A Shot In The Dark

By Keith Boykin, in sports
Tuesday, July 22 2003, 9:48AM

Five weeks after the disappearance of Baylor University basketball player Patrick Dennehy, police last night arrested his former teammate Carlton Dotson on charges of murder. The media have speculated on every angle from murder to kidnapping in this case, but one angle has not been addressed: Were these two men lovers?

The media have a strange way of dealing with private homosexual relationships in sensational news stories. While reporters may speculate about gay relationships among themselves, they often take pains not to say explicitly what they're thinking. Instead, they find ways of talking around the issue without ever saying it.

Back in 1996, the Boston Globe referred to the murder of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz as "one of the more bizarre crime cases in recent memory." John Eleuthere du Pont, heir to the chemical company fortune, allowed Schultz to stay in his house on his 800-acre estate. The two men had an "unusual" relationship, but the media were careful not to say too much about it.

In October 2002, John Allen Muhammad, a 41-year-old Army veteran and John Lee Malvo, an unrelated 17-year-old Jamaican citizen, allegedly terrorized residents in Virginia and Maryland during a sniper spree. Media accounts discussed a number of elements of their "unusual" relationship but no one said anything about the possibility that the relationship may have been more than paternal.

Now with the arrest of Carlton Dotson, the Dennehy-Dotson story involves some of the same elements as those other cases. Dotson and Dennehy seemed to enjoy an unusual relationship. They were roommates who played together, socialized together and traveled together. By all accounts, they had a very close relationship.

For some reason, these two huge basketball players lived in fear for their lives. Dennehy is listed as 6-10, 230 pounds on the team's website. Dotson is listed as 6-7, 220 pounds. Yet they each spoke of some concern they had of danger that might come to them.

In an interview yesterday with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News, Dennehy's girlfriend Jessica De La Rosa said, "Patrick is always so concerned about Carlton as a friend. He was always just completely concerned about him, always hoping that -- you know, always making sure that he was OK, that he was fine."

Van Susteren hinted that she suspected something when she asked De La Rose, "Did Carlton Dotson have any other friends on campus or on the team other than Patrick?" Yes, De La Rosa replied, adding that she had considered Dotson a friend. "If Patrick cared so much about him, if Patrick was his friend, well, you know, he was my friend, too," she said.

On the same show, Dennehy's friend Daniel Okopnyi said that he knew of no bad blood between the two teammates. "If there was any kind of discrepancy among them, he would have -- Patrick would have told me, you know, hey, this guy's getting on my nerves or whatever. But, as far as I knew, they were good friends, and they never had money problems," he said.

But Okopnyi acknowledged that "they were both afraid of another individual making threats." Van Susteren never asked what those threats involved.

The media coverage of this case has raised a number of thorny issues by innuendo and speculation. The San Jose Mercury News said "Dennehy quickly made friends at Baylor and became inseparable with one of his teammates -- Dotson. The two players shared an apartment on the edge of campus."

The Mercury News also reported that both Dennehy and Dotson reported receiving threatening phone calls, but the paper did not reveal the nature of those calls. The paper did report that someone had stolen money from Dennehy and broken into his car.

When Dennehy's childhood friend Okopnyi invited Dennehy to stay with him in Arlington, about a 90-minute drive from Waco, Dennehy reportedly declined the offer because he wanted to watch over his belongings and protect his best friend, Dotson. The story makes no mention of Dennehy's concern for his girlfriend.

The Dallas Morning News reported that Dennehy and Dotson had a "volatile" relationship. "Students at the Sterling University Parks Apartments had a word for Patrick Dennehy and Carlton Dotson: inseparable," the paper reported.

"The men they knew as P-Dog and Dotty were more than basketball teammates. They were tight."

One friend, Susan McWilliams, said "you could tell they really enjoyed each other's company," but she added that Dotson "never seemed to fit in." Classmates told the paper that Dennehy was more "presentable" than Dotson and often "neat and tidy." Are these code words for gay?

"They spent a lot of time together off the court," the paper reported. "When Dotson's eight-month marriage broke up in April, Dennehy invited him to stay in the four-bedroom apartment at Sterling that he shared with two roommates."

But they were also described as "unlikely buddies" who "came from opposite ends of the country and family backgrounds that were galaxies apart." So what would draw them together? The love of basketball? That's a question that hasn't been answered.

There's much more to this story to come and many more questions to be answered. Just how close were Dotson and Dennehy? Who threatened them and why? Did the two men share any secrets?

It's too early to know what really took place with Dennehy, and it's far too early to say if Carlton Dotson is guilty before he's even had his day in court. But it's not impossible to imagine that these two men had some kind of sexual or intimate relationship.

It's understandable that the media would be cautious about discussing this issue directly, but hopefully the police won't be afraid to explore all angles to get to the bottom of what really happened.