Previous victims describe attacks

Erica D. Johnson

Tuesday, April 15, 2003 | 10:07 a.m.

Jurors on Monday heard two elderly California women describe how Anthony Dotson abused them decades before he robbed and killed a 79-year-old Las Vegas woman.

Prosecutors used the videotaped testimony to argue Dotson should be put to death for killing Doris Bair. Bair was murdered at her home in the 1400 block of Bracken Avenue in December 1999.

Dotson's lawyers then called on experts to tell jurors that Dotson had an obsession with terrorizing elderly women because of childhood abuse.

The first attack occurred in April 1978, when Dotson and an accomplice kidnapped a 53-year-old woman in an underground parking garage in Los Angeles.

The men handcuffed her, forced her into her car and drove her to another garage in a remote part of Los Angeles, she said in the tape. She was raped, robbed of her jewelry, tied up with rags, then left alone, she said.

"I (asked them), 'How would you like someone to do this to your mother?' " she said.

The attack on Olive Pennington came in July 1986, in an underground parking garage in Pasadena. Pennington, a neurophysiologist, was 66 at the time.

She was walking to the elevator when she was hit over the head. She doesn't remember anything else, she said.

"Doctors say if I'd been there another 10 minutes I would have bled to death," she said.

The bones on the right side of Pennington's face had been crushed. It took two six-hour surgeries and $14,000 worth of dental work to reconstruct her face, she said.

Prosecutors say striking similarities exist between the assaults in California and the attacks on Bair and 90-year-old Kathryn Waldman, whom Dotson carjacked in a University Medical Center parking garage five days after he killed Bair.

Defense witness Dr. Thomas Kinsora, a clinical psychologist, tried to provide jurors with possible reasons for Dotson's behavior. He said Dotson is anti-social and suffers from reactive-attachment disorder, which prevents him from bonding with others.

Kinsora, who interviewed Dotson once in June 2002 and again last week, said Dotson could be acting out on aggression toward his mother, who abandoned him as a child. Dotson was also physically abused by his father and stepfather and was sexually molested by an elderly family member, Kinsora said.

"He's broken," he said. "And he's broken because of this relationship with his mother. He finds ways to dull his pain."

If Dotson were to be released from prison, he would be likely attack other elderly women, Kinsora said.