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After serving six years for kidnaping and rape, Gary Dotson, 28, seemed suddenly to be a technicality away from freedom when Cathleen Crowell Webb, his alleged victim, came forward to confess that she had made up the story. But last week, after listening to Webb recant her testimony in a Cook County court, Judge Richard Samuels upheld the original jury verdict and ordered Dotson returned to prison. As a stunned Dotson was taken away once more, Webb sobbed, "He's wrong! Gary Dotson is innocent...
...Webb's original testimony was critical to Dotson's conviction. The other evidence offered in the 1979 trial was inconclusive. The doctor who examined her on the night of the alleged attack could not say without a doubt that she had been raped, though she certainly had suffered bruises and lacerations. A hair found on her body and semen on her underwear might have belonged to Dotson, but the results of those tests were also uncertain...
...Webb, now 23, testified at last week's hearing that she had claimed she was raped because she feared she was pregnant after having sex with her boyfriend (she was not). To make her tale believable, she said, she had torn her clothes and inflicted the cuts and bruises. When her description of her assailant led to Dotson's arrest, she said, she stuck...
Judge Samuels, who presided at the original trial in 1979, found Webb's new testimony less credible than that of a seemingly terrified 16-year-old girl who had told a brutal tale of kidnaping, assault and rape. Also troubling were parts of Dotson's testimony last week. While a friend testified that he had spent the evening of the attack with Dotson and two others, Dotson said that he had spent much of the time sleeping in the back seat of a car while his companions were stopping at parties. He might have been separated from the group...
...below ground level, inscribed with the names of all the 58,022 who died in the Viet Nam War--struck many veterans as insulting at the time it was chosen. "A black gash of shame," Tom Carhart, a Viet Nam veteran and West Pointer, called it. Novelist James Webb (Fields of Fire), now an Assistant Secretary of Defense, wanted a white memorial, set above ground, with a flag. "A memorial should express more than grief," he says. "It should honor the service of those who died...