I-Team: Rape conviction overturned 20 years later; Dean Gillespie to be freed

CINCINNATI -

A Tri-State man whose conviction was set aside Thursday after spending two decades in prison may go free as soon as Monday, according to his attorney Mark Godsey of the University of Cincinnati Innocence Project.

U.S. Judge Michael Merz overturned the convictions because prosecutors didn't tell the jury the initial police investigators cleared Dean Gillispie, who swore all along he didn't kidnap and rape three women in 1988. The police investigators concluded he not only didn't fit the victims' descriptions or the rapist's profile, he also had an alibi and there was no physical evidence. The man who had brought him to their attention was a co-worker who had fought with Gillispie.

Once the original detectives retired, the same man approached the new detectives, who re-opened the case.

Two years had passed since the rapes. The new detectives set up a photo lineup and asked the three women who had been kidnapped from a Dayton mall if they recognized their attacker. Gillispie's photo was larger and on a different color background than the other photos in the lineup. The women picked it. With no physical evidence, their word was the prosecutors' main play.

A jury deadlocked 8 to 4 to acquit Gillispie. The judge sent them back, and they convicted him in February 1991 of nine counts of rape, three counts of kidnapping, three counts of gross sexual imposition, and one count of aggravated robbery.

Two decades later, he's about to be set free. He may have gotten out years ago had he admitted to the crimes. That's what the parole board required.

He wouldn't do it.

He sat his prison while his mother, Juana Gillispie, asked Godsey to make this one of the first cases of the University of Cincinnati Innocence Project. Godsey has been working the case since 2003 with some powerful allies, including former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, who also believed Gillispie's conviction should be overturned.

Thursday, Judge Merz decided Gillispie "was denied his right to due process" because the prosecutors withheld the information about the initial investigation. The ruling clears the way for the 46-year-old Fairborn man to be released within a few days from the London Correctional Institution.