Reversing course on 25 years of controversial police work and prosecutions in a single day, Lake County authorities announced new murder charges in two cases and dropped rape charges in a third Tuesday.
In one case, in which another man was held for five years, prosecutors charged Jorge Torrez, 23, with murdering 8-year-old Laura Hobbs and 9-year-old Krystal Tobias in a Zion park in 2005. Laura’s father, Jerry Hobbs, had faced the prospect of a death sentence before he was cleared of the crime and released.
Along with that double killing, the other cases dealt with Tuesday had disintegrated under the weight of DNA evidence contradicting the authorities’ initial narratives and confessions from the original suspects in the murder cases.
With the new charges, authorities tacitly acknowledged the failures of two high-profile murder investigations. The moves also represented an about-face for a prosecutor’s office that spent years insisting DNA evidence was meaningless while suspects sat in prison.
“Their moving to try to rectify a problem isn’t nearly as impressive as how long they let the problem fester,” said Jed Stone, a Waukegan defense attorney who represented the newly cleared rape suspect, Bennie Starks.
All three cases are likely to affect the legacy of Lake County State’s Attorney Michael Waller, who plans to retire at year’s end. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
In addition to the Zion case, Waller’s office also announced charges against Hezekiah Whitfield, of Chicago, in the 1994 bludgeoning death of 71-year-old Waukegan appliance store owner Fred Reckling.
Whitfield, 42, was arrested Tuesday, and a judge ordered him held on $3 million bail, according to a news release.
James Edwards confessed to the killing after his arrest in 1996, and Waller personally helped prosecute him. Edwards was convicted and is still serving a life sentence. Prosecutors knew at trial that blood at the scene matched neither Reckling nor Edwards, but they argued that the blood could have come from one of Reckling’s employees in a wound unrelated to the crime.
The conviction was recently called into question when the blood was linked specifically to another man. Prosecutors had not named any other suspect until Tuesday.
Edwards, 63, is set for a hearing in Lake County on May 25. He is not expected to go free, however, because he has yet to begin serving a life sentence for a 1974 murder in Ohio, a crime to which he confessed at the time of his arrest in the Reckling case.
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Assistant Lake County State’s Attorney Steve Scheller said “common sense” would dictate that the local charges will be dropped against Edwards.
Edwards’ lawyer, Paul DeLuca, said: “Everyone who doubts false confessions exist, here is another example.”
Prosecutors also dropped charges against Starks, 52, who spent 20 years in prison for the rape of a 69-year-old Waukegan woman in 1986. He was freed on bond in 2006 after DNA evidence pointed away from him and appeals judges ordered a new trial, but it remained unclear whether he would be retried until Tuesday.
“I’m going to enjoy this day,” Starks said at the courthouse before heading downtown for a lunch in his honor at an exclusive restaurant in the Willis Tower.
The prosecutions of Hobbs, Starks and Edwards drew criticism from defense lawyers who attacked the office for developing alternative explanations for seemingly exculpatory DNA evidence. Tuesday’s events reinforce the power of DNA to guide investigations and exculpate suspects who maintain their innocence.
“It’s ironic that on the day that they finally agreed to drop charges against Bennie Starks … they’re now arresting people who DNA identified in other miscarriages of justice,” said Barry Scheck, co-director of the New York-based Innocence Project.
While all three crimes were violent felonies, Hobbs’ case drew special attention both for the nature of the stabbings and the questions about his guilt.
Hobbs, then a recent Texas transplant, was arrested shortly after he found the bodies of his daughter and her friend riddled with dozens of stab wounds in May 2005. After about 24 hours of intermittent questioning by a squadron of detectives, he confessed.
By 2007, defense lawyers had learned that semen found in Laura Hobbs’ body didn’t match that of her father.
The prosecutor’s office responded to that evidence in a way that mirrored other cases. Then-Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Mermel told a judge that the semen didn’t indicate Hobbs’ innocence because couples sometimes had sex in the woods, and the girl could have touched some semen and then wiped herself.
Hobbs sat in jail awaiting trial until August 2010, when the charges were dropped and he was freed in the wake of revelations that the DNA had been linked to Torrez, according to court records.
Mermel retired earlier this year amid a controversy over comments he made to the news media about the significance of DNA. He could not be reached Tuesday.
Torrez, once a close friend of Krystal Tobias’ older brother, attended Zion-Benton Township High School and lived with his parents near the scene of the crime. In an interview with the Tribune last year, he did not deny that the DNA in one girl’s body was his, but he said he has a defense against any potential murder charges.
“Once I tell them how my DNA got there, I’m walking,” he said.
Prosecutors in other jurisdictions have said Torrez is accountable for gruesome crimes committed while Jerry Hobbs sat in prison. He is currently serving five life sentences for a string of brutal attacks on women in Virginia in 2010, and he is also charged with killing a 20-year-old Navy petty officer in her barracks in that state in 2009.
Although Torrez could face execution for other crimes, Scheller, the recently appointed head of the office’s criminal division, said he hopes to personally try him in the Zion double slaying.
If convicted, both Torrez and Whitfield would be eligible for life sentences without parole in the Lake County cases.
The new charges in the Hobbs case are also significantly timed. The girls were slain onMother’s Day2005, and Jerry Hobbs has recently been in Pennsylvania, visiting the mother of his children, including the victim, Laura.
Jerry Hobbs’ mother, JoAnn Hobbs, of Wichita Falls, Texas, said the charges were “great news.” The family didn’t expect charges because of all the other matters facing Torrez, she said.
“We didn’t think that the county would even want to bother,” she said, but she added that without the charges, “everyone would still be thinking Jerry had something to do with it.”
The moves come four months after the disintegration of the case of Juan Rivera, who spent some 20 years in prison for the rape and slaying of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan in 1992. Rivera was convicted three times of her killing, the last in 2009, in spite of DNA evidence indicating someone else had sex with her around the time she was killed.
Prosecutors insisted she must have had sex with another man separate from her slaying.
Rivera was released in January, a month after appeals judges delivered a damning reversal of his conviction.
Waukegan police have said they are digging back into the case.
Freelance reporter Ruth Fuller contributed.
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