THE NATION - News from April 10, 2009

As he walked out of prison a free man last month, Jessie Rankins barely greeted his wife, exchanging only a few words without kissing or hugging her. It was their fourth wedding anniversary, and he hadn’t seen her in 2 1/2 years.

“I’ll feel better when I see my dog,” he said a short time later.

Rankins isn’t a household name, but his crime was among the most notorious murders in Chicago history.

Just a scrawny boy in 1994, he and a friend abducted 5-year-old Eric Morse, dangled the screaming boy out a 14th-floor window at a public housing high-rise and dropped him to his death. Eric had refused to steal candy for them, prosecutors said.

Rankins, then 10, and codefendant Tykeece Johnson, 11, became the state’s youngest inmates, growing up in custody. In recent years, they quietly emerged from prison -- only to return again and again. With Rankins’ release March 6, both are free again, facing seemingly bleak futures. They’ve gone years without the counseling some say they desperately needed, and they possess limited education and job skills.

In extensive interviews, the two recently talked about their regret over Eric’s death and how disorienting it was to be freed to a world they no longer knew.

Rankins, 25, has never had a driver’s license, never been on the Internet, never held a real job except the month he spent stuffing newspapers with ad inserts.

“Everything was set up for me to fail again once I came home,” said Johnson, 26, who is unemployed and living with his girlfriend and five children in a run-down South Side apartment, surviving on food stamps and public assistance.

Johnson said he was still trying to put Eric’s killing behind him. But it’s “always going to be there at the back of your mind,” he said.

Rankins suffers recurring nightmares. In one, he is kidnapped and thrown off a high-rise. He wakes in a sweat just as he is about to hit the ground.

“It was just sad,” said Judge Carol Kelly, who presided over their trial in her first year in juvenile court. “Both those boys were so damaged. It would be hard to have a productive life. I was hoping that things would have turned out better.”

The 1994 killing set off a wave of indignation across the nation at a time of soaring violent juvenile crime. Rankins and Johnson became symbols of what one expert described as a new class of criminals: “super-predators” -- dangerous, heartless youths who acted impulsively and lacked remorse.

Illinois reacted swiftly to the boys’ arrest, enacting a law that lowered the age at which offenders could be sentenced to prison to 10 from 13.

Their lawyers argued that the two needed to be placed in a treatment facility for troubled youths to have any shot at living normal lives. But acting on the recommendation of state child-welfare authorities, Kelly sentenced both to prison with one caveat -- that they receive therapy and other services from corrections staffers.

More than a dozen years later, attorney David Hirschboeck, who had represented Rankins, said the pair never got the help they needed in prison. Whether full-time residential treatment would have made a difference will never be known, he said.

“How could he change?” Hirschboeck said of Rankins. “He’s been locked in a time warp. He’s the only kid I know who was raised by the Department of Corrections.”

From the beginning, experts had given Johnson a better shot at success than Rankins.

The two had grown up together in the projects, both had learning disabilities and both of their fathers were abusive and imprisoned at the time of Eric’s killing. But Johnson’s mother held a steady job and stood by her son during his lengthy incarceration. Rankins’ mother was a drug user who abandoned him to the streets from his earliest memories, according to Rankins and court records.

Rankins recalled how his mother visited him at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center while he awaited trial. She told him point-blank that she would never see him again, he said.

“I didn’t give a rat’s ass that she said it,” Rankins said. “My heart was already cold.”

Johnson, whose name has not been publicized before because he was charged as a juvenile, gave his first interview last month. He seemed eager to talk, but a few days later refused a second interview request.

“How will this benefit me?” he asked.

Johnson said Eric’s death seems like a lifetime ago. He admitted that after his initial release from prison, he sold drugs. He has returned to prison three times for robbery and drug convictions, as well as a parole violation for a failed drug test. But he said he no longer “hangs in the streets” and declared that raising his kids right is the way for him to “show society that I’ve changed.”

Johnson finished high school and worked in a factory and as a stock clerk at a dollar store, but he has been unemployed for several months. He is hoping to find work soon, perhaps putting up drywall, doing maintenance or working as a cook.

“I want readers to know I’m not a horrible person,” he said. “The people who know me know that I ain’t no dangerous person.”

Rankins, who has been interviewed a number of times over the years, sat down for 90 minutes on his last day at Shawnee Correctional Center in Vienna, Ill., and let a reporter and photographer follow him on the long drive to his wife’s home. He speaks in a nasal voice and displays an emotionless demeanor.

While in prison for killing Eric, Rankins was sentenced to an additional nine years for attacking another inmate. He went years without a visitor. Rankins, who has a fourth-grade education and is functionally illiterate, said he learned nothing in prison that would help him succeed in the outside world.

“All the jobs here, I know how to do them,” Rankins said the day before his release. “As far as anybody asking me to do this or that [outside prison], I wouldn’t know what to do. I’m lost.”

After his first release in 2004, Rankins and his wife, Connie -- who befriended him while he was in prison -- moved to southern Illinois. Rankins said he quit his only job after about a month and gave up trying to find work, embarrassed that he couldn’t write well enough to fill out a job application.

He bought a red pit bull named Cosmo, now his best friend.

“Cosmo [is] like a son,” said Rankins, pulling out a photo of the dog from his wallet during a prison interview last fall. “I love dogs more than I love humans.”

Rankins went back to prison in 2006 after he broke into an animal shelter and stole a pit bull. Freed last month, he and Connie drove their rusted Buick to her rented home in Olney, Ill. -- a sagging structure with chipped white paint and pieces of cloth hung haphazardly to cover bare windows.

Rankins bounded through the front door and hugged Cosmo. “He remembers me,” said Rankins, flashing a rare smile. “I’m home now.”

A high school dropout, Connie Rankins, 29, said her unemployment checks would run out shortly and she was trying to get a job at Hardee’s. She knows about her husband’s past but believes that “people change.”

Jessie Rankins said he’d like to find work as a garbage collector, a janitor or, best of all, in an animal shelter with dogs. He said he would never forget Eric. During the interview last fall, pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal a tattoo.

Over his heart, a gravestone is etched in black ink with the name, “Eric Mores 1984-94.” Never mind that he misspelled Eric’s name and missed his birth year by five years.

“What we did, it was like an unhuman beast that had no feeling whatsoever,” Rankins said. “And I live with that every day and night.”

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gmarx@tribune.com