Excerpt from Chapter 1
Law and Murder: Michelle Thompson and Jeanine Nicarico
On February 3, 1984, a young woman named Michelle
Thompson and a male friend, Rene Valentine, were forced at
gunpoint from the car they'd just entered in a parking lot
outside D. Laney's, a nightclub in Gurnee, Illinois, north
of Chicago. The gunman walked Valentine a short distance,
then shot him in the chest at point-blank range. When the
police arrived, Michelle Thompson was gone.
I was an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago at
the time, and my oldest friend in the federal prosecutor's
office, Jeremy Margolis, helped direct the FBI's search
for Thompson. Initially, the case appeared to be an
interstate kidnapping, which is a federal matter. Within a
few days, the crime proved to be one within the province
of state authorities: murder. Beaten, raped, and
strangled, Thompson's body was discovered in Wisconsin.
Shortly thereafter, Hector Reuben Sanchez, an illiterate
but ambitious factory worker and burglar, was arrested,
along with an accomplice, Warren Peters, Jr., who
ultimately agreed to testify against Sanchez.
Deeply enmeshed in the case by now, Jeremy was appointed a
special Assistant State's Attorney to help the local
prosecutors try Sanchez in state court in Lake County,
Illinois. As Jeremy prepared for trial, I spent hours
listening to him describe Michelle Thompson's miserable
final night. After Sanchez raped Thompson on the floor of
the family room in his house, she escaped and dashed,
still handcuffed and naked below the waist, through the
snow to the back door of a neighbor's, where she pleaded
for help. Sanchez found her there and later assuaged the
neighbor by telling him that Thompson was drunk and
hysterical. The pathos of the neighbor's account of the
young woman being led away by Sanchez was heartbreaking.
Michelle Thompson had been abused now for several hours,
and she offered no further resistance. She was resigned to
being tortured and degraded, and hoped only to live -- a
meager, abased wish that went unfulfilled. Back in his
house, Sanchez gagged Michelle Thompson with a strip of
cloth, bent her over a washing machine and sodomized her,
then strangled her with a nylon strap and a coat hanger.
He finished the job by beating her head on the basement
floor.
In pursuing the case, the FBI had discovered that nine
years earlier Sanchez had murdered his girlfriend,
slashing her throat and shooting her, then escaped
prosecution by threatening the witnesses. This time Jeremy
and the Lake County State's Attorneys were determined that
there would be no repetitions. They were seeking the death
penalty.
Through Jeremy, I followed the progress of the case
closely. Late in the summer, he and Ray McKoski, then the
First Assistant State's Attorney in Lake County, proceeded
to trial in Waukegan, Illinois. When Sanchez was convicted
and sentenced to death in September 1984, I relished their
victory.
That sideline experience remained my only direct exposure
to capital prosecutions until 1991, when I was asked to
take on the pro bono appeal of Alejandro Hernandez. By
then I was in private practice as a partner in the Chicago
office of Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal, a large
national firm. I'd known of Hernandez for nearly a decade
by now as a co-defendant in what the press commonly
referred to as "The Case That Broke Chicago's Heart." On
February 25, 1983, Patricia Nicarico, who worked as a
school secretary in Naperville, a suburb outside Chicago,
had returned home to discover that her front door had been
kicked in and that her ten-year-old daughter, Jeanine, was
missing. Two days later, the girl's body, blindfolded and
otherwise clad only in a nightshirt, was found in a nearby
nature preserve. She had died as the result of repeated
blows to the head, administered only after she had been
sexually assaulted in a number of ways. More than forty
law enforcement officers joined a multi-jurisdictional
task force organized to hunt down the killer, for whose
capture a $10,000 reward was offered. By early 1984, the
case had still not been solved, and a heated primary
campaign was under way for the job of State's Attorney in
DuPage County. A few days before the primary, on March 6,
1984, Alex Hernandez, Rolando Cruz, and Stephen Buckley
were indicted, even though six weeks earlier the State's
Attorney had said that there was insufficient evidence to
indict anyone.
James Ryan won the election and became the new DuPage
County State's Attorney. (Ryan was elected Attorney
General of Illinois in 1994 and served until early 2003,
after losing in the November 2002 election, when he was
the Republican candidate for Governor.) Ryan's new office
took the case against the three defendants to trial in
January 1985. The jury deadlocked on Buckley, but
Hernandez and Cruz were both convicted and sentenced to
death. There was no physical evidence against either of
them -- no blood, semen, fingerprints, hair, fiber, or
other forensic proof. The state's case consisted solely of
each man's statements, a contradictory maze of mutual
accusations and demonstrable falsehoods as testified to by
various informants and police officers. By the time the
case reached me, seven years after Hernandez and Cruz were
first arrested, the Illinois Supreme Court, in 1988, had
reversed the original convictions and ordered separate
retrials. Cruz was convicted and sentenced to death again
in April 1990. The jury hung in Hernandez's second trial,
but the state put him on trial for his life a third time
in May 1991. He was found guilty but sentenced to eighty
years, rather than to execution. When Hernandez's trial
lawyers, Mike Metnick, Jeff Urdangen, and Jane Raley,
approached me, they made a straightforward pitch. Their
client was innocent. I didn't believe it. I knew how the
system worked. Convict an innocent man once? Not likely,
but possible. Twice? Never. And even if it were true, I
couldn't envision convincing an appeals court to overturn
the conviction a second time. Illinois elects its state
court judges, and this was a celebrated child murder. The
lawyers begged me to read the brief that Larry Marshall, a
renowned professor of criminal law at Northwestern
University, had filed in behalf of Cruz, and to look at
the transcripts of Hernandez's trials. By the time I had
done this, six weeks later, I knew I had to take the case
or stop calling myself a lawyer. Alex Hernandez was
innocent.
In June 1985, a few months after Hernandez and Cruz were
first convicted, another little girl, Melissa Ackerman,
age seven, was abducted and murdered in LaSalle County,
about an hour's drive from Jeanine Nicarico's house. Both
Melissa and Jeanine were kidnapped in broad daylight,
carried away in blankets, sodomized, and murdered in a
wooded area. A man named Brian Dugan was arrested for
Melissa's murder. In the course of complex plea
discussions, his lawyer said that Dugan was prepared to
plead guilty not only to the Ackerman killing but to a
host of other crimes, including raping and killing two
more females. One of the additional women Dugan was
prepared to admit he killed was a twenty-seven-year-old
nurse named Donna Schnorr. The other was Jeanine Nicarico.
The prosecutors from DuPage County were contacted and
invited to question Dugan, through his attorney. The First
Assistant, Robert Kilander, and a younger prosecutor met
with Dugan's lawyer, but after returning to their office,
they refused to accept Dugan's statements or to deal with
him further. (Nor did anyone from the DuPage office inform
the lawyers for Cruz and Hernandez that another man was
prepared to admit to the murder for which their clients
were then awaiting execution.)
Faced with DuPage's response, one of the LaSalle County
prosecutors contacted the Illinois State Police to be
certain that someone looked into the matter. Under the
direction of Commander Ed Cisowski, the state police
investigated Dugan's admission that he was the lone killer
of Jeanine. By the time they were done, Cisowski had
concluded that DuPage had convicted the wrong men. Dugan
was not at work at the time of the murder, and a church
secretary recalled speaking to Dugan two blocks from the
Nicarico home that day. A tire print found where Jeanine's
body was deposited matched the tires that had been on
Dugan's car. He knew a multitude of details related to the
crime that were never publicly revealed, including several
facts about the interior of the Nicarico home and the
blindfold he'd applied to Jeanine.
Despite all of this, the DuPage County prosecutors
attempted, for a decade, to debunk Dugan's confession.
Even after Cruz's and Hernandez's second convictions were
overturned in July 1994 and in January 1995 as a result of
the separate appeals Larry Marshall and I argued, and
notwithstanding a series of DNA results that excluded
first Hernandez, then Cruz as Jeanine Nicarico's sexual
assailant, while pointing directly at Dugan, DuPage
continued to pursue the cases. Only after Cruz was
acquitted in his third trial, in late 1995, were both men
at last freed.