In September 2025, nearly 34 years after he was convicted of a rape that he did not commit, 56-year-old William Jamerson was exonerated in Tulsa, Oklahoma. DNA testing of evidence that prosecutors had contended had been lost or destroyed for more than two decades excluded Jamerson as the rapist.

On July 9, 2024, Tulsa County District Court Judge David Guten granted a defense motion to vacate Jamerson’s convictions, and the case was dismissed. The prosecution appealed, and on September 22, 2025, Judge Guten’s dismissal was upheld.

Jamerson, who had been released on parole in 2015 and required to register as a sex offender, said immediately after his case was dismissed in 2024: “It’s a blessing…I missed a lot. My three brothers passed away … I’ve still got my little brother, my mom and my sister, and they’ve been beside me.”

The crime occurred on the night of May 24, 1991, in the parking lot of Ma Bell’s restaurant on East Admiral Place in Tulsa. Earlier in the evening, 16-year-old Kayleen Dubbs had been let off early from her shift at the restaurant. Because her boyfriend, Jimmy Hunt, was still working, she chose to wait for him in her car in the rear parking lot. She turned on the dome light and began reading a book.

At about 10 p.m., two men approached her car, she said. One was wearing a bandana over his face and carrying a gun. She said he put a gun to her head and grabbed her by the neck. He ordered her to turn the radio off, ripped off the dome light, and told her not to move or he would kill her. She turned off the radio and begged him not to hurt her because she was pregnant and to not hurt her boyfriend, who was still working in the restaurant.

Dubbs would later say that he knew she was pregnant, knew her boyfriend, and that he would not hurt either of them. The man then told the second man to keep watch on Dubbs, so she didn't get out of the car, and to kill her if she moved.

As soon as the gunman went into the back door of the restaurant, the second man put a stun gun to Dubbs’s neck and ordered her out of the car. She said he forced her to go behind a dumpster. He ordered her to face away from him and pull her pants down. She refused at first, but complied when he threatened to kill her. She said that he then inserted his penis and she pretended to faint, falling backwards. She said he pushed her down, and she fell to the pavement and acted as if she was unconscious.

She said the man then pulled her pants and underwear off and digitally penetrated her vagina. At that moment, the other man ran out of the restaurant and said, “I got what we need. Let’s go.” She said both men then fled on foot, and she put her clothes back on and went inside the restaurant.

There, she learned the other man had forced two employees to open and empty the cash register.

When police arrived, the restaurant’s night supervisor, who identified himself as 20-year-old Kenneth Hopkins, said that the gunman confronted him as he took trash out the back door. Hopkins said the man said, “Give me all the money.” Hopkins said he opened the cash register and told another employee, 44-year-old Terri Soberekon, to put the money into a sack. The man then ran out the back door.

None of the restaurant workers said they could identify the gunman because he was wearing a mask and a hat. Dubbs said her attacker was Black and had large jawbones and short hair. Hunt and others in the restaurant suggested that Dubbs’s description of her attacker seemed to resemble a former restaurant employee named “Quinton.”

Dubbs was taken to a hospital where she was examined and a rape kit was taken.

During the subsequent investigation, a restaurant manager who was not present at the time of the crime provided the names of three former employees who were Black: Quenton Nails, Eugene Allen, and 22-year-old William Henry Jamerson, a former busboy. The police then pulled photographs of Jamerson and Allen. Jamerson had pled guilty to a charge of impersonation after he provided his older brother’s driver’s license when he was stopped for a traffic violation in 1990. At the time, Jamerson did not have a license of his own. He had been sentenced to probation. The police had no file on Nails and apparently never pursued him as a suspect. Allen was able to show that he was at work for a different employer at the time of the crime.

In July, the investigation was turned over to Detective Debbie Daniels in the Tulsa police sex crimes unit. The lead detective in the robbery investigation, Jim Hunter, reported that his investigation had “bogged down” because no one could identify the gunman. Hunter turned over his file, which included a photograph of Jamerson.

Daniels then arranged for Dubbs to meet with Detective David Witt, who had no formal training as a police sketch artist, and a portrait was created. Afterward, Hunter saw the drawing and commented that he believed it resembled Jamerson. Daniels concurred that, according to Hunt’s subsequent report, the resemblance was “remarkable.”

What happened next would be disputed years later.

According to the prosecution, a live lineup was assembled, and on July 25, 1991, Dubbs selected Jamerson as her rapist. Dubbs’s boyfriend, Hunt, identified Jamerson as someone he knew had formerly worked at the restaurant. At the time of the crime, Dubbs had said her attacker was 5 feet 7 inches tall. Jamerson was five feet 10 inches tall and all of the five other men in the lineup were taller than Dubbs’s description. One was an inch taller, but another was five inches taller than Jamerson and eight inches taller than Dubbs’s description. Two others were three inches taller than Jamerson.

Jamerson was arrested on August 26, 1991. He was charged with rape, rape by instrumentation, and armed robbery. He was the only person charged in the crime. The gunman was never identified or charged. Jamerson’s probation on the impersonation conviction was revoked, and he was sentenced to 131 days in jail.

In December 1991, Jamerson went to trial in Tulsa County District Court on the rape and robbery charges. Dubbs testified that she identified Jamerson in the lineup. She also identified him in court as her attacker, although she was equivocal.

Dubbs testified that she told Detective Daniels, “I told her that I wasn't sure, and I wasn't going to go blame anybody." She further stated, "I wasn't for sure, because I just caught a glimpse of him."

During cross-examination, Dubbs admitted that the hairline in the composite sketch was starkly different from Jamerson’s hairline.

The prosecution did not introduce any evidence from police officers about the lineup – records would show years later that the police department did not share the photo of the lineup with the prosecution or Jamerson’s defense.

Prior to the trial, the Tulsa police crime laboratory had conducted serology testing on the rape kit. Numerous Caucasian hairs, but no hairs from a Black person, had been recovered. This information was not disclosed to the defense. The lab had concluded that Type A blood was in the rape kit. Dubbs was Type A. Her boyfriend, Hunt, also was Type A. This information also was not disclosed to the defense. Jamerson had Type B blood and was a non-secretor, which meant that his blood type could only be found in his blood and not in other body secretions, such as semen.

Ann Morris, a crime lab forensic chemist, testified that Jamerson was among the 20 percent of the population who were non-secretors. Morris said she only found blood Type A in the samples that contained spermatozoa and that was consistent with Jamerson being the source because he was a non-secretor.

Jamerson’s defense attorney, Ed Glass, did not ask Morris any questions, saying “I’m going to confuse everybody if I do.”

During her closing argument to the jury, assistant district attorney Vicki Sousa said that Morris could not eliminate Jamerson as the rapist. “As a matter of fact…she put him in a very narrow class of people. She told you that only 20 percent of the population is a non-secretor. He’s a non-secretor.”

On December 4, 1991, the jury convicted Jamerson of first-degree rape, rape by instrumentation, and armed robbery. He was sentenced to 34 years in prison. The judge tacked on an additional 10 years to be served consecutively for violating the terms of his probation in the impersonation case.

In March 1992, Jamerson, acting without a lawyer, filed an application for post-conviction relief. He said that Glass had not sought to appeal the convictions. On July 8, the prosecution responded with an affidavit from Glass saying that he and Jamerson had agreed not to pursue the appeal because they were still looking for an alibi witness who could not be found.

Jamerson responded by asserting that he was home at the time of the crime and provided the names of three people who had been there with him: Donna Mae Jamerson, Saundra Hall, and Sheretta Hall. Jamerson also said that Hopkins, the night manager, had called him right after the robbery to report what had occurred. In fact, Jamerson noted, Hopkins’s true name was Kenneth Duncan and was currently incarcerated in Oklahoma. Jamerson asked that subpoenas be issued for the witnesses, including Duncan.

On July 30, 1991, Judge Jay Dalton denied Jamerson’s request to file a delayed appeal and his petition for post-conviction relief. Jamerson appealed, and in September 1993, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals denied his appeal.

In December 1993, Jamerson tried again, filing an affidavit from his mother saying that Glass had been hired to handle the appeal, but failed to do so. Jamerson also accused the prosecution of issuing a subpoena for Duncan in the name of Hopkins at a bogus address as a way to keep Duncan from testifying at the trial. Judge Dalton rejected Jamerson again.

In January 1996, Jamerson filed a motion seeking transcripts in the case at public expense. The prosecution opposed, and the motion was denied. Over the next several years, Jamerson filed several more motions seeking relief, but all were denied.

On May 12, 2001, the Tulsa World newspaper reported that the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System (OIDS) had asked the Tulsa police department to maintain biological evidence from cases that were "likely candidates for DNA testing not available when the defendants in the cases were convicted.”

OIDS Executive Director Jim Bednar was quoted as saying that newly available DNA testing could set the inmate free or "nail them cold," and he identified Jamerson's case as one of those for which "new DNA testing techniques might exonerate the inmates." In response to Bednar’s concern that the police had destroyed such evidence, the newspaper said Tulsa police chief Ron Palmer had reported that had not happened and that the items in the Police Department's possession remained “untouched.”

Jamerson inquired about the evidence in his case. In July, an OIDS attorney wrote him a letter saying, “the Tulsa Police Department destroyed whatever evidence they had in their possession.” The attorney said that since there was no evidence, “we must now close your file.”

In March 2002, Jamerson wrote a letter to Tulsa County Clerk Sally Howe-Smith asking for help in locating the biological evidence in his case. “Ms. Smith, this is my freedom and life is on the line. This evidence can prove that I’m not the man who commit[ted] this crime.”

In December 2014, OIDS investigator Kim Marks sent a letter to Jamerson containing a memorandum from the director of the police crime laboratory saying that a search had been made for the evidence in his case and determined that it had been “disposed of.”

On May 1, 2015, Jamerson was released from prison on parole. He was required to register as a sex offender until 2025.

Jamerson sought help from attorney Daniel Smolen, who in 2018 sent a letter to the police evidence and property room requesting assistance in locating the evidence, including the rape kit. On August 31, 2018, Senior Assistant Tulsa City Attorney Becky Johnson said that the evidence had been destroyed. The following month, Smolen sent a letter to Johnson with an affidavit from Valerie Fuller, who was the former head of the DNA testing unit at the police crime laboratory. Fuller expressed doubt that the rape kit had been destroyed. Smolen requested the chain of custody and analysis records related to the evidence in the case. In October 2018, Johnson said the city was refusing to look further. “[W]e decline your request to inspect the Tulsa Police Department Laboratory and/or Property Room to search for a piece of evidence that we are certain we have destroyed.”

Undeterred, Smolen filed a motion requesting DNA testing of evidence in July 2019. The prosecution opposed the motion, saying the evidence had been destroyed. The “items requested for testing no longer exist,” the prosecution said, adding that there was “no reason to doubt the city of Tulsa[‘s] diligence in failing to locate [the] evidence.”

In 2020, assistant district attorney Randall Young ordered the property room to conduct another search. In July 2020, Young reported that the laboratory did not have the rape kit in the case.

In November 2020, Tulsa County District Judge William Musseman ordered the prosecution to turn over the chain of custody records. In response, Assistant District Attorney Jimmy Dunn provided records relating to receipt number 9462.

In May 2022, Assistant District Attorney Matt Kehoe said he had looked into the matter and the property room had assured him that the evidence “was not located at any of [the department’s] locations where property is stored.” Kehoe said, “I have exhausted all my resources and possible information as to the location of this item, and have not been able to locate or adequately establish a chain of custody.”

On July 27, 2022, the court ordered the city of Tulsa to allow Smolen and Fuller to personally search the property room under the supervision of the prosecution, the police, and police department lawyers. On August 17, during that search, Smolen asked to see the original property receipts. He learned that receipt 9462 was related to the robbery. A separate receipt, numbered 9460, related to the rape. That receipt listed a sealed package containing “microscope slides generated during analysis.” The receipt contained a chain of custody log showing that the crime laboratory had returned this evidence to the property room in 1997.

That item was retrieved, and Smolen discovered it contained a slide created from the vaginal wash performed during taking of the rape kit. In October, the evidence was sent to Bode Technology, a private DNA testing company. In April 2023, Bode reported that male DNA was found and that Jamerson was excluded as the source. The evidence was such that it could exclude Jamerson, but was not sufficient to develop a DNA profile that could be submitted to any DNA database for comparison to unsolved cases or convicted offenders.

In August 2023, Smolen and attorney Allen Smallwood filed a petition for post-conviction relief seeking to vacate Jamerson’s convictions. The motion noted, “As it turns out, the evidence had been in [the police’s] possession for the entire 24 years Jamerson spent in prison. Locating it was as simple as looking at the property receipt, which plainly identified the evidence and its location. Yet, [police] and the District Attorney's Office either never bothered to look – despite multiple requests and even a court order to do so – or they knew of the existence of the evidence and willfully concealed it.”

The petition also noted that, in the meantime, Smolen had received hundreds of pages of witness statements, police reports, forensic tests results, and other documents from Jamerson’s case. Among these were “reams of crucial exculpatory evidence that was never shared with Jamerson or his counsel before trial.”

The petition said this included information that:

• multiple witnesses named another restaurant employee as the likely assailant;

• police records showed no effort to contact, question, or test the blood type of the individual named by witnesses;

• a witness said Duncan inexplicably left the lights off at the back of the restaurant that night, which allowed the robber to enter in darkness;

• Duncan gave police a false name and address when providing a witness statement regarding the robbery;

• police believed their investigation of the rape was "hampered" by Duncan's use of a fictitious name;

• two months after the robbery of Ma Bell's, Duncan attempted to steal from the restaurant;

• the District Attorney's Office knowingly misidentified Duncan on its witness list and directed its subpoena to a person [Hopkins] it knew was fictional at an address it knew to be false. As a result, Duncan did not testify at trial;

• witness statements and police reports gave inconsistent accounts of Dubbs’s attack;

• Dubbs stated in an interview with police that the subjects who committed the robbery and rape knew who her boyfriend was and knew that she was pregnant;

• Dubbs never independently identified Jamerson as her assailant. Instead, police notified Dubbs that they had identified Jamerson as the perpetrator;

• Forensic testing showed that the semen found in the rape kit – which the prosecution argued came from Dubbs’s attacker – was the same blood type of her boyfriend and the father of her child, Jimmy Hunt.

In response, the prosecution argued that the DNA test results were meaningless. “There was no evidence at trial (or in any of the police reports) that Jamerson ejaculated,” the prosecution said.

The prosecution contended that the defense claim of failing to turn over exculpatory evidence was barred by the statute of limitations. The prosecution also denied that much of the information had been withheld and claimed that none of it was so material to the case that it would have changed the verdict.

In December 2023, The Frontier , an online news organization, published an interview with Dubbs. She said she never identified Jamerson in a lineup, but in fact the police told her they had identified him.

“I was 16, I was pregnant, I was scared,” Dubbs said in the interview. “I just did what Vicki [Sousa, the prosecutor] told me,” Dubbs said. “I got on the stand and did what they said and answered the questions. It’s always bothered me.”

“Things don’t add up to me,” she said. “It’s been eating me alive ever since.

On July 9, 2024, Judge David Guten vacated Jamerson’s conviction and dismissed the case. After the hearing, Dubbs embraced Jamerson. “I’m so sorry,” she said, according to The Frontier . “You’re innocent. You always have been.”

Smolen declared, “This case in a very profound way shows how broken the criminal justice system has been through the years and continues to remain in a state of disrepair. It needs to be fixed so that people like [William] Henry Jamerson don’t spend their entire lives in prison.”

In April 2025, Jamerson filed a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking damages for his wrongful conviction.

The prosecution appealed Judge Guten’s dismissal, and on September 22, 2025, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the dismissal.

“The State must do more than express its disagreement with the evidence presented and the trial court’s ruling,” the court said. “It must identify how the trial court’s decision was outside its discretion. This Court is not required to determine that we would reach the same conclusion as Judge Guten, but to determine whether his conclusion was an abuse of discretion.

“Judge Guten was presented with adequate grounds under the specific circumstances in this case to find that Mr. Jamerson made a colorable showing that he is factually innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted” the court said. “Based on the record and evidence before the trial court in this case, the State has failed to establish Judge Guten’s decision as an abuse of discretion.”

In November 2025, the Tulsa city council approved paying $26.25 million to Jamerson to settle his federal lawsuit.

– Maurice Possley

Posting Date: 11-03-2025

Last Update Date: 11-13-2025