Ready for trial, woman told case will be dropped

In February, Courtney Wilkinson noticed a story in the Daily Local News about the Chester County District Attorney’s annual law enforcement awards ceremony. What she read about comments from the man named Prosecutor of the Year struck her as bitter irony.

“You are the people who give voice to those who have no voice,” Deputy District Attorney Carlos Barraza was quoted as telling the police officers who attended the ceremony in the county Justice Center’s stately Courtroom One. “Most importantly, you bring justice to those who have been victimized.”

The news story went on to recount an eloquent description by Barraza of a case he had taken to trial that involved a sexual assault. The veteran prosecutor said it was considered a problematic matter, a case that a predecessor had been ready to resolve with a favorable plea for the defense. Nevertheless, he agreed to take it to trial after listening to the lead police investigators tell him how believable the victim was.

The case indeed turned out to have its problems, Barraza said. But even though the defense attorney bragged after closings that he would get an acquittal in less than an hour the jury stayed deliberating for more than nine. Ultimately, the verdict came back not guilty, Barraza said, leaving his prosecution team devastated.

But he said that months later the victim saw him by chance away from the courthouse and told him how her life had changed since the trial. She was at school, living in Philadelphia, and doing well, putting the ugliness of the case behind her. “Thank you for believing in me,” she told Barraza.

That was not what Wilkinson, a 24-year-old Downingtown area native, said she had experienced in her dealings with the DA’s Office. Perhaps it was even the opposite.

Weeks earlier, in meetings with prosecutors assigned to her case involving the sexual abuse she claimed to have suffered at the hands of her father, Theodore John Wilkinson Jr., as a child and teenager, she learned that they would not give in to her pleas to take her case to trial and

intended, instead, to nolle prosse, or drop, all charges against him.

The reason, Wilkinson says she was told, was that there were issues in her case that would make it difficult not only for her to testify on the witness stand and but also to win a conviction; not doubts about her credibility, or newly discovered evidence, but rather inconsistencies that the prosecution would have to face up to at trial.

She felt “blindsided” by the declaration, she told a reporter in an interview in July.

“Absolutely blindsided,” she said. “I didn’t even know that was on the table. We were within seven days (of going to trial) once before. This thing was going to court. I think it completely blindsided everyone involved. I know the DA’s office has taken hard cases in the past that they didn’t know they could get a conviction for. I wanted the same chance that Carlos’ victim had.”

The case was formally dropped on Dec. 18. About two months later, and a week or so after reading of Barraza’s award, Wilkinson wrote to District Attorney Thomas Hogan pleading her case and asking for help understanding why her father’s prosecution had been short-circuited, “when all the assistant DAs and police officers on this case believe he is guilty of such serious offenses.”

Hogan replied quickly, and tersely. “Thanks for writing,” he said in a Feb. 16 e-mail Wilkinson kept. “I reviewed your case thoroughly with the assigned prosecutors and (First Assistant District Attorney Michael) Noone, including the decision about the resolution of your case. These cases are always difficult. I believe that the eventual decision reached by the prosecutors, after discussing the matter

with you, was the correct decision.” He instructed her to contact Noone with any further questions.

When she met with him later, Noone was blunt. “If I had a time machine I would go back in time and we would have never arrested (her father),” he told her.

The pursuit of justice

According to the American Bar Association, the primary duty of a prosecutor is to seek justice, and in some cases that is what a nolle prosse decision like the one entered in Commonwealth vs. Theodore Wilkinson Jr. may entail. A prosecutor may feel that a decision to seek a conviction against a defendant would be against the interests of justice if he or she felt the defendant did not commit the crime charged, for instance.

Wilkinson says that is not what happened in her case. Over three days this week, the Daily Local News will examine what happened to Wilkinson and the case against her father, a 59-yearold East Brandywine home remodeling contractor; how it was explained to her; what she believes it says about the criminal justice system; and how others associated with the case reacted to the decision to drop the charges against him.

Theodore Wilkinson has consistently maintained his innocence of all of the charges, and because of the nolle prosse, he is a free man with no convictions on his record — innocent in the eyes of the law. Said his attorney, Robert J. Donatoni of West Chester, of the decision to nolle prosse the case: “The District Attorney’s Office of Chester County, in my view, did absolutely the right thing in keeping an open mind and revisiting a case of this magnitude.”

The Daily Local News has reported on Wilkinson’s case previously, but has never used her name or that of her father because of its policy to not identify the victims of sexual offenses. Wilkinson, however, has granted permission to use her name

in these stories after reaching out to tell her version of events.

The formal case against Theodore Wilkinson began with his arrest in February 2012, and reached a milepost in June of that year when a preliminary hearing was held before Magisterial District Judge Stanley Scott of Uwchlan. Wilkinson’s father was represented by veteran defense attorney Daniel Bush of the West Chester law firm of Lamb McErlane, and attorney Christopher Casey of Philadelphia, the brother of U.S. Sen. Robert Casey, who cross-examined Wilkinson on the witness stand. Her testimony was enough to meet the bar, admittedly low, of establishing probable cause, and Theodore Wilkinson Jr. was held for trail on dozens of charges, including rape, incest, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault, and indecent assault.

As she was anticipating the preliminary hearing that spring, Wilkinson tattooed a bit of advice from a friend on her left arm. “Speak the truth even if your voice shakes,” it reads.

The case was transferred to Common Pleas Court that month. And then it stalled as her father’s attorneys began asking the court to order Wilkinson and the prosecution to turn over records of her psychological counseling.

“It was obvious in my testimony that I cared about my dad and I wasn’t angry,” she said of the pre-trial proceedings and the preliminary hearing. “The new defense was that I was crazy. Their idea was that counseling was the devil. They thought up the idea that these counselors put something in my head. I have been in counseling since I was 13 and my records didn’t show any of that.”

The case was being prosecuted by then-Deputy District Attorney Elizabeth B. Pitts, a longtime county prosecutor who at the time headed the DA’s Office’s Child Abuse Unit. But as a precaution, Wilkinson and

Pitts asked the court to allow another attorney to represent her interests on the issue of whether her father could get access to her medical records.

“I knew there was nothing in my counseling records that I needed to hide, but I fought to keep them private because they described years of trouble coping with my life and my abuse. My abuser is the last person I would ever want to have access to them,” she said. Now, she feels as though her rights to privacy in terms of medical records were subverted.

“Because I was a victim I lost my right to my own records,” she said. “I thought, ‘If I don’t fight this I can’t go to counseling ever again.’ How am I going to go when I know all of this can be exposed whenever they want it to be?”

The attorney who came to her aid was Joseph W. Carroll III of West Chester, the county’s former district attorney, who had left office at the end of 2011, just as Wilkinson’s case was getting underway. He volunteered to represent her in the criminal case for free.

The move, “made her more comfortable,” Carroll said in a recent interview. “The DA’s Office had taken the position that it was not able to prevent (the disclosure of the medical records.) I think she needed to have someone who worked only for her.” Carroll said that he came to believe Wilkinson’s version of what had happened to her — that from the age of 4 ½ her father sexually molested her, until she was 17.

“This is a case that turned very much on the credibility of Courtney versus her father,” he said. It seemed clear to him that Wilkinson had no reason to lie about what she said happened to her. “Everything made sense to me,” he said in an interview in August. “I came away feeling that she was telling the truth. Everyone said they believed her. We all came away wth the impression that it does not make sense for her to make this up.”

In a statement to the Daily Local News, Donatoni characterized the case as built on “memor(ies) ‘triggered’ by her experience with the professor and her psychological counseling. “These types of cases are problematic,” he said, noting that his client had passed a polygraph examination — even though such evidence would not be admissible at trial because of their inherent unreliability.

The battle over the medical records continued for months, during which time multiple pre-trial motions were filed by both the defense and Carroll. In that time, Pitts left the DA’s office in September 2013 to take a position with the Public Safety Department at Swarthmore College in Delaware County. The case was taken over to Assistant District Attorney Priya DeSouza -- who had come to work for the DA’s office in 2009 and was then-assigned to the Child Abuse Unit, working with Pitts, and her co-cousel -- Deputy District Attorney Thomas Ost-Prisco.

In the fall of 2013, DeSouza met with Wilkinson to prepare her for trial in the case, which was scheduled to start on Oct. 28, 2013. The two met and DeSouza also prepped other prosecution witnesses, including her therapists and those who Wilkinson said she had told of her father’s abuse. But before the case could be tried before Senior Judge Ronald Nagle, the defense asked for another continuance, which Nagle granted, and the case again went on hold.

DeSouza eventually left the DA’s Office in December 2014 for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia. Wilkinson’s father hired Donatoni in 2015, and the case was reassigned to Judge Anne Marie Wheatcraft.

The first inkling for Wilkinson that there was a new dimension to her case came when she called the DA’s office in early 2015 to check in with DeSouza on the status of the trial, only to learn that DeSouza no longer worked there, news that caught her off guard.

“I was very upset about that,” she said. “I had called to get an update and no one had told me that Priya had left. We worked together for years, and so I went to Mike Noone (the trial prosecutors’ supervisor.) I told him I felt uncared about. I felt like this is taking a huge toll on my life but that it doesn’t seem to matter.

“He said, ‘I want you to come in because I want you to know how much you matter to this office. This case is very important to us.’ Which is part of the confusion about when the decision was made not to go forward with it,” she said.

She was introduced to Assistant District Attorney Emily Provencher, who had taken over for DeSouza in the Child Abuse Unit. Wilkinson began working with Provencher and Assistant District Attorney Chad Maloney, who was assigned to Wheatcraft’s courtroom. Provencher had been with the DA’s Office since March 2014, coming to the county from a similar position in Cumberland County; Maloney had been employed since

October 2014.

In May 2015, the state Superior Court ruled that the defense could have limited access to Wilkinson’s medical records. In October, she said, she, Provencher and Maloney began prepared for trial, which Wheatcraft had specially listed for Jan. 4.

One of the things that Provencher pressed for was that Wilkinson sit down for a new interview about the case to supplement her statement to state Trooper Brittany Brenner given in September 2011, four years earlier.

“It was a very strange thing for a prosecutor to want because someone in a 4 ½ year time period most likely will contradict themselves,” Wilkinson said. “And it was horrible for me. I cried for days before I had to do it, many days after. It was just a horrible experience for me to have to restate every single thing. I know the story very well.”

She asked that state Trooper Brittany Brenner, the lead investigator, be called in to take the statement. but says she was told that Brenner was not available. She conducted to the interview by “someone I had never met before,” — later identified as Chester County Detective Christine Beiler.

“After I gave my statement they waited a little bit, and then they brought me in for what they called trial prep. And they sat across from me and they did what I was used to for trial prep, for two hours. After two hours of questioning and trial prep they told me there were issues in the case that made them reassess whether the case could proceed to trial.

Referring to Wilkinson as “the accuser,” Provencher said in response to questions by the Daily Local that she, “had a difficult time recalling simple details. She also had no recall or details regarding other issues. This is contrary to what we usually experience. The accuser stated that no one had ever addressed these issues with her or asked these questions of her before.

“The agonizing decision not to prosecute this case was not taken lightly,” Provencher said in a statement. “We worked through multiple consultations and prep sessions with the accuser, her family members, potential witnesses, investiagtors, the prior prosecutors, and multiple supervisors within the District Attorney’s Office. It was only at the end of this process that we recommended the case be dismissed.”

The decision left Wilkinson not only stunned, but also with a nagging question.

“There were too many holes in the case, they said,” Wilkinson remembered. “But there weren’t any new holes. That’s the thing. There wasn’t any evidence that changed, the only thing that changed was the (assistant) district attorney. So why all of a sudden are we not going to court?

Tomorrow: “What I need is to testify.”

To contact staff writer Michael P. Rellahan call 610-696-1544.