Who Murdered
The Newlyweds?
(Page 1 of 5)
PARIS, Illinois, Dec. 17, 2005
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Dyke and Karen Rhoads on their wedding day (CBS)
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(CBS) The 1986 wedding
pictures of Dyke and Karen Rhoads show a predictably
joyous young couple, ready for a wonderful life together
in the small town of Paris, Illinois.
Karen Spesard was 24 when they married, and had a job as
an office assistant at a factory; Dyke worked in
landscaping. There was no hint that just months after
their wedding, the lives of Dyke and Karen Rhoads would
come to a violent end.
In the early morning hours of July 6, 1986, a fire
engulfed their home.
“My dad came over at 6 o’clock in the morning. I never
will forget that. And he told me they had been killed,”
remembers Dyke’s brother Tony. “He told me about their
house burning. So we just naturally assumed they died in
the fire, and it wasn’t until two o’clock that afternoon
that we found out they had been stabbed or murdered.”
Justice moved quickly in the town of Paris. Within a
year, two men were arrested and convicted of the crime:
41-year-old Herb Whitlock, a part-time construction
worker and small-time drug dealer, and his pal, Randy
Steidl, 35, who also worked in construction and had
several convictions for assault.
Prosecutors said the motive for the killing was a drug
deal gone bad.
Both men said they were innocent, but no one was
listening. That is, until 1999, when a journalism
professor, David Protess of Northwestern University,
gave his students the Rhoads murder as a class project.
Re-investigate it, he told them. To him at least, the
case didn’t add up.
Correspondent Susan Spencer reports on their cold case
investigation, and its startling outcome, for 48 Hours.
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Protess has led classes on such projects before,
investigating old crimes, and in ten cases they have
produced evidence which helped free innocent men.
The job of finding the truth about the Rhoads case fell
to students Kirsten Searer, Diane Haag, Greg Jonsson and
Krista Larson.
Their professor admitted to having qualms about sending
his students on this mission.
“If that’s the case and the two wrong guys are behind
bars that means the actual killer or killers are roaming
free,” Protess told his students. “Number one, you’re
not going to stay anywhere in the immediate vicinity of
the town. Number two, you’re not going to tell any of
the sources you talked to where you’re staying. Number
three, I don’t want you to stay in the same place more
than two nights in a row.”
For the next nine months, the students would spend most
weekends on the road, making the 180-mile trip from
Chicago to the small town of Paris.
They would plow through police reports and court records
to track down new leads and old witnesses wherever they
could find them.
The students interviewed dozens of people for their
project.
They soon felt almost as if they had known Dyke and
Karen Rhoads.
Over and over again, the students recreated the crime
scene in their minds, going back to that Fourth of July
holiday weekend.
“Dyke and Karen were sleeping in bed. The people came
in. They attacked Dyke first, stabbing him in the back.
Karen had time to wake up and maybe grab her glasses off
her night stand, and then she was stabbed herself,
mostly in the chest,” says Greg Jonsson.
There was blood everywhere but on the suspects.
“This young couple was tragically stabbed over 50 times.
These men would’ve been covered in blood. There would’ve
been blood in their automobiles, there would have been
blood on their clothes. There would have been hair,
fiber, something that linked them to the crime scene.
Nothing did,” says Protess.
Remarkably, the professor’s skepticism is shared even by
Dyke Rhoads’ own family.
“We weren’t 100 percent convinced they were, that they
were the ones who did it,” says Tony.
Their doubt is based on both the lack of physical
evidence and on the supposed motive. The prosecutors
said it was a drug deal gone bad, a theory Tony will not
accept. But Dyke had met Whitlock half a dozen times,
according to the testimony of a friend who had bought
cocaine from Whitlock.
Tony says his brother Dyke was an occasional pot smoker
and that Karen never used any drugs. “There’s a big
difference between somebody who’s an occasional pot
smoker and somebody who gets involved in with a drug
deal that’s gone bad, that’s going cost you your life,”
says Tony.
The students also doubt the drug deal theory, but
finding holes in this case wasn’t as easy as it first
seemed, because the juries heard from two people who
said they had actually been there: eyewitnesses.
Who Murdered The
Newlyweds?
(Page 2 of 5)
PARIS, Illinois, Dec. 17, 2005
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Dyke and Karen Rhoads on their wedding day (CBS)
(CBS)
The students approached their assignment by immersing
themselves in the little community of Paris.
“My feeling was that the way an investigation like this
begins is by becoming part of the culture of the town,”
says Protess.
Because understanding Paris, Illinois, might be key to
understanding who killed Dyke and Karen Rhoads, and
whether the men convicted of this crime really are
guilty.
Weekend after weekend, the students struggled with their
investigation, knocking on doors and talking with the
locals.
But Michael McFatridge, who prosecuted the Rhoads case,
thinks the students were wasting their time. “I think
when the dust settles they’ll be very disappointed
because, in fact, Whitlock and Steidl are guilty. I
mean, they’re the murderers.”
But in 1986, the young prosecutor had had a tough time
building a case against Whitlock and Steidl.
The students quickly learned that the investigation into
the murders of Dyke and Karen Rhoads had gone absolutely
nowhere for two months until an eyewitness stepped
forward with an amazing tale. Darrell
Herrington claimed that he actually had seen Whitlock
and Steidl at the scene of the crime.
And who was Darrell Herrington? He has been described to
48 Hours as the town drunk.
“At the time that would be, you know, a fair assessment.
He was a big drinker,” says McFatridge.
In a taped statement to police, Herrington said he woke
up in Randy Steidl’s car, outside the Rhoads’ home.
“Apparently somebody was damn scared about something,”
Herrington told police. “I could hear a woman screaming
and a man saying please don’t hurt me or kill me, or
something like that.”
After using his credit card to jimmy open the lock,
Herrington told police he went inside and up the stairs,
where Steidl confronted him.
Herrington told police Steidl had blood on him and also
had a knife. “Then I looked up and saw a body on the
bed,” Herrington said.
“He knew certain things, at least in our minds, that
were not things that the town drunk would know,” says
McFatridge.
Town drunk or not, Herrington was key to the
investigation, but without a confession, McFatridge was
stuck. “We were not going to indict or charge somebody
until we had a reasonable chance of conviction. We had
one eyewitness with no corroborative evidence.”
But five months later that changed when, incredibly, a
second eyewitness came forward with that much-needed
corroborating evidence. Debra Reinbolt, a self-described
drug addict and alcoholic, had told police she had not
only seen it all, she had provided a five-inch knife,
and even helped with the killing.
By the time the students began their investigation,
Reinbolt claimed she was clean and sober. But in 1986,
she says, “I always drank, I was always drugged.”
So what happened on the night of July 6, 1986?
“A big mess. Everything went wrong. I mean they were
just going to go down there try and scare Dyke, and then
things just got out of hand,” says Reinbolt.
Reinbolt says she knew Whitlock and Steidl through her
drug use and claims that she saw them both stabbing Dyke
Rhoads.
What was happening to Karen at that point?
“She’s trying to get off the bed, and I had went over
there and was telling her that everything would be
okay,” says Reinbolt.
Reinbolt says she held down Karen Rhoads while they
stabbed her and also claims that her husband’s knife was
used in the killings.
Reinbolt’s story impressed police, especially when she
accurately described a broken lamp found in the Rhoads’
bedroom.
Two separate juries believed both the eyewitness
accounts, and in 1987, despite their unwavering protests
of innocence, the two men were convicted. Herb Whitlock
got life and Randy Steidl received the death penalty.
Steidl says he had no involvement whatsoever in the
crime and says he wished he knew who killed the young
couple.
Whitlock also maintains his innocence. “I had a little
belief that there was justice in the system. I was
pretty naïve. I’m not naïve any more,” he says.
Although prosecutor McFatridge had recommended no jail
time for the two eyewitnesses, Debra Reinbolt served two
years in prison for concealing a homicide.
Darrell Herrington was never charged, but months into
their investigation, the Northwestern students found new
evidence that cast serious doubts on the testimony of
the state’s two star witnesses.
Who Murdered The
Newlyweds?
(Page 3 of 5)
PARIS, Illinois, Dec. 17, 2005
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Dyke and Karen Rhoads on their wedding day (CBS)
(CBS)
The burned-out bedroom of Dyke and Karen Rhoads was a
gruesome crime scene, but it produced no forensic
evidence at all implicating the two men convicted of
murder. The eyewitness testimony that was apparently
enough for the juries wasn’t enough for the students.
“It did not happen the way the state’s witnesses said
that it did,” says Krista Larson.
For one thing, they doubted Darrell Herrington’s story,
which had put the murders at shortly after midnight.
They tracked down witnesses who challenged that
timeline. One had been a neighbor of the Rhoads, Ben
Light.
“You would think that with the house located just 100
yards away, we would have heard something,” says Light.
“This crime occurred much later in the night, at a time
when Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock were nowhere near
the scene,” says Protess.
And there’s one other thing that doesn’t quite add up.
Herrington told police that after the murders, he was
standing by the Rhoads’ garage with Randy Steidl. But
Reinbolt also says she stood by the garage with Steidl.
Remarkably, the two eyewitnesses never say they saw each
other.
“It could have happened that way, matter of fact, must
have happened that way,” says former prosecutor Michael
McFatridge. “That argument was presented at trial to two
different juries by two different defense attorneys. The
juries found the defendants guilty.”
McFatridge may not find this odd, but his star witness,
Debra Reinbolt, sure did. “I thought, somebody’s made
this up, somebody’s lost their mind, this is the town
drunk. There is no way this man was there,” she says.
But what about Reinbolt’s own story? Her testimony was
key to the guilty verdict. After all, she said she had
seen the murders and even said she helped.
In 1996, nine years after the convictions, Reinbolt
matter-of-factly stated in a sworn statement to Randy
Steidl’s lawyer that she had lied on the stand.
Asked by the lawyer what parts of her story were untrue,
Reinbolt said on tape, “Oh, I don’t know that Randy was
there, I don’t know that Herbie was there.”
As for those impressive details she had provided about
what she had seen inside the house, Reinbolt told the
lawyer she had actually never been inside the Rhoads
house.
But in a head-spinning reversal, Debra Reinbolt later
insisted that she actually was lying on the tape, that
her original eyewitness account of being at the scene of
the crime was and is true. Is it? Well, it’s pretty hard
to know. Over the years, Reinbolt has changed her story
more than half a dozen times.
Why has she changed her story so many times? “Basically
wanting to get out of this, just wanting it over. The
bottom line is I can’t change a story that’s true,” she
says.
Bill Clutter, an investigator working on the Steidl
case, thinks he has proof, beyond her various accounts,
that Reinbolt never saw the murders at all.
Remember that broken lamp?
“The prosecution used the lamp as the centerpiece of
their evidence, corroborating Debra Reinbolt’s account
of what happened this night,” says Clutter. “It made her
believable.”
Reinbolt testified the lamp was broken when she got to
the Rhoads’ bedroom, before fire tore through the home.
After the fire, black soot covered the crime scene.
But Clutter says the broken inside parts of the lamp
were white. He says had the lamp been broken before the
fire, there would have been soot on the pieces.
In the same 1996 statement in which she denied being at
the crime scene, Reinbolt also said police fed her the
information about the lamp.
“And they would come up with, ‘Well, there was a broken
vase or broken lamp there.’ And then I’d say ‘Well,
okay. So there was,’” Reinbolt said on tape.
For the students, it all added up to more than a
reasonable doubt, especially when they started turning
up other witnesses the police never had talked to.
One of those witnesses, a woman, pointed the students in
an entirely new direction.
The woman let the students videotape her but was so
frightened she asked 48 Hours to conceal her identity.
“I noticed two men standing opposite of the street light
by Dyke and Karen’s house. Now what caught my eye was
they had trench coats on in July. And it was very, very
hot, and I wondered why they had trench coats on,” she
said.
She said she saw them around 9 o’clock the night before
the murders. “And one of them was a big guy with blond
hair, and the other guy was small-framed and looked like
he had dark hair. But they were just standing there
looking toward Dyke and Karen’s house.”
The woman thinks she saw the same two men the next
night, the night of the murders. “This car started
coming around, and it was white with a gold stripe down
it. And it had Florida license plates. It would just go
by, turn in front of Dyke and Karen’s house, stop. And I
seen them looking, you know? And then take off. They did
this about ten times, just, I mean, continuously. Why
would anyone be doing that?”
Across town, the students also tracked down a gas
station attendant who worked the night shift and who
remembered selling a lot of extra gas to a man driving a
car with Florida plates. He told them he had sold
someone 21 gallons of gasoline at 3 a.m. that morning,
in seven three-gallon cans.
An hour later, the Rhoads’ house was ablaze. Paris
police had interviewed the gas attendant, but the
Florida connection went nowhere. The police never even
knew about the other witness, who over the years did not
volunteer the information.
But what would the killers' motive be? The students came
up with a new theory, one that focused on Karen, not
Dyke.
“Karen had told several family members and friends that
she had seen something at work that had scared her,”
says Kirsten Searer.
Karen may have seen something in the parking lot of the
pet food plant where she worked, an incident involving
other people from the factory.
“She had seen large amounts of money and a gun put in a
trunk that was on its way to Chicago,” says Kristen.
According to a friend the students interviewed, Karen
was very worried.
Protess wonders if there could be a link between what
Karen saw and the shadowy men from Florida.
Who Murdered The
Newlyweds?
(Page 4 of 5)
PARIS, Illinois, Dec. 17, 2005
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Dyke and Karen Rhoads on their wedding day (CBS)
(CBS)
The Northwestern students didn’t know it at the time,
but Michale Callahan, a seasoned investigator, also
would conclude that the men in prison for the Rhoads
murders were innocent.
Callahan’s career with the Illinois State Police spanned
nearly two-and-a-half decades. He was promoted three
times over the years, and in 2000, made lieutenant. He
was asked to review the Paris murder investigation
shortly before 48 Hours was to air a program about it.
Callahan says he had no idea what he was getting into.
“This is by far the worst investigation I’ve ever seen!”
he says.
In the case file, Callahan says he found hundreds of
contradictions or problems: “Evidence or information or
leads that weren’t followed that should’ve been
followed. Again, contradictions of what people said in
these reports.”
“The case file basically said that this was over a bad
drug deal. It wasn’t over drugs. I mean, you look at
Dyke and Karen. They had $200 in their savings account
at the time of their deaths. They’re not major narcotics
traffickers by any means,” says Callahan.
Like the students, Callahan was interested in those
stories of what Karen may have stumbled on at work --
not just large sums of money that seemed out of place,
but also a machine gun.
Callahan wondered if someone at Karen’s job knew
something about the murder – a co-worker, or even her
boss, Bob Morgan, a publicity-shy businessman. It was
something the original investigators hadn’t fully
pursued.
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.
But if Karen did see money and a machine gun, what did
it mean? Was there any connection to where she worked?
Her old boss, Bob Morgan, refused to speak directly with
48 Hours, but he denies any involvement in the murders.
And he recently told a local newspaper that, to clear
his name, he would welcome an investigation.
But Callahan says that in 2000, no one in the state
police was welcoming a new investigation and that in
fact, when he tried to pursue one, his superiors yanked
the rug out from under him.
“I was told that I could not reopen the Rhoads case.
That it was too politically sensitive. I could not touch
it,” he says.
No one ever explained what “too politically sensitive”
meant, but Callahan’s investigation did reveal that Bob
Morgan was a big campaign contributor to some very
high-powered Illinois politicians.
Callahan says he tried to get the case reopened five
separate times, but that nothing happened.
Whether Callahan’s theory of why his investigation was
blocked is right or wrong, two years ago he was
transferred out of investigations, which ended his
pursuit of the Paris murders for good.
But Callahan refused to give up. Instead, he sued the
Illinois State Police, claiming they had transferred him
to shut him up, not only about the Rhoads murders, but
also about reports he’d made to internal affairs,
alleging inappropriate conduct by superiors.
The case against the state police went to federal court.
Callahan argued that his superiors muzzled him, and
violated his right to free speech, in part because he
was trying to investigate any possible connections
between Karen’s co-workers or Morgan and the Rhoads
murders.
Callahan, now retired, found his vindication earlier
this year, when he was awarded $360,000. A jury agreed
that he had been punished for just trying to do his job.
“People come to us for the truth,” says Callahan. “We
should always try to do the right thing.”
The Illinois State Police aren’t saying anything about
Bob Morgan – in fact, they’re not talking about this
case at all. But just last month, Morgan took a very
unusual step and voluntarily submitted to a lie detector
test about the Rhoads murders.
Morgan hired Fred Hunter, a well-respected polygraph
expert. “Mr. Morgan had come to a conclusion that he
didn’t want these random rumors floating around,” Hunter
says.
“Well, the results basically show that he had no
involvement in directing anyone to kill Dyke and Karen
Rhoads or being present in their home when they were
stabbed. His polygraph showed that he was being
truthful,” says Hunter.
Morgan hopes the polygraph will put to rest all
suspicion of him. But even if it does, it changes
nothing for Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock.
“It’s my opinion that they were framed,” he says.
But fortunes are about to change, with a development
that the students, the cop, and the prisoners all have
worked long and hard for – and never thought they’d see.
Who Murdered The
Newlyweds?
(Page 5 of 5)
PARIS, Illinois, Dec. 17, 2005
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Dyke and Karen Rhoads on their wedding day (CBS)
(CBS)
The Northwestern students graduated five years ago,
feeling as if they had left one course with an
incomplete grade.
“We left this unfinished business, but there was nothing
that we could do,” says Kirsten Searer. “There were
times after we first graduated I just wanted to get back
in my car and go back to Paris,” adds Krista Larson.
They thought they had done the impossible, finding new
witnesses, new evidence. Enough, they thought, to lead
to a new police investigation.
But Herb Whitlock and Randy Steidl stayed right where
they had been for more than a decade: in prison.
The student sleuths began their careers in journalism.
Then, five years after they began working on the case,
came the story the students wished they had been able to
write.
In a remarkable reversal of fortune, a federal judge
ruled that Randy Steidl’s original attorney had made a
big mistake in not challenging the credibility of the
two “eyewitnesses.”
All charges were dropped, and Steidl, once on death row,
was now a free man.
“I’m glad the ceiling in my home is high enough to
accommodate how high – how high I jumped,” remembers
Protess, laughing.
As Steidl left the prison, two of the former students
showed up to meet him, Greg Jonsson and Kirsten Searer.
Steidl says he was surprised to see them. “I was, I was.
I’m really happy that David Protess and those kids got
involved,” he says.
But Kirsten Searer says someone was missing. “You just
couldn’t help feeling guilty for being there when Herb
(Whitlock) was still in prison.”
While Steidl’s case was heard by a federal judge,
Whitlock’s case has stayed in the state system, where
his appeals have been heard repeatedly, and repeatedly
denied.
“I finally got a real judge in federal court who
actually read the record for the very first time that, I
believe, in 15, 16 years had ever been looked at,” says
Steidl.
After Steidl’s success, Whitlock tried again, asking a
state judge to overturn his conviction based on the same
issues of questionable evidence and inadequate legal
counsel. But the judge dealt Whitlock a stunning blow,
ruling that his lawyer did an adequate job and that the
eyewitnesses, on the issues that mattered, could be
believed.
“Which means we have one of the most horrible
miscarriages of justice in our state’s history where,
based on the same pathetic evidence, one man could be
free while Herb Whitlock languishes in prison for the
rest of his life. And that would just be a tragedy
beyond words,” says Protess.
Steidl says he knows the situation could just as easily
have been reversed. He says he thinks about that a lot,
and only hopes that, somehow, Herb Whitlock will
eventually also be free.
Meanwhile, Steidl struggles to re-establish his life. He
has a new job at a local factory and a determination to
fit in, learning about all the changes that have
happened in the last 17 years.
“I am still adjusting on a daily basis. It’s a
struggle,” says Steidl.
Dyke Rhoads’ family does not understand how the same
evidence can free one man and keep another in prison,
and they say there can be no closure until they know
what really happened on that hot July night so long ago.
“It’s just not something you’re able to be at peace with
all,” says Dyke’s sister, Andrea.
“It’s like an open sore that just doesn’t heal. The
truth is still out there in my view,” says his brother,
Tony.
“And I think it will be found someday,” Andrea adds.
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