On December 18, 1984, a 26-year-old woman, C.W., was attacked and raped in Rand, West Virginia, as she walked home from her job as a nurse. C.W. was taken to the hospital and a rape kit was taken.
In March 1985, the police showed C.W. a photographic lineup that included a photograph of 17-year-old William O’Dell Harris, who lived near C.W. Initially, C.W. said she knew Harris and that he was not her attacker. This information was never disclosed until after Harris was convicted of the crime.
In July 1985, C.W. viewed a live lineup and identified Harris as her assailant. On July 25, 1985, Harris, who was a state wrestling champion with no criminal record, was arrested and charged with first-degree rape.
Harris was a juvenile, but he was prosecuted as an adult. He went to trial in July 1987 in Kanawha County Circuit Court. A Kanawha County sheriff's deputy testified that C.W. had positively identified Harris as her attacker in a live lineup.
C.W. testified and identified Harris, who lived near her home, as her attacker.
Fred Zain, a serologist and director of the West Virginia State Police Crime Laboratory, testified that the genetic markers in the semen left by the assailant matched those of Harris and excluded 96.1% of the population.
Harris testified that he was with his girlfriend at the time of the crime. She testified and corroborated his testimony.
On July 24, 1987, a jury convicted Harris of second degree sexual assault. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison.
In 1992, Glen Woodall, who had been convicted in 1987 of two rapes and other crimes in Cabell County, West Virginia, in part based on similar testimony by Zain, was exonerated by DNA testing. That testing showed that Zain had testified falsely about the serology results in the case. That case caused others convicted based on Zain’s testimony, including Harris, to seek similar DNA testing.
On November 10, 1993, the West Virginia Supreme Court ordered a review of all cases handled by Zain, concluding that Zain had fabricated evidence in more than 100 cases between 1986 and 1989.
One week later, Harris’s attorney, public defender George Castelle, filed a motion requesting DNA testing. Castelle argued that in Harris’s case, serology testing showed that the victim and the perpetrator shared the same blood group markers. Castelle noted that when the evidence being tested was a mixed stain of semen from the perpetrator and vaginal secretions from the victim and testing did not detect blood group substance or enzymes foreign to the victim, no potential semen donor could be excluded because the victim’s blood group markers could be “masking” the perpetrator’s. In Harris’s case, it was misleading not to inform the jury that 100 percent of the male population could be included and that none could be excluded, the motion said.
On December 29, 1993, the court ordered prosecutors to release the trial evidence for testing. On July 21, 1994, Harris was released on a $200,000 bond. At the same hearing, the judge again ordered the prosecutor to release the evidence for DNA testing. At that time, the sheriff's department stated that all evidence from the trial had been lost.
However, not long after, an investigator with the public defender’s office found a slide at the medical center where the rape kit had been taken from the victim after the crime.
On September 13, 1994, a hearing was held on a prosecution motion to reconsider the order to release the evidence. At the conclusion of the hearing, the court ordered for a fourth time that the evidence be released for DNA testing.
In November 1994, when the prosecution balked, Castelle filed a motion seeking to hold the prosecution in contempt of court. At a hearing on the motion, the district attorney stated that the victim was being uncooperative about giving a blood sample for comparison, but that his office had sent the slide for testing.
In 1989, Zain had moved to the Bexar County Medical Examiner's office. He was fired in 1993 and indicted in Texas in July 1994 on charges of perjury, evidence-tampering and fabricating evidence. That same month, he was indicted in West Virginia on charges of perjury.
On May 1, 1995, Dr. David Bing of the Center for Blood Research in Boston, Massachusetts, reported that Harris was excluded as the source of the sperm on the slide. The prosecution then was allowed to seek independent testing, which confirmed the exclusion.
On November 3, 1995, Harris’s conviction was vacated and the case was dismissed. His legal team subsequently discovered that the police had withheld a report from the defense which said that C.W. had described her attacker as 5 feet, 7 inches tall. Harris was six inches taller.
Zain's West Virginia case went to trial first and a mistrial was declared in September 2001 when the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. He died in 2002 before he could be retried or go to trial in Texas.
Harris later settled a wrongful conviction lawsuit against the State of West Virginia for $1.8 million. He also received an additional $2.5 million settlement after filing a separate lawsuit against the state, an insurance company, and a law firm for delaying his release by engaging in a cover up early in the Zain scandal.
Harris died in North Carolina in 2016. He was 49 years old.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 02-10-2026
