LIFE ENDS, LEGACY ENDURES

The suicide of Amanda Wallace–who died Sunday, three days after strangling herself in a Downstate prison cell–was the last, gruesome chapter in the chaotic life of a woman whose murder of her son reverberated across America.

But there is an epilogue still being written to the death of Wallace’s 3-year-old son, Joseph, who watched as his mother tied an extension cord around his neck, waved goodbye and kicked a stool out from under his small frame as his baby brother played on the kitchen floor beside him.

The murder of Joseph Wallace on April 19, 1993, only months after the courts removed him from loving foster parents who had begged to keep him, prompted profound changes in the state’s child welfare system that are still being refined today.

Perhaps more important, though, it changed views of what constitutes a family, and whether some are worth preserving. It also enveloped the child-welfare system in a cloud of caution that increased its foster child population–a bittersweet legacy, some say.

Doctors removed Wallace, 32, from life support on Saturday, and she died at 4:04 p.m. Sunday, according to Nic Howell, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections.

It was only one of many ironies in Amanda Wallace’s life that, after a childhood she says was virtually devoid of love, she repeatedly tried to kill herself. Only after she killed her child did the system become fully aware of her capacity for violence.

After Joseph’s death, whose heartbreaking details were cemented in the public consciousness for months, there was an avalanche of public recrimination and confession ranging from the governor’s office to the Cook County Public Guardian and even Wallace’s own family.

“Everybody had a hand in Joey’s death–my mother, my sister, DCFS, even me,” said Evelyn Walker, one of Amanda’s sisters, after her nephew’s death.

“This was my personal case. I can’t tell you how sick I am,” Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy said the day Joseph died. “I remember telling (Cook County Circuit Judge Walter) Williams, `This is not family preservation. There is no family to preserve here.’ “

On Friday, Murphy said, “She never should have had her kid in the first place. And she’s to be more pitied than condemned.

“This was a case where everyone blew it, including my office. Everyone knew how crazy Amanda was, but they did it anyway.” He called the decision to return Joseph to his mother “a recipe for murder.”

The Wallace case was “the death blow” to the family-preservation movement, he said.

The evidence that Wallace was unfit to be a parent was clear and voluminous–a range of official documents and police reports detailing psychotic behavior, explosive rages and episodes of violence. But bollixed communications and egregious misjudgments along the way ended in a death that everyone agrees was avoidable.

“This is a situation that attacks the entire system,” former Chief Cook County Circuit Judge Harry Comerford said of the legal and bureaucratic train wreck that led to the decision to send Joseph back to the West Side apartment where he died.

Almost immediately after his death, legislation was passed to place the interests of children in child-custody cases above family reunification efforts.

“Anyone who had anything to do with Amanda knew she was crazy,” Michael Callahan said at the time.

He was Joseph’s foster father and had pleaded to let the boy remain in his family’s Park Ridge home, where he and his wife, Faye, had cared for him much of his life.

“Had that law been enforced, Joseph Wallace would have never been reunited with his mother,” Callahan said this week, noting that the law passed the day Joseph was buried.

Upon learning of her suicide attempt earlier in the week, Callahan said bluntly: “Put the woman out of her misery and get some justice.”

In the emotional climate following Joseph’s death, John Casey, an attorney on a state committee that investigated the case, said of the evidence of Amanda’s problems: “If they didn’t have that information available to them, why not? If they did, what the hell were they thinking?”

Perhaps the most far-reaching impact of the Wallace case, experts said, was the psychological effect it wrought on judges, caseworkers and everyone else involved in the child welfare system.

Initially, many more cases languished in an already overloaded system because people were fearful of sending another Joseph Wallace home to his death. Caseloads finally have begun coming down again, but the legacy of Joseph remains.

“Any system that gets burned by the kind of bad decisions that took place in the Wallace case will never be the same,” said Bruce Boyer, supervising attorney with the Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University Law School. “There’s an optimism that dies.

“And I don’t mean that’s all a bad thing,” Boyer said. “Cautiousness, being careful, is a mixed bag. You want to be careful, but at some point, the nature of the Juvenile Court business requires taking risks.”

More than four years after Joseph’s death, the Cook County Juvenile Court and other elements of the child welfare system have made strides to ensure that those risks are more carefully assessed than in the Wallace case.

Foremost, Juvenile Court has gone from a judicial backwater to the home of more respected jurists.

And those judges are being given more complete pictures in the cases they handle.

“If you know what you’re dealing with, you can weigh the risks much more effectively and make better decisions,” Boyer said.

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In the Wallace case, he said, “Nobody in the system had the time or the means to cull out what really would have made a difference.”

Other improvements also have been made.

For instance, Boyer said, caseloads have “come down significantly”–even from last year, when each Juvenile Court judge was responsible for about 3,500 kids, and attorneys in the child-protection courtrooms routinely handled 300 or more cases apiece.

But problems remain. The court still is waiting to get a $4.1 million computer system budgeted by the Cook County Board to improve the collection and storing of court data.

Caseloads at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services have remained at about 25 per worker since being cut in half from 1991 to 1996, Boyer said.

Wallace had a long history of mental problems and self-mutilation. After Joseph’s death, it was learned that one psychiatrist had said Wallace should “never have had custody of this baby or any other baby.”

For all the changes, however, Callahan is skeptical that the child welfare system can protect the most vulnerable children.

“When Joseph moved into our house, there were 19,000 kids in the DCFS system. There’s now well over 40,000,” he said. “How can you expect them to handle those kids?”

As for Amanda Wallace, no one will ever know the thoughts that coursed through her mind as she sat in her cell and again prepared to take her own life.

“She never should have gone to prison,” Murphy said as Wallace lay in a hospital on life support. “She should have been hospitalized for life. She was one of the most insane people I’ve ever dealt with.”

Wallace was taken from the Dwight Correctional Center to St. Mary’s Hospital in Streator on Thursday after she ripped a strip of cloth from her robe and tied it taut around her neck.

A nursing supervisor at St. Mary’s said that Jimmy Jones, Wallace’s attorney during her murder trial, had been at the hospital on Friday.

One of the last people to visit Wallace in prison was a stranger, Erma Eaton. A homemaker from Morris, Eaton had been told by a local clergywoman that Wallace rarely had visitors.

Prison records show that Wallace’s family members never came to Dwight to see her. But on May 30, Eaton did, and the two chatted amiably across a table in a glassed-in visiting room, with Wallace’s hands in shackles.

Eaton, 57, said she felt comfortable talking with Wallace, but was spooked by the prison itself. She recalled that when she got up to leave, Amanda asked for a hug. The two embraced for a long moment.

“She said that she didn’t get many hugs there in prison,” Eaton said.

On Friday, Eaton said she had been preparing to send Wallace a letter to inform her that she would correspond by mail, but couldn’t visit her again.

“Dear Amanda,” Eaton wrote in the letter, “Please forgive me for not visiting because it’s so traumatic for me. . . . So I will keep in touch by letters. Will close and hope that you are growing emotionally and spiritually. God loves you and has a reason for everything.”