Have an idea that my opinion will be in the minority view, but after reading through the article, I would put the full weight of charges against Stipe. He was the one who organized the rape and is fully responsible for what happened. Mcdowel seems to be an innocent dupe as far as the actual crime is concerned. Though Mcdowel may have committed the rape, he did it under false pretenses thinking he was only doing as asked and therefore he had full permission and instruction to do as he did. Was Mcdowel stupid? Most certainly. But in a sense, he was set up by and is an innocent victim of Stipe. Many states, and even the Federal government have laws concerning this, that a person who is set up by another person to commit a crime is held innocent of that crime. An example would be when John DeLorean was set up by the Federal government to deal in drugs and the charges ended up being thrown out of court. Its called "entrapment". So while DeLorean was an active participant in the entrapment as far as knowing he was going to commit a crime, McDowel was entrapped into committing a crime without his knowledge or understanding that a crime was being committed. On that basis, I would have to say that McDowel was innocent of committing a crime. Be assured that I'm only going by the article as its written, and there may well be aspects that I don't know about.
For a different take, what if the woman had been able to defend herself and maybe killed Mcdowel, shooting him or something? In the woman's mind, she would simply defending herself against an attempted rapist. In Mcdowel's mind, if he had time to register the thought, he would be wondering what was going on, why was this happening. Then, if it ever was found out and went to court, Stipe would have the full responsibility of sending someone to his death. In such a case, the woman would have the horror of being raped replaced by the horror of killing an "innocent" person. While I can make no judgment of how others may feel, I personally would rather endure a rape than have to live with the fact that I killed an innocent person.