Evidence Questioned in Missouri Child Rape Case
Evidence Questioned in Missouri Child Rape Case - seattlepi.com
The crime was brutal: a 7-year-old girl choked, raped and forced to smoke drugs before she was left for dead in a fire set by her attacker. Somehow, she survived. Firefighters founder her at dawn, stumbling through the street and wearing just one shoe.
The child couldn’t initially name her attacker, but police quickly targeted a 36-year-old with a lengthy rap sheet who had first met the girl hours earlier at an all-night card game hosted by his cousin. The girl’s grandmother brought her there and left her to watch TV and play video games in a nearby bedroom.
A Greene County jury found Jeffery Allen Dickson guilty of child kidnapping, forcible rape and forcible sodomy in the April 6, 2008, attack, and a judge sentenced Dickson to four consecutive life terms. He remains imprisoned at the Potosi Correctional Center in southeast Missouri.
The case shocked and horrified local residents, and Dickson’s arrest days later eased the minds of those who feared that a child rapist remained on the loose. But new evidence unearthed by Dickson’s state-appointed appeals court lawyer and reviewed as part of a five-month Associated Press investigation suggests that a rush to judgment could have caused police and prosecutors to target the wrong man.