Murder in Paris Columns (.pdf)

Eric Zorn columns on the Rhoads murders in Paris, Ill., 1987

November 10, 1998 Tuesday, NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION

SHATTERED LAMP CASTS HARSH LIGHT ON DEATH PENALTY

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.

SECTION: METRO CHICAGO; Pg. 1; ZONE: N

LENGTH: 689 words

A lamp broken a dozen years ago today shines a harsh light on yet another dubious death penalty case in Illinois.

It was a cheap table lamp with a ceramic base that belonged to newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads, of Downstate Paris, a small town near the Indiana border. It stood on a night stand in their bedroom until the night they were stabbed to death in July 1986, and their house set on fire.

Police who followed firefighters onto the gruesome scene found the lamp broken to pieces several feet from Dyke Rhoads' body.

The crime was a mystery for many months, but then investigators produced a couple of supposed witnesses from the tavern-frequenting, drug-using, blue-collar crowd around Paris who fingered two men from that same milieu--Herb Whitlock, 41, and Gordon "Randy" Steidl, 35.

The witnesses, a man and a woman, claimed to have seen Whitlock and Steidl at various moments during a butcherous spree at the Rhoads', though they didn't see each other. Their stories were farfetched and inconsistent in some respects, but, police said, the woman, Deborah Rienbolt, knew about the lamp!

Rienbolt testified in mid-1987 that she had come upon the murders in progress and seen the broken lamp in the bedroom and either Whitlock or Steidl holding a piece of that lamp.

This was "a fact that was known to virtually no one, because in fact the lamp was found outside the bedroom," crowed the prosecutor in closing arguments at Steidl's trial. It proved she was there, he said. It made her story "credible and believable to the utmost."

And indeed it was probably the most damning testimony in the case, which offered no physical evidence against the suspects for what prosecutors claimed was murder over a drug deal gone bad.

Two juries bought it. Whitlock got life without parole for killing Karen Rhoads. Steidl got the death penalty for both murders.

Then, in 1989, as the appeals process moved forward, Deborah Rienbolt recanted her testimony, saying she had lied on the stand. Shortly thereafter she un-recanted. The other witness also recanted, then he, too, withdrew his recantation.

When Rienbolt decided to recant a second time in February of 1996, Steidl's lawyers assembled a team of witnesses, a court reporter and a videographer. The transcript runs 205 pages and the video shows Rienbolt alert, relaxed and occasionally smiling as she explains how investigators fed her details, such as the information about the lamp, and encouraged her to regurgitate it.

"They kept asking over and over about a vase or a lamp being broken," she says in the video. "I'd say, 'I don't know what you're talking about,' and then they would come up with, 'Well, there was a broken vase or a broken lamp there.' And then I'd say 'Well, OK, so there was.' "

Rienbolt later recanted this recantation and is now about as useless as witnesses get, no matter what you want to prove.

But the lamp is still able to illuminate the situation. Steidl's appellate lawyer, Michael Metnick of Springfield, secured the unrebutted testimony of two veteran arson investigators to examine the lamp fragments and crime-scene photos.

Their conclusion: Based on the patterns made by soot on the bedroom carpet, and based also on the lack of sooty residue on the interior surfaces of the lamp fragments, the lamp was intact during the murders and during the fire the killer or killers set to cover it up. Firefighters later broke the lamp in all the confusion.

You put the pieces together.

The Illinois Supreme Court cited the lamp evidence and other troubling irregularities such as Steidl's ineffective trial attorney in unanimously ordering last year that Steidl receive a new evidentiary hearing. That hearing concluded last month. A ruling on Steidl's request for a new trial is expected any day.

A national conference this weekend at Northwestern University Law School will feature 74 cases of wrongful convictions that resulted in a death sentences as well as a number of cases such as Randy Steidl's that seem likely to add soon to the troubling total.

That bedside lamp, we will see, is not the only thing that's broken.

February 5, 1999 Friday, NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO BRING JUSTICE TO DEATH ROW?

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 707 words

Ronald Jones likely will be No. 11 on the roster of men sentenced to die in Illinois who were then exonerated and set free.

No. 10, of course, will be Anthony Porter, whose innocence in a 1982 double murder was dramatically established in the past week when a Milwaukee woman described for investigators how her ex-husband, Alstory Simon, fired the fatal shots, and then when Simon implicated himself in a videotaped interview.

These two developments corroborated other witness affidavits obtained in recent months and will all but certainly result in Porter's release with the cooperation of Cook County State's Atty. Dick Devine.

Devine is inexplicably dragging his feet in the Ronald Jones case: DNA testing in 1997 wrecked the prosecution's theory of the 1985 murder for which Jones was sentenced to die and invalidated the confession Jones claims was beaten out of him by police, a confession that provided the only real evidence against him at trial.

An assistant state's attorney told a reporter that the office now lacks the "moral certainty" to seek the death penalty in Jones' pending re-trial. But common sense and decency likely will prompt Cook County to drop the charges eventually rather than attempt a bit of prosecutorial gymnastics I call the Full Twisting DuPage--radically changing the theory of the crime in light of exculpatory evidence in order to preserve a conviction.

And after Jones, No. 12 might be Randy Steidl, the Downstate man whose death sentence for a 1986 double murder is supported solely by the testimony of a pair of witnesses who've recanted and un-recanted so often that you wouldn't take an umbrella if they told you it was raining out.

Or it might be a member of the so-called Death Row 10, a group of condemned prisoners each of whom contends he was tortured into confessing by our own Torquemada of interrogations, former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge.

Burge was fired in 1993 after the department's Office of Professional Standards identified 50 people who'd allegedly been electro-shocked, suffocated, kicked, beaten, hanged by handcuffs and otherwise mistreated by Burge and his minions. The People's Law Office, a firm that specializes in representing those who allege they are victims of police brutality, has a list of more than 60 people who describe having been victims of what OPS termed "systematic abuse" under Burge.

Aaron Patterson is one. He's on Death Row for the 1986 murder of an elderly South Chicago couple. The lone witness against him tearfully recanted what she said was police-coerced testimony to the Tribune's Steve Mills when Mills tracked her down in Alabama last fall. So the case against Patterson now rests solely on a confession obtained in an allegedly violent interrogation by Team Burge during which Patterson etched, "Police threaten me with violence. Slapped and suffocated me with plastic. No lawyer or dad. No phone. . ." on a metal bench.

Or maybe No. 12 will be Ronald Kitchen, another of the Death Row 10, whose conviction for a 1988 quintuple homicide is based on the hearsay of a jail-house snitch and the results of a Burgian interrogation that left him with

severe injuries to his genitals.

Or Stanley Howard. Hospital reports and station-house witnesses support his accusation of police torture during an interrogation that produced his confession to a 1984 killing. Or Leroy Orange. His confession to detectives whom he says put electrodes on him and attempted to suffocate him is virtually all that supports his capital conviction in a 1984 quadruple slaying.

Or Madison Hobley. Notes taken at his alleged confession disappeared, as did key evidence that might exonerate him in a 1987 arson that killed seven.

Experience and the odds suggest that at least some of these or even other members of Death Row 10 are not guilty of the murders for which they are to die. Their advocates held a joint news conference earlier this week to call for a reopening of the cases and an objective truth-seeking review of a capital justice system in Illinois that appears recklessly out-of-whack.

How high must the number go--12, 13, 14?--before our legislature, our state Supreme Court or our constitutional officers step in to set things right?

February 18, 1999 Thursday, NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION

YET ANOTHER DEATH ROW CASE ESCAPES SCRUTINY

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 729 words

On Thursday, another inmate will leave Illinois' Death Row.

His name is Gordon "Randy" Steidl, and he was convicted in 1987 for the stabbing deaths of a young married couple in Downstate Paris. The case against him was built upon the alleged eyewitness testimony of a pair of town drunks and defended by an inexperienced lawyer who conducted an incomplete investigation.

The Illinois Supreme Court in 1997 unanimously ordered Steidl's case reopened for a hearing on newly discovered evidence and on Steidl's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel.

This one had an odor as bad as any of the other miscarriages of justice that have seen 10 condemned Illinois prisoners exonerated and released in recent years.

No physical evidence linked the crime to Steidl, who maintained his innocence and had no plausible motive. And the key witnesses against him had gone on the record with as many different answers as a Magic 8 Ball to the question about whether they'd seen him at the crime scene: "You may rely on it." "My reply is no." "Better not tell you now." "Very doubtful." "Concentrate and ask again."

Astonishingly, witness Deborah Rienbolt has offered three recantations of her trial testimony against Steidl, each one followed by an un-recantation. Her credibility meter is now fixed at zero.

"Given Ms. Rienbolt's statements, she would be a less attractive witness at this stage," said Edgar County State's Atty. Matt Sullivan, who now heads the office that prosecuted Steidl.

To say the least. And the second key witness, Darrell Herrington--who, like Rienbolt, has a documented history of substance abuse--would be almost as ugly. He's also formally taken back his testimony that implicated Steidl, then changed his mind and reasserted it. Further, Steidl's new attorneys have uncovered evidence not previously revealed to the defense: In Herrington's very first statement about the crime to police, he implicated two other men.

Even beyond that, re-analysis of crime scene evidence--including the nature of the wounds on the victims and the pattern of soot stains left by the fire that the killer or killers set to cover their tracks--by forensic experts has cast still more doubt on the eyewitnesses' credibility.

In short, the case is a mess. If Circuit Judge Tracy Resch of neighboring Clark County had ordered a new trial for Steidl at the conclusion of the comprehensive hearing last fall, prosecutors would have had to drop the charges and set him free. As it was, though, Resch ruled that even though the case was messy, the original jury verdict should stand. The

death sentence, however, needed a second look.

"I'm not going to get drawn into a discussion of whether I would have or wouldn't have" retried Steidl, said Sullivan. He said he will not ask for a death sentence at Thursday's hearing, which both sides expect will result in a life sentence without parole.

Why? In part because the victims' families requested life "to spare themselves the interminable appeals process and, hopefully, to get closure," Sullivan said.

He wouldn't elaborate on his other reasons, but my guess is that he and others whose fingerprints are on this prosecution are eager to get it out of the capital-punishment spotlight. Steidl would become just another forgotten lifer whose claims of innocence will not be subject to the extra scrutiny and review that top state officials have recently sworn they will apply to all Death Row cases.

Neat trick. Will the governor and the attorney general see through it and give Steidl's case the thorough, objective review it deserves in light of their recent declarations of interest in real justice? Or will they sit back and wait to be embarrassed again by some college kids, reporters and volunteer lawyers?

The choice is theirs and the time is now to demonstrate their sincerity. Already, Steidl's lawyers say reporters from CBS News and Turner Broadcasting have requested interviews with Steidl, and Northwestern University professor David Protess has arranged to send a team of his famous student sleuths down to Paris--a town of 9,000 10 miles northwest of Terre Haute, Ind.--in the coming weeks to probe the case from all angles.

It's a long, compelling and, in the end, disquietingly illuminating story of small-town justice apparently gone wrong. So. Who will get credit for telling it first?

May 2, 2000 Tuesday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

IN THIS SMALL TOWN, A MURDER MYSTERY REMAINS AT LARGE

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 697 words

DATELINE: PARIS, Ill.

The sound of a loud argument down the street followed by a woman's screams startled 66-year-old Ollie Campbell from her sleep around 4 a.m. of a sticky July night. The commotion so troubled her, she later told police, that she got out of bed and walked out onto her front porch for a look.

But all was quiet again in her neighborhood, one of the nicer ones here in this small, Wabash River Valley farm and factory town of 9,000 near the Illinois/Indiana border, 200 miles south of Chicago.

Around 20 minutes later--no one can be quite sure of the interval because it only seemed important in retrospect--terrible sounds again filled the night: breaking glass, the crackling of flames, the frantic pounding of neighbors on the door of a burning house, shouting, sirens, sobs.

The two-story corner house was in the maw of an angry blaze that appeared to have started in the kitchen. The first firefighters on the scene crashed in and found the charred bodies of newlyweds Dyke Rhoads, 28, and Karen Rhoads, 26, in an upstairs bedroom.

Paris Fire Chief Carroll Hartley arrived just in time to help carry out the bag containing Karen's body. He returned to his car for a flashlight so he could get a better look around the dark, smoky bedroom: "I noticed there was a large amount of blood inconsistent with a fire death," he later testified. "I called for a police officer to come up and take a look."

But the scene suggested what the evidence later proved--the fire had been set to conceal a particularly brutal and bloody stabbing, a close-range, hands-on murder the likes of which Paris had never seen and has not seen again in the nearly 14 years since that dreadful night.

They were a handsome, athletic couple with no known enemies. He was a former National Honor Society student and high school basketball star employed by ChemLawn in nearby Terre Haute, Ind. She was a relentlessly straight-arrow graduate of Eastern Illinois University who worked as a secretary and bookkeeper for a large local manufacturing firm.

Their slaying was a mystery straight out of Agatha Christie: No apparent motive such as rape or robbery; no known eyewitnesses; no foot-, hand- or fingerprints remaining after the fire; and, given the natural dearth of good alibis for 4 a.m., plenty of possible suspects.

Was the killer the peeping Tom whom neighbors had been reporting--thought to be a part-time Edgar County sheriff's deputy? Was it the man Karen was reportedly feuding with at the office? Were the murders connected to her boss, a secretive man Karen allegedly told friends she was afraid of because of things she'd seen at the office? Or connected to a stranger seen around town driving a car with Florida license plates?

The number of wounds on the bodies, 54, suggested a crime of passion: Was Karen's ex-boyfriend involved? He'd recently sent her a card at work, and she'd written back a friendly letter but never mailed it. What about the new boyfriend of Dyke's former girlfriend? Or a neighbor with whom they'd had a parking feud?

Or had the Rhoadses run afoul of someone on the sometimes seedy tavern circuit in Paris, a world where recreational drugs--in which Dyke reportedly dabbled--were common? They were last seen in a bar shortly after midnight the night they were murdered, and several days before the murders, one of the bar's more prominent habitues, Randy Steidl, had been heard saying that "something big" was about to come down that would rock Paris like never before.

This murder mystery will play out in upcoming columns--the investigation, the official solution to the case, the trial and the controversy that still occupies the people of Paris and the appeals courts of Illinois.

The man who prosecuted the case says it's no longer a mystery to him who killed Dyke and Karen Rhoads in 1986. Others who have studied the same set of facts for many years say the mystery is deeper than ever, and that when the final chapter is written, another name will be added to the list of innocent men sent to Illinois' Death Row and finally freed.

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NEXT: Months later, a voice from the back of the squad car: "Just don't ask me about the murders!"

May 4, 2000 Thursday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

CONTRACTOR'S TALE PUTS PARIS POLICE ONTO 2 SUSPECTS

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 743 words


Looking back, every angry word or odd incident, no matter how innocent, seemed like it might be linked to the seemingly inexplicable slayings of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads.

Near dawn on a Sunday in the summer of 1986, firefighters found the couple naked and stabbed to death inside their burning home just four blocks from the downtown square. And, as explained in Tuesday's column--the first in a series on what some consider this state's most intriguing real-life murder mystery--authorities, family and friends were baffled.

They were unlikely victims--personable, clean-cut, employed and never in trouble with the law--killed for no obvious reason in an unlikely setting--Paris had not seen a slaying since 1980 and would not see another until 1990.

The mission of local and state authorities was to find the heart of darkness in this Downstate farm and factory town of 9,000 and learn the fatal secrets, if any, of the Rhoadses.

Police reports indicate a broad if not especially deep investigation. Friends told police that Karen, 25, had personality conflicts at the manufacturing plant where she did clerical work, that she believed something ominous and illegal was going on at the plant and that she was not content in her marriage. Other friends said Dyke, 27, was more

temperamental than he appeared, that he was depressed because he believed his job at ChemLawn was going to end, and his recreational interest in marijuana displeased Karen.

A 15-year-old neighbor told police she saw Karen argue with and slap a man who came to her door at midnight about six weeks before the slayings. Three hours later she said she saw Dyke make a surreptitious purchase from another stranger.

A 19-year-old attendant at an all-night gas station remembered taking note of a stranger with "very large hands" and Florida license plates who was in town at midnight before the slayings.

Other residents said they'd heard unemployed barfly Randy Steidl, 35, talking cryptically before the slayings about "big boys" coming to town and some shocking event about to occur. Police made a grand show of bursting into a tavern to haul Steidl in for questioning on the Wednesday after the slayings, but a woman he'd been with the night before the murders was among those who backed up his alibi.

The vengeful ex-lovers faded as suspects. All the ends seemed loose or dead, all the theories simply rumors. Even a $25,000 reward for information offered briefly by Karen's boss didn't break the case. By early September of 1986, authorities were asking the FBI for help and checking out periodic but skimpy tips such as a report of men with cuts and scratches on their chests.

Then, an astonishing plot twist: Close to midnight on Sept. 19, 45-year-old Darrell Herrington, a local drywall contractor with five drunken-driving convictions and two convictions for passing bad checks, was at the Paris police station in the company of Paris' top police officials, Detective James Parrish and Chief Gene Ray. Neither man returned my calls asking why they all were there, but Ray previously told a private investigator that he didn't remember the reason.

Spontaneously, Herrington is said to have blurted out, "Just don't ask me about the murders!"

They did, of course. Records reflect that he first offered information implicating men named "Jim" and "Ed."

But by the evening of Sept. 21, when Herrington was formally interviewed in the presence of Parrish, Ray, Illinois State Police Sgt. Jack Eckerty and Edgar County State's Atty. Michael McFatridge, the perpetrators in his gory and astonishing narrative had become Steidl and Herbert Whitlock, 40, a convicted drug trafficker who, like Steidl, was the black-sheep son of a prominent Paris family.

The motive seemed to be money, Herrington said, but it wasn't clear to him. A lot wasn't clear, actually, as he said he'd been drinking 7&7's nearly nonstop since after lunch the day before the slayings, and by closing time at the taverns he was stumbling drunk and lapsing occasionally into unconsciousness.

Yet he claimed to be very clear on certain horrifying details of his travels through Paris that night and early morning with Steidl and Whitlock. Was his story believable? Police proceeded as though it were. I'll outline it as tastefully as possible in Monday's column for your consideration as the murder mystery continues.

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Find previous columns at chicagotribune.com/go/zorn/

May 8, 2000 Monday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

WITNESS' STORY STRETCHED BOUNDS OF BELIEVABILITY

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.

SECTION: METRO CHICAGO; Pg. 1; ZONE: C

LENGTH: 711 words


Darrell Herrington, 45, said he was thoroughly drunk after a daylong binge and sitting alone in a parked car shortly after last call at midnight July 6, 1986. Then, he said, he heard the sounds of a violent quarrel.

He stumbled to a nearby house to investigate. Finding the front door locked, he said, he went around back, where he was able to slip open the lock with a credit card. From upstairs, he said, he heard a woman screaming as though being

tortured: "Please! Please don't kill me!"

Rushing up the stairs, Herrington said, he met his acquaintance Randy Steidl, 35, coming down, a knife in his hand, blood all over his shirt: "What the hell are you doing in here, you son of a bitch?" Steidl said, according to Herrington. "I told you to stay in the car."

Herrington had been drinking at several bars and riding around with Steidl and Herbert Whitlock, 40, since early that evening, Herrington said later. They'd stopped by that same house earlier, apparently so Steidl and Whitlock could collect a debt of some sort, but found no one home. When they'd stopped a second time, a man answered the door.

Ten or 15 minutes later, Herrington said, all hell broke loose. Steidl hauled him back to the car, he said, held the knife to his throat and threatened him. Shortly thereafter, Herrington said, Whitlock emerged looking as though someone had thrown blood all over him.

Whitlock drove off, Herrington said, and Steidl made Herrington re-enter the house and look at the butchered bodies of a man and a woman. "This is what's going to happen to you and your family if you ever say anything," Steidl said, according to Herrington.

Herrington said he threw a pillow onto the woman's face as he left. Back outside, he said, Whitlock appeared carrying two milk jugs filled with a dark liquid. Herrington broke and ran for home a little more than a mile away, he said, stumbling, falling and perhaps occasionally passing out. As he arrived, he said, he heard sirens in the distance.

What a story! Police wrote it down eagerly. It had been 77 days since firefighters called to a pre-dawn blaze near the heart of this small town 200 miles south of Chicago had discovered newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads lying murdered in their bedroom, a pillow over Karen's face. Authorities had no good idea who had done it or why.

Some say they still don't. A team of Northwestern University student journalists similar to the teams that helped solve two major Illinois murder cases in recent years has been reinvestigating the Rhoads murders since last fall. Next week, CBS' "48 Hours" will take an hourlong look at the doubts the students and others have raised about the ultimate official solution to this murder mystery, and the Illinois Appellate Court will hear oral arguments in a related appeal.

A central question, then and now: Was Herrington's story true? It was at odds with what others had seen, but how would he know about the pillow on Karen's face if he wasn't there? Small-town gossip?

Three days after Herrington's first recorded interview with police, authorities put a wire on him and sent him to try to elicit guilty remarks from the men he implicated, who had previously been questioned in the case and were not savory characters: Steidl had been convicted of seven misdemeanors since 1974 (assault, battery, criminal damage to property and the like), while Whitlock had pleaded guilty in 1980 to felony drug possession and had another felony drug charge pending.

But both responded to Herrington with bewilderment and indignation that suggested innocence. Five days after that, Herrington failed a polygraph. The state police examiner's report said Herrington engaged in "purposeful non-cooperation . . . (consistent with) not telling the truth to one or more of the issues under investigation."

Police didn't arrest Steidl and Whitlock or even take the elementary step of seeking to test their vehicles with Luminol--a chemical spray that reacts to hemoglobin and years later can detect minute traces of blood that professional cleaning jobs often don't remove.

They waited two more months before bothering to videotape Herrington telling his story. Their big break was yet to come.

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NEXT: Another suspect, another "witness."

May 9, 2000 Tuesday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITIONCorrection Appended

TROUBLED EX-COP WAS A SUSPECT

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.

SECTION: Metro Chicago; Pg. 1; ZONE: N

LENGTH: 739 words


(The headline as published has been corrected in this text.)

The place where Dyke and Karen Rhoads were murdered is now a green wedge of vacant land at the peak of a Y intersection in a residential neighborhood. Grass pokes through the broken concrete of a circular driveway that used to serve the house in which the newlyweds were stabbed to death in their bedroom nearly 14 years ago.

The house, badly damaged by a fire set by the killer or killers, was razed shortly thereafter. But the lot is still something of a local landmark, a place to go to wonder and speculate on the question that still haunts this town: Who killed the Rhoadses? Why?

Though small, Paris is not an unlikely place for intrigue. An 1879 county history predicted that "this beautiful little city of the plain" at the junction of three rail lines was bound to be "a commercial and business center of considerable importance." It's situated on rich farmland roughly 100 miles west of Indianapolis, 170 miles east of St. Louis and 200 miles south of Chicago.

But its importance faded. Paris had 6,000 residents 120 years ago; only about 9,000 today. The interstates passed it by. A handful of manufacturers moved in to take advantage of its central location, and, in what seems to rank as the second-biggest story in town history after the Rhoads murders, so did mob drug-runners.

In 1984, Giuseppe Vitale, owner of Joe's Pizza and Italian Food, was charged with being part of "The Pizza Connection," an international heroin trafficking ring that used small-town fronts to move $1.65 billion in narcotics onto the streets.

Vitale was sentenced to 5 years in 1987 after he and 18 other defendants were convicted in a New York City courtroom.

Were these big stories related? Had the Rhoadses, seemingly a straight, hard-working couple with no enemies, somehow fallen afoul of drug traffickers who still were said to use Paris as a regional hub?

A story told by the town drunk more than two months after the crime suggested as much. But his gory, hazy narrative--outlined in Monday's column--in which he claimed to have been a bystander as tavern louts Randy Steidl and Herbert Whitlock butchered the Rhoadses over an unspecified cash debt, didn't match up well with other evidence.

Even when the drunk later added to his tale periods in which he was asleep or blacked out in order to make his timeline fit the apparent timeline of the crime, police took little action based on his ramblings, and let the investigation languish.

Was the savage slaying the work of a lone psycho? That theory got a boost on Jan. 2, 1987, nearly six months after the murders, when 37-year-old Phil Stark of Paris shot himself to death. His widow told detectives that Stark, a part-time radio dispatcher for the Edgar County Sheriff's Department, had awakened in a cold sweat just hours after the Rhoads murders and related a nightmare in which he had stabbed someone. From then on, he repeatedly expressed fears to his wife and others that somehow he was the killer and that detectives were about to arrest him.

Stark had resigned in 1985 from a job as a part-time police officer in nearby Chrisman over allegations that he had propositioned a 14-year-old girl. Was he the peeping Tom in a police cap the Rhoadses' neighbors had reported seeing in the weeks prior to the murders? His long suicide note alluded only to unspecified regrets--"nothing illegal," he assured his family--and did not mention the Rhoads murders, which his widow said she was certain he could not have committed.

Police took hair and blood samples from Stark's body and actively pursued the lead for a week. But again, the investigation stalled. Winter dragged on.

A most extraordinary thing happened next, which I'll detail here Wednesday, since my colleague Mary Schmich is on assignment this week:

Unprompted, another purported witness oozed up from the local tavern scene--a drug-addicted alcoholic and convicted felon who approached her probation officer with a story that began with her seeing Whitlock arguing with Dyke Rhoads over a drug deal the day before the slayings.

And here, she said, handing over a folding knife: I think you'll find that this is the murder weapon.Were these big stories related? Had the Rhoadses, seemingly a straight, hard-working couple with no enemies, somehow fallen afoul of drug traffickers who still were said to use Paris as a regional hub?

LOAD-DATE: July 31, 2000

May 10, 2000 Wednesday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

Correction Appended

WITNESS' ACCOUNT: GOOD, OR TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 702 words


Debra Rienbolt (the name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text) had a good story for the detectives who were investigating the horrific stabbing murders of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads:

Instead of going to her job as a certified nurse's aide on the evening before the mysterious, early-morning slayings in July 1986, she told them, she asked co-worker Bev Johnson to clock in for her and went barhopping instead. At Jeanie's Place, she said, she saw Dyke arguing with Herb Whitlock, a local lowlife whom police considered a suspect, about Dyke's effort to back out of a deal of some sort.

Later, Rienbolt, 30, said she and her friend Barb Furry ended up at the Tap Room. And there was Whitlock again! This time with another possible suspect, Randy Steidl, and another important character, Darrell Herrington.

Herrington was important because, in September, after the crime, he suddenly came forward to tell police he was with Steidl and Whitlock that night. In fact, he said he had traveled with them to the Rhoadses' house, heard the arguments and seen the knife, the bodies and all the blood. But he had been extremely drunk that night by his own admission and he couldn't pass a lie-detector test. Police had done little with his story.

But Rienbolt's account, volunteered in mid-February, bolstered Herrington's credibility. Better still, she said she saw Whitlock use a large knife to open an envelope at the Tap Room and heard him speak of "tak[ing] care of a few people [who] know too much" in the context of a creepy allusion to Karen.

Rienbolt said she and Furry left, drove around, popped some codeine pills, then hit the American Legion bar, another one of the numerous drinking establishments that dot this Downstate town of 9,000 just across the Indiana border from Terre Haute. Amazingly, Whitlock and Steidl were there too.

The men left just after the bar closed at midnight, she said, and she worried that they were up to no good. So she drove alone past the Rhoadses' house, a two-story rental just a few blocks from the town square. She said she saw Whitlock outside and kept driving.

A little before 5 that morning, firefighters found the house on fire and the Rhoadses slain in their bedroom. At daybreak, Rienbolt told police, a bloodied Whitlock stopped by her house and told her to keep her mouth shut. Two days later, she said, she was drinking at the Horseshoe Bar and asked Whitlock if she could borrow a knife. He gave her a blood-encrusted weapon that he told her had "been around," and she cleaned it off.

Based on Rienbolt's word, police arrested Whitlock and Steidl and a grand jury charged them in the Rhoadses' murders.

But Rienbolt's seemingly good story had problems. Co-worker Johnson wasn't at work that day to clock Rienbolt in. Furry said she wasn't with Rienbolt that night. Other witnesses put Steidl and Whitlock elsewhere.

Her murder timeline didn't match the time of the fire or other disturbances neighbors had heard. Her long history of drug and alcohol abuse and a felony theft conviction made her less than believable. And another co-worker told police that Rienbolt was carrying a big knife at least a month before the murders.

So, as if to compensate, her good story got even better when she told it a second time to police in late March: The knife was hers and Whitlock had borrowed it at the Legion bar. And she didn't just drive by the house, she said, she actually went inside, heard the screams and saw the dead bodies.

On April 11, two days before police checked Rienbolt into a residential drug-treatment program, her even-better story got great: Not only had she gone inside, she said, but she had also participated in the murders--physically restraining Karen while Whitlock and Steidl stabbed Dyke and then Karen.

One of the assailants, she said, was wielding a piece of a broken lamp.

A broken lamp had, in fact, been found at the scene! Perfect! Or too perfect?

Jurors would have to decide. Two death-penalty trials were about to begin, with Debra Rienbolt as the star witness.

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May 11, 2000 Thursday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

STAR WITNESS IN TRIAL LOSES HER LUSTER

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 745 words


Mystery solved!

Dyke Rhoads, 27, tried to back out of a drug deal, so a couple of sleazy ne'er-do-wells went over to his house shortly after midnight, stabbed him to death in his bed, stabbed his new bride to death for good measure, then tried to set the house on fire to destroy any clues they might have left behind. The fire didn't catch, so the men came back a couple of hours later, threw gasoline in the kitchen, and with the snap of a Bic lighter, the place went up.

For months, this small, Wabash River valley town had vibrated with fear and speculation as the seemingly inexplicable July 1986 murder of a nice young couple went unsolved. But despite all the elaborate theories, it turned out to be just a sloppy drug hit by a couple of local hoods.

So said Edgar County State's Atty. Michael McFatridge, who put this version of events to jurors in the spring 1987 capital murder trials of Randy Steidl and Herbert Whitlock.

McFatridge relied primarily on the testimony of two purported eyewitnesses whose accounts were featured in this column earlier this week: Darrell Herrington, a notorious alcoholic who said he was very drunk the night of the murders, but remembered riding in a car with Steidl and Whitlock to the Rhoadses' house and seeing the butchered bodies; and Debra Rienbolt, a dizzy drug addict and alcoholic who said she'd spent the night of the murders drinking, smoking pot and popping codeine pills. She said she supplied the murder weapon to Whitlock, then drove to the Rhoadses' house, walked in and, for reasons she could not articulate, ended up restraining Karen as Karen was being stabbed.

Herrington said he did not see Rienbolt. Rienbolt said she did not see Herrington.

A handful of minor witnesses testified to strange behavior and seemingly sinister, incriminating remarks by Steidl and Whitlock before and after the murders.

The defendants both took the stand at their separate trials. They said they'd been boozing and chasing women that night, but had not been with Rienbolt and Herrington and had nothing to do with the murders

The seemingly damning remarks attributed to them, they said, were either their own sick jokes, speculations, or misunderstood references to other matters.

Other defense witnesses--including the women they said they were with that night--corroborated Steidl and Whitlock's account of their whereabouts and cast doubt on the version of events supplied by Rienbolt and Herrington.

But what's striking, in retrospect, is whom the defense attorneys did not call in the weeklong trials: Rienbolt's direct supervisor, who would have testified that Rienbolt was at work that night; Rienbolt's friend Barb Furry, who also would have contradicted Rienbolt's account of her evening; a fire investigator, who would have testified that a ceramic lamp in the Rhoadses' house that Rienbolt said was broken during the murders had to have been intact; and a forensic pathologist, who would have testified Rienbolt's knife was likely not the murder weapon.

Further, neither defense attorney had bothered to independently canvass the neighborhood around the crime to find the

witnesses who would have shot holes in the prosecution's timeline, and neither even began to explore alternate suspects and provocative leads that police never pursued.

Even still, "the evidence in this case was closely balanced," as the Illinois Supreme Court later noted in a ruling in Steidl's case. So close, in fact, that Whitlock's jury came back with an utterly illogical, split-the-difference verdict: Not guilty in Dyke Rhoads' murder; guilty in Karen's. He was therefore not eligible for the death penalty and received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Jurors found Steidl guilty in both murders and sentenced him to die. Debra Rienbolt pleaded guilty to concealment of a homicidal death and began serving what would end up being about two years in prison.

Mystery solved? Not to many in Paris who still doubted the alleged drug angle--friends said Dyke was just a minor recreational user--and had no faith in the screwy stories of heavy substance abusers. As the appeals process got under way, they continued to wonder if Rienbolt, in particular, had lied.

Then in January 1989, she gave them an answer: Yes, she said. Her story was a lie.

FRIDAY: Recantations and Un-Recantations. But what's striking, in retrospect, is whom the defense attorneys did not call in the weeklong trials.

May 12, 2000 Friday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

RECANTATIONS ADD TO MESS OF MURDER MYSTERY

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 714 words


It was hardly a surprise when Debra Rienbolt (the name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text) came forward in early January 1989, to say her testimony as the star witness in a murder case had been a lie.

Her story already had a bad smell. It was a wild narrative that changed dramatically from the first time she told it to police, didn't match up with what her friends and boss said and insulted common sense. It concluded with her acting on a hunch and driving to the home of a couple she barely knew, walking in an unlocked door just in time to help two men she barely knew stab the couple to death over a phantom drug debt.

The July 1986 killing of Dyke and Karen Rhoads and the fire set to cover it up was the most horrific crime in the 177-year history of this Downstate city of 9,000. And Rienbolt's testimony had been key to convicting the two men she implicated--Randy Steidl and Herbert Whitlock.

It's a fact of courtroom life that, since disreputable people tend to seek their own kind, witnesses to crimes are often disreputable themselves. But Rienbolt--31 when she testified--was disreputable even by those standards. She'd started boozing at age 9 and smoking marijuana at age 12. She admitted to using drugs heavily much of her life--speed, pot, cocaine, codeine--and to downing up to two cases of beer in a single day. She had a felony theft conviction, two DUIs and a history of being in and out of addiction-recovery programs.

The other major witness, Darrell Herrington, an alcoholicwhose dreamlike tale put Steidl and Whitlock at the scene, had already come forward several months earlier and said under oath that police had fed him information and asked him to change his story to bolster his testimony, though he added that most of it was still true. Rienbolt's recantation fit the pattern--she said her testimony had not been "close to the truth," according to notes taken by Steidl's appellate defender.

But both times, within a week, the recanting witnesses signed affidavits for the state's attorney withdrawing their recantations and reaffirming their trial testimony. They claimed they'd been pressured by Steidl's attorneys.

The appeals process ground on, with Steidl's case getting the most attention since he'd been sentenced to die while Whitlock had received a life term. In 1991 the Illinois Supreme Court rejected an appeal that was based in part on the ever-shifting accounts of Rienbolt and Herrington. Steidl's new pro-bono advocates--Springfield attorney Michael

Metnick and his investigator, Bill Clutter--began painstakingly reinvestigating the case and building an appeal based on a claim that Steidl's trial lawyer had been incompetent.

The biggest break fell in their lap: In February 1996, Rienbolt contacted them through an intermediary and said she wanted to come clean. This time, the lawyers took no chances. On Feb. 17 and 18 they videotaped Rienbolt in the presence of several witnesses as she explained both how and why she had falsely implicated Steidl and Whitlock.

On the video--parts of which will be shown in a CBS "48 Hours" documentary on this case Monday (9 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2)--Rienbolt appears relaxed and sober.

She said she began inventing stories about the crime even though she had no memory of it because she knew she was subject to alcoholic blackouts and detectives intimated to her that physical evidence linked her to the murders. The more they badgered her and pretended they had the goods on her, the more she kept adding to her story in a way she hoped would make her "look halfway innocent," she said.

She said police began feeding her information in the form of questions ("They kept asking over and over again about a vase or a lamp being broken," she said, by way of example) which then she dutifully included in her enhanced version of events .

Does a normal person do this? No. But no one argues that poor, pathetic Debra Rienbolt was even close to normal.

As if to prove that, five days later, Feb. 23, 1996, she signed another affidavit recanting the recantation of the unrecantation of her first recantation. Who still has faith in her original trial testimony? Attorneys for the people of Illinois, for one.

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MONDAY: New evidence.

LOAD-DATE: June 27, 2003

May 15, 2000 Monday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

TIMELINE QUESTIONS STILL BEING RAISED IN COUPLE'S SLAYING

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 689 words


Edgar County prosecutors had a problem: Both of their star witnesses in the biggest murder case in local history told stories that had those murders occurring at 1 a.m. at the latest, shortly after last call at local bars.

But whoever had stabbed a young couple here 54 times and left them dead in their bedroom the morning of July 6, 1986, also set a fire in the house to cover the tracks, and close-by neighbors didn't spot the fire until shortly after 4:30 a.m.

To reconcile this, prosecutors told jurors the loud argument, screaming and stabbings did indeed take place not long after midnight, as the star witnesses said, but that the killers failed in their first attempt to set the fire. At least one of them returned, then, several hours later with more gasoline, and this time was successful.

The attorneys for Herbert Whitlock and Randy Steidl, who were charged in the slayings and tried in 1987, didn't bother to challenge this speculative improvisation.

They did not, for instance, call to the stand a neighbor who had been awakened about 4 a.m. by the sound of a violent argument and a woman's screams. Jurors convicted Whitlock of one of the murders, Steidl of both.

When a team of Northwestern University journalism students began spending weekends here last fall re-interviewing old witnesses and prowling the streets and taverns looking for new ones, they attacked the timeline. And with the sort of relentless asking-around that neither police nor defense attorneys did enough of, they found Dr. Ben Light, now a Pittsburgh-area surgeon, who lived across the street from the crime scene.

Everyone from Paris seems to have seared in memory where he was that dreadful night, and Light is no exception.

He said in an interview last week that he and a friend, both of whom had just graduated from high school, were sitting in chairs outside talking from 11:30 p.m. until at least 1:30 a.m.

"It was absolutely dead quiet the whole time," he said.

Though the young men could not see the murder scene, neither Light nor his friend (a U.S. marshal who confirmed the story but asked that his name be withheld) recalled hearing even a hint of the mayhem that was supposedly then taking place about 100 feet away.

No one asked them about it until this year, they said, and because they were unaware of the timeline issue, they didn't think they had information that would help.

It does help. If the murders occurred after 1:30 a.m., the damning stories told by the star witnesses--the only real evidence in the case--were not true, as defense attorneys have long insisted. And if their stories were not true, it's likely the wrong men are locked up and the real killers are still free.

Light will appear on a "48 Hours" documentary on this case at 9 p.m. Monday on WBBM-Ch. 2, as will another woman from the neighborhood who was never interviewed by police, though she was among those who called in the fire. That woman, whose face and voice will be altered on TV and who asked that I not use her name, says that just before the murders, she saw two oddly dressed strangers lurking by the house and driving around and around the block in a car with Florida license plates--uncommon in this off-the-beaten-path town.

The idea that the murders were the work of hit men from Florida affiliated with dark doings in Paris--perhaps drug trafficking or gun running as witnessed by one of the victims--has been floated in local conversations since shortly after the murders. It was the pet theory of Steidl's first attorney, who swore he was stalked by a car with Florida plates during the trial, and was previously lent some credence by two local gas station clerks who said they saw such a car not long before the murder/arson. One clerk said the driver paid cash for seven 3-gallon cans of gasoline.

The new evidence on the timeline and supposed Florida Connection was developed too late to be part of the arguments the Illinois Appellate Court will hear Wednesday in Springfield.

But there are no shortage of compelling legal issues still alive in this 14-year old case: Check back here Tuesday for a preview.

May 16, 2000 Tuesday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION

STATE HIGH COURT ALSO HAD DOUBTS ABOUT STAR WITNESS

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 744 words

Technically, the question before a three-judge Illinois Appellate Court panel Wednesday morning in Springfield will be this:

Was Edgar County Circuit Judge Tracy Resch correct 17 months ago when he ruled that Randy Steidl had an effective lawyer and received a fair trial in 1987, and that nothing we've learned since is significant enough to warrant a new trial?

Steidl's attorney, Michael Metnick of Springfield, will argue no, and offer several specific and in some places intricate arguments related to the evidence in the case. Assistant Illinois Atty. Gen. Mary Beth Burns will argue yes, Steidl's lawyer was adequate, his trial was fair and all the new information doesn't amount to much.

But the real question is the same one that's loomed over this case since charges were filed: Is Debra Rienbolt (the name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text) a liar?

It was largely Rienbolt's gruesome account of how she helped Steidl and Herbert Whitlock stab a newlywed couple to death in their Downstate Paris home that convicted the men and sent Steidl to Death Row. Though everyone acknowledges she was a thief, a drunk and drug addict whose story kept improving as the trial approached, jurors

believed her. And though on two occasions since the trial she has admitted she lied, both times she has quickly retracted that admission.

The Illinois Supreme Court first ruled in Steidl's case in 1991, after Rienbolt's first recantation, and rejected his appeal in a decision that underscored its skepticism of recanted testimony.

But in 1997, after Rienbolt had done another 360 and Steidl's new team of defenders produced experts and other witnesses who attacked the plausibility of her story, the high court was more skeptical. It found that new developments "tend[ed] to discredit" Rienbolt and that Steidl had made a "substantial showing that [his trial attorney's] performance constituted ineffective assistance of counsel." The court directed the Circuit Court to conduct a hearing on whether Steidl should get a new trial or sentence.

He did get a new sentence at the circuit level--life without parole instead of death. But Judge Resch denied him a new trial. Whitlock's case, recently taken on by Kent College of Law professor Richard Kling and his students, has gone nowhere on appeal, but the big issues for court review in Whitlock are nearly identical to those Steidl's attorney will raise Wednesday:

1. The knife: Forensic experts say the 5-inch blade of the knife Rienbolt produced as the murder weapon was unlikely to have caused the fatal wounds, one of which measured 6 3/8 inches in depth, and that defense attorneys were negligent in not calling such an expert at trial.

2. The lamp: Rienbolt testified she saw one of the killers holding a broken piece of a ceramic lamp during the stabbing spree, after which the victims' house was set on fire. And, sure enough, a broken lamp was found at the scene. But arson experts who since examined the soot stains say the lamp was almost certainly broken by the first firefighters to arrive. This suggests police fed Rienbolt information so her story would better fit the crime scene, and defense attorneys were negligent in not calling an arson expert.

3. The supervisor: Rienbolt's story depends on her claim that, on the night of the murders, she had a friend clock in for her at her job as a nurse's aide. But defense attorneys never contacted Paula Brklach, her direct supervisor. Brklach has since sworn that her notes, based on personal observations, corroborate the secondhand accounts and records from the nursing home--discounted by jurors at trial--that showed Rienbolt at work that night.

Legal briefs on file suggest Metnick will argue that all these taken together prove Rienbolt was such a liar that Steidl deserves a new trial that sorts out this 14-year-old mess and, perhaps, solves one of the most compelling murder mysteries in state history.

Burns will argue there is no mystery; that two knives could have been used; that there's "room for the possibility that one piece could have been broken off the lamp before the fire;" that Brklach added little; and that, in sum, no, Rienbolt is not a liar and justice was done.

Thursday, when I conclude this mini-series of columns on the murders in Paris, I'll tell you how it went and where we go from here.

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May 15, 2001 Tuesday

NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION

Convictions in '86 murders weather squalls

BYLINE: Eric Zorn

SECTION: METRO; ZONE: N; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 745 words

One year ago this week, the murder convictions of Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock looked like a house of cards by an open window in a mobile home during tornado season.

New witnesses had come forth to challenge the accuracy and integrity of the prosecutors' story that Steidl and Whitlock had stabbed to death newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads in the middle of a July 1986 night, then set their house on fire.

An hourlong report on CBS' "48 Hours" on May 15, 2000, delved into the recanting witnesses, the state's improbable

timeline for the crime, irregularities in the evidence and other strange doings in the eastern Illinois town of Paris that indicated Steidl and Whitlock were not the killers--issues I had raised in a series of columns.

The next morning, May 16, the Illinois attorney general's office abruptly withdrew from the case, thus postponing an Illinois Appellate Court hearing set for the following day. The attorney general's motion cited a conflict of interest related to "a criminal investigation" about which the state would not elaborate.

Steidl and Whitlock's defenders have long maintained that others executed the clean-cut Rhoads couple because one or both of them had learned too much about drug trafficking in Paris, a crossroads town of 9,000 in the Chicago-St. Louis-Indianapolis triangle.

The killings baffled police for more than two months, after which a pair of acknowledged drunks said they had watched Steidl and Whitlock, a pair of louts, murder the couple over a minor drug debt. Their stories seemed to conflict with known facts and with each other, but jurors convicted both men in 1987. They are now serving life terms.

Were their defense lawyers incompetent? Did the multiple recantations and reaffirmations of a key witness render her testimony wholly unreliable? Is the case in such shambles that a new trial is in order? Steidl's appellate attorneys argued yes when the hearing was finally held in Springfield on Nov. 9.

The state appellate prosecutors who had taken over the case argued no, and in a ruling issued Dec. 5, a unanimous three-judge panel agreed: "Any arguable deficiencies" in the proceedings, they wrote, "were not cumulatively so prejudicial to defendant to indicate that the outcome of the trial would have been different."

Steidl's attorney, Michael Metnick of Springfield, was confident the state Supreme Court would take his appeal. In 1997, the seven justices had unanimously expressed reservations about the case when sending it back for an evidentiary hearing, and it since had become even flimsier.

Metnick said he was stunned, then, last month when the high court refused without comment to consider the matter again. Steidl's only avenue now is the federal courts, where the legal hurdles will be much higher. (Whitlock was tried separately, and though his case presents similar issues it has tended to follow Steidl's through the courts because Steidl was originally sentenced to death.)

Lawrence Marshall, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, has taken over as lead counsel for Steidl. The on-site investigative effort by Northwestern University journalism students led by professor David Protess is on hold. The same is true of an investigation by students at Chicago-Kent College of Law who were working under the direction of professor Richard Kling, Whitlock's attorney.

Protess said law-enforcement sources told him the students risked jeopardizing an ongoing investigation that might end up having a connection to the Rhoads murders. Kling added that authorities said the student sleuths were moving in very dangerous circles.

An Illinois State Police spokesman said the agency did not want to disclose any details of that investigation, and a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan declined to elaborate on the connections that prompted the attorney general's office to withdraw abruptly from the Steidl case last year.

It seems there was glue in that house of cards. The passing storms have left it standing.

"I believe that, ultimately, the system will work and that the wrongfulness of these convictions will be exposed," said Marshall. "Whether that comes through the federal courts or though the results of continued investigation it's impossible to say. But there's great reason for optimism that justice will prevail."

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Find this column's coverage of the case and related documents through "extra info" at chicagotribune.com/go/zorn.

Chicago Tribune

January 14, 2003 Tuesday NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION

Flawed justice doesn't stop at capital cases

BYLINE: Eric Zorn

SECTION: METRO; ZONE: N; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 703 words

Almost totally overlooked in former Gov. George Ryan's dramatic speech Saturday afternoon was the passage in which he pointed out that the wrongful convictions that sent 17 innocent men to Death Row are "just the beginning of our sad arithmetic in prosecuting murder cases in this state.

"During the time we have had capital punishment in Illinois, there were at least 33 other people wrongly convicted on murder charges and exonerated," Ryan said. And "93 people--93--where our criminal justice system imposed the most severe sanction and later rescinded the sentence."

It wasn't a surprising assertion. Obviously, most of the same flaws in the criminal justice system that resulted in innocent people being condemned to die are present in non-death cases as well--"arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake," Ryan said, quoting the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.

And though miscarriages of justice in such lesser cases aren't literally matters of life and death, they, too, rip apart families, destroy lives and threaten the innocent.

It wasn't surprising that the media overlooked the point. Ryan's blanket commutation of all 164 death sentences in Illinois as he left office and the intense response to that act left little time or room to consider the fate of those who were serving only life in prison.

What was surprising, though, was that Ryan himself almost totally overlooked the point as well.

"As I prepare to leave the office of governor," he said later in the speech, "I had to ask myself whether I could really live with the prospect of knowing that I had the opportunity to act, but that I failed to do so because I might be criticized."

Yet for all the time he spent mulling and studying and vacillating over how he could best correct or prevent injustice, Ryan failed to grant a pardon or sentence reduction to even one person serving a life term. In fact, apart from the Death Row pardons, Ryan signed off on pardoning just one current prisoner: Franklin Thompson, who was serving a 24-year sentence for a 1994 murder in Joliet.

Talk about a missed opportunity to act! At last Illinois had a governor who recognized the systemic problems in criminal justice and was defiantly unafraid to spend political capital righting old wrongs. But he focused so intently and for so long on death-penalty cases and the apparently inevitable blanket commutation that he ended up not doing anything for such prisoners as Gordon "Randy" Steidl.

Steidl is one of the 93 who were once sentenced to die but are no longer, and the case for his innocence in a 1986 double-murder in Downstate Paris is compelling. Steidl is serving life without parole, but before his sentence reduction five years ago, he told supporters that he was afraid that when he left Death Row it would sap the urgency from the effort to free him and harm his chances for exoneration.

Those fears now look prophetic. Though Ryan's advisers were aware of the strong case for the innocence of Steidl and his co-defendant, Herbert Whitlock--spokesman Dennis Culloton called it "meritorious"--they said various paperwork glitches and a lack of time to review the case thoroughly prevented the governor from acting.

When I asked Ryan after his speech Saturday why he hadn't signed off on Steidl as so many had expected he would, the name didn't ring a bell with the governor and he looked to his aides to refresh his memory.

This may sound like ungrateful carping at a man who just took one of the biggest swipes ever taken at our dangerously untrustworthy death penalty system. And perhaps it is. History may judge his efforts as pivotal in modern justice reform and in the debate over capital punishment. And here I am complaining about what he didn't do.

But I'm not alone. Anyone who thinks George Ryan simply "jumped into bed with the defense bar," as Cook County State's Atty. Dick Devine charged Saturday, should consider the many disgruntled advocates for whom no news from the outgoing governor was bad news.

His deeds did not quite match his words. He ran out of time or will or patience. So now it's up to others to perform subtraction on our state's sad arithmetic.

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J October 21, 2003 Tuesday

Chicago Final Edition

Madigan passes test by diligently reviewing case

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.

SECTION: METRO ; ZONE C; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 710 words

One of the strangest cases in the Illinois criminal justice system recently has gotten even stranger.

Michale Callahan, the Illinois State Police lieutenant who was assigned in 2000 to reinvestigate the 1986 murders of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads in downstate Paris, has sued three state police officials in federal court. His complaint alleges that the officials demoted him in part for concluding that earlier state police investigations had blown the Rhoads case and helped put the wrong men in prison.

And, in a lions/lambs moment I never thought I'd see, defense attorneys are praising their traditional foe, the Illinois attorney general, even though the AG's office has so far refused to yield to defense claims that support Callahan's conclusion.

Meanwhile, the 17-year-old case now seems to hinge on a long-shot DNA analysis of assorted hairs found at the scene.

The couple were stabbed to death in the bedroom of their home in the middle of the night for unknown reasons. Prosecutors convicted two local barflies, Herb Whitlock and his friend Gordon "Randy" Steidl, solely on the word of two other local barflies whose astonishing accounts of separately having witnessed the butchery have changed many times over the years.

Steidl and Whitlock are serving sentences of life without parole.

The case against them was outrageously shabby, as I've detailed in periodic columns dating back five years, as the CBS newsmagazine "48 Hours" showed the nation three years ago and as Callahan told top state police brass in a December 2002 meeting, according to his complaint.

How shabby? "Acquittal was reasonably probable if the jury had heard all of the evidence," ruled U.S. District Judge Michael McCuskey in June when ordering a new trial for Steidl.

So shabby that if Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan doesn't successfully appeal McCuskey's order for a new trial, Edgar County prosecutors will almost certainly have to drop charges against Steidl and set him free.

Callahan's suit against state police deputy director of operations Charles Brueggemann, Lt. Col. Diane Carper and Capt. Steven Fermon alleges that during the week of McCuskey's ruling, Callahan was "relieved of his prestigious investigation duties and assigned to work a much less prestigious position" because of the doubts and related concerns he was voicing about the Rhoads case.

State police officials would not comment on the suit, which also alleges that Callahan uncovered "strong evidence to link another individual to the murder," but does not cite the evidence or name the person.

Defense attorneys for Steidl and Whitlock have expressed astonishment at the seriousness with which Madigan has been reviewing the case, which I've contended is the first major test of her lofty campaign rhetoric.

Instead of reflexively fighting to uphold the conviction, or yielding quickly to pressure not to appeal McCuskey's ruling, Madigan mounted a diligent review of the evidence.

She not only assigned to the case her deputy for criminal justice, Ellen Mandeltort, and her solicitor general, Gary Feinerman, she also studied the fine points of the evidence herself.

"It's absolutely startling how thorough they've been and how well they know the facts," said Springfield attorney Michael Metnick, who has long represented Steidl on appeal. "I think of when I tried to get [former Democratic Atty. Gen.] Roland Burris or [former Republican Atty. Gen.] Jim Ryan to take an objective look at a case. They didn't want to go near the issue of innocence."

Madigan recently filed notice to appeal McCuskey's ruling, but that filing was a formality designed to give her office more time to examine the case and perform DNA testing.

"We have no objection to [Madigan] being careful," said Metnick, who added that he has great confidence that the DNA

evidence will not link Steidl or Whitlock to the scene.

Both parties say that Madigan has not promised to drop the appeal if the DNA evidence points elsewhere, but the bet here is that she won't go forward without some sort of new smoking gun.

Even if she does decide to fight to preserve the original trial verdict without DNA backup, no one can complain that Madigan didn't take seriously her responsibility here to seek justice.

That first test? She's already passed.

March 25, 2004 Thursday Chicago Final Edition

18 years later, justice poised to be served

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 671 words

Signs point to a dramatic development this week in a controversial 18-year-old double-murder case in Downstate Paris.

Relatives of the victims--newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads--had an unpublicized face-to-face meeting in Champaign with Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan Wednesday afternoon to hear why Madigan's office has decided not to appeal a ruling last year by a federal judge who vacated the conviction of one of the defendants, according to several sources close to the case.

The ultimate result is very likely to be exoneration and freedom for yet another former resident of Illinois' Death Row: Gordon "Randy" Steidl, 52, whose sentence was reduced to life without parole in 1999.

The case against Steidl and his co-defendant, Herbert Whitlock, 58, was based almost entirely on the far-fetched, contradictory and ever-changing accounts of a notorious alcoholic and an admitted drug addict, both of whom claimed several months after the crime to have witnessed Steidl and Whitlock butchering the Rhoads couple

In ordering the state to retry or release Steidl last year, U.S. District Judge Michael McCuskey concluded that "acquittal was reasonably probable if the jury had heard all of the evidence."

Madigan, to her credit, neither surrendered to nor reflexively challenged McCuskey's ruling. Instead, she and her staff gave the case a thorough review that one of Steidl's attorneys, Michael Metnick, gratefully deemed "absolutely startling."

No physical evidence in the case has ever linked Steidl or Whitlock to the crime, but Madigan asked defense attorneys for several extensions on the deadline for filing an appeal so she could be sure that every last scrap of crime-scene evidence that could be DNA-tested was DNA-tested.

That effort was an indication that Madigan shared at least some of the skepticism that McCuskey and numerous advocates for Steidl and Whitlock had expressed over the years, and was inclined to send the case back for retrial.

It was also an indication that Madigan knew her decision would be all but final, given that it will be extremely difficult to put Steidl on trial again: One key witness, the admitted drug addict, has recanted, then un-recanted her testimony twice; her job supervisor, who did not testify at the original trial, has since sworn the woman was at work at the time she claimed to have seen key events the night of the crime.

An Illinois State Police investigation four years ago concluded that earlier investigators had blown the Rhoads case and helped put the wrong men in prison.

It's not clear what motivated the person or people who broke into the Rhoads' home in the middle of the night in July 1986, stabbed the young couple in their bed 54 times, then used gasoline to set the house on fire and cover their tracks, but it's a good bet that the secret still lives in Paris, a crossroads town of 9,000 about 20 miles northwest of Terre Haute, Ind.

A March 12 court filing said the final round of DNA tests showed nothing of value.

If all goes as anticipated, the case will now return to the state appellate prosecutor's office in Springfield. There,

attorneys "will review the case," said Edwin Parkinson, the prosecutor who has lately been overseeing the state's end of Whitlock's appeals and petitions for clemency. He declined to speculate Wednesday whether his office will attempt to try Steidl again or what his exoneration might mean for Whitlock, given that the case against Whitlock is nearly identical.

Andrea Trapp, sister of victim Dyke Rhoads, would not discuss what Madigan told the families Wednesday, but after the meeting, Trapp said, "We have confidence in the attorney general."

Letting go will be a courageous, smart and just move by Madigan, who approached the Steidl case with exactly the combination of toughness and fairness that we expect from our prosecutors.

Some say justice delayed is justice denied. But this week, it simply looks like justice.

My columns telling this story in far greater detail are archived at http://ericzorn.com/columns/paris/

May 30, 2004 Sunday Chicago Final Edition

Driver's license photo reflects loss of 17 years

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 678 words

DATELINE: DANVILLE, Ill.

Prison was still literally in the rear-view mirror for Gordon "Randy" Steidl on Friday afternoon when his mother reached into her handbag and said, "I may as well give you this."

She handed a thin, brown wallet from the back seat to the front.

"My billfold!" Steidl said, opening the wings to find an almost perfectly preserved time capsule from the day he was arrested for murder in February 1987. Police had given the wallet to his mother, who had kept it just as it was, thinking it wouldn't be long before they saw this was a mistake and let him go.

Just how long it turned out to be came into focus as Steidl explored the contents, including old school photos of his kids, who are now 27 and 34, and an Illinois driver's license that expired in June 1990.

"Holy cow, who is that young man?" he said, peering through his reading glasses at the picture on the license. "He wasn't bad looking back then, was he?"

Comparing that man to the man in the passenger seat, one month shy of 53, his thinning hair going gray at the temples, was to see in a glance what it means to lose 17 years out of the heart of your life, and to begin to feel the magnitude of the wrong in the now well-worn phrase, "wrongful conviction."

Steidl and his friend Herbert Whitlock, now 58, were convicted of the July 1986 slaying of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads in Downstate Paris. Time and follow-up investigations utterly destroyed what little evidence there had been against the men, and when Steidl's attorneys finally convinced a federal judge that justice demanded he get a new trial, the state grudgingly agreed to Friday's release.

Eight members of Steidl's legal team, some of whom had been working on his behalf since the first appeal of his former death sentence, met at a nearby Holiday Inn at a little past 11 a.m. and made a convoy to the Danville Correctional Center parking lot. Five of them presented Steidl's paperwork at the guard station, then passed through metal detectors and onto the prison grounds shadowed by me and my colleague Hal Dardick.

Steidl waited in an empty, locked transfer cell, already in a white golf shirt and khaki pants, the first street clothes he'd worn since his arrest. The reunion was upbeat but not euphoric. Steidl, who said he hadn't slept in days, was clearly preoccupied.

"Nervous?" I asked him as he walked ahead of the pack toward the outer guard station.

"Yeah," he said, his jaw set.

Before he could leave, a guard made him recite his prisoner number one last time. "N72890," he said.

"There you go," she said, nodding and handing him an envelope containing $29.93, his final prison pay. "Good luck to you." It was 11:50 a.m.

He turned, and about a dozen members of his family broke into applause. The group included his wife, Patty. She'd known him in the early 1970s, then got in touch again after seeing a CBS-TV documentary on his case four years ago. They married in September.

Steidl's new father-in-law, Jerry Heltsley, led the group in a brief prayer of thanks before the guards shooed them outside where a cluster of journalists awaited.

"The air is much sweeter on this side of the fence," Steidl said, squinting in the brilliant light.

He, his family and his lawyers answered questions for 40 minutes and hit all the key points, including an acknowledgment of the ongoing pain of the victims' families, the moral urgency of freedom for Whitlock (who is still serving a life sentence in Menard Correctional Center), and the now familiar reminder that, were it not for our extensive system of legal appeals, this innocent man would have been executed years ago.

Rory Steidl, his younger brother, pulled the car around. Gordon Steidl, his wife and his mother climbed in for the 5-mile ride from the big house to the Beef House, a restaurant just across the Indiana line. There Steidl was to have a private reunion with his son, who wanted to avoid the media spotlight, and with rib-eye steaks.

"Did I really look like that?" he asked his mother, again showing her the driver's license.

"You did, honey," she said, patting his hand. "You did."

LOAD-DATE: May 30, 2004

March 8, 2005 Tuesday Chicago Final Edition

Case messier than ever; who cleans it up?

BYLINE: Eric Zorn.


LENGTH: 725 words

The long-simmering cauldron of putrid ooze that is the prosecution of Randy Steidl and Herbert Whitlock has at last boiled over.

As outlined in my colleague Hal Dardick's Page 1 article today, 24-year veteran Illinois State Police Lt. Mike Callahan, the former leader of a multiagency reinvestigation of the case, has issued a raft of specific and damning allegations against state police higher-ups in a 134-page memorandum and other documents filed recently in federal court.

To boil 134 pages down to 134 words,

Callahan alleges:

Prosecutors and investigators conspired to conceal evidence and otherwise frame Steidl and Whitlock for the 1986 murders of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads in downstate Paris. In early 2000--as private investigators, journalists and defense lawyers were exposing weaknesses in the evidence and asking questions about the failure of authorities to investigate possible links to a prominent local businessman and big contributor to then-Gov. George Ryan--Callahan was tapped to lead a review of the evidence. But his supervisors almost immediately began waving him off and telling him to quit sleuthing because the case was "too politically sensitive." They continued to discourage him even after his digging showed the case against Steidl and Whitlock was as unsustainable as critics were charging. When he refused to back down, state police supervisors demoted and reassigned him.

Callahan, 50, names names and cites corroborating testimony in the depositions of several other state police investigators. These fellow officers confirmed under oath Callahan's accounts of meetings with balky supervisors who, they said, seemed far more interested in defending what had been done than correcting any mistakes.

These supervisors have denied Callahan's allegations in their depositions, but state police officials did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office said the issues raised in Callahan's wrongful-demotion suit, which the AG's office is fighting, are independent from the issues raised in the criminal case. But if what Callahan and his allies on the force say is true--still a question for the courts--it amounts to a huge and even frightening scandal that suggests a cynical dereliction of duty inside the state police hierarchy at best, a high-level conspiracy to obstruct justice at worst.

It would be nice to say such an allegation from respected law enforcement professionals is unprecedented in the annals of Illinois justice. But it's not.

Callahan's insider critique of the Rhoads case contains many echoes of the insider critiques of the 1983 Jeanine Nicarico case that were offered by DuPage County Sheriff's Detective John Sam, Assistant Atty. Gen. Mary Brigid Kenney and Illinois State Police Cmdr. Ed Cisowski.

Sam, Kenney and Cisowski publicly challenged the acts and decisions of those behind the prosecution of Rolando Cruz and Alex Hernandez, who were sent to Death Row for the Nicarico murder. Their apostasy was vindicated when the pair were later freed.

Callahan, who will not speak to the media until he retires from the state police later this month, has already won partial vindication: A federal judge ruled in 2003 that Steidl's "acquittal was reasonably probable if the jury had heard all of the evidence," and Steidl was released from prison last May after Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan refused to attempt to retry him.

Steidl and Whitlock, now 59 and serving a life sentence at Lawrence Correctional Center in downstate Sumner, were convicted almost entirely on the same evidence--the far-fetched, contradictory and ever-changing accounts of a notorious alcoholic and an admitted drug addict, both of whom claimed several months after the crime to have witnessed Steidl and Whitlock butchering the Rhoads couple.

Whitlock's next court hearing in his fight for a new trial is March 21, and if state appellate prosecutors continue to object in light of Callahan's powerful statements, they'll officially become part of the putrid ooze.

Make no mistake. Nearly 19 years after the fact, this case is now a bigger mess than it's ever been. State police officials are the subject of very serious allegations of misconduct, and the attorney general's office is representing the state police against the man leveling those allegations.

Who will step in to clean it up?

LOAD-DATE: March 8, 2005

September 11, 2007 Tuesday Chicagoland Edition

Right decision in freeing man ripe for making

BYLINE: Eric Zorn


LENGTH: 683 words

One of Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan's finest hours in office actually lasted 348 days -- the interval between June 17, 2003, when a federal judge ordered a new trial for one-time Death Row inmate Gordon "Randy" Steidl, and May 29, 2004, when Steidl finally walked out of the Danville Correctional Center a free man.

Now the clock is running on another potential fine hour for Madigan, but this one can't be nearly as long.

On Friday, the courts ordered a new trial for Steidl's former co-defendant, Herbert Whitlock, 61.

Both men were charged with killing newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads in Downstate Paris in July 1986. And both were convicted, on largely the same evidence, the next year: Steidl of both murders; Whitlock of just Karen's murder.

It was a troubling mystery that eventually drew national media attention. The murders were horrific. The victims were butchered in their beds, stabbed 54 times before their house was set on fire.

And the case against Steidl and Whitlock was weak, based almost exclusively on the accounts of a pair of local ne'er-do-wells who claimed well after the fact to have separately wandered onto the scene and witnessed the killings.

I devoted a series of columns seven years ago to the troubling aspects of the case (read them online at chicagotribune.com/zorn.)

And I was not surprised in 2003 when a federal judge ruled it was "reasonably probable" Steidl would have been acquitted if his jury had heard all of the evidence.

This was similar to the conclusion reached earlier by an Illinois State Police investigator.

Madigan faced a big decision, similar to the decision she is facing today: Should she appeal the order for a new trial?

She knew if she didn't appeal and block a new trial, Steidl would have to be released. The evidentiary fabric frays over time in nearly all prosecutions, but the case against Steidl was completely in tatters: The key witnesses had changed their stories and changed them back -- twice in one instance -- making them all but useless to prosecutors. And newly developed evidence badly undercut their stories anyway.

Madigan didn't reflexively appeal the ruling. Nor did she simply accept the consensus of the federal judge, the Illinois State Police, "48 Hours," a team of Northwestern University student investigators and me that Steidl's conviction was a sham.

Instead she conducted her own painstaking review of the case, even ordering long-shot DNA tests on materials recovered from the crime scene. Her decision in the end not to appeal all but forced prosecutors to drop charges against Steidl.

Given that the case against Whitlock -- heard at a separate trial and sent off on a different path through the appellate system -- is nearly identical to the case against Steidl, it was only a matter of time before Whitlock, too, got the favorable order that came down Friday.

A three-judge panel held unanimously that prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to Whitlock and that his defense lawyer was ineffective. "We find a reasonable probability that but for these errors, considered cumulatively, the verdict would have been different," they wrote.

Now, once again, Madigan all but holds the keys to the cell in her hand. Her office can appeal this ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court and delay, perhaps forever, a new trial for Whitlock. Or she can effectively set him free by declining to appeal. (An additional difficulty for the state this time around would be that one of the two key witnesses died in February.)

Madigan's deputy for criminal justice, Eileen Mandeltort, who oversaw the reinvestigation of the Steidl case in 2003 and 2004, told me Monday she's already reviewing Friday's ruling and the Whitlock trial to see whether there are any substantive differences that would result in a different decision.

There aren't.

I don't expect the attorney general to accept my word for it, but I do expect her to reach this obvious conclusion at least by the end of the month. Every hour that Whitlock spends in prison after that will be an hour of shame for Lisa Madigan.

Leave a comment on this column online at chicagotribune.com/zorn

January 10, 2008 Thursday Chicago Edition

Prosecutors add shame as Paris case ends

BYLINE: Eric Zorn


LENGTH: 698 words

Herb Whitlock's parting gift from the state of Illinois was a shot of slime.

Prosecutors moved Tuesday to drop murder charges and set Whitlock free after nearly 21 years behind bars. But instead of just letting him go gracefully, they grumped and groused and accused him again of participating in the grisly 1986 killings of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads in Paris, Ill.

Assistant appellate prosecutor Michael Vujovich told reporters that, "we've always believed [Whitlock and his former co-defendant Randy Steidl] were responsible" for the killings and noted that the murder charges could be reinstated at any time.

"Previously unknown information has come to light which requires additional investigation," said the peevish motion that granted Whitlock, 61, his freedom. But, the motion said, the Illinois State Police simply don't have time to "complete their investigation and re-evaluation" of this "previously unknown" information before the Feb. 22 speedy-trial deadline.

Just what is this "previously unknown information" that couldn't be cleared up in the next month?

Vujovich didn't return my repeated calls this week, and his partner Charles Colburn declined to elaborate on the language in the motion. But Whitlock's attorneys, a defense investigator who has been studying the Rhoads murders for 17 years, and others close to the case say they think they know:

A woman living in Paris has told investigators that, in the very early-morning hours after someone stabbed the Rhoadses to death in their bedroom and set their house on fire, Whitlock showed up at her door with dried blood on his shirt. He was with a friend -- not Steidl -- and both of them smelled of smoke.

It's a suggestive tale, if true. But defense records show that police first interviewed the woman about this story in April 2006, after getting an anonymous tip.

They've now had more than 20 months to check it out. Is her memory accurate? Is it consistent? Can anyone corroborate it? Is she confused about the details or the dates? Is she lying?

Such questions so fogged the accounts of other key prosecution witnesses that the cases against Steidl and Whitlock, never particularly strong to begin with, fell apart under scrutiny. Steidl's appeals went more quickly than Whitlock's because he was initially sentenced to death. He was released from prison in May 2004, when the state declined to retry him.

The idea that prosecutors still need more time to investigate one of the most investigated and re-investigated crimes in state history is nonsense. And so is the idea that this "previously unknown" story means much.

In recent years, records show, authorities have beaten the bushes for snitches, interviewing dozens of inmates to see if one will testify that Whitlock or Steidl confessed to them. And they've pored over years' worth of calls placed from prison by Steidl and Whitlock, who aren't friends, hoping in vain for a guilty slip of the tongue.

It's time for them to shrug, not point fingers.

These murders took place in the middle of the night and had no obvious motive. When I visited Paris several years ago to report on the crusade to free Steidl and Whitlock, it seemed like everyone in town had a theory about who killed Dyke and Karen Rhoads and why. Some were simple tales of personal disputes gone bad, others involved elaborate interstate conspiracies, and none were convincing.

Bill Clutter, the veteran defense-team investigator who helps lead the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois at Springfield, may have studied this case more than anyone, and he told me Wednesday that he remains mystified. His best guess, he said, is that the murders were a random, utterly senseless act perpetrated by a transient killer.

It's safe to say we'll never know. Too much time has passed, too many stories have changed and too many questions appear utterly unanswerable for there to be another criminal trial, much less a conviction.

Petulance and insinuation at the end only serve to compound the state's errors and stubbornness that turned this tragedy into a disgrace.

The unsatisfying truth: This story has no conclusion, but it's over.

Documents

Murder in Paris Columns (.pdf)