Four Heights Four case summary

In what became known as the Ford Heights Four case, Dennis Williams and Verneal
Jimerson were sentenced to death for a double murder they did not commit. Two other
innocent men, Willie Rainge and Kenneth Adams, also were convicted in the case and
sentenced to prison.
The crime occurred in the early morning of May 11, 1978. A recently engaged young white
couple, Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal, were abducted from a Clark Oil Company
filling station in the mostly white Chicago suburb of Homewood where Lionberg worked
as the overnight attendant. Their bodies were found the next day in an abandoned
townhouse in mostly black East Chicago Heights (now Ford Heights). Both had been shot,
and Schmal had been gang-raped.
What would prove to be a false tip from a man named Charles McCraney, who lived near
the murder scene, led to the arrest of Williams and Jimerson. Based on information
provided by McCraney, Cook County Sheriffs officers picked up an intellectually limited
young woman named Paula Gray, who also lived nearby.
On May 16, after being held questioned intermittently for two days, Gray testified before
a grand jury that she held a disposable cigarette lighter burning while Adams, Rainge,
Jimerson, and Williams raped Schmal seven times, after which Williams shoot both
victims with a .38-caliber pistol.
A month later, on June 19, Gray recanted her story at a preliminary hearing, claiming that
her confession to police and grand jury testimony had been coerced. Since Jimerson had
been implicated only by Gray, the charges against him then were dismissed, but Gray was
charged with murder and perjury and brought to trial jointly with the remaining male
defendants Adams, Rainge, and Williams.
The trial was conducted before two juries one for the men, the other for Gray. All four
were convicted, their convictions resting primarily on the testimony of three witnesses
McCraney, who claimed to have seen them near the scene preceding the murders; Michael
Podlecki, a state crime laboratory forensic analyst who claimed that three of several
Caucasian head hairs allegedly recovered from the back seat and trunk of Williamss car
matched the hair of Lionberg and Schmal; and David Jackson, an informant who
claimed to have heard Williams and Rainge talking in jail about how they committed the
crime.
Williams was sentenced to death, Rainge to life, Adams to 75 years, and Gray to 50
years. The convictions initially were affirmed on appeal, but Williams and Rainge won
new trials in 1982 because the lawyer who represented them at trial, Archie B. Weston,
also represented Gray.
Prosecutors then made a deal with Gray under which she would be released in exchange
for testifying against Williams and Rainge at their retrial. As part of the deal, Gray also
agreed to testify against Jimerson, who was then charged, convicted, and sentenced to
death in 1985. Two years later, Williams and Rainge were convicted a second
time. Williams again was sentenced to death, and Rainge to life.

In 1994, the David Jackson, the informant who had testified against the defendants in
their first trial, recanted his testimony in an affidavit prepared by defense investigators.
He said he had lied because prosecutors gave him a deal on charges he was facing at the
time.
In 1995, the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously reversed Jimersons conviction and
ordered a new trial due to witness perjury prosecutors had allowed Gray to lie on the
stand and say that she had not received any benefit for her testimony. Lacking credible
evidence against Jimerson, the Cook County States Attorneys Office agreed to DNA
testing, which prosecutors theretofore had strenuously opposed.
Meanwhile, Northwestern University journalism students working on the case under the
direction of Professor David Protess obtained a recantation from Paula Gray of her
testimony at the Jimerson trial and Williams and Rainge retirals.
More important, the students discovered a police file showing that within a week of the
crime a witness named Marvin Simpson had told the Sheriff's Police they had arrested the
wrong men. Simpson said he knew who committed the crime because he heard shots, saw
four men run away from the scene, and the next day saw them selling items taken from
the robbery of the victims. Simpson had identified the men as Dennis and Ira Johnson,
Arthur (Red) Robinson, and Juan (Johnny) Rodriquez. Simpsons statement had
never been turned over to the defense.
In another important development, an independent forensic re-examination of the hair
evidence showed that the testimony of Michael Podlecki, the state forensic analyst,
purporting to link Williams to the crime had been false.
In 1996, the results of the DNA testing conclusively established the innocence of the Ford
Heights Four and linked the men Marvin Simpson had identified to the crime. One of
them, Dennis Johnson, was by then deceased, but the other three were convicted and
sentenced to prison.
In 1999, Cook County settled lawsuits filed by the innocent men for $36 million at the
time the largest civil rights payment in U.S. history. In 2008, Grays suit against Cook
County also settled for an additional $4 million.
Rob Warden