David Dowaliby was convicted of murder based solely on testimony that the Appellate Court found preposterous
David Dowaliby in 2002. (Photo: Jennifer Linzer)
David Dowaliby was convicted in 1990 of the murder of his adopted daughter, 7-year-old Jaclyn Dowaliby, solely on the basis of testimony by a man with a history of mental illness who claimed to have seen someone with a nose structure resembling Dowaliby's on the night the victim disappeared near where her body was found five days later.
The witness, Everett Mann, who previously had been diagnosed as suffering from a bipolar disorder, made the purported identification from a distance of 75 yards in an unlighted parking lot on a moonless night.
Dowaliby and his wife, Cynthia, biological mother of the victim by a prior marriage, both had been charged with the crime, based not only on Mann's testimony but also on what proved to be an erroneous assumption about the forensic evidence: Police and prosecutors incorrectly assumed that a window through which the Dowalibys contended an intruder had entered their home in Midlothian, Illinois, to abduct Jaclyn had been broken from the inside. That was not an irrational assumption because there was more glass outside than inside the home, but forensic analysis ultimately established positively that the window had been broken from the outside.
Illinois State Police and the FBI also failed to investigate the principal alternative suspect in the case, a mentally ill relative, who offered a dubious alibi that witnesses who eventually came forward disputed.
At the Dowalibys' 1990 jury trial, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Richard A. Neville granted a directed verdict of not guilty in Cynthia Dowaliby's case because there was no credible evidence against her. Neville allowed her husband's case to go to the jury, even though the only difference between the evidence against the two was the so-called “nose witness” testimony.
In 1991, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed David Dowaliby's conviction outright, holding that the evidence against him had been no more probative than that against his wife. The appellate court also held that Assistant State's Attorneys Patrick O'Brien and George Velcich had committed reversible error during closing argument and that Neville had erred in allowing jurors to see gory crime scene and autopsy photographs.
The Cook County State's Attorney's Office asked the Illinois Supreme Court to review the case, but the high court declined, thus ending the case in 1992.
