3 Inmates Freed After Students Probe Sentences

CHICAGO —  It started as a class project for three college journalism students: Take another look at a real-life crime and see whether the right people were punished.

The assignment took the students and their professor on a six-month odyssey from the campus of Northwestern University to crack houses and prisons across Illinois.

It ended Friday--Graduation Day--when three men who had spent 18 years in prison for murder were released based on DNA evidence and the dogged efforts of the class group.

“That four people are going to be walking out of--I want to call it a hellhole--where they’ve been sitting for 18 years, and to know you had some direct impact on that is a good feeling,” said Stacey Delo, one of the students.

The inmates, Kenneth Adams, Willie Rainge and Dennis Williams, had maintained their innocence in the 1978 murders of a gas station worker and his fiancee. Twice, juries decided otherwise.

Six months ago, professor David Protess, who specializes in investigating possible wrongful convictions, wrote details of four cases on the chalkboard in his investigative reporting class.

One case was included at the urging of a man executed last year. Hours before his death, the man made Protess promise to do his best to save the life of a fellow death row inmate: Williams. His was the case Delo and fellow seniors Laura Sullivan and Stephanie Goldstein chose for their class project.

Williams, Adams and Rainge were convicted of killing Larry Lionberg and Carol Schmal, who had been abducted from the suburban Homewood gas station where Lionberg worked. Schmal was raped, then both were shot in the head. Rainge was sentenced to life, Adams to 75 years. Williams and a fourth man, Verneal Jimerson, were sent to death row; Jimerson recently won an appeal and is free on bail.

Legwork and determination led the women across the city to Ford Heights, known as East Chicago Heights when Adams, Rainge and Williams lived there.

They spoke to Paula Gray, whose testimony helped convict the three men and Jimerson. Gray had told police that she and the men killed Lionberg and Schmal, but she changed that story so often she eventually went to prison for perjury and murder. Gray told the students she was pressured into testifying against the others.

The students also found Marvin Simpson, who said he knew the real killers and told authorities so just six days after the crime. But the police records of his interview appeared “sanitized,” Protess said.

Finally, in an interview in a southern Illinois prison, convicted murderer Ira Johnson told the Northwestern team that he, his now-dead brother and two other men killed Schmal and Lionberg. Another man named by Simpson and others, Arthur “Red” Robinson, also signed a statement that said he was an accomplice. The fourth man named by Johnson has not been found.

The discoveries persuaded prosecutors to agree to DNA tests on semen found in Schmal. Prosecutors said the results showed that none of the men committed the rape.

As the students and their teacher watched in court Friday, Judge Thomas Fitzgerald ordered the men released with electronic monitoring while officials consider dropping the charges. The judge turned down the convicts’ request to attend the women’s graduation, saying security could not be arranged.