dean cage

it was the worst Christmas of her life, the pain so raw she secluded herself in the her bedroom to shield her two young daughters. It was 1996, and the man she was supposed to marry - the man her girls idolized - had already been gone two years. But this Christmas, he was supposed to come home and pick up where they had left off:

Walking Latoni and Latoya to school. Playing Chutes and Ladders with them on Friday nights. Taking their mother on dates to the lakefront to watch the waves of Lake Michigan dance.

But Jewel's fiancé wasn't returning to their home on Chicago's South Side. Five days earlier, Dean Cage, had been sentenced to 40 years in prison for an aggravated sexual assault he said he didn't commit. Jewel was his alibi. At the time of the attack, she said, he was asleep next to her.

The day they'd planned to marry had come and gone with Dean in the Cook County Jail, unable to afford bond set at half a million dollars. When his trial date finally arrived -- just two months before this miserable Christmas -- Jewel listened to a young girl describe the man who brutally attacked her as she walked to her bus stop on a dark November morning. She was just 15.

Those were difficult days for Jewel, but at least then she could still cling to the hope that the world would soon learn what she knew without a doubt: This was a case of mistaken identity.
Reporting of story
The scenes in this two-part story span more than 14 years and were reconstructed through interviews, court documents and letters.

CNN writer Stephanie Chen interviewed Jewel Mitchell and Dean Cage and their attorneys and family members. Among the documents she reviewed were Cage's trial transcript and the Innocence Project's file on Cage.

The quotes in the story are drawn from interviews or documents. The thoughts of the subjects, or the words they recall speaking or hearing, appear in italic.

On the day of the verdict, family and co-workers packed the courtroom to support a man who'd never been arrested before in his life. Jewel wore her best navy pantsuit and told her older brother: Today, my fiancé is coming home.

But the truth did not prevail. Two years after being arrested, Dean was declared guilty, and Jewel's optimism was drained away, her hope annihilated.

She would put on a happy face to celebrate the holiday with her daughters. But the Christmas gifts she'd bought Dean, a boom box and a pair of black Timberland boots, lay on the bedroom floor, unopened.