At about 3:30 a.m., on Aug. 12, 1982, an 18-year-old woman was attacked from behind as she walked home in Westchester County, New York. Her attacker dragged her into an alleyway between a warehouse and another building. As her attacker dragged her up a flight of stairs, she hit her head and lost consciousness.
When she came to, the woman saw three assailants. One held her arms, one held her legs, and one stood between her legs. As she struggled to get free, the man between her legs slapped her, bringing his face within inches of hers. The man then raped her and all three fled.
The victim, who was six months pregnant, later suffered a miscarriage. After the attack, the woman was taken to Peekskill Community Hospital where a rape kit was collected. The victim's clothes were also preserved as evidence.
The victim identified the man who raped her as 27-year-old Charles Dabbs. She said she was sure it was Dabbs because he was a distant cousin of hers whom she had known casually for nearly nine years. She claimed to have seen Dabbs as recently as three to four months earlier.
On September 13, 1982, Dabbs was arrested and charged with one count of first-degree rape.
In April 1984, Dabbs went to trial in Westchester County Supreme Court. The victim identified him as her attacker. She said he wore a black baseball cap with a Playboy bunny embroidered on the brim, which was similar to one she had seen Dabbs wear on other occasions. She also testified that she recognized Dabbs by his distinctive laugh and missing teeth. The two other attackers were never identified or arrested.
The prosecution also presented the results of the forensic examination of the physical evidence. Semen was found on the victim’s underwear and on a gauze pad and slides from the rape kit, but no conclusions were made about the source. Blood tests on a semen stain on the victim's pants revealed the presence of blood antigens B and H.
Dabbs was a secreter of H antigen, according to the testimony. Although the antigen could have been from either the victim or the perpetrator, the analyst said only that Dabbs’s blood type was consistent with the evidence.
The prosecution contended that one explanation for the presence of the B antigen was that the pants had been borrowed from the victim’s mother and that the semen could have been deposited on the pants at a different time. The victim’s mother testified that she might have had sexual intercourse during a time she had worn the pants prior to Aug. 12, 1982.
Dabbs testified and denied involvement in the crime. He told the jury that he had worn his hair braided into corn rows, a fact not mentioned by the victim. He also said he had all his teeth, contrary to the victim’s description.
On April 10, 1984, the jury convicted Dabbs of rape. He was sentenced to 12½ to 25 years in prison.
In 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Appellate Division upheld Dabbs’s conviction and sentence.
Following the trial, the physical evidence, which included cuttings from the victim’s underwear and pants, and the gauze pad from the rape kit, had been frozen in storage at the Westchester County Department of Laboratories and Research.
In 1990, Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey-based nonprofit organization that worked to overturn wrongful convictions, agreed to pay for DNA testing for Dabbs. In November 1990, the trial court granted a motion to submit the evidence for testing and the evidence was sent to Lifecodes, Corp., a private testing laboratory in Westchester, New York.
The company performed testing in July 1991. It said the results from the victim’s pants and the gauze pad were inconclusive because there was insufficient material to test. However, DNA was extracted from a cutting of the victim’s underwear, and Dabbs was excluded as the source of semen on the underwear.
On July 31, 1991, the trial court granted a defense motion to vacate Mr. Dabbs’s conviction and he was released from prison. The prosecution dismissed the charge on Aug. 22, 1991.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
