Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 249

nn INSIDE SECTION 2 DuPage Briefing 3 About DuPage 9 DuPage overnight 2 Metro State roundup 12 14 Obituaries 14, 15 Weather 13 sift. i -1. twfJuy i wi fcfcl Newsfrom DUPAGE COUNTY aon uifi reports from around the region. Thursday, December 12, 1996 Awlwantaess alead in Cim case Eric Zorn 'N 111 wm I 1 I 1 -J 1 i Outsider Kunkle set to announce indictments By Janan Hanna Tribune Staff Writer One year ago, Chicago attorney William Kunkle set up shop in a small office in the chief judge's complex on the second floor of the DuPage County Courthouse in Wheaton. Each week, the robust and straight-talking lawyer would arrive in his white Buick, joined by a couple of assistants and enough Diet Coke to keep him sated for the day.

Keeping pretty much to himself and the four other profes- Kunkle's work began in November 1995, when he was appointed as a special state's attorney a title that came with awesome power, $250 an hour (Kunkle's "government" rate, he said) and no supervision. He kept a low profile in the DuPage County Courthouse, where he usually went once a week when the grand jury was impaneled in June. "We tried, intentionally, not to come in contact with each other," said Chief Judge Michael See Kunkle, Page 2 Ford Heights 4 case also calls for special prosecutor ment is about to get more awkward, Kunkle said. That's because on Thursday, the results of his investigation will be revealed. Kunkle will hold a news conference where he is expected to announce that the grand jury has approved indictments against three former prosecutors and four current sheriffs officers for their handling of the 1983 murder case.

"I've been a strong supporter of police and prosecutors and I still am," Kunkle said in an interview Wednesday. "But the question of whether an individual prosecutor or policeman followed the rules is every bit as important as supporting vigorous law enforcement. Aggressive prosecution doesn't mean suspending the Constitution." What by his own characterization was an awkward assign sionals working with him, Kunkle, 55, tended to his job as a special prosecutor in charge of scrutinizing allegations of wrongdoing in the investigation of the 1983 slaying of Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville. It was an awkward task for Kunkle, a former prosecutor himself who personally knew, or knew of, many of the targets and witnesses who were the subject of the investigation. 0 nly seven? That's my first response to reports that seven current and former DuPage County authorities will be indicted by a grand jury Abuser convicted of murder Mother's boyfriend beat child to death Thursday on criminal charges relating to the wantonly bungled prosecution in the 1983 Jeanine Nicarico murder case.

Given how blatant this miscarriage of justice was and how long it went on, far more than seven officials either knew or ought to have known that the dubious machinations of the state were aimed at protecting a lie and putting innocent people to death. We call that aim "attempted murder" when private citizens undertake it And for all that I have been critical of DuPage's sorry record of deception and denial in the Nicarico case, I do give officials there credit for requesting the appointment of a special prosecutor last year who impaneled a grand jury to try to get to the bottom of what Si 'r. 5 mm 4 WETN-FM becomes a golden oldie went wrong and who was responsible. As in DuPage, external oversight is clearly called for. Cook County authorities, meanwhile, have been nonchalant about bringing to account the perpetrators of their most recently Tribune photos by John Dziehan Tracy Hayes, public service director at WETN-FM, picks through compact discs in the station's music vault.

Wheaton College station to mark 50th anniversary By Art Barnum Tkibune Staff Whiter Deciding that the defendant "knew what he was doing" when he abused a 2-year-old boy, Judge Peter Dockery on Wednesday found Augustin Acosta guilty of the child's murder. "You are guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt," Dockery told Acosta, who glanced at neither the victim's family nor his own as he was led out of the DuPage County courtroom in Wheaton and back to jail. "He knew his acts would cause strong possibility of great bodily harm," Dockery said. Because prosecutors had decided not to seek the death penalty, which is an option for people convicted of killing children, Acosta could be sentenced up to life in prison. Acosta, of West Chicago, was arrested in March after Tyler Ler ma-Miller, the son of Ann Marie Lerma, stopped breathing and paramedics were called.

Paramedics noticed numerous bruises and other injuries on the child as they took him to Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, where he died. An autopsy found the boy had many injuries, both internally and externally, and the DuPage coroner's office ruled the cause of death was multiple blunt trauma. See Boy, Page 2 01 i ByJeffCoen Special to the Tribune It has been nearly 50 years since students took the controls that were stuffed into a closet under the organ pipes of a Wheaton College chapel and put a school radio station on the air for the first time. The station, now known as WETN-FM. celebrates its golden anniversary in January.

Wheaton communications professor Edwin Hollatz arrived at the school as program adviser for the station in 1953, and he remembers the humble early years of the first radio station in DuPage County. "The students definitely had a pioneering spirit, because they were on the cutting edge," Hollatz said. "They were moving into new terri- Gone are the days of makeshift controls at the station. tory and plowing the ground for others to follow. It was a very significant enterprise for that time." The sugges- INSIDE i i i exposed travesty, the botched investigation and wrongful prosecution related to the 1978 slayings of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal.

In that south suburban case, as DNA evidence and witness testimony brought to light just this year proved conclusively, a group of innocent men now known as the Ford Heights Four were arrested, tried and convicted. Two of them were sent to Death Row. The men were exonerated and freed in July, three other men were indicted, and then-Cook County State's Atty. Jack O'Malley issued an extraordinary public apology: "I am sorry to these defendants personally and on behalf of the criminal justice system," he said. "When I say, 'I'm sorry, I know those words are inadequate." Just so.

"Sorry" works for honest error, but there is much about the Ford Heights case that suggests dishonest error aggressive, cynical negligence and disregard for the law by those sworn to uphold it. It starts with the interrogation of Paula Gray, a woman who we now know did not witness the crime and had nothing to do with it, but who became an "eyewitness" spouting telling, incriminating details after a team of Cook County sheriff's investigators and an assistant state's attorney got through grilling her shortly after the crime. How? How did she know how many shots were fired, where those shots hit and the exact position and location of the victims' bodies? These were not lucky guesses. Someone fed that information to her and persuaded her to regurgitate it several times (though she alternately and ultimately recanted). Who? Questions continue about the testimony of Charles McCraney, a man who lived across a courtyard from the crime scene.

When he first contacted investigators, he said he'd heard and seen a suspicious commotion involving the original suspects between 1 and 3 a.m. the morning of the slayings and he i listed the automobiles he'd seea But as things went along, lo, he added another car to his tale the same color and make as one owned by an original suspecthe moved the time of the ruckus back to 3:15 a.m. the earliest the slayings could have occurred and an "unknown subject" he'd seen breaking a streetlight suddenly acquired a most convenient name How did this happen? Then, less than a week after the killings, investigators interviewed a new witness with a powerful story implicating a wholly different set of suspects than the quartet then (and for most of the next 18 years) in custody. That lead, which would have led to the men recently charged, was not pursued. Why? Four of the eight sheriff's investigators in the case have retired, but the other four including the two who mishandled the key lead are still on active duty.

An "internal review" conducted recently for current Sheriff Michael Sheahan cleared the men of wrongdoing, but, as in DuPage, external oversight is clearly called for. The county prosecutors who first oversaw and may have abetted all this have moved on (one is now representing a member of the DuPage Seven), but the office's long involvement in the case demands that the elected state's attorney also step aside and call for a special prosecutor. O'Malley after cooperating creditably in the clearing of the four scapegoats did not do so in his final months, so now it's up to newly elected State's Atty. Dick Devine. Devine has been in office less than two weeks and "has had no time to talk about it," said a spokesman Wednesday.

He should find the time. It's never too early to start in setting things right flit v. V. t-, VtjV WhP ve-- A- 4 1 jmit wr tion in 1946 of a station to be used for the training of students was carried out by the school's physics department early in 1947. Beginning AM broadcast as WHON, the station was on the air only two to three hours a day, with a range that barely exceeded the boundaries of the campus.

Hollatz, who still provides voice training for Wheaton students in radio- and television-announcing classes, said the station operated as a window on the school during its first few years. It aired music and chapel services each day from a station control room in a storage closet in Pierce Chapel, with a small studio under the chapel platform. The station eventually adopted the call letters WETN, began staying on the air longer and added news, live drama and See Radio, Page 2 L. U. -w Cf jr-iO fS; A Meigs shift? Chicago Aid.

Burton Natarus says the state legally can take Meigs. Page 12 Shot across the bow Downstate utility decries Edison's deregulation plan. Page 6 i fcswttk wfj Station manager Dave Houk (from left), production director Jon Peterson and morning show host Kerry McGee work in a WETN studio on the Wheaton College campus. County probes T-shirt sales at Oakbrook Terrace auto shows Mayor, aldermen allege that $3,700 is unaccounted for by organizers of the events that Valle suggested were covered by the T-shirt revenues. "The inarguable fact is that taxpayer money is missing, and we have one question: Where did it go?" Flanagan said.

"There was no authorization, no receipts and no concrete evi; dence that the money was spent on anything, but the shirts were sold, and somebody made See T-shirts, Page 10 Flanagan alleges that for the last several years at the car shows, organizers have, without City Council authorization, sold T-shirts that were paid for by the city's Tourism Department and intended for free distribution. The complaint claims that $1,600 in sales cannot be accounted for from shows last June and August, and $2,100 from shows in 1995 remains By Bob Goldsborough Special to the Tribune The DuPage County state's attorney's office is investigating a complaint that Oakbrook Terrace officials cannot account for $3,700 generated over the last two years from sales of T-shirts during city-sponsored car shows. A complaint filed last month by Mayor William Kallas and Aldermen Arlene Chval and Joe unexplained. Show organizers, including longtime Oakbrook Terrace Aid. John Valle, have called the charges politically motivated and said that any revenue from the T-shirt sales was poured into other car show-related expenses, such as Hula-Hoops and camera film.

But Flanagan said it appears the city wound up paying many of the expenses fc, MK ffl.