Murderer who escaped death sentence dies in Nevada prison
A convicted murderer who escaped a death sentence by a single juror’s vote in 2003 died Wednesday at a Carson City prison.
Anthony B. Dotson, 61, was pronounced dead just before 10 p.m. Monday in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center’s medical unit, according to the state Department of Corrections.
Dotson was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder, kidnapping, robbery, burglary and battery in the December 1999 killing of 79-year-old Doris Bair.
Bair was eating breakfast and reading the morning newspaper when Dotson walked into her Las Vegas home and beat her savagely, the Review-Journal reported at the time.
Dotson broke her glasses with punches, smashed her jaw and shoved a gag in her mouth. The frail woman was then covered with blankets and pillows and left to die.
Authorities have said days after Bair was killed, Dotson also brutally attacked 87-year-old Las Vegan Kathryn Waldman in the parking lot of University Medical Center. Waldman required brain surgery because of her injuries.
Waldman died in 2003, but authorities couldn’t charge Dotson because they were unable to link the beating to her death, according to Review-Journal reports.
In addition, Dotson was convicted twice in California of similar crimes, including the near-fatal beating of a 66-year-old woman in a Pasadena parking lot in the 1980s.
The Carson City Sheriff’s Office coroner will conduct Dotson’s autopsy.
Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.
