If You Don’t Believe In Coincidences, You Will After Reading This

The Story

This case centers around seventy-year-old Dorothy Donovan and her son Charles Holden. Holden was a factory worker and often had long shifts. On the night of June 22, 1991, he ended his shift around midnight. After stopping at a restaurant in Harrington, Delaware, Holden found himself in a precarious situation. As he was preparing to pull off in his truck, a man he had never met appeared in his window and asked him for a ride. The strange man told Holden he needed to get to Georgetown so that he could see the birth of his sister’s child. While Holden had initially declined to take him, he soon relented with the agreement that he only drives him up to a certain distance. He made his way to the intersection where he would normally turn to make his way home before telling his new passenger that he’d gone the distance he was willing to go.

It was at this moment that things took a turn.

The Confrontation

While still in the car, the strange man got very angry and started to attack and threaten Holden. Throughout their scuffle, he was demanding money and Holden’s truck while physically accosting him. Impressively, Holden was able to grab the keys from the ignition and jump out of the driver’s side of the truck. He immediately began running toward a convenience store while the strange man followed close behind. As he caught up to Holden, the man brandished a screwdriver and told Holden that he was going to kill him. In an attempt to diffuse the situation, Holden assured the man that he would drive him wherever he needed to go. The strange man took the bait and walked with him back to his truck. As he walked around to enter the passenger door, Holden drove off and watched the man (unsuccessfully) try to chase down his truck on foot.

Although he was safely away from his attacker, Holden decided not to drive straight home. Instead, he drove in the opposite direction so that he could give himself some time to decompress. It was during this downtime that one of the biggest coincidences in history would take place. As Holden found his way back to his trailer, he saw the same man who had attacked him walking around his property. To avoid — once again — winding up in a confrontation with this unhinged individual, Holden drove to a nearby payphone and alerted the police. An officer soon arrived on the scene and walked with Holden to his trailer while keeping an eye out for the strange man. A look through his trailer showed that the man was not there (nothing was out of place or missing). Holden was still concerned, however, about his mother who lived in the house behind his trailer. Things already looked bad when they found that the back window was broken. As the two made their way to the upstairs bedroom, they found Dorothy Donovan dead from several stab wounds to the arms, chest, and face.

The Suspects

As investigators began to hone in on suspects, they started by looking at a potential motive. Since nothing was stolen from Dorothy’s house, it was easy for them to rule out robbery as a reason for the brutal stabbing. As you can probably guess, investigators turned their suspicion onto Holden. Aside from the lack of a robbery motive, it was just too hard for the police to believe his story. What are the odds that Charles Holden meets a stranger miles away from his house, gets attacked by that stranger, evades death at the hands of that stranger, and escapes, only to find that the same stranger just so happened to walk to his mom’s house and murdered her without taking anything? That last point is especially odd because the stranger apparently looking to rob Holden of both his money and his truck during the version of events he’d told the police. Investigators found their own motive when they discovered that Holden was listed as one of the beneficiaries of her life insurance policy.

Fortunately, a witness was able to corroborate part of his story. Someone who was at the restaurant that night informed investigators that the strange man was — in fact — real. Not only that, the witness recalled seeing Holden and the strange man having a bit of a scuffle by his truck. Crime scene investigators also found a bloody palm print on a banister in Dorothy’s house. When it was determined that the print wasn’t a match for Holden’s, he was officially cleared as a suspect.

The Resolution

In November 2005, the DNA database CODIS found a match. Forty-one-year-old Gilbert Cannon was a match for the bloody palm print on Dorothy Donovan’s banister. Back in 1997, Cannon had previously been incarcerated for drug and robbery charges. The collection of his DNA from those past convictions lead to his arrest for Dorothy’s murder. In January 2006, he was charged with first-degree murder. Cannon confessed to the murder and also explained that — unbelievably — it was a complete coincidence that he’d wound up at the home of the mother of the man he’d just attacked minutes earlier.

He was sentenced to life in prison in 2007.