Woman Testifies She Fabricated Park Rape Story

The third of three Oxnard brothers to be charged with rape in unrelated incidents went to trial Wednesday, with the alleged victim emphatically denying that any crime occurred.

Dale L. Chester, 22, frequently covered his mouth with his hand to hide his grin from jurors as a 20-year-old woman testified nervously about what she now says was consensual sex between the two on July 3 in a Camarillo park.

While the prosecution says the Camarillo woman is recanting her story because she was threatened by the Chester family, the woman denied that and testified that she fabricated the rape story because she was angry with the defendant.

“I said look . . . I’ll hang you, and I hanged him,” the woman testified. “Look where he is. I hanged him.”

The woman at first testified that she could not remember what caused her to become angry and falsely claim she was raped at gunpoint, but minutes later changed her story, saying both she and Chester got mad after having sex in the park because each was dating another person.

Through three hours of testimony the woman strayed from her story only once, when the prosecutor pulled out the .357 magnum Chester had with him the night of the incident and asked if that was the gun that was held to her head during the rape.

“Yes,” she answered, then shook her head as though startled and said, “I mean no, no, no.”

Two of Chester’s brothers are serving lengthy prison terms for violent rapes. Samuel C. Chester, 28, was sentenced in July to more than 35 years in prison for raping a mother and daughter 15 months apart in the same house.

Leonard Chester, 32, is serving a 44-year sentence for a series of rapes in Oxnard in 1980.

Dale Chester is charged with two counts of rape and one count each of oral copulation and sodomy. He has been in custody in the Ventura County Jail since July, with bail set at $50,000.

The incident in question occurred about 3:30 a.m. in Pleasant Valley Park. Although the woman initially told sheriff’s deputies she went with Chester to the park because he promised to take her to his brother, Ruben, whom she was dating, she now says Dale was her boyfriend, a fact she kept hidden from her family and friends.

The woman first recanted her story on July 6, three days after the incident. She acknowledged on the witness stand that she had received a threatening phone call from the defendant’s girlfriend, but she denied that was the motive for her retraction.

The woman first reported the rape to a couple who live across the street from the park, where she ran for help after the incident. In a tape-recorded telephone call made to police moments later, the obviously hysterical woman sobbed into the phone and told the dispatcher, “He raped me. He raped me.. . . He has a gun.”

As the tape was played for jurors during the trial, the woman wiped away tears. After it was completed, however, she said she was hysterical when the call was made because of her anger at Chester for having another girlfriend.

In repeated interviews with sheriff’s and district attorney’s officials about the alleged rape, the woman gave a detailed account about what happened before, during and after the assault.

She said she was able to remember all the details from one interview to the next because she concentrated on the lies she was telling.

“Everything I said to the deputies that morning, I knew they were going to believe,” she testified.

Asked by Deputy Dist. Atty. Lela Henke-Dobroth how she was able to concoct a fictional rape in such detail in just a few minutes, the woman replied, “When you’re trying to get somebody in trouble you’re going to go by the first lie you come up with.

“When you start one lie, one lie comes after another and after another and after another,” the woman said. “It just all came out at once.”

The woman denied that Chester said he would kill her if she reported the rape, saying he had no reason to threaten her because he never used force.

She also denied that she told him she wouldn’t report the rape out of concern for her 18-month-old son.

On cross-examination, the woman refused to go along with defense suggestions that she was being pressured by prosecutors to stick to her rape story.

“All everybody tells me is to tell the truth,” she said. “I told them the truth, and I just don’t understand why this keeps getting dragged out.”