Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1990, By Matt O'Connor
A former convict was indicted Thursday on charges of sexually assaulting a woman last May in a South Side forest preserve 20 days after he was paroled from prison for rape.
It marks the first time charges have been filed in Cook County based solely on the results of DNA testing, Assistant State's Atty. Scott Nelson said.
Criminal Court Judge Robert Bastone ordered Vernon Watson, 32, of 9328 S. Laflin St. held in custody without bond after learning Watson previously had been charged with a rape attempt in the same area in September.
In the May 25 attack, Watson is accused of abducting a 24-year-old woman as she walked on a path through the Dan Ryan Woods to a commuter train station to go to work. The assailant warned he had a gun, forced the victim into the woods and raped and robbed her, Nelson said.
Police suspected Watson because he had just been paroled for a 1980 rape in the same woods. But the victim was unable to identify him as the attacker because the rapist repeatedly ordered her not to look at his face and covered her face with her sweater during the attack, Nelson said.
But her description of the attacker's height and weight fit Watson, Nelson said. And another witness identified Watson as the man he saw jogging in the area shortly before the attack, Nelson said.
Watson was forced under court order to submit blood last July, and the FBI testing results, which were revealed recently, show his blood matched semen found on the victim's clothing, Nelson said.
In the meantime, Watson was indicted on charges he tried to rape a woman last Sept. 13 as she walked to the train station through the Dan Ryan Woods, but she was able to escape, Nelson said. That victim identified Watson as the assailant in a police lineup.
DNA testing recently was criticized by several leading scientists as too unreliable to use in court. The Cook County state's attorney's office said the criticism reinforced its decision to be "very conservative" in its use of genetic testing.
Nelson said the DNA match in Watson's case was "the sufficient last straw" to charge him with the rape.
Chicago Sun-Times, March 26, 1992
DNA TRIAL: Opening arguments are set for today in the attempted rape and robbery trial of Vernon Watson, the first person ever indicted in Cook County for sexual assault based on DNA. Watson, 33, is accused of raping a 28-year-old woman in an alley at 94th and Hamilton in September, 1989 - 20 days after he was paroled on a 1980 rape conviction. DNA tests found that semen stains on the victim's clothing matched Watson's blood samples.
Chicago Sun-Times, March 27, 1992
A Beverly lawyer testified Thursday that it took her 15 seconds to pick from a police lineup paroled rapist Vernon Watson as the man who robbed and attempted to sexually assault her.
"There was absolutely no doubt in my mind" that Watson, 33, had attacked her on Sept. 13, 1989, the 31-year-old woman testified. The victim, who works in the Loop, was walking to a commuter train station when Watson allegedly grabbed her and forced her into an alley at 94th and Hamilton, she told a Criminal Court jury hearing Watson's case.
After taking her watch, wedding band and about $ 4, the victim said, Watson told her to undress. She turned her back and removed her raincoat and shoes.
When prosecutor Scott Nelson asked why she turned away, she replied, "I was embarrassed."
She escaped when the man was helping remove her skirt.
Later that day, she tentatively identified Watson from 1975 police photographs. Two days later, she positively identified him.
Watson also is a suspect in a Beverly rape on May 25, 1989.
The May 25 victim could not identify her attacker; Watson was the first person in Cook County indicted for sexual assault based on DNA testing. The test results were barred as evidence.
Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1999, by Terry Wilson
A South Side Chicago man, who was the first in Cook County to be arrested primarily on the basis of a DNA-link between his blood and evidence taken from a rape victim, was convicted Monday of the attack nearly a decade after it occurred.
Vernon Watson, 42, was found guilty by Criminal Court Judge Michael Toomin, in the May 25, 1989, sexual assault and robbery of a woman he confronted as she walked to a commuter train station along a pathway through the Dan Ryan Woods.
Although police questioned Watson shortly after the attack, they did not charge him until after he was arrested in the robbery and attempted rape of another woman in the same area four months later, said Assistant State's Atty. Bill O'Brien. At that point, police obtained a court order for a blood sample from Watson, which matched DNA left at the scene of the earlier attack.
But a trial in that case was sidetracked in 1991 when Toomin threw out the results of the FBI's DNA tests on the grounds that the statistical procedures used were not accepted as reliable in the scientific community, according to O'Brien. That ruling followed a lengthy series of hearings during which experts debated the validity of the statistics and methods of calculation in the new tests.
"At the time, you had statisticians, molecular biologists and population geneticists lined up on both sides of the issue," O'Brien said.
The ruling chilled local interest in the use of DNA evidence, O'Brien said, until the science became more sophisticated and new rules were developed to provide standards for its use.
As part of that process, he said, the National Research Council, a group of scientists and statisticians, was resolving differences over the test's validity and by the mid-1990s, DNA evidence was finding its way into courtrooms across the nation.
In the Watson case, DNA evidence was critical because the victim had not seen her attacker's face--he had placed a sweater over her face and told her he would kill her if she looked at him, prosecutor Angela Petrone said.
Prosecutors appealed Toomin's 1991 ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court, O'Brien said, but the case moved to the judicial system's backwaters when Watson was convicted in the other attack, which occurred in September 1989, and sentenced to 37 years in prison by Judge John Morrissey.
By 1995, when the Supreme Court ordered another evidentiary hearing in May 1989 attack, O'Brien said the prosecutor who had handled the case had left the state's attorney's office, and another two years passed before Toomin inquired about why no motions had been filed.
By then, although the victim's clothing had been destroyed in accordance with routine procedures, the FBI had preserved the now more widely accepted DNA samples gathered during the investigation and the trial could proceed, O'Brien said.
"We had a DNA result in January 1991," O'Brien said. "Everyone accepted the results in this. What we were quibbling about was the statistical results of the match."
Watson, who is still serving the 37-year sentence, could receive as much as natural life in prison at his sentencing hearing on his latest conviction on May 4.
Chicago Sun-Times, December 4, 1994, Bob Secter
As criminal defendants go, Vernon Watson has hardly earned the notoriety of O. J. Simpson. But in Illinois, at least, Watson's case could have far-reaching significance.
Watson was accused of aggravated criminal sexual assault, armed robbery and aggravated kidnapping of a 24-year-old woman attacked on May 25, 1989, near the 1900 block of West 91st Street as she walked to a commuter train station.
A crucial piece of evidence in the case was a DNA "fingerprint" taken from Watson's blood after his arrest. FBI technicians said it not only matched the DNA in semen found on the victim, but the odds of finding another African American with the same genetic pattern were one in 90 million.
Experts in molecular genetics and molecular biology, forensic chemistry, human population genetics, biostatistics and evolutionary biology testified at a pre-trial hearing on DNA before Judge Michael P. Toomin. It spanned several weeks, generated more than 1,500 pages of transcripts and included 68 exhibits, primarily scientific articles and reports.
In March, 1991, Toomin ruled the DNA evidence inadmissible at trial because scientists disagreed over the validity of methods used to derive that one in 90 million calculation. Last January, the 1st District Illinois Appellate Court in Chicago agreed with Toomin.
Though Watson is in jail awaiting trial in another sexual assault case, an appeal of Toomin's ruling is pending before the Illinois Supreme Court. But so, too, may be another DNA case decided June 7 by the 4th District Illinois Appellate Court in Springfield. Those justices disagreed with the Chicago judges on the statistical question and said DNA could be used at trial.
"The state of admissibility in Illinois is up in the air," said Allan Sincox, the assistant Cook County public defender who represented Watson.