Who Killed Jeanine Nicarico? A Decade Later, Doubts Persist : Murder: Two men in prison, one of them on Death Row, still deny guilt. A third man says he did it, and many believe him.

The judges have ruled, the juries have spoken, again and again. There should be no more mystery, no more doubts about the shocking murder of one little girl.

But nearly a decade after 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico was raped and killed, questions about the case linger like a terminal illness--always lurking, frequently painful, with no indication of when the end will come.

Who killed Jeanine? Many of those steeped in the case say they know who did it. They say they are positive.

But there is a problem: They point to different murderers.

Consider this conundrum: Two men in prison, one on Death Row, say they are innocent. A double murderer says he is guilty, and several hard-nosed law enforcement experts believe him--the latest a state prosecutor who resigned this spring, saying she wouldn’t help “execute an innocent man.”

“There’s something that’s terribly wrong in this case,” declares Michael Metnick, a defense attorney. “If you put all the facts on a piece of paper . . . and showed them to 100 people, I guarantee you 95% of them would find so many areas of reasonable doubt it would make your head spin.”

Jeanine’s murder has been dissected in four trials, argued up to the U. S. Supreme Court and documented in a 25,000-page record. No end is in sight: It was debated most recently on June 22 in state Supreme Court in yet another appeal.

“It is an extraordinary case where someone is convicted of a crime to which another person has confessed,” said attorney Scott Turow, author of the best-selling novel “Presumed Innocent,” who recently joined the defense.

“That was the first thing that raised my interest,” Turow said. “Studying the record raised my passion.”

That record, prosecutors and Jeanine’s parents insist, is clear.

“People say it’s a weak case,” said Thomas Nicarico, Jeanine’s father. “It mustn’t be that terribly weak if they keep getting convicted.”

Jeanine, a dimple-faced fifth-grader, was home alone with the flu when she was abducted on Feb. 25, 1983. She had been raped and her head bashed in when her body was found two days later on a deserted prairie path.

Three juries in different parts of the state listened, analyzed, discussed the facts and reached one conclusion: Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez killed her.

“It’s not a single jury, some kind of aberration out of left field,” said Richard Stock, first assistant Du Page County state’s attorney.

Twice, though, juries have been hung: The jury in Hernandez’s second trial deadlocked, and the panel that first convicted both men--judgments that an appeals court overturned, saying they should have been tried separately--couldn’t reach a verdict on a third defendant, Stephen Buckley. He never was retried.

Cruz eventually was sentenced to death and Hernandez to 80 years in prison.

At center of the controversy is another man, Brian Dugan, who is serving life for two rapes and murders, one of them involving a 7-year-old girl. He claimed in 1985 that he alone killed Jeanine and provided unsettling details of that day nearly three years earlier.

But he wouldn’t confess in court--and his words couldn’t be used against him--unless prosecutors guaranteed that they would not seek the death penalty.

They refused, noting his inconsistent statements, and suggested that he could have culled details from the trial or news reports.

Now, the government offers a different explanation.

“Dugan is not being truthful when he says he committed the crime alone,” Stock said, adding that evidence from one trial indicates that he was involved in the murder.

The defense contends that Dugan was the sole killer. And what’s unusual is that many traditional adversaries agree, including a prosecutor, former state and local police chiefs, investigators and an assistant attorney general assigned to represent the state in Cruz’s death sentence appeal.

In March, Mary Brigid Kenney urged her then-boss, Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland Burris, to confess error, writing in her resignation: “I realized that I was being asked to help execute an innocent man, and certainly a man who had been grossly denied a right to a fair trial.”

Burris’ response: “It is not for me to place my judgment over a jury, regardless of what I think.”

Seven years earlier, John Sam, one of the first Du Page County sheriff’s investigators on the case, also quit in protest--and testified for the defense.

Authorities got their first break weeks after the murder when a reward was offered and a tipster told authorities that Hernandez knew something about the killing.

Hernandez, who agreed to meet with detectives, told them that Cruz and Buckley also had some knowledge of the murder. The two denied that, but when Buckley was shown a photo of the kind of boot that had kicked in the Nicarico door, he said he owned a pair and didn’t mind giving them to police.

A year later, the three were indicted. But, Sam said, “I just felt we never proved it. It was too heinous of a crime for three guys to do it and keep it a secret. . . . I can’t see three guys going to the electric chair and not ratting on each other.”

In Sam’s view, Hernandez and Cruz were unemployed, uneducated petty hoods who got entrapped in lies hoping to collect the reward. Cruz even test-drove Cadillacs, so confident was he of a windfall.

“I would have loved to have been the big hero,” Sam said. “It would have been easy to pat yourself on the back and say you did a wonderful job when you didn’t.”

But while some have doubts, prosecutor Stock says, “There are just as many, if not more law-enforcement (officials) that have a different opinion.”

“I’m positive that everything we did was correct,” said Sheriff Richard Doria. “None of these guys who are talking, with the exception of Sam . . . know a damn thing about the investigation.”

Jeanine’s parents, who once cited more than 25 errors in Dugan’s story, also don’t believe him.

“(It’s) very intriguing and I can understand how some people can buy into it,” Nicarico said, but “after living through the pros and the cons . . . and listening to it be argued, I don’t believe it.”

“It troubles me that people . . . continue to exploit this,” said Patricia Nicarico, Jeanine’s mother. “These people don’t have all the facts.”

The murder stunned this peaceful white, upper-middle class suburb 40 miles west of Chicago. It was so horrendous, the defense claims, that jurors examining crime photos and witnessing the grieving Nicaricos couldn’t render anything but a guilty verdict.

“This is THE case that our jury system is not capable of handling,” Metnick contends. “A white 10-year-old girl is taken from the safety of her neighborhood in broad daylight. You put two dark-skinned men in front of a jury, a white small town is facing their concerns . . . they’re going to err on the side of the state. . . . In the back of their minds, (they think) ‘Maybe this guy did it.’ They’re just faceless Puerto Ricans.”

The prosecution rejects suggestions of racism, noting that the trials were moved and that minorities were on the juries.

What makes Jeanine’s murder so intriguing is the many shades of gray, the many unanswered questions and the scarcity of hard evidence.

Consider:

* Cruz: He allegedly told deputies of a “vision,” describing a dream resembling many aspects of Jeanine’s abduction-murder. He wasn’t asked about it during a police interview the next day, however, and authorities didn’t write it down for 18 months.

“It’s so ludicrous,” scoffs Larry Marshall, Cruz’s attorney. “It’s the equivalent of saying, ‘I walked past a million dollars in cash. I’ll come by next week and pick it up.’ ”

Other prosecution witnesses said Cruz admitted his involvement in the crime or said he “killed a girl in Aurora.” The defense contends that all are unreliable, noting one was a murderer looking for a deal with prosecutors.

* Hernandez: He purportedly told a cellmate all he did “was hold that little girl down,” according to a detective who overheard the conversation.

Hernandez allegedly told authorities he had been in a car with Cruz and that a girl with a bloody lip was abducted. After his indictment, he reportedly said, “Not me. . . . I only went there to do a burglary.”

The defense says the detective overheard only bits of the conversation, some of it in Spanish. It also says no report was made on the “not me” statement for 45 months.

The defense says Hernandez, whose IQ is in the 70s, was enticed by a box of money that supposedly contained a reward and that despite his claims, he didn’t know the victim’s name or the location of her house or her body.

* Buckley: The key evidence against him was the boot print on the door. In 1986, the FBI said the print probably did not belong to him.

* Dugan: He accurately described Jeanine’s nightshirt, the color of her furniture, the serrated tape used on her head, where it was purchased, and a missing bedsheet. He directed authorities to the Nicarico home and to within 50 feet of where her body was found.

Also, he skipped work that day; a secretary blocks from the Nicarico home remembers him stopping there; tollway workers remember seeing a car similar to Dugan’s--it had a missing hubcap. He also was among a group of men with the genetic traits of the rapist.

“You’d have to know every nitty-gritty detail of the crime and remember it for a couple of years,” said Kane County prosecutor Gary Johnson. “It would be next to an impossible thing to do for anyone, much less a street criminal like Brian Dugan.”

But Dugan’s story was full of inconsistencies: He never saw a sailboat in the driveway. He said he may have kicked in a chain lock, when there was none. He also inaccurately described how Jeanine’s body was found and mistakenly said there was nail polish on her toes.

“There were at least 40 discrepancies (in the police report), six or seven that were major,” said Sheriff Doria. “They were outright misstatements, and the state police took him at face value.”

Authorities haven’t been able to link Dugan with the others except for one night when they were in jail together.

Marshall, Cruz’s attorney, contends that the Dugan discrepancies may be partly due to the time that elapsed from the murder to his confession.

“People are convicted and killed with half as much evidence as they have against Dugan,” he said.

Stock and Nicarico say all these arguments have been presented--and rejected.

“They’re not saying anything they haven’t said before,” Nicarico said. “They’re just getting a new audience to listen.”

But Jed Stone, who represented Hernandez, believes the two convicted men will someday walk free.

“It will take a long time for the system to wrench itself and work through this injustice,” he said. “But it will happen. . . . As long we can keep the balls in the air, slowly, slowly, slowly the truth will come out.”