Two ambitious, high-profile political figures aim in next Tuesday’s primary election to take the next critical steps in their promising public careers. One is Attorney General Roland Burris, who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor of Illinois; if he wins and goes on to defeat Governor Edgar in the general election next fall, he’ll be Illinois’ first African American governor. The other is Du Page County state’s attorney Jim Ryan, who narrowly lost the attorney general race to Burris in 1990; endorsed recently by the Chicago Tribune, he’s heavily favored to earn a second chance at the job by winning the Republican primary next week.
Reams have been written about the first prisoner, Rolando Cruz. The crime he’s been convicted of, the gruesome slaying and sodomization of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in February of 1983, sent waves of disgust, disbelief, and outrage through the “safe” suburb of Naperville. Snatched from her home in midday, the little girl was found facedown in a muddy field, her skull crushed by blows from a tire iron.
“You’ve got the wrong guys,” he told first assistant state’s attorney Tom Knight, a gung-ho prosecutor who to this day, as a private lawyer in Wheaton, proudly recounts his role in convicting Cruz. Sam, a career investigator whose father was a Cicero cop, was so certain of Cruz’s innocence that he made the wrenching decision to resign a month before the trial rather than participate as a witness.
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The linchpin of the prosecution’s case was a dubious “vision” story told by two of Sam’s colleagues. They testified under oath that Cruz told them he’d had a vision filled with mostly accurate details of the Nicarico abduction and murder. Though Cruz supposedly made this admission in May of 1983, when every step of the investigation was being carefully documented, the sheriff’s investigators took no notes on Cruz’s startling story, made no recording, and failed to relate it to their colleagues (including Detective Sam) or to the grand jury that indicted Cruz. In fact no one connected with the investigation seemed to know anything about the vision until the prosecution suddenly brought it up more than a year and a half later, just a few days before the trial was to begin.
“I had the impression [they] did not want to hear anything,” Mueller said later. Dugan was a far more likely suspect than the two men who had just been convicted in the Nicarico murder. He had a long string of sex crimes similar in their savagery to that brutal slaying; all had been committed within a stone’s throw of Du Page County, all involved young girls, and all were committed, Dugan said, by him alone. But Dugan’s confession would destroy the case so meticulously contrived by the Ryan bunch. That would leave an indelible blot on Ryan’s reputation as a fair and able prosecutor.
Dugan missed work the day of the murder.
Key law enforcement officials were so sure of Cruz’s innocence, and Dugan’s confessed guilt, that they came forward and spoke out unequivocally, something rare in touchy, high-visibility cases. A couple resigned, effectively demolishing their careers in law enforcement; others wrote to the sentencing judge.
