California girl says her bloody bed room was not a criminal offense scene

“I believed reality and justice was on the entrance of all the things. And it actually has not been in my case,” Jane Dorotik instructed “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty in an encore of  “The Troubled Case In opposition to Jane Dorotik,” now streaming on Paramount+.

Dorotik reported her husband Bob lacking the night of Sunday, Feb. 13, 2000. She instructed the San Diego County Sheriff’s Division she had final seen him that afternoon, when he stated he was going out for a jog. Bob Dorotik’s physique was discovered early the subsequent morning on the facet of the street a number of miles from their Valley Heart, California, house. He had been bludgeoned within the head and strangled.

“It was apparent to me that it was a murder,” sheriff’s detective Rick Empson instructed Moriarty.

Investigators shortly decided Bob Dorotik wasn’t killed the place his physique was discovered, as a result of there wasn’t sufficient blood there. After they searched the Dorotiks’ house, they discovered spots of blood everywhere in the bed room. Jane Dorotik defined that Bob had had a nosebleed lately, they usually had canine who had bled. However authorities dismissed her explanations.

“There was no query in our thoughts that this assault occurred in the main bedroom,” Empson stated.

Three days after Bob Dorotik’s physique was discovered, Jane Dorotik, 53, was arrested for his homicide. She later posted bail, and although she was below a cloud of suspicion, she invited “48 Hours” into her house in 2000.

“It felt like a nightmare, and I saved saying ‘when am I gonna get up?'” she instructed Moriarty.

When the case went to trial in Could 2001, prosecutor Bonnie Howard-Regan described the 20 places the place investigators discovered blood.

“There was blood on the comforter. There was blood on the pillow sham …on the wall behind the mattress … on the ceiling above the mattress,” she stated.

Howard-Regan additionally instructed jurors there was a big blood stain on the underside of the mattress. The prosecution theorized that Jane Dorotik hit her husband with an object within the bed room and strangled him. She then dressed him in his jogging go well with, put him of their truck and dumped him alongside the facet of the street the place his physique was discovered.

“The proof will present that every one this blood that has been described to you, the observations made on this bed room, that it was all despatched out for DNA evaluation, and all of it got here again Bob Dorotik’s blood,” Howard-Regan instructed the jury.

The jury deliberated for 4 days earlier than discovering Jane Dorotik responsible. She was sentenced to 25 years to life.

“I simply, I can not see my approach clear to a life in jail. I simply can’t see it,” she instructed Moriarty in an interview in jail.

Dorotik spent years behind bars asking for a brand new examination of the proof. She argued authorities centered on her from the start of the investigation and did not comply with different leads. However movement after movement was denied.

By 2016, she started working with a workforce from Loyola Venture for the Harmless. They reviewed the bed room blood proof the prosecutor instructed the jury was absolutely examined and was Bob Dorotik’s. In response to the attraction, not each single spot within the bed room believed to be blood, was examined. As a substitute, consultant samples have been examined.

The appellate workforce says that a number of blood-like stains on gadgets together with a pillow sham, the nightstand and a lampshade turned out to not be blood. And a few stains on the bedspread, which have been described at trial as Bob Dorotik’s blood, have been by no means examined in any respect.

“In case you simply have a look at all the items of proof that Loyola was in a position to completely take aside … and but we all know what was instructed to the jury within the authentic conviction… How can that occur?” Jane Dorotik instructed Moriarty after they spoke once more twenty years after her conviction.

The state stood by its authentic investigation, sustaining the bed room was the homicide scene and that the proof nonetheless pointed to Jane Dorotik because the killer. It additionally claimed the protection arguments have been “largely derived from hypothesis and misstatements of truth.”

In April 2020, Jane Dorotik was briefly launched from jail because of COVID well being issues. The San Diego County District Legal professional’s Workplace advisable her conviction be overturned because of new proof within the case, however in October 2020, it made the choice to retry her.

The decide dominated that the brand new trial might go forward, however that some key proof introduced in her authentic trial wouldn’t be admissible. In Could 2022, simply as jury choice was about to start, the prosecutors dropped the fees.

“We not really feel that the proof is ample to indicate proof past an inexpensive doubt and persuade 12 members of the jury,” stated Deputy District Legal professional Christopher Campbell.

At a information convention outdoors the courthouse, Jane Dorotik expressed her reduction.

“It simply is overwhelming to comprehend that now I can decide my very own future. It is one thing I’ve prayed for and hoped for,” she stated.