Fickle Trib Irks Ryan
“The threadbare nature of the state’s case was obvious long ago to anyone who read the powerful, passionate work of Tribune columnist Eric Zorn,” declared the Tribune’s November 6 editorial. It was written by Wycliff two days after a Du Page County judge described the original police investigation as “sloppy, very sloppy” and acquitted Cruz of the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico. Yet if “DuPage authorities had had their way,” said the Tribune, “Cruz and [codefendant Alejandro] Hernandez would be dead now, executed…on the basis of ‘evidence’ that was never more than a tissue of lies.”
Yet by that time Zorn had already written well over a dozen columns on Cruz’s behalf, calling his conviction a “massive miscarriage of justice” and denouncing “the shifty, disingenuous, opportunistic prosecutors behind this sham prosecution.” The editorial page had not been moved. Without even mentioning the Cruz case the Tribune would soon endorse Ryan for attorney general, and last November he would be elected.
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Curry added, “I think, in his defense, in one of his columns he says he’s no longer objective on this.”
Curry told me Ryan would never have prosecuted Cruz if he’d believed Cruz was innocent. What does Ryan think now? I asked. “The evidence has changed,” Curry said. “He’s concerned about the statements of Montesano–he’s the Du Page County deputy who changed his testimony on the stand at the recent trial. And the DNA [testing] has changed since Jim Ryan left office. The DNA when Jim Ryan was state’s attorney did not exclude either Cruz or [Brian] Dugan.” Dugan, in prison for two other murders, confessed ten years ago in hypothetical language to also kidnapping and murdering ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico.
Talking to me about Ryan got Zorn so steamed that he immediately wrote a column daring the attorney general to take him on in public. He wrote that Curry had been complaining about Zorn’s ethics to the Reader, to ABC News, and to Zorn himself. Enough was enough. “So I’m not calling Ryan today, I’m calling him out: Me and him. One on one. No lackeys or advisers. On the record. Two hours. Live on a major Chicago radio station that has agreed to play host to this discussion. Topic: The facts and only the facts–his interpretation, my interpretation–no one else’s.
