The Rape That Never Was: Gary Dotson and Cathleen Crowell Webb

Cathleen Crowell Webb and Gary Dotson in 1985 (photo source)

The True Story Behind the First Person Exonerated by DNA

It was Saturday, July 9, 1977, shortly before 11 p.m.  A Homewood, Illinois police officer was making his normal patrol rounds when he happened upon a teenage girl standing beside a road located not far from a shopping mall.  The girl, sixteen-year-old Cathleen Crowell, flagged down the officer and tearfully told him that she had been raped.  According to Cathy, she had gotten off work at Long John Silver's, where she was employed as a cashier and a fry cook, and begun walking home around 8:45 p.m. when she approached by a car that was occupied by three men.  Two of the men jumped out, grabbed her and threw her into the back, with one of the men joining her in the backseat and the other sitting up front with the driver.  The car sped off and she was restrained by the front seat passenger, who hooked his arm around her knee, and the man in back, who sat on top of her.  The man in back tore at her clothing, ripping it, tried to kiss her, bit her breast, and then raped her while the others "laughed like it was a big joke."  After being raped, Cathy said her rapist took a broken beer bottle and attempted to write something with it on her stomach.   She was then pushed from the car nearly naked, with her clothing and handbag tossed out after her.  She had pulled her clothing back on and had begun walking when the officer happened to pass her.   "I tried to fight him off," she cried, "and I couldn't."  She was certain, though, that she had torn her rapist's shirt during the attack and scratched his chest.

Cathy was taken first to the police station and then to the hospital.  Dr. Andrew Labrador, the physician who performed the examination of Cathleen, noted that her clothing was dirt-stained and in disarray when she arrived.  He observed a swelling on her head, bruises on her arm, markings on her breast, which Cathy said was the result of her attacker biting her, and raised red scratches on her stomach that resembled letters.  A pelvic examination showed abrasions to her hymen and trauma to her vaginal area.   

(Photo source) 

Cathy's clothing was sent to the Illinois crime lab, where forensic scientist Timothy Dixon noted seminal material on her underpants, as well as a pubic hair.  Dixon stated that the seminal fluid came from secretor (a person who secretes their blood antigens into their other bodily fluids) with type B blood.  He also said the pubic hair did not come from Cathy Crowell.   It was also noted there was blood on both her blouse and her underwear.    

On July 12, Cathy's parents drove her back to the Homewood police station, where she worked with a sketch artist to compose a picture of her rapist, a man she described as a young white man with stringy, shoulder-length hair who was clean-shaven.  

Over the next several days, Cathy viewed several hundred photographs in various mug books.  It was on July 15, 1977, while looking through a mug book at the Country Club Hills Police Station, that she identified a photograph of a 20-year-old high school dropout by the name of Gary Dotson as her rapist.

(Photo source)

Gary's Nightmare Begins

On July 16, 1977, Gary Dotson was arrested at the Country Club Hills home he shared with his mother and sister.  He was placed in a police lineup at the Homewood Police Station and despite the fact that Gary had a mustache and certainly couldn't have grown it in less than five days, Cathy Crowell positively identified him.   She also mentioned to the officers that the fifth person in the lineup may have been the front seat passenger but she could not make a positive identification on him.

It took nearly two years before Gary Dotson was brought to trial in May of 1979 in the neighboring community of Markham.  Gary, now 22 years old, testified that on July 9, 1977 he had left his home around noon with his friend, Terry Julian.  The two men had then gone to a local bar before picking up Terry's girlfriend Pam.  The three then drove to Chicago to visit Terry's mom, where they watched television and drank beer until roughly 8:30 or 9 p.m., at which time they returned to Country Club Hills with the intention of going to some parties.  Gary and his friends went to several different house parties, the last one being in Province Town.  Gary said he had been tired by the point so he went to sleep in the backseat of the car while his friends went inside.  He remembered nothing else before waking up at home the next morning but denied raping Cathy Crowell.  

Gary's friends testified on  his behalf, corroborating his testimony.  Terry Julian and his girlfriend both testified that Gary was with them at Terry's mother's house until 9 p.m., making it impossible for him to have been in Homewood around 8:45, when Cathy claimed she had been abducted.   Terry and Pam, as well as other friends who had accompanied them to the parties that night, swore that Gary had been in their presence all evening, other than when he slept in the car, and had been taken home that night between midnight and 12:30 a.m.    

Gary's mother Barbara took the stand to testify that her son had last been clean-shaven at fifteen.  Ever since, he had had a mustache.  

Of the prosecution's witnesses, two were the most substantive:  Cathy Crowell herself and Timothy Dixon, the state police forensic scientist who had examined Cathy's clothing.  

In 1979, Cathy was a student at Homewood-Flossmoor High School, where she swam on the junior varsity swim team, studied Russian, and was considered a hardworking and high-achieving student.  She recounted the details of her abduction and rape, finishing by identifying him in the courtroom and adding, "There's no mistaking that face."  

Dixon testified that he had found type B blood antigens in the stain in Cathy's underwear, a stain that he deemed a seminal stain.  He told the jury that type B secretors made up only 10 percent of the white male population.  Gary Dotson was a type B secretor.  

Dixon then testified to loose hairs that were recovered from Cathy Crowell, stating that "several" were "microscopically similar" to Gary Dotson's. 

Assistant Cook County State's Attorney Raymond Garza, the lead prosecutor in the case, reiterated to the jury the horror that Cathy Crowell had been subjected to and added that she had been a virgin prior to the events of July 9, 1977.  He twisted Timothy Dixon's testimony in his closing argument, telling the jury that the hairs recovered from the rape "matched" Gary Dotson.  He also said that the jurors should disregard alibi testimony provided by Gary's friends, whom he called "liars," and said their testimony was just too pat to be believed.  Their lack of inconsistencies between their accounts of the night in question, according to Garza, made their testimony lack merit.  

Gary's attorney, Assistant Cook County Public Defender Paul Foxgrover objected to Garza's outlandish claim (in 1979, many years before DNA analysis, there was no way to say with absolute certainty that hairs matched and/or belonged to a certain individual) but did not challenge anything that Timothy Dixon testified to.  He also did not remind the jury of the very obvious and major inconsistencies in Cathy's description of the rapist - clean-shaven when Gary sported a full mustache - and her claims to have scratched the rapist's chest, when Gary bore no such scratches when he was examined on July 15, 1977.   He did not hammer home that the car Cathy described being thrown into did not match the vehicle of any of Gary's family members or known acquaintances.     

On those instances where Foxgrover objected to Garza's prejudicial arguments, the judge, Richard L. Samuels, overruled Foxgrover's objections.  

On May 14, 1979, the jury, predictably, found Gary Dotson guilty of aggravated kidnapping and rape.   On July 12, 1979,  one year and three days after Cathy Crowell claimed to have been raped, Judge Samuels sentenced Gary to 25 to 50 years for rape and another 25 to 50 years for aggravated kidnapping, with the sentences to be served concurrently.  

Gary immediately appealed his conviction through appellate attorney Jeffrey Schulman, claiming that he had not been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, his sentence was excessive, and that lead prosecutor Raymond Garza's improper conduct had denied him a fair trial.  The Illinois Appellate Court sided with the trial court and upheld Gary's conviction in 1981.

Cathy Recants

In 1982, Cathy Crowell married a high school classmate of hers, David Webb.  The couple moved to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where they joined Pilgrim Baptist Church.  In early 1985, Cathy told her pastor, Reverend Carl Nannini, she was riddled with guilt because she had fabricated a rape allegation that had sent an innocent man to prison.  According to Cathy in 1985, she had invented the story out of fear that a sexual encounter with her then-boyfriend would lead to pregnancy.  Afraid of potentially having to explain a teenage pregnancy to her parents, she had invented the cover story of the rape.  She had inflicted the superficial cuts to her stomach and had torn her clothing to support her story.

With Cathy's permission, Pastor Nannini contacted attorney and devout Baptist John McLario, who agreed to represent her at once.  Believing it would be a simple and straightforward transaction, McLario contacted the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.  He was surprised to find the prosecutors not only unresponsive to him but believed that Cathy Crowell Webb was lying about making up the rape.  As they were unwilling to revisit the Crowell/Dotson case, or consider that they may have imprisoned an innocent man, McLario was put in touch with reporter Jim Gibbons.  It was Gibbons who broke Cathy Crowell Webb's recantation on March 22, 1985.  

On March 23, 1985, the Chicago area papers all ran with the news, although some made it front page while others gave it a small inside story.  The Chicago Tribune cited a source that claimed Cathy was "unstable," and from that point onward, the State's Attorney's Office set out to discredit Cathy Crowell Webb.  

Public sympathy was most definitely with Gary Dotson, however and Illinois residents were outraged that a seemingly innocent man was still sitting behind bars.   Gary's attorney, Warren Lupel, a commercial attorney who had taken the case as a favor to Gary's mother Barbara, filed a petition in which Gary asked that his conviction be set aside.  Inexplicably, Lupel filed the petition under the Illinois Civil Practice Act, which sent it back to the original trial judge, rather than the Illinois Post Conviction Act, which would have garnered Gary a new judge.   On April 4, 1985, Richard L. Samuels, the same judge that presided over Gary's trial and the same judge that sentenced him, surprisingly ordered Gary's release on a $100,000 bond pending a hearing the following week.  Samuels could have vacated Gary's conviction and ordered a new trial, virtually guaranteeing the end of the case, but the prosecution asked the judge to delay his ruling, which Samuels did.  

Attorney J. Scott Arthur, who had taken over the case from Raymond Garza, told Judge Samuels that the prosecution had located Cathy Crowell Webb's former boyfriend, a man by the name of David Bierne, and the state wished to conduct new forensic tests and compare them to her recantation.  

On April 10, 1985, one day before the scheduled hearing, the Chicago Tribune published a story stating that forensic results cast doubt on Cathy Crowell Webb's claim that the semen recovered from her underpants in 1977 was that of David Bierne's.  The ubiquitous "unnamed sources" claimed that "recent blood and saliva samples taken from Bierne do not match the evidence police found on Crowell in 1977."  

It turned out to be a false story because the prosecution's new forensic report not only corroborated Cathy Crowell Webb's recantation but found many glaring and inexcusable errors in Timothy Dixon's original analysis and report.  The original stain, called a seminal fluid stain by Dixon was not; it was a mixture of seminal fluid and vaginal fluid.  That meant the antigens Dixon detected and tested could have come from the unidentified male or from Cathy herself, who was also a type B secretor.  Dixon had known that fact in 1979, as was indicated in his notes, but chose not to share that with the jury or with Gary's attorneys.  

The new testing showed that the contributor of the semen stain could have type B blood . . . or type O.  That meant the ten percent of the white, male population Dixon cited was as the percentage of males that could have left the stain was false.  In fact, a full two-thirds of the white, male population could account for the stain.      

Dixon, as it turned out, had begun his testimony back in 1979 with a lie.  He claimed that he had done graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley.  It turned out that he had actually only attended a two-day seminar there.  

Dixon admitted in a 1985 telephone interview with a Washington Post reporter that "almost anyone could have been chemically linked to the stain" that Raymond Garza had linked to Gary Dotson and the stain "could have come from a nonsecretor" as well as other blood groups than the one he specifically testified to.  Why didn't he offer that information at trial?  "I guess it just wasn't asked."

At the April 11 hearing, Warren Lupel made a tactical error.  Attempting to reinforce Gary's alibi for the night of July 9, 1977, already a matter of record, he called a witness by the name of Bill Julian who had not previously testified.   Julian was Gary's best friend but unfortunately, his testimony contradicted that of the other witnesses on the question of who had been driving on the evening of July 9.  At the trial, the witnesses unanimously stated that one of the young women present had been driving but Julian now claimed that he had been the driver.

 Prosecutor J. Scott Arthur said in his closing argument at the hearing that "if you give a guilty man enough rope, he'll hang himself."  After having decreed the alibi as being unworthy due to consistency, now the prosecution claimed it was indeed unworthy because an inconsistency emerged.  

Ignoring the exculpatory new forensic evidence, as well as Cathy Crowell Webb's recanting of her original testimony, Judge Samuels stated that Cathy's trial testimony was more credible and believable than her recantation, and revoked Gary's bond, sending Gary back to prison.  

Warren Lupel was told after the hearing that Gary's friends back in 1979 had lied, or at least fibbed.  They knew that Bill Julian had been driving that night but he had been driving on a suspended license and they worried that disclosing the truth would get him in trouble.  It did not help Lupel, who had been blindsided by the testimony, and it certainly did not help Gary, who found himself back behind bars.

Although the Chicago Tribune continued with its very prosecution-friendly coverage (continuing to suggest that Cathy was unstable, calculating, evasive and manipulative), public sentiment remained with Gary.  Petitions were circulated demanding his release and the nation began to cotton on to the injustice happening in Illinois.  

On April 19, Warren Lupel petitioned Governor James R. Thompson for clemency.  

Enter the Governor . . .

Thompson, whose administration was under fire for the handling of a massive salmonella outbreak, chose to preside over the clemency hearing, although  no Illinois governor had ever done so before.  The Illinois Supreme Court reinstated Gary's bond on April 30 and the clemency hearing took place from May 10 until May 12.  For the first time since 1979, Gary Dotson and Cathy Crowell were in the same room.  Both gave testimony, which was broadcast live on several television stations.  

Thompson, though, stacked the deck in the favor of the prosecution.  He did not permit cross-examination and Edward Blake, who had conducted the new forensic tests disputing the results of Timothy Dixon, was not called.  Neither was Charles P. McDowell, who had conducted the most comprehensive study of false rape allegations, and who was prepared to tell the Prisoner Review Board that there was no doubt that Cathy Crowell had fabricated her rape allegation. 

The Prisoner Review Board voted unanimously to deny clemency and Thompson claimed that not only was the hearing fair but the evidence of his guilt was now stronger than ever.  Despite that, he made the decision to commute Gary's sentence to time served.  Although it meant that Gary would walk out of prison a free man, it also meant that he would be on parole and a convicted felon.  Any violation could and would be punished without benefit of a trial and could and would send him back to prison.

After being behind bars for more than six years, Gary Dotson did not immediately fall back into life as a free man.  His ordeal, combined with still being legally guilty, led him to soothe with alcohol.  He would later claim that during his clemency hearing, booze was virtually his only sustenance.  He would drink before the hearing, during the lunch break, and at night he would drink until he passed out.

He took the advice of well-meaning friends, who thought he would be set for life, and signed book and movie contracts, none of which came to fruition.  Cathy Crowell Webb, with whom he had appeared on national television in some post-release interviews, sent him $17,500, the total advance she received for Forgive Me, the book in which she chronicled her childhood, her mother's mental illness, her false rape allegation that led to Gary's conviction and incarceration, and her atonement.   In return, Gary agreed not to sue her over her false allegation.  He took the money and eloped to Las Vegas with a 21-year-old bartender named Camille.  The money quickly disappeared after the two purchased a pair of used cars, rented and furnished an apartment and drank.  They were broke two months after marrying and by March of 1986, they were evicted from their apartment, forcing the couple to move in with Gary's mother.  

On top of everything else, Gary found himself virtually unemployable.  Outside of his drinking habit, no one wanted to hire the very notorious convicted rapist.

Gary and Camille on their wedding day (photo source)

. . . and the Prisoner Review Board

By the summer of 1987, Gary and Camille had a baby daughter and Gary had a short-lived run at Alcoholics Anonymous.  On August 2, 1987, following a day out with friends, Gary and Camille got into an argument on the way home.  Camille attempted to get out of the car and Gary slapped her, before getting out of the car with the baby.  Camille ran after them when a police car drove by.  She stopped the squad car and told the officers that her husband was a convicted felon who had taken their baby. 

Gary was found with the baby down the street, sitting on a curb.  Camille had told the police that Gary had struck her and she wanted to press charges.  Based on her complaint, Gary was arrested, charged with domestic battery and ordered to appear in court on August 27.  Because the charge constituted a parole violation, he was held without bond.   

Gary's story got the attention of a journalist, who felt he was suffering an overreaction by the state to what amounted to a relatively minor incident.  She took it upon herself to find Gary a new attorney and managed to introduce Thomas M. Breen, a former Cook County State's Attorney, to the case.  Breen felt that "the schmuck probably did it" but was still fascinated by the case and accepted it.

Breen's first action as Gary's newest attorney was on August 27, 1987, when he successfully argued against a prosecution motion to delay the domestic battery hearing until September 4.  Given that Camille Dotson refused to cooperate with the prosecution there was no case and Judge William Ward agreed, denying the prosecution's motion.  The prosecution then dropped the charges.  

If Gary and Breen believed that Gary would then go free, they were sadly mistaken.  The Illinois Department of Corrections put a parole hold on Gary, which required him to remain in jail pending a hearing before the Prisoner Review Board on September 4.  In short, although the prosecution lost their motion, they accomplished their goal via the parole board to keep Gary locked up.  

At the September 4 hearing, Gary's parole officer testified that the parole violation had more to do with chronic alcoholism than criminal orientation or a serious threat to public safety.  Breen established that Camille Dotson had suffered no bodily harm as a result of the incident, despite the police claiming otherwise.

Following the hearing and the meeting of the parole board members behind closed doors, Breen was told by the members that they had not reached a verdict - although they had.  He learned from the media that the parole board had revoked Gary's parole, reinstating his original sentence.  In other words, for slapping his wife, Gary faced just over 16 years in prison.

DNA for Exonerations

In late October of 1987, Breen saw an article in Newsweek magazine that caught his attention.  Written by Sharon Begley, the article reported the discovery of a technique capable of linking criminal suspects to crimes through DNA, "the molecular equivalent of dusting for fingerprints."  Breen wondered if the technology could do the same in reverse:  could it exonerate an individual?  He inquired if it had ever been used for such purposes and although it had not, he filed a motion requesting that DNA testing be done in Gary's case.

On December 24, 1987, Governor Thompson ordered Gary's release for the parole violation.  On December 26, Gary went with friends to Calumet City, a town southeast of Chicago nearly on the Indiana line.  They went to a bar and began drinking.  When Gary received a meal not prepared as he had requested, he refused to pay and an argument ensued.  He allegedly struck a 67-year-old server an the cops were called.  He was arrested and charged with theft, battery, and disorderly conduct.  Gary's bond was set at $1,000 but the Department of Corrections intervened and put another parole hold on him, preventing his release pending yet another Prisoner Review Board hearing, set for February 18, 1988.

On December 29, 1987, Camille Dotson filed for divorce.  Several days later, the criminal charges against Gary were dropped by the prosecution after prospective witnesses cast doubts on the server's versions of what happened at the bar and the server herself had second thoughts about giving testimony under oath.  

On January 7, 1988, DNA testing in the Crowell/Dotson case was ordered.   Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester would perform the testing.   

On February 17, 1988, the parole board found that Gary, in failing to contact his parole officer on December 24, 1987, had violated his parole.  Breen argued that Gary had called his parole officer on December 26 before leaving for Calumet City but the board would not be swayed and Gary was ordered back to prison for six months.

On April 7, 1988, Governor Thompson announced that Alec Jeffreys had been unable to obtain a result in the testing.  Jeffreys' process, restriction fragment length polymorphism, or RFLP, required DNA of a high molecular weight.  Any genetic material that had lost mass due to degradation simply could not be tested.  

Edward Blake, the forensic scientist who had tested the evidence in the case three years earlier, stepped forward once again.  He had used a type of DNA testing called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR.  PCR testing worked on degraded samples and unlike RFLP testing, could link a specific suspect to a semen sample to the absolute exclusion of all other men in the world.  

Although Governor Thompson had refused to consider Blake's results in 1985, he ordered the stained underpants and fresh blood samples from Gary Dotson and David Bierne, be sent to Blake.

On August 15, 1988, Blake concluded his testing and notified the governor, the prosecutors and Thomas Breen that the PCR testing had positively excluded Gary Dotson and positively included David Bierne as the source of the semen in the underpants.  

On August 16, 1988, Thomas Breen formally asked Governor Thompson to grant unconditional clemency to Gary based on actual innocence.   Breen had asked that Thompson act expeditiously but Thompson chose not to.  He wanted to be assured of the accuracy of the PCR test and therefore would not act on the clemency question until receiving a recommendation from the Prisoner Review Board.  Meantime, although Gary was due to be released on August 16 from his six month parole violation sentence, he was involuntarily committed to a residential treatment center for alcohol and substance abuse. 

Nine long months would pass in which the Prisoner Review Board failed to speak or act with regard to Gary's case.  On April 20, 1989, Alec Jeffreys, whose RFLP testing had been unable to provide results, wrote a letter to Thomas Breen.  In it, he criticized the inaction of the Thompson administration and wrote that he hoped that Breen would be able to go back to court on the matter and obtain Gary's release.  He ended by adding "It is clear that rejection of this evidence by the judiciary would constitute a gross miscarriage of justice."  

On May 3, 1989, Breen released the Jeffreys letter to the public and filed a new petition for post-conviction relief based on the PCR results.  Although the prosecution initially publicly vowed to oppose  Breen's petition, by August 14, the day of the hearing, they had joined in the motion.  Judge Thomas R. Fitzgerald, upon granting the motion, added "It's my belief that had this evidence been available at the original trial, the outcome would have been different."  

In granting the petition, Gary was assured of a new trial.  The State's Attorney's Office, however, announced that the charges against Gary would be dropped.

At long last, 14 years after it had began and 12 years after being convicted, Gary Dotson's legal nightmare seemed over.   He began working in construction and taking college courses, hoping to become a counselor.  He also underwent treatment for alcoholism.  

Free at last in 1989 (photo source) 

Following their divorce, Gary's former wife Camille had taken their daughter and moved to Las Vegas to be close to family, where she remarried.  By September of 1994, she and her husband had split and she was living with another man.  She was reportedly using crack and marijuana and was involved in prostitution.  She was last known to be in police custody at the Clark County Detention Center on September 26, 1994 before she vanished.  Camille has not been seen nor heard from since and is still considered a missing person.  

   

(Photo source)

 Following the publication of her book, Forgive Me, in the fall of 1985, in which she recounted her institutionalized mother and a father who abandoned her to a foster parent, actions which she claimed caused her to become emotionally disturbed and sexually active at the age of 12, Cathy Crowell Webb returned to her life in New Hampshire, shunning the spotlight.  She had claimed that she was coerced by the Homewood, Illinois police to pick Gary Dotson's photograph in 1977, an allegation the police denied.   During the time of her public recanting, she claimed that she had tried to put Gary out of her mind following the trial, even going so far as to forget his name entirely.  

Regarding the rape allegation, she told a psychologist that she didn't exactly create it from thin air.  Instead, she lifted it from a novel she had been reading, called Sweet Savage Love.  In that book, published in 1974, a woman is abducted by three men in a carriage, two of whom laughed along with the rapist.  After being stripped and pinned down by her rapist's weight, the character tears at her attacker's shirt and was then bitten on her breast.  She is tossed out of the carriage naked and onto the ground, following the rape.  

Cathy went on to teach at a Christian academy and have four children, with two of her sons graduating from West Point Academy.  She died of breast cancer on May 14, 2008, just a month before her 47th birthday.   

Gary Dotson was formally pardoned on January 9, 2003, nearly 24 years after his conviction.  On August 25, 2003, he was awarded $120,300 from the Illinois Court of Claims for his wrongful conviction.

At the time of Cathleen Crowell Webb's death, Gary was said to be in the south suburbs of Chicago, living a quiet life.  

(Photo source)

Sources:

The National Registry of Exonerations (2012). Gary Dotson - National Registry of Exonerations (umich.edu)

Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.  First DNA Exoneration, Center on Wrongful Convictions: Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

People v. Dotson, 99 Ill. App. 3d117 (1981). 

People v. Dotson, 163 Ill. App. 3d 429 (1987).   

The Washington Post (April 21, 1985).  Witness Failed to Offer Evidence That Could Have Aided Dotson - The Washington Post