Murder in Paris Columns
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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. SECTION: METRO CHICAGO; Pg. 1; ZONE: N 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. SECTION: METRO CHICAGO; Pg. 1; ZONE: N 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.