At the pastor’s urging, she sought out McLario, a Menomonee Falls, Wis., attorney and, like Webb, a “born-again” Christian.

When the story first appeared, her attorney requested anonymity for her, and only her maiden name was released. But, eventually, she was fully identified.

“I never anticipated this attention,” said Webb, a dark-haired woman who carries a leather-bound Bible in her purse and pauses to fold her hands in prayer before each interview. “It makes me uncomfortable, but I’m not sorry I came forward.”

Her new story caught Dotson by surprise. Despite his long years in prison, he did not seem bitter.

Judge Samuels, who had heard the first trial, was on the bench again when Webb took the stand two weeks ago. The burden this time was on Dotson, to prove that Webb’s new story was true. The odds were long: The law characterizes recanted testimony as very unreliable.

Webb’s new testimony was not nearly so assured as her comments to reporters had been, and the years had made some of the events of July 9, 1977, fuzzy in her mind.

She said she had carved the marks on her own abdomen with a broken bottle, torn her clothes and scratched her vaginal area that night in 1977. She had intended to then go home and tell her foster parents she had been raped when a police officer stopped her and took her to a hospital, she said.

She felt forced to select Dotson out of the police photographs because he matched the description she had made up, she testified. Only now, because of her belief in God, had she felt compelled to come forward and tell the truth, she said.

But, except for her own admission, there was little to corroborate her new story. The evidence supporting her story in the first trial remained.

One key point raised during the hearing was the presence of semen on her underclothing. She said she had sex with her boyfriend “a few days before” she made the rape claim and was examined by a doctor. Did she wear the same underpants a few days later? She was uncertain.

The hearing was postponed. Judge Samuels set a bond for Dotson that was posted by an anonymous donor. Then, last week, Samuels ruled against Dotson’s petition, saying he did not know “for what unfathomable reason Cathy recanted.”

He said her testimony in 1979 “was clear and convincing” and “consistent with a person making a sincere claim of rape.” This time, he said, she seemed to have “selective recollection.”

The judge wondered aloud why she had taken so long to recant. Two years passed before the case went to trial, and he noted that by then she knew she was not pregnant.

The celebrated case has now grown beyond the doors of one courtroom or the borders of one state.

The Senate subcommittee on juvenile justice plans hearings next week in Washington on the way recanted testimony is treated in the courts. The panel wants to explore ways to better screen persons who are fabricating crime stories.

All the attention worries both rape victims and prosecutors who handle rape cases. “We’re going to suffer a major setback because of this,” said Cecily M. Robbins, executive director of the Rape Crisis Center in Washington.

“People are already using the Illinois case as an example in courtroom arguments. Any public case that raises questions about a sexual assault victim’s credibility is devastating,” she added.

‘Should Raise Doubts’

Roger L. Stanton, head of the felony division of the Los Angeles public defender’s office, said the Dotson case “should raise doubts and cause people who hear cases to be more skeptical than they might otherwise be.” But, he added, he sees no dramatic effect on other rape cases.

Meanwhile, Dotson has been moved from Joliet to a medium-security prison at Dixon, Ill. Prison officials fear his fame might make him a target for attack by inmates wanting publicity. He has been described as depressed, but his attorney, Warren Lupel, said Dotson still has hope that he will be freed.

Webb continues to press Dotson’s cause. Her attorney has a stack of movie and book offers that he says will not be opened until Dotson is freed. Webb, he says, wants to return to being just another housewife.

“It’s getting to the point where she thinks she’s done everything she can,” he said.

Times researcher Wendy Leopold also contributed to this story.