A Pennsylvania man who was convicted of killing his wife 30 years after her corpse was found in her burning car failed Tuesday to convince a state appeals court panel that his lawyer was incompetent.
That Superior Court ruling means John D. Dawson, now 71, will keep serving a life prison term for the November 1981 slaying of Kathleen Dawson in Somerset County’s Conemagh Township.
Kathleen Dawson, 31, was last seen alive when she left work at Windber Hospital on the night of Nov. 9, 1981. She never made it home.
Instead, just after midnight the next morning, she was found dead in her blazing car. An autopsy showed she had been beaten to death. A blackjack was found at the murder scene.
John Dawson
The slaying remained a cold case until 2009 when John Dawson was arrested based on information his nephew and another witness gave police implicating him in the killing. He was convicted by a county jury two years later.
Investigators said John Dawson killed his wife because he was cheating on her and he was having financial problems. He collected more than $25,000 on her life insurance policy.
In his unsuccessful appeal to the Superior Court, John Dawson claimed his attorney failed him by, among other things, not calling character witnesses during the trial, not arguing that another man was in fact the killer, and by not preventing the testimony of a dead witness from being read to the jury.
Judge Mary P. Murray wrote the state court opinion rejecting those arguments.
She cited the defense attorney’s contention that calling character witnesses could have enabled prosecutors to present evidence of John Dawson’s prior criminal record.
The defense attorney said implying that another man owned the blackjack and had committed the murder could have been counterproductive in that the jurors could have concluded John Dawson conspired with that man to have his wife murdered, Murray noted. The defense attorney also cited the fact that a prosecution witness who said he remembered seeing John Dawson in the 1970s with the blackjack found at the murder scene actually recanted that claim when he testified during the homicide 2011 trial.
The witness who died before that trial was John Dawson’s nephew Duane Schmidt whose information led state police to arrest Dawson for the murder. Murray found the defense attorney did try to block testimony Schmidt gave during the preliminary hearing in the case from being read by prosecutors during the trial, but was not successful.
Schmidt testified at the preliminary hearing that he smelled a foul odor when he saw John Dawson at his grandmother’s house the morning after the murder. He also said Dawson had burns and blisters on both of his cheeks.
The lawyer didn’t fail Dawson, either, by not preserving objections to the testimony of another witness for an appeal, the state judge concluded. That witness testified Dawson had told him, “If you are going to kill somebody – if you are going to murder somebody, do it in Conemaugh Township.”
Even without that witness’ statement prosecutors “presented ample evidence of (Dawson’s) guilt,” Murray wrote.
The Superior Court’s denial of his appeal came almost 10 years to the day after Dawson was convicted of first-degree murder.