The story told by Cathleen Crowell Webb and her attorney was presented to the world as a modern-day morality play: A young woman purges herself of a horrible lie and frees an innocent man from prison.
Webb stood before the public as a sinner, a woman who had wrongfully accused a man of rape in order to conceal a sexual transgression. The swell of public support for Gary Dotson, the man who paid for Webb`s accusation with six years of his life, was tremendous.
But the continuing ambiguities in the case have prevented an immediate storybook ending to the storybook tale.
Many of the people who have known Webb over the years, including her foster parents, her natural father and her teenage boyfriend–the man around whom much of Webb`s current story revolves–are perplexed by her account and dispute her claims about many basic elements of her past and the events of July 9, 1977.
Interviews with principal figures in her life and in the investigation of the rape case have produced a portrait of Webb far different from the one she has developed through media appearances in the last month.
Her former boyfriend, David Beirne, gives a version of her past that contradicts the basis of her recantation–that she was a sexually naive girl who wrongfully charged Dotson with rape because she feared she might be pregnant.
Beirne said he and Webb had intercourse at least 10 times over several months in the Beverly neighborhood in which they lived as teenagers, and that she knew enough about sex to restrict their relations to days when she was not in danger of becoming pregnant.
Webb has contended in court and media appearances that after having intercourse with Beirne, she ”panicked immediately” and fabricated an intricate tale of rape in July, 1977, a story she repeated with precision during police interviews, discussions with her foster parents and sworn testimony at two court appearances over a two-year span.
Webb`s foster mother, Carol Smith, said that three days before Webb identified Dotson as her assailant, the girl began menstruating. Knowing she was not pregnant, Smith said, Webb had no reason to falsely accuse Dotson of rape.
”Maybe she thinks she`s telling the truth, but she`s lying now. Something happened to her out there,” Smith said, referring to the New Hampshire town where Webb became a born-again Christian and now lives.
According to the Smiths, John McLario, the Menomonee Falls, Wis., attorney who began his representation of Webb in March by placing anonymous calls to police and prosecutors here, has forbidden her to discuss her recantation with her foster parents.
The Smiths, who were with Webb throughout the police investigation of the rape and the ensuing trial, first heard her full disclosure of the recantation on NBC`s ”Today” show.
The inquiry into when Webb lied–at the time she charged rape or the time she recanted–will continue Thursday when she goes before Gov. James Thompson, who has called a special hearing of the state`s Prisoner Review Board to decide the fate of Dotson, now out of prison on bond. Thompson, a former prosecutor, plans to conduct the questioning of witnesses himself.
According to sources in the governor`s office, Thompson is privately favoring a commutation of Dotson`s sentence. ”We have two choices: an outright pardon or clemency,” one source said. When asked about the third choice open to Thompson–that of affirming Judge Richard Samuels` ruling that Dotson should complete his 25- to 50-year prison sentence–the source retorted, ”What third choice?”
During an interview Saturday, his first since being released on bond last week, Dotson said he already has started making plans for a new life outside prison, including organizing a foundation to help generate legal fees ”for all the innocent guys in prison.”
Though he has denied past requests by Webb to meet, he said he wants to question her after ”it`s all over. . . . I`ve got to find out why. It`s been so long; why six years later? How could she hold it for so long?”
At the start of her quest to free Dotson, Webb said, ”My best dreams were that I could go to the state`s attorneys and say, `A man is innocent,`
that they would let him out and that would be it.”
Yet the office she had hoped would facilitate that release has waged a vigorous campaign against it. The prosecutors, like Webb`s foster parents, are convinced that Webb was raped and that she is suppressing the truth.
What none of them can say is why.
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The Long John Silver`s Seafood Shoppe in Homewood is a cookie-cutter franchise store on a strip of Halsted Street lined with fast-food restaurants and bandbox movie theaters. Cathleen Mae Crowell worked there as a cashier.
The 16-year-old girl reported to work on Saturday, July 9, 1977, at 4 p.m. wearing the blue pants, sailor blouse and striped apron that made up her restaurant uniform. She worked until 8:30, punched out, and at 8:45 went out the employees` rear entrance into the parking lot of the Washington Square Mall. Her home was two blocks west. The sun had set. The night was warm and dry.
That much is agreed upon by everyone involved in the case. What happened next, and for the next two hours before Webb was found dazed and bleeding in a wooded area 12 blocks east of the mall, is in dispute.
Webb said at the time that she was walking toward home, window shopping along the mall, when a car came toward her. She tried to jump out of the way but tripped and fell. She heard laughing and someone yell, ”Two points!” Two of the three men in the car got out, grabbed her by her arms and legs and shoved her into the back seat feet first, hitting her head against the door frame.
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The next two hours were what prosecutor Raymond Garza would describe in the trial 22 months later as ”a ride of terror,” based on Webb`s account that a young man with long, greasy blond hair tore the buttons from her blouse, ripped her pants zipper, pulled her underwear down and raped her while a front-seat passenger held one of her legs immobile. When her attacker had finished the sexual assault, Webb said, another passenger handed him a broken beer bottle that was used to carve letters into her stomach.
She was pushed from the car near 187th Street, she said, and her clothing was thrown out after her. Glenwood police Sgt. Russell Schoeneck found her staggering near a Little League baseball diamond in a heavily patrolled area. ”She was a mess,” Schoeneck recalls. ”She sat in the back, hysterical, and didn`t say a thing. Then she told me she was raped. She was so scared that she wouldn`t leave the car when the Homewood police got there. She was bleeding and her clothes were ripped.”
According to police records, trial transcripts and interviews with police investigators, Schoeneck drove Webb to the Homewood police station, where she met officer Anna Carroll. Webb repeated that she had been raped and gave a description of her attackers. Her foster parents, who had been playing cards at a neighbor`s house, were summoned to the station. Carroll drove Webb and her foster mother to South Suburban Hospital in Hazel Crest.
There she was examined by Dr. Andrew Labrador, who would later describe the girl as hysterical. Labrador found trauma to Webb`s vaginal area, which, he determined, had been inflicted within several hours of her arrival in the emergency room. Lab tests found semen on her undergarments.
She slept late on Sunday. When Webb awoke, Carol Smith talked to her about the possibility the girl was pregnant. On Tuesday morning, hours before Webb gave a description for a police sketch of her assailant and before the police investigation of the rape began, Webb woke her mother with a hug.
”She told me she had gotten her period,” Smith said. ”I hugged her and told her she`d be okay, that she had nothing to worry about. I said, `See honey, I told you you`d be all right.` She didn`t have any reason to identify Dotson, if she was afraid she was pregnant. She didn`t have to, but she did.” According to police records, that afternoon Webb and Smith went to the Homewood police station where they met with detective Jerry Brandt and a police artist. Webb described her attacker as the sketch was drawn. The completed sketch revealed a young man with long, unkempt hair, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones and a sharp chin.
Over the next three days, Webb scanned several hundred mug shots in four area police stations without making an identification. On Thursday afternoon, Country Club Hills police detective William Schultz received an envelope containing the sketch.
”I opened it, looked at the sketch and there he was. It was Gary Dotson,” said Schultz, who had previously arrested the 20-year-old Country Club Hills resident for lesser crimes and had entered his picture in the department mug book. ”I called Jerry Brandt up at Homewood and told him.”
The next morning, July 15, Webb and her foster mother went to the Country Club Hills police station and searched through the pictures in the department`s mug book. Webb passed 87 photographs before stopping at Dotson`s, Schultz said.
During the four-day search for a suspect, according to the Smiths, Brandt and other officers brought mug photographs to their home at least once for Webb to examine. Webb now contends that her identification of Dotson was made during a visit to her home, from a group of only four or five photographs, and that she was urged by police to use the sketch as a guide.
Police reports make no mention of home visits. Carol Smith, who said she was with her foster daughter during the mug search, denies Webb identified any photograph at their home.
After Webb selected Dotson`s photo that Friday, Brandt drove to the house of a Homewood landscaper who employed Dotson to dig ditches and plant shrubs. It was noon when he arrived at the home and asked for Dotson.
Dotson recalled later, ”I raised my hand. I said, `Yes, what can I do for you?` ” Brandt arrested him.
Homewood police also picked up Mickey Marcum, a friend of Dotson`s. Webb, according to police, had tentatively identified Marcum from mug shots as a passenger in the car. Marcum said police asked him where he had been on July 9, but brushed off his claim that he had been playing horseshoes in a neighbor`s yard, an alibi later corroborated by the neighbor.
”I was walking one way toward the line-up and looked up and saw Gary coming the other,” Marcum said. ”We looked at each other like, `What`s going on here?` I didn`t know until then that Gary was even there.”
Webb was home eating dinner with her foster parents when Brandt phoned. Carol Smith drove Webb to the police station. Six youths stood on the opposite side of a one-way mirror. Standing behind her foster daughter, Smith scanned the group and, recalling the police sketch, silently picked out the assailant. ”I looked at Dotson and knew he was the one,” Smith recalled. ”Then Cathy pointed her finger at him. The police said `Are you sure?`
”She said, `Yes.` ”
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In 1966, a man arrived at the Beverly home of Nellie Landers, a 62-year-old grandmother who took in foster children. His marriage to a woman with mental illness was collapsing. He had met another woman and he had come to talk to Landers about his daughter, Cathy Crowell.
The 5-year-old girl moved in with Landers.
Webb, in a recent bylined article in People magazine, portrayed her childhood as tortured and her parents and Landers as cold and uncaring. But according to the Smiths and two of Webb`s relatives–one brother and another relative who asked not to be identified–Webb was not unloved, just caught in the middle of her parents` disintegrating marriage.
”The magazine cut out the good parts of Cathy`s life,” said Steven Crowell, a brother eight years older than Webb who lives near her current hometown of Jaffrey, N.H. ”My sister was a very pampered little girl. She was my father`s princess.”
Though Landers was strict, Crowell said in an interview at the office of the New Hampshire construction company he owns, his sister did not suffer under the woman`s care. She did well in her studies, learned the flute and became a cheerleader for St. Barnabas Catholic School in Beverly.
Landers was well into her 70s when Webb became a teenager. Carol Smith, Landers` granddaughter, began pressuring the elderly woman to let her and her husband take Cathy and raise her with their two sons. The summer before Webb entered high school, Landers consented and the girl moved to Homewood.
According to Webb`s foster parents, her high school friends and a review of her school record, she was a disciplined but not brilliant student and adjusted well to her new life in the suburbs. She swam on the junior varsity team at Homewood-Flossmoor High School and joined the Russian Club. The telephone rang for her continuously. She dated.
Webb routinely traveled back to Beverly on weekends to see Landers. David Beirne, then a teenage neighbor of Landers, said it was during those weekend visits that they began their liaison.
Beirne said Webb would wait until Landers had fallen asleep and listen for his knock on her window. Webb would bring him in through the front door and into her bedroom. This routine was repeated throughout the spring and early summer of 1977, Beirne said.
”When I heard about it, that she didn`t know anything about sex and said, `I`m pregnant because of one time,` well that`s not true at all,” said Beirne, now an airman stationed in Odgen, Utah.
According to the Smiths, in 1978, a year after she said she was raped, she began dating David Webb, a senior at Homewood-Flossmoor and the man she would marry at age 20.
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While awaiting the May, 1979, rape trial, neither Gary Dotson, his family nor his friends seemed to take seriously the threat of a conviction.
”When he first told me about it I said, `Don`t worry, Gary. If you didn`t do it, everything will be okay,` ” recalled his mother, Barbara.
”We knew that it weighed on his mind,” said William Julian, Dotson`s closest friend. ”But we all knew she had picked the wrong person and told him not to worry about it. It didn`t cross our minds, not once, that he would be found guilty.”
Dotson`s family and friends believed that police had chosen him, a branded punk, as a scapegoat. The group he ran with, all of them school dropouts, most of them fatherless, were not counted among the suburb`s finer citizens. Run-ins between police and the clique had become routine.
”Once me and Gary and another friend were walking from my house over to the Dotsons`, and the cops stopped and took us in for walking three abreast on the sidewalk,” Julian said. ”It was a small town with young, gung ho cops. Us and them weren`t a good mix.”
The record Dotson compiled after his family`s 1970 move to Country Club Hills from Chicago`s South Side included thefts, curfew violations, criminal trespassing and public intoxication. In February, 1975, Dotson collapsed in the office of Hillcrest High School`s dean of students and a bottle of Southern Comfort spilled from his pocket. He denied he had been drinking. Before the rape charge, the darkest blemish on Dotson`s record was his 1975 conviction for theft of a television set and stereo equipment.
Dotson lost his job with the landscaper, and in the two years before his trial worked as a window washer and a night porter at a local Burger King.
Late one night, as Barbara Dotson was driving toward home, she saw a hitchhiker and stopped dead in the road, not to pick the man up but to get a better look. He reminded her of Gary, and as she stared out at him through the windshield she thought, ”That must be the man who did it.”
Of her son, she said, ”They needed somebody and he was the perfect somebody.”
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Cathy Webb was a prosecutor`s dream: a solid, believable witness. According to one attorney, ”She looked like she just jumped off a wedding cake.”
Webb wept during the trial but never wavered. She now says that her testimony went so smoothly because prosecutors asked her to study her police statements–a claim her foster parents deny. But a transcript of a preliminary hearing held five weeks after she first charged rape shows that Webb gave the same highly detailed testimony then that would result in Dotson`s conviction nearly two years later.
Webb`s performance mitigated the effect of some troublesome holes in the state`s case, including her failure to describe her attacker as having a mustache, as Dotson did.
Perhaps the biggest gap was that police never produced the car in which Webb said she had been raped. Her description did not match the cars of Dotson, Marcum or William Julian. Dotson said he had been in Julian`s car the night of the rape.
”Her testimony at the trial was just so strong,” recalled Katherine Swanson, the jury foreman. ”For me, that was the biggest factor.”
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A year after the trial, Cathy Crowell and David Webb moved to the quietude of southern New Hampshire. In July, 1981, they returned to Homewood to be married in St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church.
The Smiths said they were invited to the wedding a week before the ceremony, but, because of hard feelings over the fact that Cathy and David had been living together out of wedlock, they declined. The newlyweds returned to New Hampshire, where David was an ironworker and Cathy did secretarial work.
That year the Webbs met Carl Nannini, a chemist who had given up a career with General Motors Corp. in Milwaukee and moved to New Hampshire to found a conservative Baptist church. Webb began attending services at the church and, with Nannini`s guidance, became ”born again.” She credits this conversion for her recantation.
”When we first met Cathy you could see she was a hardened, very unhappy person,” said Laura Sparling, who with her husband, Michael, joined Nannini`s Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1984 at the Webbs` urging. The Sparlings consider themselves the Webbs` best friends.
”She seemed to have been searching for something for a long time. She didn`t like to be touched, even as a close friend. . . . She would cringe.
”But she`s changed. It wasn`t right after she was saved. It was a slow process.”
Of Webb`s recantation, Laura Sparling said: ”David told us the news. He brought the local newspaper and asked Mike to read it. He did. Then he asked me to read it. After the story I cried.
”That night I saw Cathy at church. Cathy couldn`t meet my eyes. She said, `I was so afraid that you`d hate me.` I hugged her and we started crying.”
Nannini said church members have been taking care of the Webbs` two children while the parents have traveled between New Hampshire, Chicago and New York for court and media appearances. The church recently stocked the Webb home with groceries and paid a month`s mortgage on their small, clapboard house.
Jaffrey is a pastoral town of post card dimensions. Before Webb`s debut on the national media stage six weeks ago, the town of 4,500 was known mostly for Mt. Monadnock, which natives say attracts 100,000 climbers each year, and the annual Jaffrey Jubilee.
Since Webb`s recantation, however, the town has been flooded with correspondents, making Jaffrey a media dateline from coast to coast.
”We knew there would be some publicity in Chicago, but we never expected what happened,” Nannini said. ”We thought this would be a paragraph on Page 3.”