The weary investigators assigned to crack the mystery of who killed 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico were sitting in makeshift offices on the third floor of the Du Page County government complex.
It was March 14, 1983, and for more than two weeks they had been sorting through scant evidence, fielding thousands of bogus tips pouring into their 24-hour hot line. A $5,000 reward had been offered for information about the widely publicized case, and the phones rang continuously.
Shortly after lunch an anonymous caller gave them the name of Alex Hernandez, a 19-year-old high school dropout known as ”Crazy Alex” in his neighborhood on Aurora`s East Side.
The cross-eyed kid with a two-digit IQ, who harbored a fantasy since grammar school of some day solving a big crime, had been telling people that he knew something about the Naperville girl`s death.
With that tip, investigators had their first break. Hernandez soon led them to Rolando Cruz, then 19, and Stephen Buckley, who was 20.
Two years later, in January of 1985, bailiffs escorted the three men, handcuffed, into packed courtroom 204 of the old Du Page County courthouse, where they faced charges of kidnap, rape and murder in Nicarico`s death.
After 35 days of testimony, Cruz and Hernandez were convicted and sentenced to death. The jury could not make up its mind about Buckley. But a confident prosecution team rescheduled a new trial for next month.
The mystery had been solved.
Then Brian Dugan, an admitted rapist and killer, burst into the Nicarico equation by claiming last month that he alone committed the Nicarico murder, along with committing two other sensational killings.
His claims stunned law enforcement authorities and renewed controversy around the Nicarico case.
They also have raised many questions about what happened the day Jeanine Nicarico was killed and the way the Du Page justice system had handled the case.
Is Dugan telling the truth? Were the wrong men convicted and sentenced to death? Did political pressure on the prosecution team distort justice?
Could he have acted with the others? What are Dugan`s motives?
Some investigators, who acknowledge that no hard evidence to support Dugan`s varying accounts has been found in the 43 days since his admission became known, fear that so much time has elapsed they may never get the answers.
But even if Dugan is never charged or convicted in the Nicarico slaying, his statements have cast a spotlight on the way Du Page officials built their case against Hernandez, Cruz, and Buckley.
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Court records and interviews portray an investigative team pressured in the 24 months after Nicarico`s slaying to resolve the biggest murder investigation in Du Page County history. They show that veteran investigators cajoled and hustled three hapless East Side Aurora men, detectives referred to them as ”mutts,” as they sought to solve the case.
The question of whether the tactics were justified may only be answered when investigators finally determine whether Dugan, not the men charged in the case, killed Jeanine Nicarico.
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The phone tip, it turned out, came from Richard Kepner.
Kepner and a co-worker, Wilfredo Estremera, had talked about the killing and a troubled Estremera said his nephew, Alex Hernandez, claimed to know who killed the Naperville schoolgirl.
Estremera said he did not want to get involved. But Kepner, insisting they had to alert police, received Estremera`s permission to place an anonymous call to police.
The next day Du Page County Sheriff`s investigators Dennis Kurzawa and John Sam drove to the frame two-flat building where Hernandez lived with his mother and grandmother.
”At that time you`d jump on any tip you could get,” Sam said last week. ”It sounded like a good tip. It was the first we heard anybody talking about it. We figured he must have known something if he was shooting his mouth off.”
Hernandez hesitated, then climbed into the back of the squad car and began to tell his story: Hernandez was joy riding and drinking beer with three others, Buckley, Mike Castro and a man identified only as ”Ricky,” when Ricky made a derogatory comment about women and added cryptically, ”I didn`t mean to kill the bitch.”
Hernandez hinted he thought Ricky meant Nicarico.
Detectives searched for the mysterious Ricky but decided the account didn`t ring true after they`d hit too many dead ends. ”Crazy Alex,” who defense attorneys say has an IQ of 76 and was under psychiatric care, hinted that he knew more and he soon became a suspect.
A friend of Hernandez told investigators that Rolando Cruz might know something as well. Before long the two men, who grew up together, began pointing the finger at each other. In sessions with detectives that alternated between being chummy and threatening, each said the other was involved in the murder.
Investigators gained confidence in suspicions about the three Aurora men when a controversial forensic anthropologist said that Buckley`s bootprint matched a print found on the kicked-in front door of the Nicarico house. It was the only alleged physcial evidence against any of the three.
”This was like a Cinderella story, trying to find somebody with a boot like this,” said detective Sam, of the popular ”Cloud Climber” model. ”A 10 1/2 boot–a terrific clue, a lovely clue.
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Investigators said the killer, or killers, had kicked their way into the Nicarico family`s custom-built house on tree-lined Clover Court in a comfortable neighborhood and encountered Jeanine home alone, absent from school because she had the flu.
Her mother, Patricia Nicarico, a secretary at a neighborhood school, had come home for lunch. As the girl ate a grilled cheese sandwich, she admitted to her mother that earlier she had broken one of the household rules.
A meter reader from the gas company had made his rounds and Jeanine said she`d opened the back door to talk to him, with the storm door locked. The girl`s mother reminded her again never to open the door for anybody.
Just after 3 p.m., Kathy Nicarico, one of Jeanine`s older sisters, returned home from school to find the front door open.
Too frightened to search the house, she ran across the street and asked a neighbor to go in with her. The two of them looked inside. When they could not find Jeanine, they telephoned Mrs. Nicarico.
In the downstairs family room, Jeanine`s mother found only an empty glass stained with chocolate milk and a coffee cup of melted chocolate chip ice cream. In an upstairs bedroom, a top sheet from one of the two beds was missing, as was a small blanket.
An autopsy would show that Jeanine, whose body was found two days later, had been killed not long after lunch. The sheet and blanket were never found. With Hernandez their best lead, detectives hit upon a quick way of trolling for how much he knew.
They drove him to task force headquarters, where he was seated at a conference table with Armindo Marquez, a prison inmate he had known on the streets of Aurora. They were shown a basket of money, told it was the reward and were left alone.
Marquez became a key witness against Hernandez and testified that his friend had confided that he and unidentified partners dragged the screaming 5th grader from her house. By Marquez`s account, Hernandez said he had driven the car and held the girl down while she was bludgeoned.
Defense lawyers never denied Hernandez made this statement. However, they portrayed him as a compulsive liar who wanted to impress Marquez and was enticed by the reward money.
With Hernandez`s comments to Marquez in hand, investigators began to view Hernandez as a prime suspect, and they set out to win his trust, hoping he would make a confession and lead them to his partners.
Detectives would pick him up and drive him to task force headquarters for long interviews and chit-chat. At other times, they would cruise the streets of Aurora with him in the back seat, or take him out for a hamburger or doughnuts.
”He became like one of the guys for a while,” Sam said.
In fact, defense lawyers would later argue that Hernandez was dazzled by all the attention from detectives, and was anxious to please them.
”These kids were all from poor families,” said one. ”The murder investigation became a romantic involvement for them.”
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Shortly after the first meeting with Hernandez, detectives visited Buckley, who allegedly had been in the car when ”Ricky” made his comment.
Buckley denied the incident took place, and said he knew no one named Ricky. But he admitted owning a pair of Cloud Climbers and his mother put them in a brown paper bag for detectives so they would not get their clothes dirty. Du Page County crime lab specialists began trying to link the boot to the print found on the Nicarico front door.
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Cruz, a muscular jogging enthusiast who lived off $75 a month in food stamps, denied knowing about the killing when approached by investigators but offered to help get some leads.
In May, 1983, when Cruz said he had no place to stay and expressed fear he would get killed for helping them, authorities rented him a room in the Four Seasons Motel in Glen Ellyn.