Julie Rea Harper Case Chronology
Compiled by Ayse Tuker
Copyright © 2006, Center on Wrongful Convictions
Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern University School of Law
June 25, 1993 — Tommy Lynn Sells is sentenced to an indeterminate term of two to ten years in prison for a knife attack on a twenty-year-old woman in her home in Charleston, West Virginia.
September 3, 1994 — Julie Rea Kirkpatrick is divorced from her husband, Leonard Kirkpatrick.
March 7, 1996 — Leonard Kirkpatrick is awarded residential custody of their nine-year-old son, Joel Kirkpatrick.
May 1997 — Tommy Lynn Sells is released from prison in Moundsville, West Virginia.
October 13, 1997 — Ten-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick is stabbed to death in his mother’s home in Lawrenceville, Illinois.
December 31, 1999 — Thirteen-year-old Kaylene Harris is stabbed to death and a companion, eleven-year-old Krystal Surles, is wounded by a knife-wielding man in Del Rio, Texas.
January 2, 2000 — Sells makes a tape-recorded confession to the Del Rio crime and approximately fifty others, although not the Kirkpatrick crime, to a Val Verde County, Texas, Sheriff’s Lieutenant Larry Pope and Texas Ranger John Allen.
September 2000 — Sells is sentenced to death for the Del Rio crime.
October 12, 2000 — A Lawrence County grand jury indicts Julie Rea for her son’s murder and she is taken into custody in Monroe County, Indiana.
December 15, 2000 — Rea, an Indiana University Ph.D. candidate in psychology, waives extradition to Illinois in exchange for an agreement under which she is to be released on $500,000 bond.
August 23, 2001 — Julie Rea marries Mark Harper.
September 12, 2001 — Harper wins a change of venue to Wayne County, Illinois. The state agrees to provide $2,500 to hire a defense investigator.
February 21, 2002 — The Harper trial opens in Wayne County before Lawrence County Circuit Court Judge Robert M. Hopkins and a jury of six men and six women.
March 4, 2002 — Even though there is no direct evidence of Harper’s guilt, the jury finds her guilty. Her bond is revoked and she is taken into custody.
March 19, 2002 — Judge Hopkins sentences Harper to sixty-five years in prison.
June 22, 2002 — In a letter to Diane Fanning, a writer researching a true crime book, Sells writes that he committed the murder of Joel Kirkpatrick.
July 23, 2002 — Fanning visits Sells in jail in Texas where he was being held and he describes the Kirkpatrick murder in some detail.
February 28, 2003 — Allen Wolf and Robert Bunting, private attorneys from Michigan, file a direct appeal for Harper in the Fifth District Illinois Appellate Court.
Summer 2003 — The Downstate Illinois Innocence Project begins an investigation with the goal of filing a clemency petition for Harper and the Center on Wrongful Convictions agrees to represent Harper.
September 23, 2003 — Bill Clutter and Larry Golden, of the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project, announce at a Springfield press conference that they have “compelling new evidence corroborating [Sell’s] confession.”
October 23, 2003 — Author Diane Fanning holds a Springfield press conference describing Sells’s confession to the Kirkpatrick crime.
November 6, 2003 — Sells confesses once more to the Kirkpatrick murder, this time to Illinois law enforcement officials.
June 24, 2004 — The Fifth District Appellate Court vacates Harper’s conviction and remands her case for a new trial based on procedural error.
Early July 2004 — Ronald S. Safer, a partner in the Chicago law firm of Schiff Hardin LLP, enters the case, partnering with the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
July 22, 2004 — Harper is released on $750,000 bond pending retrial.
September 9, 2005 — The Lawrence County Circuit Court agrees that Harper is entitled to a change of venue but does not name a location.
October 4, 2005 — Clinton County is selected as the venue for the new trial and Hamilton County Circuit Court Judge Barry L. Vaughan is selected to preside.
March 10, 2005 — Over the objection of prosecutors, Judge Vaughan rules that Sells’s statements are admissible at the Harper retrial.
July 11, 2006 — Jury selection begins.
July 26, 2006 — The jury finds Julie Rea Harper not guilty.
