DNA Tests Free Convicted Rapist : Justice: William Harris, 28, served seven years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He doesn’t show animosity, but keeps thinking about the could-have-beens.

At the age of 28, William O’Dell Harris’ life is already full of could-have-beens and should-have-beens.

He could have been an Olympic wrestler and should have been a college graduate. He could have been a husband by now, and a father.

But a jury convicted him of raping a woman in 1984 while he was a high school sophomore. A judge sentenced him to up to 20 years in prison, beginning a month after he graduated from high school in 1987.

In August--after Harris had served seven years in prison--prosecutors acknowledged it had all been a mistake. DNA tests proved Harris was not the culprit, and authorities said they will drop the charges against him.

Despite this gaping, seven-year hole in his life, he renounces anger.

“It can make you bitter,” he says.

“It can make you a madman. It can make you not care about anything. It really depends on what kind of person you are.”

This is the kind of person Harris is: “You would never know that he was ever in jail,” said Bill Sohovich, his boss at the restaurant where he works as a short-order cook.

“There’s no outward anger or animosity toward anyone here. I’ve never heard him say a derogatory remark about the justice system or any of the people who had anything to do with this.”

It took a jury just four hours to convict Harris of slugging and raping a 26-year-old nurse as she walked home from work. The woman identified him and a state police chemist testified his DNA matched the rapist’s.

His father, William Sr., had tried to persuade him to accept a plea bargain in exchange for as little as six months at a youth center.

“He said, ‘Dad, I didn’t do it. So I’m not going to plead guilty,’ ” the father said. “I couldn’t have done that.”

His parents remained his only confidants during his years in prison. His girlfriend and her parents testified on his behalf, but she left him shortly before he entered prison.

There was a lot of time in prison to think of what might have happened had he been acquitted. Maybe he would have graduated from college; he had accepted a four-year wrestling scholarship at Norfolk (Va.) State College.

Maybe he would have gone to the Olympics in Seoul in 1988 or Barcelona in 1992. He was the state high school heavyweight wrestling champion in 1986 and thinks he was good enough to compete internationally.

Instead he watched the games on television.

“I’d put myself in another guy’s shoes. I’d think of what was going through his head or in his heart,” he said. “I remember the kind of feeling I had when I won the state. You never get another feeling like that. That’s the ultimate.”

It was another inmate, Glen Dale Woodall, who showed the way to freedom. “Without him, I would still be there for the next four or five years,” Harris said.

Woodall was the first wrongfully convicted inmate to be released because of questions about the work of police chemist Fred Zain.

Zain faces allegations that he fabricated or tampered with evidence in scores of cases. A West Virginia jury in March acquitted Zain of one charge of perjury and deadlocked on a second; he faces similar charges in Bexar County, Tex., where he worked after leaving West Virginia in 1989.

Woodall was freed in 1992 after five years in the cell next to Harris, and ultimately won $1 million from the state on a wrongful conviction lawsuit.

“I could always hear him in there late at night typing,” Harris said. “I’d wake up and his light’s the only light on. He was in there working on getting his DNA test.”

Harris followed suit, and ultimately his case was among the three in West Virginia--and a fourth in Texas--that have been overturned thus far as a result of the investigation into Zain’s practices.

When he was released from the state penitentiary at Moundsville on July 1, 1994, Harris knew most people still didn’t believe him. He would catch the stares and see them whispering.

“I know most people shouldn’t care about what other people think, but I did,” Harris said. “People were always wondering. I knew what they were talking about.”

Nobody really spoke until Kanawha County prosecutor Bill Forbes announced that he was dropping the charges. Now, people honk their horns and wave to him from their cars. Sometimes, they call the restaurant where he works to request a milkshake specifically by “Will Jr.”

He doesn’t have the money for arthroscopic knee surgery for an injury suffered while practicing with a semipro football team; he plans to sue the state for $1 million, but right now he’s still burdened by legal fees. He worked two jobs for a few months, getting up at 3 a.m., finishing after noon and punching in at a part-time job at 3 p.m.

There is joy in his life: “I do things now that I could only dream about when I was locked up,” he said. “I’d sit in my cell and I think, ‘Man, it would be nice to go to the park and just sit back.’ ”

He goes to the mall. He enjoys solitude. His life is simple, but it will never be normal.

“I don’t think that any person that comes out of the penitentiary will get to that point. It won’t come,” Harris said. “You can work and work and work, but you’ll always have that in the back of your head.”