The retrial of a Geneva man who was previously found guilty of murdering his wife in 2014 in a jealous rage and staging her body on a set of railroad tracks begins Monday in Kane County court.
The bench trial of Shadwick King under Judge John Barsanti was delayed for several months because of the coronavirus pandemic and is now set to begin at 9 a.m. Monday.
King, 55, was convicted in 2015 of murdering his 32-year-old wife, Kathleen King, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
But in 2020, the Illinois Supreme Court granted a new trial to King, stating the Kane County trial court erred when it allowed former FBI profiler Mark Safarik to testify for the prosecution as a crime scene expert witness and offer opinions in areas that went beyond his expertise.
Kathleen King’s body was found on train tracks not far from the couple’s Geneva home. A train conductor spotted her body and cellphone on the tracks on the morning of July 6, 2014, stopping the train before it ran over her and destroyed the phone evidence, officials said.
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Prosecutors previously said King strangled his wife, angry over a relationship she had with a 22-year-old Massachusetts man she met after enlisting in the U.S. Army earlier that year. Prosecutors said King placed her body on the tracks to make it appear as if something happened to her while she was out jogging.
King told police that he had left the home early that day to pick up the couple’s three children at their grandmother’s house.
He was arrested and formally charged with murder two days later.
During his trial, King’s defense team presented a pathology expert witness who said Kathleen King died of a cardiac event. But Safarik said Kathleen died of strangulation, an opinion the Supreme Court said he was not qualified to give.
King is being held at the Hill Correctional Center near Galesburg.