Lake County exoneration could ripple beyond Illinois

chicagotribune.com

Lake County exoneration could ripple beyond Illinois

James Edwards, cleared of Waukegan murder, hopes to be absolved of murder in Ohio case tied to same confession

By Dan Hinkel, Chicago Tribune reporter
July 28, 2013

Advertisement

During an interrogation that stretched for more than 24 hours, James Edwards confessed to three murders, Waukegan detectives said, enough to make him a serial killer.
He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in two of the slayings — the shooting of a woman near Cleveland in 1974 and the bludgeoning of a businessman in Waukegan in 1994.
Because Edwards knew details of the Waukegan murder "only the killer would know," prosecutors argued at trial, his account of the slaying had to be true.
Lake County prosecutors were wrong, they now say.
Edwards' sentence in Illinois was wiped away last year after prosecutors charged another man allegedly linked by DNA to the crime. But Edwards still isn't free. Although he admitted to the Ohio murder during the same interrogation that produced a vivid confession that Lake County authorities say was false, little has happened in his Ohio case.
The discovery that Edwards gave an apparently false confession containing accurate details about the Waukegan slaying suggests he was fed facts by the detectives who interrogated him, a common phenomenon in false confessions, experts on criminal defense and wrongful convictions said.
Though Edwards, 64, has a violent record even beyond the two murder convictions, the justice system's portrayal of him as an itinerant multiple murderer has been called into question by a confession local prosecutors now say is a mixture of fact and fiction. Ohio authorities must immediately seek the truth, said Steven Drizin, legal director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions.
"The victim's family in that case have a right to know whether the (murderer) … is behind bars or still on the streets," Drizin said.
In a visiting room overlooking inmates circulating outside Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, Edwards — a voluble man who has spent roughly half his life in prison — said he's confident he'll go free before he dies. The acknowledgment by prosecutors that his Waukegan confession was false shows police coerced the whole statement, he said.
"Those were details that only the police could have known, in addition to the killer," he said.
Edwards' lawyers are preparing to use the revelations from Lake County to challenge his Ohio case, but Ohio prosecutors learned of questions about his interrogation only when called by the Tribune, said Joseph Frolik, a Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office spokesman. He declined to comment on details of the case but said the office was receptive to putting it before an internal review panel prosecutors are setting up.
"Just based on the fact that the Waukegan confession has been discredited, that would certainly suggest that this would be a prime candidate for the review process," he said.
Ohio police officers did find other potentially damning evidence — a thumbprint matching Edwards' on the inside of the window of the car containing the body, police reports show. Experts noted, though, that a case based on a fingerprint is weaker than one based on a print and a confession. The print match was made after Edwards confessed, and Drizin pointed to research suggesting that forensic experts such as fingerprint examiners can be swayed by other evidence indicating guilt or innocence.
The Ohio conviction is not Edwards' only problem. He's serving a 60-year sentence in Illinois for an armed robbery he committed in Waukegan with a lighter resembling a gun, the crime that spurred his arrest and interrogation in 1996. He doesn't contest his guilt in the robbery, and the Department of Corrections projects his discharge date as 2029.
But the apparent false confession is key to his hope of seeing his sentence reduced. At his robbery sentencing, Lake County Judge Christopher Starck, who also presided over the Waukegan murder case, noted Edwards' conviction in that killing before giving him the lengthy robbery sentence.
Edwards argued — and experts agreed — that the punishment should be reconsidered, given he's been exonerated of the murder.
Edwards' lawyers said they'll seek a sentence reduction, but Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim said he'll contest that because of Edwards' criminal past, including yet another murder conviction.
A troubled past
Raised in New York City's Harlem borough, Edwards' arrest record stretches to childhood, he said. Early on, he said, he joined the Five Percent Nation, a Nation of Islam offshoot, and took on another name by which he's been known, Divine God Epps.
In 1974, he came to Chicago and met Cora Lee Young, 83, according to court records. Days later Young was found beaten to death, and Edwards, who had her blood on his clothes, was charged with murder, court records show.
His lawyers raised an insanity defense, and psychiatrists testified that he was schizophrenic, while his mother testified the family doctor had said he seemed to be suffering schizophrenia at age 8, according to court records. He was convicted and imprisoned until 1991, according to court records.
At Stateville, Edwards said he doesn't think he was ever schizophrenic; rather, people mistook his religious adoption of the name Divine God for a delusion.
His attorneys, Kathleen Zellner and Paul DeLuca, said they don't believe him to be mentally ill now.
In January 1996, he was arrested for robbing a Waukegan motel with a lighter resembling a gun, according to police reports.
Waukegan detectives Michael Quinn and Mark Tkadletz quickly started pressing Edwards, he said,about the murder of Fred Reckling, a widower beaten to death at his Waukegan appliance store in December 1994.
The detectives also asked about his time in New York and Cleveland, Edwards said, and phoned police in both areas to ask about slayings in which he could be a suspect. From Cleveland-area police, Edwards said, they learned about the shooting of Sylvia Greenbaum in 1974.
Edwards said the detectives beat him and led him to a secluded part of the Waukegan station, where they told him they could kill him and make it look like a suicide.
"My denials were followed by their fists," he said.
Edwards, thinking he couldn't be found guilty of crimes he didn't commit, signed statements the officers wrote, he said, confessing to the murders and a string of local burglaries and robberies.
His confession also says he murdered a man with a butcher knife in 1973 in New York City after the man made a pass at him. Edwards contends Waukegan police had fed him the supposed details of the crime. New York authorities have never charged him. New York City police didn't respond to requests for comment. Edwards' attorneys believe the crime was fictional.
In Lake County, he was charged with robbery and burglary-related offenses, but those charges were dropped, leaving the Waukegan murder and the armed robbery.
Detectives said Edwards voluntarily detailed his criminal past without threats, harsh questioning or coercion of any kind. Tkadletz told the grand jury that indicted Edwards that police learned of the Ohio crime from the suspect, not the other way around.
Judges in Ohio and Illinois heard evidence and ruled his confessions were not coerced.
Neither Quinn, Tkadletz nor lawyers defending them from a lawsuit Edwards filed could be reached.
There is no recording of the interrogation to settle the disputes between Edwards and the detectives; that wasn't yet required in homicide investigations in Illinois.
'Only the killer would know'
Lake County sought the death penalty and the state's attorney, Michael Waller, helped lead the prosecution at trial.
Jurors heard how Edwards told detectives he clubbed Reckling, 71, with a stick as he closed his store, stole about $1,500 and fled in the victim's car. The statement went on to say he had to change the tire before dumping the car on Chicago's North Side.
Though much of his confession is not precisely aligned with the details of Reckling's killing, Edwards' narrative fits much of what authorities knew before his arrest, including the specific detail that the flat tire was left on the side of the road, according to police reports.
"Defendant's statement contains details that only the killer would know," Waller told jurors in his closing statement, according to a trial transcript.
But Edwards' lawyers pointed to blood in Reckling's store and car that matched neither Edwards nor the victim, arguing that it came from the real killer. Prosecutors said it was a Reckling employee or softball teammate before the murder.
Jurors convicted Edwards but recommended a life sentence instead of execution.
In 2010, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered DNA testing Edwards sought on the blood. In May 2012, prosecutors announced charges against Hezekiah Whitfield, 43. Whitfield has an armed robbery conviction, and the blood matched him, Assistant State's Attorney Stephen Scheller said. Whitfield awaits trial. Waller could not be reached for comment.
Cases such as Edwards' have haunted Lake County prosecutors. His was one of four discredited by DNA near the end of Waller's 22 years in office. Prosecutors in each had dismissed blood or semen evidence by suggesting alternative theories as to how it arrived on the crime scene. Like Edwards, two of the other men had confessed to crimes DNA now indicates they didn't commit.
After taking office promising reform in December, Nerheim signed a certificate this year asserting Edwards' innocence in the Waukegan slaying.
But the Waukegan case was not the only one built upon his confession.
A murder in Ohio
On Feb. 11, 1974, Cleveland police found 60-year-old Sylvia Greenbaum shot five times and slumped on the floorboard of her 1971 Cadillac Eldorado, according to police and court records. It appeared someone had rummaged through her purse and glove compartment.
Her son, Ronald Greenbaum, now of Sarasota, Fla., said recently his mother was a "human dynamo." The day she was murdered, he said, she was shopping in preparation for a trip to Jamaica the son gave his parents for their 40th wedding anniversary.
"My father called and told me that dinner wasn't on the table when he got home and he knew (something was wrong). ... This is kind of difficult for me, even now," he said, his voice wavering.
The statement Edwards signed said he approached her in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights and asked for change, but she said something "nasty" and spat in his face. So he shot her with a .22-caliber pistol and stole the car, which was found near one of his prior addresses, according to police reports. The bullet caliber in the confession matched the bullets police found in her body, police reports show.
At trial in 1997, Edwards' lawyers called no witnesses, and the jury found him guilty, court records show.
Along with the confession, officers found a thumbprint identical to Edwards' on the inside of the victim's car window, according to police reports. Edwards insists authorities are mistaken about the match.
Even with the print, the discrediting of the confession would weaken the case, said veteran local defense attorney Terry Ekl. He noted that fingerprints vary in significance, and a print in a car is "not like a fingerprint on a knife that's sticking in the person's chest."
Greenbaum's son knows little about Edwards' case but did say one part of the confession was hard to believe.
His mother was too decent, he said, to have responded to a panhandler by insulting him and spitting in his face.
The future
Though there is little indication authorities agree that Edwards should go free, he has plans for his future and doesn't allow for the possibility he'll never leave prison.
He has a bachelor's degree in general studies from Roosevelt University and has started on a graduate degree, the university confirmed. He'd like to go back to school and get his doctorate, he said.
Edwards insists he's not dangerous.
And the fact that local prosecutors say he confessed falsely to one murder 17 years ago, he said, means Ohio authorities need to determine whether they got the wrong man.
dhinkel@tribune.com