Court Upholds Rape Sentence : Accuser’s Recantation ‘Unfathomable’ to Judge

MARKHAM, Ill. —  A judge Thursday upheld the conviction of a man who already has served six years of a long prison sentence for a rape his accuser now says never happened.

Cook County Circuit Judge Richard Samuels decided not to grant freedom to Gary Dotson, who was convicted of raping Cathleen Crowell Webb in 1977.

“I really don’t know for what unfathomable reason Cathy recanted,” Samuels told a packed courtroom.

“The petitioner has failed to sustain his burden (of proof), and I cannot find that perjury was committed (by Webb at the original trial),” Samuels said. Citing Illinois case law, which considers recantation testimony “very unreliable,” the judge said he believed the jury’s original 1979 conviction was correct.

“He’s innocent! He’s innocent! I told the truth!” Webb screamed in the hall after the decision, clutching her husband’s arm.

Earlier in the day, Dotson took the witness stand for 30 minutes and denied that he had assaulted the woman.

“Did you rape her?” attorney Warren Lupel asked his client.

“No,” Dotson replied.

Long Prison Sentence

After his conviction in 1979, Dotson, of the Chicago suburb of Country Club Hills, was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison.

He was freed April 4 from the Joliet Correctional Center on $10,000 cash bond after a hearing at which Webb recanted her original testimony. The hearing, to determine if Dotson was wrongfully convicted, was resumed Thursday.

Webb, 23, now a mother of two living in New Hampshire, testified last week that she was never raped on July 9, 1977. She said she concocted the story when she was 16 because she feared she was pregnant and wanted to prevent her parents from learning she had had sexual relations with a boyfriend.

Dotson told Lupel that he vividly remembered the events of the July night he was accused of raping Webb. But, under cross-examination by Peggy Frossard, assistant Cook County state’s attorney, he was confused about some details of his activities.

“I’m sorry, I keep mixing July 9 up with the day I was arrested,” he said.

‘Lost Track of Time’

Dotson said he had been drinking beer with friends the night of the alleged assault, driving between parties. He said he remained in a car while the friends attended one party and “from there I lost track of time because I fell asleep.”

The doctor who treated Webb the night of the alleged assault, Dr. Andrew Labrador, testified earlier Thursday that he had found no sperm or seminal fluid during examinations of her.

But Mark Stolorow, a crime lab scientist with the Illinois Department of Law Enforcement, testified that a hair found on Webb’s body in the 1977 examination “is microscopically consistent with . . . that of Gary Dotson and microscopically dissimilar to those of” both the former boyfriend and Webb. Stolorow said that he had examined seminal stains found on Webb’s underpants to determine blood type, but results of that test were inconclusive.

Stolorow’s testimony appeared to conflict with Labrador’s, but Stolorow said the apparent conflict is the result of more sophisticated lab techniques now available.

Labrador said also that he had found bruises on Webb’s head, arms and abdomen and scratch marks on the abdomen that “looked like nail marks.”

Webb testified last week that she had inflicted wounds on herself to support her rape claim.