Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,105

and read on.

Wilson may have been murdered after she dozed off in front of the computer in Rendell Hall—and caught the guard trying to remove her Reebok sneakers.

“Law enforcement sources” said Dickson was believed to have a “foot fetish” and “gets enjoyment from smelling women’s sneakers and socks.”

“Clever of them,” Fleisher said. Walter smiled.

According to accounts in the Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dickson had been a suspect all along, but police never had enough evidence to arrest him. They decided to take a fresh look at the cold case but weren’t getting far until “investigators learned of his alleged foot fetish and linked it to the fact that Wilson’s sneakers and socks were missing.” For eight years, investigators thought the missing footwear was important, “but they didn’t know why. Then, in 1993, police said they found a clue in the files of the U.S. Army.”

Dickson had been arrested and court-martialed for the theft of women’s sneakers on an Army base in Korea in 1979. Army Sergeant Gwendolyn Garrett-Jackson, who now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, was prepared to testify that Dickson broke into her quarters on the Korean base and stole her white sneakers, video camera, and other belongings. Based on the Army court-martial, police obtained warrants to search Dickson’s apartment on City Avenue and his storage bin at the Philadelphia Navy base.

In both locations, police seized more than a hundred pairs of women’s white sneakers, all used, and confiscated seventy-seven videotapes of women wearing white sneakers. The tapes were pornographic, including sex scenes of women in white sneakers, and women fondling other women’s feet. There were shots of Dickson’s Florida vacation to Disney World, with the camera trained on his female partner’s feet, and a scene in a fast-food restaurant where the camera was focused on women wearing white sneakers. There was a home-shopping commercial for a cross-country ski machine showing a woman on the machine wearing white sneakers, and a naked store mannequin wearing white Keds.

Dickson’s foot fetish was not a harmless fetish, the prosecution said, but a sexual deviancy that led him to psychopathic behavior. Three years after Wilson’s murder, police said, Dickson was fired from a maintenance job at the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical company after admitting he had written a love letter to a female chemist, asking her to leave him her sneakers. Three other women were prepared to testify they believed Dickson had broken into their apartments to steal their white sneakers.

Dickson’s ex-wife told police Dickson “was obsessed by, and drew sexual satisfaction from, women’s feet, sneakers, and socks . . . when she came home from work, tired and wearing sweaty sneakers, her husband removed her shoes and rubbed, kissed, and fondled her feet and toes.” She saw him masturbate in their home while watching aerobics tapes of attractive young women exercising in white socks and sneakers. When she found other women’s sneakers in her closets on several occasions, her husband said “he was giving them to Goodwill.”

Police had shattered Dickson’s alibi for the murder. He claimed he’d been talking to his girlfriend on the telephone at the time of the murder and “forgot” to check on Wilson and take her to her car. Yet the woman, now his estranged wife, testified that Dickson phoned her only once that evening, for fifteen minutes between midnight and one in the morning, when Wilson was alive. She also testified that she received a frantic phone call from Dickson saying, “Felicia, you’ve got to help me. You’re my alibi. You’ve got to help me.”

Reached at her home in Woodbury, New Jersey, Dorothy Wilson, Deborah’s mother, said the family felt “very, very thankful . . . it’s been eight and a half years. . . . We just can’t say enough for the Philadelphia Police Department and district attorney.”

A Drexel spokesman said the university was “gratified” by the “break in the long-standing Deborah Wilson case.” Police credited a grand jury for recommending Dickson’s arrest on murder charges after an eighteen-month investigation. The police homicide special investigations unit and the district attorney’s office investigated the case extensively. Chief of Detectives Richard Zappile said he “feels very sorry for the family of the victim and we are glad that this case has finally been resolved.”

The Daily News said “it was not clear why the old murder case was reopened, although the special homicide investigations unit periodically goes back to take a fresh look at unsolved slayings.” The Wilson family hired a private detective to work on the case, police