Dorothy Williams was convicted in Chicago of the robbery and murder of Mary Harris, a 97-year-old woman who lived in housing for senior citizens run by the Chicago Housing Authority. Mrs. Harris was strangled in her apartment on July 25, 1989, and a stereo set was taken. Williams was arrested on September 6, 1989, and the next day gave a court-reported statement in which she admitted the killing and said she had wanted the stereo to sell for drugs.
A Cook County jury found her guilty of first degree murder and robbery. She gave up her right to have a jury decide her sentence, and at the sentencing hearing the state set out a longer history: her admissions to police that she had killed two elderly men, Lonnie Laws in December 1987 and Caesar Zuell in December 1988, and a series of robberies of elderly people in their homes. The trial judge sentenced her to death on April 18, 1991. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence in 1994. In 2002, after a long fight over her mental fitness, the same court sent her case back to the trial court for a hearing on her claim that her trial lawyers had failed her.
Neither of the two earlier deaths was part of her trial. The Illinois Supreme Court said in 1994 that she had been charged with first degree murder in both, and her one murder conviction is for the death of Mary Harris.
Williams was 35 when she was arrested, the Illinois Supreme Court recorded. Her early years were described in the evidence offered on her behalf at the 1991 sentencing hearing and in the affidavits filed in her post-conviction case a decade later.
Her mother testified that she and Williams's father had separated before Williams was born. Her father's contact with her was limited to letters, and he died about four years before the sentencing hearing. An older sister, to whom she was close, died of bronchial pneumonia in January 1987.
Williams became pregnant at 15. By the time of the hearing in April 1991 she had a daughter, then 22, and a son, then 20. The daughter's father was killed in 1978, and the son's father gave the family no support. Her daughter testified that Williams had raised both children well.
The post-conviction filings added more. A brother stated in an affidavit that she never finished grammar school, never went to high school and could not read, and that she had used heroin and cocaine since she was 14. A defense psychologist reported that Williams had suffered a closed head injury at 11 that left her functioning at what the psychologist called a "mentally retarded level." The accounts of that injury differed slightly. The brother said she had been hit by a car at 11; a mitigation specialist reported a blood clot after a car accident at 12. Williams also reported a lump above her left eyebrow, migraines, dizziness and nosebleeds, and told the mitigation specialist that she had trouble understanding and remembering what she read. State doctors disputed the claim of brain injury, as described further on.
The state's evidence at sentencing reached back to the early 1970s. On May 30, 1973, after an arrest on a breach-of-the-peace charge, she kicked a police officer repeatedly. In October 1973 she assaulted a woman. That woman testified at the 1991 hearing and said that a man Williams was dating, together with his brother, had later approached her and asked her not to testify. On March 10, 1975, Williams was convicted of delivery and possession of marijuana and received 18 months of misdemeanor probation and a $200 fine.
The heart of the state's case at sentencing was a pattern of robberies of elderly people in their own apartments. According to the Illinois Supreme Court's summary of the evidence, Williams gained entry by various ruses, among them pretending that the resident knew her or was related to her, or that she had come to help. Some of the people she robbed were physically abused.
The earliest robbery in the record took place on January 11, 1986. She robbed the same elderly resident again on April 4, 1989. On that same day she also robbed a second elderly resident, and her fingerprints or palm prints were later found in that apartment. On July 1, 1989, she robbed a third. On July 4, 1989, she robbed a fourth person, who told police it was the third time she had robbed him; an eyewitness to that robbery testified at the hearing. The robberies of the July 1 and July 4 victims were never charged. Those two victims did not testify, and the evidence about them came in through police officers and the eyewitness.
Two of the people Williams went to did not survive. The Illinois Supreme Court described them as two slight, elderly men.
Lonnie Laws died on December 5, 1987. Caesar Zuell died in the first weeks of December 1988. In statements to police, taken down by a court reporter, Williams admitted that she had strangled Mr. Laws and stabbed Mr. Zuell. The autopsy findings in both deaths were consistent with what she told police. Her fingerprints or palm prints were found on the outside door of Mr. Laws's home and in Mr. Zuell's apartment after the crime.
These deaths were not tried with the Harris case. They came before the sentencing judge as evidence in aggravation, and in 1994 the Illinois Supreme Court noted that she had been charged with first degree murder in both.
Mary Harris was 97 years old. She lived in a Chicago Housing Authority building for senior citizens. Her daughter had bought her a stereo set, and at trial the daughter identified it.
On the evening of July 25, 1989, a woman who visited Mrs. Harris left the apartment at about 6 p.m., according to her trial testimony. At about 6:30 p.m. a man who lived in the building saw Williams, in a white nurse's uniform, carrying a box large enough to hold the stereo. Mrs. Harris was found dead in her apartment. A detective testified that her drawers and closet had been gone through. The medical examiner ruled that she had been strangled with a ligature. The stereo, one of the boxes it came in and a bedspread were missing.
The break came on the morning of September 6, 1989, when Betty Woods, a Chicago police officer working in plain clothes from an unmarked car, was approached between about 11 and 11:30 a.m. by the resident who had seen the woman with the box. He told her that on the day of the murder he had seen a woman he knew as "Peggy" leaving the building, and that she had since dyed her hair red and cut it shorter.
At about noon he pointed out Williams as she walked past the building. She gave her name as "Deborah" Williams. She was with a woman friend. Woods offered to drive them both to the police station, about 16 to 18 blocks away. Neither woman was handcuffed, and Woods's weapon was not drawn or visible. The friend was worried about picking up a child, and Woods dealt with that concern. Woods did not tell them that they did not have to come.
At the station Woods left the two women in a large second-floor office and had no further part in the questioning. At about 1:15 or 1:30 p.m., Detective Edward Schmitt and his partner gave Williams the Miranda warnings and spoke with her for 10 to 15 minutes, with the door open. At about 2 p.m. she signed a consent to search her apartment, where officers found a stereo and two speakers. About an hour later she told them the stereo was hers, and that she had bought it "hot," from a man on the street, about a month earlier.
She agreed to be fingerprinted and to take a polygraph examination. At about 6:30 p.m. she took the polygraph and failed it. At about 8:30 p.m. she was formally arrested for the murder of Mary Harris.
On September 7, 1989, Williams gave a statement before a court reporter. She said she went to Mrs. Harris's apartment on July 25 and talked with her for about ten minutes, and that Mrs. Harris asked her to go to the store and gave her two dollars. She admitted strangling Mrs. Harris. She said she had done it to get the "component set," which she meant to sell for drugs. The statement was read to the jury at her trial.
Before trial, Williams's lawyers asked the court to quash her arrest and suppress everything that followed from it, including her statements. They argued that she had in effect been arrested without probable cause when Officer Woods drove her to the station, hours before the formal arrest. The trial court denied the motion. It found that she had not been in custody before she said the stereo was stolen goods, and that her admission that she had bought it "hot" gave police probable cause to arrest her.
At the suppression hearing the judge sustained the state's objection when the defense asked Woods whether Williams had been free to leave once she reached the station. On appeal, Williams called the hearing a "sham" because of that ruling and others. The Illinois Supreme Court disagreed. An officer's private intent, it said, is relevant but not controlling, and nothing in the record showed that any belief that Williams could not leave had been conveyed to her. The test was whether a reasonable, innocent person in her position would have thought she was under arrest or not free to go.
The court went through the facts one by one. Williams had gone with the officer voluntarily, in an unmarked car, after being offered a ride. The officer's gun was neither visible nor drawn, and Williams was never handcuffed. The drive took about eight to ten minutes. She and her friend were left together in a large room, not a cell. The detectives' Miranda warnings did not by themselves turn the interview into custody. The questioning was brief, the door stayed open, and she was not booked or fingerprinted before she made the statement about the stereo. On that record, the court held, the trial judge's finding that she was not in custody was not manifestly erroneous, and probable cause existed from about 3 p.m., when she said she had bought the stereo knowing it was stolen. Any limits on the questioning of Woods were harmless.
Two disputes over jury selection reached the Illinois Supreme Court. The state asked the trial judge to excuse one prospective juror for cause, arguing that she had not disclosed that she had been under supervision for a marijuana offense and had given false answers. The defense asked for more questioning; the judge said enough questions had been asked and excused her. The Supreme Court held that judging a juror's truthfulness was a matter for the trial court.
The defense also objected under Batson v. Kentucky when prosecutors used a peremptory challenge to remove a prospective juror. The judge found that the defense had made a prima facie case and asked the prosecutors for their reasons. Assistant State's Attorneys Levin and McNerney gave three: he had kept his hat on until the court asked him to take it off, his answers were short and sometimes cryptic, and he did not know where his son worked, while a juror the state had accepted did. The defense replied that accepted jurors had given similar answers and that the point about the hat was speculation. The prosecutors noted that they had accepted other jurors and that the victim was also Black. The trial judge accepted the reasons, and the Supreme Court found that ruling was not clearly erroneous.
The trial concerned only the death of Mary Harris. Williams did not testify. The jury heard from Mrs. Harris's daughter, who identified the stereo found in Williams's apartment as the one she had bought for her mother; from the neighbor who saw Williams with the box; from the visitor who had left the apartment at about 6 p.m.; from a detective who described the state of the apartment; and from the medical examiner. Williams's fingerprints were found on objects inside the apartment. Her September 7 statement was read aloud.
The jury found her guilty of first degree murder and robbery. On appeal she raised five evidentiary complaints about the trial and four complaints about the prosecutors' closing arguments. The Illinois Supreme Court found all of them without merit, and said that any error would have been harmless beyond a reasonable doubt given what it called the overwhelming evidence of guilt.
Williams waived a jury for the sentencing phase, leaving the decision to the trial judge. The judge first found her eligible for the death penalty under the Illinois statute because the murder had been committed in the course of a robbery.
In aggravation, the state presented her admissions in the deaths of Lonnie Laws and Caesar Zuell, with the matching autopsy findings and the print evidence; the robberies of elderly residents from 1986 to July 1989; the 1973 attacks on a police officer and on the woman struck with a milk crate; the 1975 marijuana conviction; and an incident on November 23, 1989, while she was in jail awaiting trial, when she was verbally abusive and threatening toward a correctional officer.
In mitigation, the defense showed that the November 1989 incident was her only disciplinary violation in jail. Her mother testified about the family's history, and her daughter testified about how she had been raised. The defense also presented the loss of her sister and the circumstances of her children's fathers.
The judge found no mitigating factor sufficient to preclude a death sentence. In words the Illinois Supreme Court later repeated, the matters in aggravation "so far exceed the matters in mitigation as to reduce the matters in mitigation to insignificance." On April 18, 1991, she was sentenced to death.
Because she had been sentenced to death, her appeal went directly to the Illinois Supreme Court. She was represented by the Cook County Public Defender's office, with Rita A. Fry as Public Defender and Robert P. Isaacson as assistant public defender. The state was represented by Attorney General Roland W. Burris and Cook County State's Attorney Jack O'Malley and their staffs.
Justice Harrison wrote the opinion, filed on September 22, 1994. The court rejected every claim. Besides the arrest, jury and trial issues, it held that hearsay evidence about the uncharged robberies was admissible at a capital sentencing hearing because it was relevant and reliable, and that the defense had pointed to nothing that made it unreliable other than the fact that it was hearsay. It found that the trial judge had considered the mitigation evidence. It said that if the testimony about the approach to the woman she assaulted in 1973 was improper, its effect was at most minimal and did not touch the sentence. It rejected constitutional challenges to the Illinois death penalty statute, relying on its earlier decisions.
Reviewing the record for itself, the court agreed with the trial judge that the aggravation far outweighed the mitigation, and it held that death was not an inappropriate sentence. It affirmed the judgment and directed the clerk to set Tuesday, January 10, 1995, as the date of execution. Rehearing was denied on January 30, 1995, and the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case in 1995.
In June 1995 her lawyers filed a petition for post-conviction relief in the Circuit Court of Cook County. In August 1995 they asked for an examination of whether she was fit to take part in the proceedings, supported by an affidavit from Dr. Linda Wetzel, the psychologist who reported the childhood head injury. The court ordered an evaluation.
The state's examiners at first agreed that she was unfit. Dr. Mathew Markos, clinical director of Forensic Clinical Services, and Dr. Edward Blumstein, chief psychologist of its adult division, both found her unfit in 1995. Both later changed their opinion, finding her fit and saying she was malingering. Wetzel had recommended brain scans. A radiologist for the state, Dr. Calvin Flowers, found the CAT scan essentially normal; the MRI showed small bright spots of the kind that appear in three or four of every ten scans and, in his words, "signify nothing great." He saw no sign of a past brain injury.
Discovery took nearly three years. The fitness hearing opened in May 1998, final arguments were heard in March 1999, and the court found her fit.
With the fitness question settled, her lawyers filed an amended petition in June 1999 and added to it in June and August 1999. Every claim was that her trial lawyers had been ineffective. They had failed, the petition said, to discover and raise that she was not competent to stand trial; failed to tell the court that she was taking psychotropic medication in the Cook County jail during her trial and to ask for a competency hearing; failed to seek suppression of her confession on the ground that she was illiterate and mentally deficient; and failed to present her mental deficiency as mitigation at sentencing.
The medication claim turned on two drugs she had been given in jail, Pamelor and Sinequan, and on the dose. Markos had testified that 50 milligrams of Sinequan would not affect her fitness and that 150 milligrams was within the normal therapeutic range. The August 1999 amendment attached the jail's prescription records, and after the ruling Dr. James O'Donnell stated in an affidavit that the records showed she had been receiving 200 milligrams a day during her trial.
In August 1999 the circuit court granted the state's motion to dismiss the petition. In a ruling that ran about 33 pages of transcript, the judge found that she had made no substantial showing that her trial lawyers had been ineffective and that she had been competent at all times to stand trial. A motion to reconsider, supported by O'Donnell's affidavit, was denied.
The Illinois Supreme Court reversed on June 20, 2002, in an opinion by Justice Freeman. The court did not decide whether any of her four claims was right. It held that the circuit court had misunderstood what had happened in the earlier proceedings. The judge had treated the fitness hearing as if it had settled whether she was competent at the time of her trial, but at that hearing the court itself had sustained the state's objections to questions about her medication during the trial, limiting the hearing to her fitness at the time. Because the trial-time question had never been heard, it could not be treated as decided.
The court reversed the dismissal and remanded the case for the circuit court "to conduct a hearing on the merits of the post-conviction petition." It expressed no view on how that hearing should come out.
Two justices would have gone further. Chief Justice Harrison wrote that she should get a new trial under the comprehensive new rules the court had adopted for capital cases, because "no proceeding conducted without the benefit of those rules can be deemed reliable." Justice Kilbride agreed that the convictions and sentence should be set aside and the case retried under the new rules, writing that "the new rules should be applied retroactively." Both pointed to their dissents in two capital cases decided on September 27, 2001.
The outcome of the hearing the court ordered in 2002 has not been reported.
Only one killing has been proven against Williams in court: the death of Mary Harris, for which a jury found her guilty of first degree murder and robbery. The deaths of Lonnie Laws and Caesar Zuell rest, in the published court record, on her own court-reported statements, the matching autopsy findings and the print evidence, and in 1994 the Illinois Supreme Court described them as charged, not proven. How those charges were resolved has not been reported.
Her mental condition was contested from 1995 on. Her psychologist described a brain injury that left her functioning at a very low intellectual level; the state's doctors found her fit, said she was malingering and saw no sign of brain injury on the scans. Whether her trial lawyers should have raised her medication and her mental condition was the question the Illinois Supreme Court sent back for a hearing in 2002.
May 30, 1973: Kicks a police officer after an arrest on a breach-of-the-peace charge.
October 1973: Strikes a woman with a milk crate.
March 10, 1975: Convicted of delivery and possession of marijuana; 18 months of misdemeanor probation and a $200 fine.
January 11, 1986: Robs an elderly resident, the earliest robbery in the sentencing record.
January 1987: Her older sister dies.
December 5, 1987: Death of Lonnie Laws, which she later admits to police.
Early December 1988: Death of Caesar Zuell, which she later admits to police.
April 4, 1989: Robs two elderly residents, one of them for the second time.
July 1, 1989: Robs another elderly resident.
July 4, 1989: Robs a man who says it is the third time she has robbed him.
July 25, 1989: Mary Harris, 97, is strangled in her Chicago apartment and her stereo is taken.
September 6, 1989: A resident points Williams out to Officer Betty Woods; she fails a polygraph and is formally arrested that evening.
September 7, 1989: Gives a court-reported statement admitting the killing of Mary Harris.
November 23, 1989: Threatens a correctional officer in the county jail.
April 18, 1991: After a Cook County jury has found her guilty of first degree murder and robbery, the trial judge sentences her to death.
September 22, 1994: Illinois Supreme Court affirms and sets an execution date of January 10, 1995.
January 30, 1995: Rehearing denied.
1995: United States Supreme Court declines review.
June 1995: Post-conviction petition filed.
August 1995: Defense asks for a fitness examination.
May 1998: Fitness hearing opens.
March 1999: Court finds her fit.
August 1999: Circuit court dismisses the post-conviction petition.
June 20, 2002: Illinois Supreme Court reverses and orders a hearing on the merits.