In the early morning hours of December 12, 1999, a woman, naked from the waist up, ran screaming from her home in Elizabeth. Wearing nothing but a sock and a long, fitted skirt, she pummeled a neighbor’s door with her fists, begging someone to let her in.
When they opened the door, Elizabeth Connolly (not her real name) barreled past them, yelling, “Call the police!” She’d been raped, she said, and feared that her attacker, whom she believed was still inside her home, would kill her roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend.
At 7:10am, a 911 call went out to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police. Connolly’s roommate, Nicole, and her boyfriend, who had slept through the entire episode, were eventually awakened by a SWAT team ripping back their curtains and bursting into the house.
It was the second time that morning that police were called to the area. Investigators later learned that a female neighbor of Connolly’s called 911 after she saw an African-American male in his mid-30s openly masturbating in the street a short distance from Connolly’s home. She took the man’s automobile tag number down, but it would be April before police would arrest 37-year-old Donnie Alexander Rodgers on charges of public masturbation and public exposure — along with charges of first degree rape, burglary, kidnapping, sex offense and felony robbery with a dangerous weapon in the Connolly case.
DNA taken from semen still inside the victim confirmed police suspicions. The samples taken from Rodgers were a perfect match, and detectives and prosecutors alike believed it would be an open-and-shut case. Rodgers had a criminal history that stretched all the way back to 1981, when he was convicted in Iredell County of multiple burglaries, forced entry and assault on a female.
Within six weeks of his release from prison in 1989, he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill for a bar brawl in which he gutted a bouncer, slashing the man so viciously across the abdomen that the man’s intestines spilled from the wound. This rape case, they thought, would finally put Rodgers away for life.
But last Monday, November 5, a verdict was read in the case that shocked court personnel and investigators alike. Despite the DNA evidence, the jury unanimously voted Rodgers not guilty of all charges (that is, with the exception of the still-pending public exposure and masturbation charges, for which he is scheduled to stand trial. Given that those are misdemeanors, Rodgers will likely be walking the streets of Charlotte by the end of the month.)
“I’ve never seen a judge that shocked by a verdict,” said a court employee who was present for most of the weeklong trial.
A week later, Detective T. Brandon, who investigated the case, said he is still trying to make sense of the jury decision. He said he’s warned the police department’s homicide team about Rodgers’ return to Charlotte’s streets.
“This guy here was getting more and more violent,” said Brandon. “He’s going to kill someone.”
Brandon’s not the only one with that gut feeling. Astonishingly, several of the jurors had it too, including one who lives in the same Shamrock Drive area where Rodgers lists his address. The juror, who fears future retribution from Rodgers, claims to have asked to be dismissed from the case, but the request was denied.
“I have been very tormented about it,” said another female juror. “It was very difficult to be on that case. I felt this lady didn’t get justice.”
Nearly all of the jurors interviewed by Creative Loafing expressed similar sentiments. So why did they set Rodgers free? It seems that a bizarre set of circumstances and personalities collided in such a way that, with a bit of possibly sloppy prosecution thrown in for good luck, Rodgers managed to hit the correctional jackpot.
Omitted evidence
There are two versions of what happened that night. Rodgers told the jury he met Connolly, then 31, at Bar Charlotte the month before the alleged assault. She was dancing on the bar at the time, he claimed, and told him that she thought the hoop earring he was wearing in his ear was “cute.” She gave him her phone number, he said.
When he called her the night of December 11, she didn’t remember him at first, he told the court. But after they talked for awhile, she invited him over to her place, and he picked up a 12-pack of beer along the way. Despite the fact that it was the middle of December, he claims that Connolly greeted him at the side door of her home wearing nothing but a t-shirt, black socks and underwear. She attempted to seduce him, he said.
He told the jury that, being a married man, he had trouble getting his equipment to function, so Connolly performed fellatio on him. Rodgers claimed that he later left after a fight in which Connolly, who is white, called him a “nigger.”
Jurors later told CL that the discrepancy between the timelines given by Rodgers and Connolly, which the prosecutor in the case didn’t actively dispute, was one of the major reasons for their decision.
The time frame Rodgers gave would have put both of them at Connolly’s home before 2:45am, when it is agreed that Connolly’s roommate returned home to find Connolly cooking in the kitchen.
Connolly claimed she was working at her job as a waitress at the Lamplighter until at least 1:30am, when she headed alone to Thomas Street Tavern to have a beer before returning home. In court, Rodgers’ attorney claimed that no one interviewed by the defense could remember or verify that Connolly was in fact at work or at the bar — a fact that jurors said created significant doubt about Connolly’s story.
It would have been a simple task for the prosecution to verify that Connolly worked that night and then went to the bar, but it wasn’t done. Employee work schedules for the Lamplighter still exist, although the restaurant is now closed. It took Creative Loafing less than an hour to locate Joe Carriker, the former manager of the Lamplighter, who clearly remembers that Connolly worked that night, which would have put her at the restaurant until at least 1am. He says he remembers the weekend not only because of the rape, but because Connolly took time the day after the incident to call him and let him know she wouldn’t be returning to work.
Mike Neumann, an acquaintance of Connolly’s who is now employed at Cajun Queen restaurant, remembers seeing Connolly at Thomas Street Tavern about the time the bar stopped serving alcohol, around 2am. He remembers that Connolly left before the place fully cleared out, which would have meant she arrived home shortly before her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend returned between 2:30am and 2:45am.
District Attorney Amanda Mingo, the prosecutor in the case, did not return CL’s calls, so it is unknown why verifiable evidence backing Connolly’s story wasn’t introduced, leaving jurors to decide which story to believe.
For jurors, that wasn’t an easy decision, because the attack Connolly described was so brutal. Connolly told the court she hung out with her roommate and some friends who had stopped by briefly, and went to bed around 4am. Connolly said she remembers waking up for the last time around 5am.
Sometime later, she claims to have awoken to every woman’s nightmare: a man she had never seen before, standing over her with a gun pointed at her face, his hand clasped over her mouth.
“It’s like this, Shorty,” he said. “If you be quiet, I won’t kill you.”
He tied her hands behind her back with clothing and gagged her. Though he said he wouldn’t hurt her, when he pulled the covers back, she began to panic. She says he pulled the gag out, shoved the barrel of the gun into her mouth and cocked it, swearing again that he would kill her. He then crammed a sock in her mouth and tied her feet.
“You white bitches think nothing like this will ever happen to you,” she claims he told her as he raped her.
Although Connolly’s bedroom was right next to her roommate’s, her roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend slept through the attack.
“I made a lot of noise,” Connolly said. “I fought to a certain degree until I had a gun shoved in my mouth. I was trapped in a corner and I thought about different ways to fight, but he could have killed me with his bare hands and I knew I because I struggled with him.
Connolly said she had enough wits about her to remember a trick and ol boyfriend once taught her. By spreading her fingers as widely as possible, she could increase the size of her wrist just slightly. She spread the fingers on both hands as Rodgers tied them, hoping she when she relaxed them, the knotted clothing he bound her with would have enough slack so she could wiggle free.
Connolly said Rodgers took his time, alternately raping her, dressing her up in underwear and two different skirts he pulled from her closet, touching the gun to her rectum and forcing her to fellate him. He would alternately leave the room and return, telling her if he heard the bed move, he would kill her. All the while, Connolly said she wiggled the ties that bound her hands, trying to get free, afraid he intended to hurt or kill the other occupants of the house.
Finally, she got her left hand loose, and ran from the house.
“I think about the jurors and I have to pray not to wish them ill will,” Connolly said after last week’s verdict. “I want them to know what it feels like to be so afraid for their life that they have an out-of-body experience. I want them to know what it is like to go through that. . .”
Incomplete investigation and a befuddled jury
For two years, Connolly said, she waited for justice, certain that any jury would find Rodgers guilty. But from the beginning of the investigation through the close of the trial, she had nagging doubts about the way some seemingly important details of the case were being handled.
Investigators told CL that any bruises or abrasions suffered in an attack are always photographed immediately, or as soon as possible in the hours after the incident. But no one bothered to photograph any of Connolly’s bruises until she called investigators two weeks after the attack to ask whether they wanted or needed pictures of a row of identical round bruises on her inner thigh, which she said were made when Rodgers pressed bullets from the gun into her thigh. By the time she called, although investigators quickly photographed the bruises on her thigh after her call, other bruises on her wrists and calves had faded.
The single picture of bruising taken by investigators wasn’t shown at the trial. An investigator close to the case said pictures weren’t taken because the bruises “hadn’t risen yet” when investigators interviewed Connolly.
The lack of evidence of trauma was compounded by the fact that investigators couldn’t pinpoint how Rodgers, an experienced burglar, got into the house. Though a window in the back of the house the women believed to be painted shut was found wide open, Rodgers, who does concrete work and has abraded palms, did not leave a single fingerprint anywhere in the house.
In the hands of what has to be described as an oddball jury, the above information — and the lack of other information — took on a life of its own. Some of the reasons jurors gave for their decision were bizarre. Some bore little relation to the actual facts in the case. Others were simply a sad commentary on the biases and prejudices rape victims still must face in the 21st century.
When it came right down to it, jurors seemed confused about basic facts in the case, including testimony by a forensic scientist, one of the most crucial parts of the prosecution’s case.
“There was semen in her rectum, but the state didn’t test it to see if it was his,” said one male juror, discussing factors that influenced his decision. “That made it seem like she was a, you know, a sexually active person, which made people think she was out there.”
Court records and Connolly’s testimony show that there was no sperm found in the victim’s rectum, and that she was not sodomized. Jurors were instead told that Connolly claimed that Rodgers at one point placed the gun up to her rectum, a point that somehow clearly confused jurors.
Another juror passionately argued that he believed Rodgers to be guilty and suggested other jurors who disagreed were somehow lacking in intelligence.
“I wouldn’t want to serve on a jury with those people again,” he said. “I thought they were stupid. I felt that many on the jury were thinking about things that had never been brought up at all.”
But when asked why he voted for the not guilty charge, he said the same jurors convinced him there wasn’t enough evidence to convict. Besides, he said, he didn’t want to vote no and cause a hung jury because “we would have to do it all over.”
The man did not understand that any new trial would be heard by a different jury, or that he personally wouldn’t have to sit through another trial.
At the same time, random bits of evidence seemed to stick in juror’s minds, only to be reworked into a conspiracy theory of sorts revolving around a bag of marijuana and a bong found by police on the coffee table. The pot, which Connolly’s roommate testified in court was hers, drew speculation from jurors that because Rodgers had several convictions for cocaine trafficking and dealing in the 1990s, maybe what had really happened was a drug deal gone wrong. Some suggested that Connolly might have made the whole thing up to get back at Rodgers somehow over an issue involving drugs.
Connolly claims she has never done cocaine, and that she tried marijuana once in high school, but didn’t like it and hasn’t used it since. She maintains that she had never known Rodgers before that night.
Almost all the jurors interviewed said they didn’t believe that the two didn’t know each other before the night in question, but no one interviewed was able to explain why they felt this way aside from “a feeling.”
“You get to a certain age and you know things, you get vibes,” said one woman. “I felt like they knew each other.”
Another man said several of the jurors thought that Connolly didn’t show enough emotion to be convincing when she testified about the details of the alleged attack. Other jurors said Connolly was “out there,” “weird” or “cold,” although what role this would have played in the incidents of the night in question was unclear.
The issue of race also seemed to play a role in the juror’s decisions. Of the 14 people on the jury, four were black and two were Hispanic. When asked why she felt the two knew each other, one woman of mixed descent who said she was from Miami railed against decades of prejudice against African-Americans in the South rather than answering the question.
“Twenty years ago if it was a black man and a white woman everyone would be screaming rape,” she said. “Twenty years ago in the South, he’d be hanging. But now you see interracial couples all the time. They could have known each other.”
But when pressed about which nonracial factors in the case led her to believe the two knew each other, she could not give an answer other than that she just had a feeling the two had met before.
The race card reared its head in other ways as well, particularly in an undercurrent of resentment that seemed to run among at least the two non-Caucasian members of the jury interviewed by CL. It seemed to some members of the jury that investigators and prosecutors didn’t do all the research they could have because they assumed the jury would convict Rodgers because he’s black and his supposed victim is white.
But even these members seemed to take pity on Connolly. Another female member of the jury, who said she was deeply affected by the experience, said she can’t get Connolly off her mind.
“I just hate it for that lady,” she said. “I think that sometimes rape victims aren’t believed.”
But when asked why she voted against a guilty verdict, she repeated the same line used by every juror interviewed. “The state,” she said, “didn’t prove its case.”
It was an opinion echoed word for word by jurors, who said jury foreman Karen Williams, a corporate lawyer with Bank of America, had a lot of legal knowledge, and a lot of influence on the jury.
Though Williams wouldn’t comment on the case, several other jurors said she was the jury’s most influential member and was able to point out holes in “the state’s case” that they might have missed.
Jurors faulted investigators for not testing the sock to see if Connolly’s saliva was present. They wondered what had happened to the gun Rodgers supposedly used to subdue Connolly, a detail they said wasn’t covered by the prosecution. They said that DNA evidence wasn’t clear, nor was it clear that Rodgers had broken into Connolly’s home.
So after eight hours of discussion, they found Rodgers innocent of all charges.
For at least one person, Rodgers’ attorney Bob Trobich, the verdict wasn’t surprising. Trobich, a private attorney who served as a public defender for Rodgers, says he believes there was a lack of evidence pointing to Rodgers’ guilt. Trobich said he believes that’s because his client is innocent.
For Connolly, her family and her friends, the verdict was devastating news.
“They just went in there and spent eight hours creating a Jerry Springer episode,” she said of the jury. “How could they do this to the women in this city?”
“We (rape victims) have nothing to gain by going through this kind of shame in court, not to mention how painful it is to have to say what I had to say in front of my own mother,” Connolly yells. “Why would any woman make a claim as severe as that? Why did I even bother?”
For now, Connolly is planning her seventh move in two years, this one out of state to an undisclosed location. She fears violence from Rodgers when he is released, and although family members and friends are here in Charlotte, she’s afraid to stay.
Connolly said her life has changed forever since December 1999. She leaves no trace of her whereabouts on paper, foregoing a license, credit card and any other form of information registration that might disclose her whereabouts. Through counseling, she has managed to get the recurring panic attacks she has had since last December under control, and to occasionally venture out into public places like grocery stores, though she says she is still afraid to drive, or to go anywhere by herself, and is still mostly dependent on those around her.
“There is more than one victim here,” she said.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2001.
