Gary Dotson - Alleged Crime

Alleged Crime

Sixteen-year-old Cathleen Crowell made up a rape allegation to explain to her foster parents her pregnancy concerns after having had consensual sex with her boyfriend the previous day. After her 1985 recantation, she described herself as an "emotionally disturbed" foster child and revealed that she had been sexually active since the age of 12. Crowell later admitted her fabrication was based on a scene from a 1974 best-selling bodice ripper romance novel, Sweet Savage Love.

The hoax began the night of July 9, 1977, when a police officer happened upon her standing beside a road not far from the shopping mall in the Chicago suburb of Homewood, where she lived and where she worked in a Long John Silver's seafood restaurant. Her clothing was dirt-stained and in disarray.

Crowell tearfully told the officer that, as she walked across the mall parking lot after work, a car with three young men in it darted toward her. Two of the men jumped out, grabbed her, and threw her into the backseat. One of them climbed in beside her, and the other joined the driver in the front. The man in the back tore her clothes, raped her, and scratched several letters onto her stomach with a broken beer bottle.

Crowell was taken to South Suburban Hospital, where a rape examination was performed. She identified Gary Dotson, according to her, under pressure from police based on the resemblance of his mug shot in the mug book to the composite sketch of an assailant she described. Even though there was no sign on Dotson of the scratches Crowell claimed she inflicted on her assailant and, unlike the smooth-shaven assailant Crowell described, Dotson had a mature mustache, he was arrested.

In July 1979, he was convicted following a trial that included Crowell's identification of him as one of her attackers and false and misleading forensic evidence. The prosecution's forensic expert, who claimed to be doing graduate research at the University of California at Berkeley, had in fact only attended a two day course there. He testified that he had detected type B blood antigens in swabs taken as evidence and that type B comprised only 10% of the population. Dotson was type B so the implication was clear. However, he failed to mention that Crowell herself was type B which made the testimony irrelevant. It was also claimed pubic hair evidence "matched" Dotson although there was no test at the time capable of matching hairs with a source. It would come to light later that the hairs were not even similar to Dotson's. Alibi testimony from four of Dotson's friends that placed him in another part of city at the time of the rape was dismissed by the prosecutor who claimed the fact that there were no inconsistencies in their testimony "proved" they were lying.

Another inconsistency in the case did not come to light until after Crowell's recantation in 1985 when Dotson's new lawyer retained a forensic serologist to look at the trial evidence. Although Crowell claimed she was raped several hours before the hospital examined her, the original forensic testing of the swabs taken in fact indicated the sexual encounter had occurred at least a day earlier.