A notorious informant and a discredited profiler helped convict Drexel guard of student’s killing. DA says the case was tainted.
David Dickson Jr. was convicted in 1995 of killing Drexel University student Deborah Wilson for her sneakers. Now, Philadelphia District Attorney Krasner has acknowledged the conviction is tainted.

Thirty years after former Drexel University security guard David Dickson Jr. was convicted of killing student Deborah Wilson for her white sneakers, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has agreed that the conviction was tainted by illegally suppressed evidence and must be overturned.
The filing, made in court last month, does not yet mean that Dickson, now 64 and suffering from congestive heart failure, will be released from prison. At a court proceeding on Monday, Assistant District Attorney Sara Cohbra said that prosecutors are weighing whether to retry the case.
But it is the office’s first formal recognition of the flaws underlying the conviction, which was the focus of a 2021 Inquirer investigation into misconduct by the prosecutor, Roger King.
Dickson’s 1995 trial was a media circus, built on a theory by a discredited criminal profiler once billed as the “living Sherlock Holmes,” anchored by a jailhouse informant dubbed “the monsignor” for all the confessions he elicited — and put on by a prosecutor notable for a record number of death sentences and a remarkable record of misconduct that has led to at least seven overturned convictions.
Even with just what was known at the trial, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Juanita Kidd Stout said on the record that she expected the conviction “will certainly be overturned,” and King would be hit with a finding of prosecutorial misconduct.
But the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit has now acknowledged additional misconduct. The office said King didn’t disclose that the informant, a serial car thief and fraudster named John Hall, had lied in previous cases and received leniency in his own criminal matters in exchange for his cooperation in Dickson’s case.
Hall and his mentee, Jay Wolchansky, whose convoluted testimony at Dickson’s first trial resulted in a hung jury, were also the DA’s key witnesses accusing Walter Ogrod of the 1988 murder of a 4-year-old girl. Ogrod was exonerated of that murder in 2020, after decades on death row, and in 2023 received a $9.1 million settlement from the city.
To Dickson’s brother, Michael Dickson, it’s hard to understand how a conviction relying on those same informants could remain intact.
“My brother was pretty much stripped of his whole life for something he was falsely accused of,” he said. “Everyone knows they were corrupt and they were accusing people of things they didn’t do. … I don’t understand why my brother is not getting that same exoneration.”
The surviving family members of Deborah Wilson, who grew up in Woodbury, are also outraged, said her niece Michelle Cook.
“My family can’t go through this again,” Cook said. She firmly believes that Dickson was guilty of the murder, and that there’s no valid purpose to reopening the case.
“It opens up a lot of old wounds,” she said.
‘Dr. Smell’
Police struggled to find leads after Wilson, age 20, was found barefoot and strangled to death in a stairwell outside a Drexel computing building on Nov. 30, 1984.
She’d been working late to finish an assignment, and there were no eyewitnesses.
The case went cold for eight years — until, in 1992, then-Sgt. Robert Snyder decided to present the case to a luncheon of the Vidocq Society — a group of part-time sleuths that had received national press for cracking unsolvable cases.
Richard Walter, a self-described criminal profiler, was the one who homed in on Dickson and articulated a theory that Dickson killed Wilson in order to steal her sneakers, which he would use later for sexual gratification. Walter was the subject of a 2023 investigation by New York Magazine, which found he had faked his credentials and that at least three murder cases he worked on were later overturned.
A grand jury charged Dickson, based on circumstantial evidence of Dickson’s foot fetish and his presence at the building, where he was working an overnight security shift.
The jailhouse informant testimony was the only direct evidence, but the case of a Black guard killing a white student to satisfy his perversion was a tabloid sensation. Papers across the country, and internationally, carried news of the conviction of the inmate labeled “Dr. Smell.”
It was one of at least half a dozen homicide cases Hall testified in, aided by news clippings provided by his wife, Phyllis Hall. He died in 2006. In 2021, Phyllis Hall told The Inquirer her late husband took pride in his performance at Dickson’s trial. But, she added, “Nothing he said was true.”
The hidden evidence
The jury found Dickson guilty of robbery, for the sneakers, and of felony murder.
But lawyers from the nonprofit law firm Phillips Black, who reinvestigated Dickson’s case, uncovered evidence in the police file that appeared to upend the purported motive: witness statements, never previously disclosed, that white sneakers were found near the victim’s body.
They presented that claim in a 2022 petition that described even more suppressed exculpatory evidence. That included statements pointing to multiple alternate suspects, including a fellow security guard who failed a polygraph test, a known campus stalker who had claimed knowledge of Wilson’s murder, and a male student who was allegedly obsessed with Wilson and had a foot fetish, causing a friend of the victim to suspect him of the murder.
The uncovered evidence also revealed how a witness, who was herself facing an attempted murder charge, arrived at the statement that Dickson had stolen her sneakers years earlier. The statement evolved after multiple off-the-record meetings with a prosecutor, “discussing women’s shoes and life generally before the witness began to trust enough to open up.”
Cohbra, the assistant district attorney handling the case, said the office is still investigating the crime.
“We still have evidence outstanding,” she said, adding, “we’re in the process of discussing what happens next.”