Did you know there’s an “innocence industry” in Chicago? It’s a “conglomeration of defense lawyers, investigators, a major Chicago-based university (Northwestern), . . . media outlets,” and other assorted players. Its product is innocence—or at least the appearance of innocence—extracted from the convictions of men who may or may not be guilty.
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In other words, what really happened in Paris, Illinois, remains a mystery. Michale Callahan, then a lieutenant with the Illinois State Police, which had spearheaded the murder investigation, was asked by the ISP to review the file when the CBS news program 48 Hours came calling in 2000. Expected to do no more than make sure the state police were ready with answers to the network’s questions, Callahan instead concluded Steidl and Whitlock had been railroaded, and he made sure everyone knew it. “How many times did you try to get this case reopened?” 48 Hours would ask him when they returned to the story in 2005. “Officially, to Springfield, five times,” Callahan replied. He was transferred from investigations to patrol in 2003 after refusing to back off, and in 2005 he retired. In 2009 he published a book about the case, Too Politically Sensitive.
48 Hours asked Callahan: “What Karen said she saw in the parking lot made her afraid, according to her family and friends, who say she was thinking about quitting her job.”
On October 16, Governor Quinn received a letter from Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions—a key player in the “innocence industry” Curry and Pearman are tackling. The letter, urging Quinn to grant the pardon Steidl had first asked for 11 years earlier, noted the support Steidl has received from the media, including a Tribune editorial back in 2006 that said “everything in this case does, indeed, point to Steidl’s innocence.”
The other day Alvarez—Protess’s bête noir—told her office to look into the possibility that Simon is actually innocent and Porter was guilty all along. And now Curry—on behalf of Morgan—is bringing the Porter/Simon debate to to bear on the very different circumstances surrounding Steidl’s hopeful pardon in the Rhoads murders. “When I say Northwestern might be counting on its media allies to have its back,” Curry’s post lecturing the university concluded, “consider the coverage it received for its call for the Steidl pardon this week.” He contrasted the media’s favorable coverage of Steidl’s hopeful pardon to the “complete lack of coverage the Alstory Simon letter has received so far.”
But if that’s the case, I asked him, why do you care one way or the other if Steidl gets pardoned in the deaths of Karen and Dyke Rhoads?
