Before daybreak on an October morning in 1997, 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick was murdered in the Lawrenceville, Illinois home of his mother, Julie Rea, a PhD student at Indiana University. Five years later, a Wayne County jury found Rea (also known as Julie Rea Harper) guilty of the crime. She was sentenced to 65 years in prison.
In 2004, Tommy Lynn Sells, a serial killer who committed similar crimes in Missouri and Texas, confessed that he had broken into what he presumed to be Harper’s home, taken a knife from a butcher block in the kitchen, stabbed a little boy to death, and scuffled with a woman. Those details were strikingly similar to Rea’s account of the crime, and the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project developed evidence indicating Sells had been in the area at the time of the crime. After the Sells confession — although not as a result of it — the Illinois Appellate Court reversed Rea’s conviction and remanded the case for retrial, holding only that state law had been violated by the appointment of special prosecutors in the case.
Rea was released on bond, and the Center on Wrongful Convictions assembled a pro bono team led by Ronald S. Safer, managing partner of Schiff Hardin LLP, to represent her. A change of venue was granted to Clinton County, where the case was again tried in 2006. The jury heard a tape of the Sells confession, which the prosecution contended was false. But in addition to the confession, the defense adduced extensive forensic evidence strongly indicating, as Rea had contended from the beginning, that an intruder had killed Joel and attacked her. The evidence established that Rea had suffered extensive injuries that could not have been self-inflicted. The jury found the defense evidence persuasive, and returned a verdict of not guilty. — Rob Warden
