A special event will take place in Springfield on Monday, May 24, when exoneree Rolando Cruz comes to Springfield to recognize those who helped free him almost 15 years ago.
In 1983, 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico was kidnapped from her Naperville home in the middle of the day, taken to a nearby wooded location and brutally killed. But despite the tragedy of the killing and the injustice of the wrongful convictions that followed, there are stories that don’t get told very often of those who, at great personal cost, pursued justice.
Some law enforcement officials followed stereotypical thinking to focus on Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, lower class Hispanics living in the nearby town of Aurora. Cruz and Hernandez were convicted despite the confession, shortly after Cruz’s first conviction, of the real perpetrator, Brian Dugan. Their arrests, convictions and death sentences comprise one of the most renowned innocence stories in American legal history. Cruz was tried three times and spent 12 years on death row before he was shown to be innocent and then released.
The case became nationally known as a major example of prosecutorial misconduct. Reporters Thomas Frisbie and Randy Garrett wrote their book, Victims of Justice Revisited, about the case. Following Cruz’s exoneration a special grand jury indicted seven highly prominent individuals – four sheriff’s deputies and three former prosecutors – for perjury and obstruction of justice in the case. Although a DuPage County jury acquitted the seven, the county later agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle the defendants civil rights claims.
Despite the wrongful prosecution, many who constituted the legal team, such as local lawyers Michael Metnick, John Hanlon and investigator Bill Clutter, vigorously fought to have the truth told and justice achieved. The legal team also relied upon other individuals who demonstrated courage to the point of sacrificing established careers because they believed Cruz and Hernandez were innocent. These individuals include:
DuPage County Detective John Sam. Sam had a distinguished record for nearly 11 years. After reviewing all the evidence in the Nicarico murder investigation, Sam was convinced that Cruz, et al. were innocent. He pursued other suspects until the chief of prosecutions and the sheriff removed him from the case and demoted him, forcing him to quit the force in 1984. He has been unable to continue his career in law enforcement.
Mary Brigid Hayes. Hayes (formerly Kenney) was working for then Attorney General Roland Burris in 1991 when she was asked to continue the prosecution of Cruz. After examining the case, she became convinced that neither Cruz nor Hernandez were guilty. When Attorney General Burris insisted that prosecution of Cruz go forward, Hayes resigned, proclaiming: “I cannot sit idly as this office continues to pursue the unjust prosecution and execution of Rolando Cruz.” She now works for the Cook County Public Guardian’s Office in Chicago.
Ed Cisowski. During the 1980s, Cisowski worked as commander of the Illinois State Police’s investigation division in DuPage County. Cisowski was asked to look into the possible involvement of repeat sex offender and murderer Brian Dugan in several cases. In the course of the interviews, Dugan confessed to killing Nicarico as well. Despite his confession backed by corroborating evidence, investigators refused to consider Dugan as the culprit and even accused Cisowski of leaking specific case-related details to Dugan. As a result Ed retired from the Illinois State Police. In 2009 Brian Dugan was finally convicted and sentenced to death for killing Nicarico.
Each of these individuals is a “profile in courage.” Their willingness to stand up and sacrifice for what was right serves as a contrast to the ugliness of the crime and the oppression of the state authorities. Their actions need to be recognized and their stories told many times. We owe that to these honorable people; we owe it to ourselves to follow their example.
Larry Golden is an emeritus professor of political studies and legal Studies at UIS and is the director of the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project.
Innocence Project reception
Mary Brigid Hayes, Ed Cisowski and John Sam will be formerly recognized and thanked by Rolando Cruz with “Profiles in Courage” Awards Monday evening, May 24, 5-7 p.m. at the Executive Mansion at an awards reception sponsored by the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project. Reservations can be made by calling 206-7989 or at www.innocence.uis.edu.
As a UIS student, I was actually embarrassed to find that the "Innocence" Project was sponsored by my university.
Yes, prosecutors are human and occasionally the evidence points to the wrongs person. Once in a great while an overzealous prosecutor will continue a prosecution in the face of significant exculpatory evidence, as in the Cruz case.
However, most of the stories paint Cruz and Hernandez as innocent people. They did not kill Jeanine Nicarico, but they are far from innocent--they commited fraud in attempting to collect the $10,000 reward for the conviction of Nicarico's killer by implicating each other, as well as other street-level benefits of "cooperating" with the police. The ten years they spent in prison is just about right for the crimes they DID commit in the Nicarico case.
Now the Innocence Project is trying to get the Slover family off--a family convicted of a vicious, gruesome murder.
Karyn Hearn was found dismembered and her body parts dumped in garbage bags in a lake. Her skull had seven .22 caliber bullet holes, typically an indication to most investigators that this was not random criminal violence, but a crime of passion.
Michael Slover Jr, Karyn's ex-husband, had a history of felony crimes, such as drug possession, burglary and illegal gun possession. He also had a history of violence, even in public places, against Karyn Hearn.
Police were suspicious of how intricately detailed his alibi for the day Karyn disappeared was, as if he were remembering every detail of the day because he would need to recall it later-even to remembering what he had for dinner and exactly how much he paid for it.
Michael Slover Sr. owned a car lot whose boundaries contained cinders and broken concrete. The garbage bags containing Karyn's body parts were weighed down with concrete consistent with that found on Slover Sr.'s car lot. The autopsy yielded bits of cinder consistent with those found on Slover's car lot. A search of a "burn barrel" on the car lot yielded rivets and buttons that matched the clothing that Karyn was wearing on the day she disappeared.
Slover Sr. also owned twelve firearms, eleven of which were discovered with a search warrant. The twelfth, a .22 pistol, was missing, and he said he couldn't remember anything about it, and didn't know where it was. A witness testified at the trial that he had seen a gun in Slover Sr's office at the car lot. The gun was never found.
Dog hairs found on the duck tape used to seal the bags containing the body parts were a DNA match to a dog owned by the Slovers.
Jeannette admitted she had fought with Karen over custody of her grandson Kolten. Karyn had just gotten a job in the St. Louis area and Jeannette was angry over Karyn taking Kolten so far from the Decatur area.
The Slovers are vicious people who took a mother away from her child in a particularly brutal, heinous way, cutting up her dead body and dumping it in a lake in garbage bags. Sixty years was too easy of a punishment for what they did, and I am ashamed that my school's name is being used to try to get them off.