With DNA testing bolstering their claims of innocence, four men convicted of the 1986 rape and murder of Rush University medical student Lori Roscetti called on Cook County prosecutors to dismiss charges against them and run crime-scene DNA through a state database in an effort to find the real killer.
The men, who were teenagers when Chicago police detectives arrested them, spoke in separate telephone interviews Tuesday and Friday with a mixture of hope and sadness about trying to find and reconnect with relatives who they said had abandoned them when they went to prison 13 years ago.
The four recalled moments when they despaired of ever convincing anyone that they were innocent and that the confessions obtained from two of them were coerced.
“There was a time when I thought I was … going to grow old in the penitentiary and die here,” Larry Ollins, who was 16 when he was arrested, said Tuesday from Menard Correctional Center.
“When you didn’t do something, you hope the truth will come out,” he added. But “after so many years, your faith begins to waver.”
The despair the four men had battled began to lift last year when Naperville attorney Kathleen Zellner agreed to investigate their case, and it turned to joy recently as each of them learned of the DNA test results.
Those results, from tests performed at an independent forensic laboratory in Canada, showed that semen found on a vaginal swab and on the underwear Roscetti was wearing when she was murdered did not match the defendants’. Zellner received the results on Friday.
A court hearing was scheduled for Thursday, although it is just a status hearing on Zellner’s earlier motion for a new trial. She said Tuesday that she intended to file another petition at the end of the week to vacate the four convictions.
Even with the test results, it is not clear the four will be released any time soon. Cook County prosecutors have challenged cases in similar circumstances. After DNA tests failed to match Ronald Jones to semen found in a woman whose murder sent him to Death Row, prosecutors considered other theories of the crime for some 22 months before dismissing the charges against Jones in 1999.
As they did in the Roscetti case, Chicago police said Jones had confessed.
Chicago police deputy chief James Maurer, who was the commander of the homicide unit that investigated Roscetti’s murder, said he remains convinced the four men are guilty, even though the purported confessions said that three of the men had sexually assaulted Roscetti and that only those four were involved in the crime.
Maurer suggested the defendants might have worn condoms during the sexual assault or that another person took part in the murder–even though the lead detective testified at trial that the possibility of a fifth person’s involvement was “fiction.”
At the same time, one of the prosecutors who put the four men in prison said he took time on Tuesday to revisit the case and said he still believes the confessions are valid.
Patrick W. O’Brien, now in private practice, said that he again read the two purported confessions and that they “seem to me to come from guys who were there and did what they said they did.”
But he conceded he was “perplexed” by the DNA tests.
The defendants, however, saw the DNA tests as vindication.
“We didn’t do it,” said Omar Saunders, who didn’t hear the news until Tuesday because he is being held in solitary confinement at Menard for fighting with another inmate. “We were framed. The truth is out.”
Larry Ollins said other inmates told him they had heard about the results on television Sunday, but he was reluctant to trust them. Zellner gave him the official word Tuesday as well.
Marcellius Bradford, Saunders, Ollins and his cousin, Calvin Ollins, were arrested in January and February of 1987, about three months after Roscetti’s Oct. 18, 1986, murder. They were accused of attacking Roscetti as she drove home from school after a night of studying, forcing her to a railroad access road on the West Side, and then raping and killing her.
Police said Bradford and Calvin Ollins confessed, saying they ambushed Roscetti at random to get bus fare for Calvin to return to his home at the Cabrini-Green housing development, according to court records.
Bradford pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for his testimony against Larry Ollins and received a 12-year sentence. He was released, but he returned to prison in 1998 on a burglary conviction. The other three were convicted in separate trials and got life terms.
A Tribune investigation of the Roscetti case published on May 2 revealed that Bradford now says he falsely confessed under police coercion to save himself from a life sentence. Calvin Ollins said he confessed because police told him he could go home if he did.
“Sorry wouldn’t be good enough, especially to Larry,” Bradford, who is set to be paroled in late June from Graham Correctional Center, said Tuesday. “I sat on the witness stand and told a baldface lie because I was hassled, I was scared.”
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Other key witnesses recanted critical testimony in interviews with the Tribune–one said he testified falsely in an effort to get a reward, and the other said he testified to avoid being implicated himself. The Tribune also found that the confessions mirrored a scenario that an FBI criminal profiler said he provided before the four were arrested.
In interviews Tuesday and Friday, the four men said they were looking forward to regaining their freedom and hoped that prosecutors would act quickly to get them released.
The defendants also urged prosecutors to put the DNA in the state’s database of convicted sex offenders in hopes of finding the real killer–information that, they said, would further bolster their case.
“That DNA is going to catch him,” Saunders said.
Prosecutors are open to the idea of submitting the DNA to the database but have not yet made a final commitment to it, a spokesman said.
Now, having spent close to half their lives in prison, the men said they look forward to the task of trying to rebuild their lives and reclaim some sort of future. They said their families had, for the most part, abandoned them when juries returned verdicts of guilty.
Calvin Ollins, who was 14 when arrested, said his mother broke off contact years ago.
“I want to try and get back with my family and try to find a way to get my life back in shape,” Calvin Ollins said Friday when reached at Joliet Correctional Center.
Larry Ollins said he no longer knew where his mother lived.
Saunders said he had not heard from his family in several years until recently, when an older brother and a cousin read about the case and made contact. He said he has two daughters he has never seen but does not know where their mother is. He hopes to find them.
“I never got a chance to meet them because of this case,” he said.
Mindful that his youth was spent in prison, Larry Ollins said he expects it will be tough adjusting to life outside the penitentiary. But he is eager to try.
“We were young boys at the time. I had no hair on my face,” he said. “Hopefully this can bring my family back together. As years went by, people fell off.”