Chronology of the case of Valentine Harpstrite
Compiled by Rob Warden
Copyright — 2006, Center on Wrongful Convictions Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern University School of Law
September 9, 1928 — Justus Nungesser, an eccentric bachelor farmer about sixty-five years old, is shot several times while chopping wood on his farm near Muscoutah in St. Clair County, Illinois. An itinerant laborer hears the shot and alerts a neighbor of Nungesser’s, Frank Grimmer, who runs to the cornfield and finds Nungesser gasping for breath. Before lapsing into a coma from which he does not recover, Nungesser tells Grimmer that he was shot by two strangers.
November 29, 1928 — Harpstrite, twenty-four-year-old operator of a ’soft-drink parlor? (euphemism for a bar operating in violation of the Eighteenth Amendment) in the town of New Baden, which in Clinton County (adjoining St. Clair County), is arrested for bootlegging, fined $300, and sentenced to ten days in the county jail.
December 5, 1928 — Elmer Linder is arrested in Clinton County and confesses to Sheriff Joseph E. Ragen and State’s Attorney Hugh Murray that he committed the crime with Harpstrite and Raymond Rensing, a New Baden coal miner.
December 6, 1928 — Linder, Harpstrite, and Rensing are interrogated by at the St. Clair County Jail in Bellville. Linder and Rensing confess to Sheriff Charles Aherns, but Harpstrite insists he is innocent.
April 19, 1929 — Sheriff Aherns allegedly offers to release two St. Clair County Jail inmates, Charles F. Pillow and George Shelton, if they will testify falsely that Harpstrite and Rensing made statements while in jail implicating themselves in the Nungesser murder. (Linder and Rensing have by now recanted, claiming that their confessions were physically coerced and that they were false.)
May 10, 1929 — Harpstrite (whose name was misspelled in official records as Harpstreith) is convicted of murder along with Rensing and Linder. Harpstrite and Rensing are sentenced to life, Linder to only fourteen years in prison.
February 6, 1935 — Harpstrite’s first application for executive clemency is denied.
June 27, 1946 — Harpstrite’s second application for executive clemency is denied.
July 1, 1949 — Harpstrite is released on parole.
July 6, 1954 — Harpstrite is discharged from parole.
July 26, 1954 — Governor William G. Stratton restores Harpstrite’s citizenship rights.
July 9, 1959 — Illinois General Assembly amends the Court of Claims Act to create an obligation on the part of the state to compensate wrongfully convicted persons, the prerequisite being a gubernatorial pardon based on innocence.
December 30, 1968 — Governor Samuel H. Shapiro grants Harpstrite a pardon based on innocence.
May 8, 1975 — Illinois Court of Claims rejects Harpstrite’s claim for compensation totaling $35,000, holding that 1959 statute was not retroactive; to be eligible for compensation the claimant must have served at least part of the sentence after the date of the statute’s enactment.
