Gone in the Night (1996) Shannen Doherty, Kevin Dillon
The persecution of Cynthia & David Dowaliby according to Cynthia & David Dowaliby
This is a four-hour made-for-CBS (but shown frequently on LMN) tv movie about the aftermath of the apparent abduction and subsequent murder of 7-year-old Jaclyn Dowaliby from her home in suburban Chicago in 1988. The Dowalibys lose custody of their son on abuse charges (that turn out to be false) while the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office focuses on railroading the parents for the crime. Cynthia is acquitted but David is found guilty and sentenced to 45 years, on approximately zero real evidence. (The case provides a cautionary tale about playing 12 Angry Men in real life. Jurors noticed dents in a door in a photograph of the family home that were discussed by neither the prosecution nor the defense, and assumed they were evidence of David’s violent temper; in fact, they’d been on the door when the Dowaliby’s moved into their home). David’s cause is taken up by a journalism professor at Northwestern, and eventually David’s conviction is overturned and their son is returned to the Dowalibys.
I don’t doubt any aspect of the account of the railroading, shoddy police work, and general lack of minimal ethics on the part of the State’s Attorney’s office or any law enforcement officers involved in the case; Cook County police agencies and prosecutors have done much worse, sometimes to defendants who seem to have been chosen almost at random. The movie blames the behavior of the prosecutors on then-State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley’s mayoral race, the theory being that he needed a conviction in this high-profile case to win the election. However, this strikes me as a bit like trying to multiply explanations for snow in January in Chicago. The treatment the Dowaliby’s received is actually pretty routine for Chicago law enforcement, and Daley probably didn’t have to put anyone in jail to beat poor old Eugene Sawyer in the primary. It’s just exactly the kind of thing he would have done from the Mayor’s office if he’d been in it at the time, or whether he’d had a campaign to worry about that year or not. The actor playing Daley portrays him as a basset hound, but really he’s more like a bulldog, and he pretty much always wants stuff to be DONE already.
However, as a Chicagoan of 20+ years, I have noticed that it’s next to impossible to describe how things work here to people who live in other cities. They just fundamentally don’t believe it can be as crazy as you say, and that you must be embellishing some. I think the political-campaign explanation is there just to make the case seem more plausible to outsiders.
My husband pointed out to me that if I decided it was my job to fact-check all of the true crime movies on Lifetime, I’d be busy, busy, busy. I’ll just point out that the Dowaliby case has never been solved, parents really are responsible for the deaths of their children about 95% of the time, and just because you can’t legitimately prove that somebody did something doesn’t mean they didn’t do it, it just means you can’t prove it. I found the schizophrenic uncle thrown in as an alternate suspect a little pat. Did he really make the thinly veiled confession to the Dowaliby’s attorney, and were the details as accurate as the movie implies? It’s hard to 100% trust a movie based on a book by the best suspects' main advocate, and that contains almost no details about the actual crime and ends with them appearing in person to tell you about a missing & exploited children’s hotline.
So, basically, I found the movie tragic and unsettling, but with a mildly creepy aftertaste.
Lifetime rating: **
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