Authors: Steve Bogira
The Pointer crime remains unsolved. Police never reopened the case. The consensus at Area 2 was that there was no need to reinvestigate, since Jones had been the real offender. But even earlier, after Purvy said there were two offenders, detectives had made little attempt to find the second one, as they acknowledged in testimony during Jones’s civil suit. “Sometimes detectives just get something in their heads and they don’t want to hear anything else,” Laverty says today.
Purvy’s father had been discounted as a suspect as soon as Purvy said the attacker wasn’t a family member. Likewise, the middle-aged “George” next door was ruled out after Purvy said the attacker was a teen.
While Purvy was still in his coma, detectives had interviewed a man named David Thomas, the family friend who’d found the kitchen screen in the alley. An Area 2 lieutenant had wondered later that day how Thomas had happened to be on the scene, and he’d asked detectives to talk to Thomas. Thomas said he’d been dating Purvy and Sheila’s aunt, and when the aunt heard about the crime that morning, she asked him to drive her to the Pointer home. There, when he heard that the TV and the kitchen screen were missing, he strolled down the alley and found the screen.
After Purvy whispered “George,” detectives quickly forgot about Thomas. Court records show that in 1981 Thomas already had a conviction for pandering (soliciting a woman to work for him as a prostitute). Since the Pointer crime, he’s gone to prison four times—twice for drug dealing, once for violating his parole, and once for aggravated criminal sexual assault. The victim of the sexual assault was a girlfriend’s daughter, an eleven-year-old.
TESTIMONY DURING
the class action suit supported what August Locallo had said about street files—that many prosecutors knew about them before the Jones case but pretended they didn’t. The elder Locallo also said
he’d complained widely about the double-filing practice, and that among the people he’d talked to about it was his son. But Dan Locallo says his father never told him about street files until after the Jones trial. The first he ever heard of such files was when Laverty came forward, he says.
It wasn’t only Detectives Houtsma and Tosello who kept Locallo in the dark during the Jones case; his supervisors apparently did as well.
Laverty hadn’t informed only his commander about the information he’d gotten that cast doubt on Jones’s guilt; he’d also informed the state’s attorney’s supervisor of felony review, Larry Hyman, of his belief that Jones was innocent.
During testimony in the class action lawsuit, Hyman acknowledged that Laverty had visited him at his office at 26th Street in October 1981 and had told him that he thought someone else was guilty of the Pointer crimes. Hyman testified that he relayed this information to Michael Angarola, chief of the Felony Trial Division, and William Kunkle, chief deputy state’s attorney, while Laverty waited in his office. But according to Hyman, he then merely told Laverty to come back to him with evidence to support his “theory,” as Hyman called it. (Hyman contended that Laverty didn’t give him any particulars during the visit; Laverty testified that he did.) Laverty at this point had been a police officer for thirteen years, a detective for nine of them, and he had an unblemished record. But Hyman said he made no inquiries to Area 2 about the Pointer case after the visit from Laverty. He also said he didn’t inform the trial prosecutors, Locallo and Varga, of what Laverty had said.
Locallo says none of his bosses told him that a detective who’d participated in the Pointer investigation had doubts about the case. He says he doesn’t know why they didn’t and that he wishes they had. “If they had information that we possibly had the wrong guy, yeah, I would have liked to have checked it out.”
THE JONES CASE
was “an eye-opener, a good lesson learned,” Locallo says. “I learned that when you talk to police, just as when you talk to any other witness, you have to check out what they say. You can’t just accept what they tell you automatically.”
But unlike Judge Cousins, the federal jurors, and the federal judges, Locallo wasn’t outraged by the actions of police, or by the felony review attorney who approved charges against Jones. He was “devastated” when Laverty came forward, he says—not because he learned he’d been an unwitting pawn in a wrongful death penalty prosecution but because it meant his case had suddenly and irreparably collapsed. “I was more shocked about what happened to the case, because I felt strongly about it,” he says.
Detectives Houtsma and Tosello were wrong to suppress evidence, he says, but he wasn’t angry at them. “The culture of the police department at that time was to take notes but not necessarily turn over everything,” Locallo says. And it’s unfair to contend that anyone was trying to “railroad” Jones since, he believes, the detectives sincerely thought Jones was guilty: “It’s hard for me to conceive that detectives would go out of their way to zero in on X, if X is not the person, because then they’re letting the real killer go free.”
He felt bad for Purvy and his parents after the case caved in because they “didn’t get any closure.” He never felt bad for Jones. Judge Cousins and the federal jurors and judges were “entitled to their opinion,” he says, but he still thinks Jones was guilty “based on my conversations with Purvy.
“If George Jones was not the guy, then whatever he received [in the lawsuit] is fine,” he says. “But I don’t necessarily buy that he wasn’t.”
During testimony in the civil suit, a psychiatrist said Jones had suffered anxiety attacks, nightmares, and chronic depression after his imprisonment—classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d had to fend off a rape attempt in jail. Jones was no longer the “sensitive, hopeful” person he’d been, according to another psychiatrist; he’d been “deeply wounded” by the wrongful prosecution.
“Bullshit,” Locallo says.
TEN
Freely and Voluntarily
JUST BEFORE A HEARING BEGINS
in 302 on the last Friday in May, the two guards behind the defense table remove the chains from the ankles of the bald, broad-shouldered, middle-aged African American in the green penitentiary uniform. The prisoner, forty-six-year-old Leroy Orange, has been on death row for thirteen years.
A jury convicted Orange of a quadruple murder in 1985. On the advice of his private lawyer, Earl Washington, Orange opted to have Judge Arthur Cieslik, rather than the jury, decide whether to invoke the death penalty. A death penalty hearing, like any sentencing hearing, is a balancing of “aggravation” and “mitigation,” as the state pushes for severity and the defense for mercy. But Washington, the subject of
three disciplinary complaints at the time, called no mitigation witnesses for Orange. No relatives or friends told Judge Cieslik that Orange was worth saving or that his death would be a loss to them. Cieslik quickly sentenced Orange to death.
Orange now is represented by Thomas Geraghty, director of the Northwestern University Legal Clinic. Geraghty has convinced the Illinois Supreme Court to send the case back to 26th Street for consideration of whether Orange was denied effective assistance of counsel at that 1985 death penalty hearing.
On five dates last year, Locallo heard testimony from relatives and friends of Orange about the kindness he’d shown throughout his adult life despite the violent home in which he’d been raised. All of the witnesses said they’d have testified for Orange at his sentencing hearing had they been asked. Geraghty had to persuade Locallo there was a “reasonable likelihood” that the testimony of these witnesses would have changed the
judge’s sentencing decision in 1985. If Geraghty succeeded, Orange’s death sentence would be thrown out and he’d get a new sentencing hearing—fresh consideration of whether he ought to be executed or sentenced to natural life (the minimum sentence for a multiple murder). Geraghty and prosecutor David O’Connor would make their closing arguments today, and Locallo was expected to rule this summer.
The murders had occurred on January 12, 1984. While fighting a blaze that morning in an apartment building on Chicago’s far south side, firefighters discovered the bodies of a man, two women, and a ten-year-old boy in a third-floor apartment. The victims were bound and gagged, and they’d been stabbed repeatedly. A neighbor told police that Orange had been at the apartment the preceding evening. Area 2 detectives took Orange to their station, on East 111th Street, and twelve hours later he gave a confession in front of a court reporter. According to that confession, he’d committed the murders after freebasing cocaine and then arguing with Ricardo Pedro, the adult male victim. Orange’s half brother, Leonard Kidd, confessed to being present when Orange was tying up the victims and stabbing them. Both Orange and Kidd were charged with the slayings.
Orange was tried first. He acknowledged being at the apartment that night but said he left before any violence occurred, spending the rest of the evening at a girlfriend’s. (Later in the trial, the girlfriend corroborated this alibi.) Orange testified that detectives induced him into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit by shocking him electrically, placing a plastic bag over his head repeatedly, and squeezing his testicles. Detectives who participated in the investigation denied coercing Orange in any way. A doctor who examined Orange after his arrival at the Cook County Jail testified that he found no evidence of torture.
Leonard Kidd took the stand, against his own lawyer’s advice, and said that he alone had bound and stabbed the victims and torched the apartment, in a crazed, drunken, drug-induced state, after Orange left the flat. Prosecutor Timothy Quinn told the jury that Kidd was trying to do “a nice thing for his brother” by taking the rap, but that one person couldn’t have tied up and stabbed four people—certainly not Kidd, who at five foot six and 120 pounds was much smaller than Orange. “Leonard Kidd isn’t big enough to handle three adults and one child,” Quinn said. “Leonard Kidd needed help.” The jury convicted Orange. Prosecutors used Kidd’s admissions in the Orange trial against Kidd in his trial, and he too was convicted and sentenced to death. Kidd later got a second death sentence for another multiple murder involving arson: he was convicted of setting a fire that killed ten children in a south-side apartment building in 1980. Like
Orange, he’s now been on death row for thirteen years while various appeals have been litigated.
On this May morning, Geraghty begins his argument by summarizing the testimony he’d presented from Orange’s supporters. Relatives had depicted Orange’s upbringing by an abusive, alcoholic mother and an abusive, alcoholic stepfather (Leonard Kidd’s biological father) who fought constantly, pulling knives on each other and sometimes firing guns in the family’s home on the south side. In spite of this horrific childhood, Orange had become a generous and dependable adult, Geraghty’s witnesses had said. Orange’s sister had related how Orange helped her raise her first child after she got pregnant at thirteen. His niece had recounted how Orange rescued her and her mother from her mother’s abusive boyfriend. His daughter had told how her father helped her with her schoolwork and took her to shows. Locallo had arranged a field trip to hear testimony from Orange’s hospitalized stepson, a sickle-cell patient. The stepson had described how Orange would tell jokes and stories to distract him from his illness. Orange’s former landlord and boss had characterized Orange as gentle and quiet, a good tenant, and a trustworthy worker. The witnesses had described a “caring, respectful, loving, responsible, hardworking, and protective person,” Geraghty now tells Locallo. These qualities “are precisely the kinds of attributes that are most important for a sentencer to hear”—but the sentencing judge didn’t hear them, Geraghty says, because of the neglect of Orange’s lawyer.
Orange’s disciplinary record during his fourteen years in prison was exemplary. At a new sentencing hearing, Geraghty could raise that as a mitigating factor, but he couldn’t do so in this hearing because it was limited to matters that could have been made known to Judge Cieslik before he sentenced Orange in 1985.
Before prosecutor David O’Connor begins his argument, he places montages of the four bloody corpses, as they were photographed at the crime scene, on two easels he’s aimed at Locallo. He asks the judge to remember the “gallery of death” left by Orange and Kidd. “The blood, the brutality, the viciousness, the ties, the bindings, the gags, the incisions, the slices, the stab wounds … this sounds almost like an outline for a Stephen King book,” O’Connor says. “But unfortunately, Judge, it isn’t fiction.… It’s an outline of the abilities of that guy over there.… In short, it’s an outline of evil.” O’Connor adds, “No mitigation on this planet” could outweigh the crimes Orange committed.
O’Connor had found nothing compelling in the testimony of Orange’s relatives. “Adolf Hitler and John Wayne Gacy probably had families, too,” he
says. “So
what
?” As for Geraghty’s portrayal of Orange as a loving family man, O’Connor says, “He’s closer to a meat cleaver than a Ward Cleaver.”
O’Connor says the aggravation evidence against Orange includes the “wild allegations” he’s made about being tortured by detectives—allegations that show his “utter contempt for the legal system.”
And now it’s up to Locallo to deny Orange the “break” he’s seeking, O’Connor says. The prosecutor concludes: “Someone once said that all it takes for evil to thrive is for good men and women to do nothing. And I think that is directly applicable here.”
Before Geraghty begins his rebuttal, he flips over the montages so they’re no longer staring at Locallo. “It’s difficult to look at these photographs and not react emotionally to them,” Geraghty says. The hideousness of the crime is not the point, he says; the point is Orange’s right to a genuine sentencing hearing. He adds that evil thrives when defendants are deprived of their constitutional protections.
Locallo tells the lawyers he’ll rule on the sentencing issue in July.
Geraghty’s concern about the effect of the photos on Locallo was understandable, given their gruesomeness. But the judge had remained impassive when the montages were facing him. The sphinxlike expression he wears on the bench befits his role, of course, but it also betrays a genuine numbness that’s developed over the years. “There are pictures I’ve seen, both as a prosecutor and as a judge—heads chopped off, gunshot wounds to the head where you see the brain matter,” he says. “When you hear about man’s inhumanity to man, twenty and thirty and forty times—it’s not like you become completely indifferent to what you hear, but you build up a mechanism to deal with it.”