David Dowaliby was convicted of murdering his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Jaclyn Dowaliby in 1990. That conviction was overturned by the Illinois Appellate Court in 1991, which did not order a retrial, and the Illinois Supreme Court declined review of the case in 1992, thereby putting an end to the murder charges against David. To date, the only other suspect arrested for the murder of Jaclyn was her biological mother Cynthia Dowaliby, who was found not guilty by a directed verdict that was ordered by the Honorable Richard A. Neville, the judge who presided over the trial that resulted in David's conviction. No other suspects have ever been arrested in the case, and the case remains unsolved.
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The Disappearance
Jaclyn was reported missing from her Midlothian, Illinois (a village in Cook County, whose seat is Chicago) home by David and Cynthia on the morning of September 10, 1988. According to David and Cynthia, Jaclyn had gone to sleep in her bedroom there the night before. Police initially assumed that a window through which an intruder may have entered the Dowaliby home to abduct Jaclyn had had the glass pane broken from inside the home, as there was more broken glass on the outside of the window than on the inside. However, forensic analysis later established conclusively that the glass had in fact been broken from the outside.
David and Cynthia initially cooperated with the police, volunteering for polygraph examinations and drug tests, which they both passed. They also directed the police to two possible suspects, the first being Jaclyn's biological father and the second being Jaclyn's uncle Rob Kenny. However, Jaclyn's biological father was in prison when Jaclyn's abduction took place, and Kenny had an alibi, albeit a dubious alibi that was later disputed by witnesses. Meanwhile, with no other leads that they felt were worth following, and an enormous amount of pressure to clear the case, the police started focusing their investigation on David and Cynthia.
The Body Is Found
On September 14, 1988, four days after Jaclyn was reported missing, she was found dead four miles (6 km) from her home in a field of the nearby city of Blue Island wrapped in a blanket from her bedroom, from which she was apparently abducted as her parents slept close by in their own room. Although Jaclyn's body was badly decomposed when it was found, there was a rope around her neck, and the cause of her death was determined to be strangulation. Notwithstanding a paucity of evidence tying them to the murder, David and Cynthia were both arrested shortly thereafter and charged with first degree murder, and their young son was taken by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and placed in a group home based on allegations of child abuse that were later proved false.
Trial, Conviction, and Acquittal
At David and Cynthia's trial, the prosecution presented testimony given by a witness named Everett Mann who stated that he saw someone with a "nose structure" resembling that of David's on the night Jaclyn disappeared near where her body was found four days later. However, this witness had a history of mental illness, and the person he claimed to have seen on the night in question was allegedly in an unlit parking lot about 75 yards (69 m) away on a moonless night. The prosecution also offered gruesome photos of Jaclyn's corpse into evidence that were of dubious probative value and that the appellate court later ruled were prejudicial to the jury.
In an interview given after the trial, the jury forewoman said that fist marks on the door of a bedroom in the Dowaliby family home were critical to the jury's decision to convict David. These marks appeared in one of the evidence photos, but were never mentioned by either side. Nonetheless, the jury concluded from these marks that David had a terrible temper. In fact, these fist marks had no bearing on the case, as they had been made years earlier, before the Dowalibys had moved into their home. The jury forewoman also said that, if given the chance, the jury would have convicted Cynthia of murder as well.
Instrumental in the reversal of David Dowaliby's conviction were journalists David Protess and Rob Warden, who developed new evidence and convinced Dowaliby to accept pro bono representation on appeal from Robert L. Byman, Esq. of the law firm of Jenner & Block, LLP. Motions for acquittal and for a new trial by Dowaliby's trial lawyer were rejected by Judge Neville in the Cook County Circuit Court; on appeal Byman argued for Dowaliby's outright exoneration based on insufficiency of the evidence. In reversing Dowaliby's conviction, the Illinois Appellate Court found that the state's prosecutors had committed reversible error during their closing arguments and that Judge Neville had erred by allowing lurid crime scene photos into evidence that could have prejudiced the jury.
Media Coverage
Protess and Warden's account of the Dowaliby case appeared in print as Gone in the Night: The Dowaliby Family's Encounter With Murder and the Law. The book was later adapted for a TV movie, Gone in the Night.
References
- Page for David Dowaliby at the Web site of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Northwestern University School of Law [1]
- People vs. Dowaliby, 221 Ill. App. 3d 788, 582 N.E. 2d 1243 (1st Dist. 1991).
- American Justice: A Parent's Nightmare
- Gone in the Night: The Dowaliby Family's Encounter With Murder and the Law by David Protess and Rob Warden (1993)