Mike Callahan was sitting inside a giant piece
of fruit on a carnival ride called the Berry-Go-Round when he heard
somebody yell, “There’s the narc!”
Looking around, he recognized a
crack-cocaine-dealing gangster — a man then awaiting
sentencing on a drug charge, thanks to Callahan’s undercover
work.
As a master sergeant with the Illinois State
Police, Callahan was, for the most part, past participating
personally in drug buys. But as supervisor of a narcotics task
force in north-central Illinois, he had accompanied a tentative
young cop working a sting in a biker bar, which is where he had
crossed paths with this particular specimen of humanity.
“There’s his kid. That’s
his wife,” the drug dealer was growling as his buddies
gathered around. “Make sure you get a good look at ’em,
’cause we’re gonna get ’em.”
Callahan realized that they had spied his
spouse, Lily, waiting at the ride’s exit. And he knew that
his 3-year-old son, Tanner, might also be in danger, trapped next
to him inside a metal strawberry that was starting to whirl.
Callahan shouted to the attendant to stop the ride, unbuckled his
son’s seat belt and handed Tanner to Lily. Then he phoned the
local prosecutor, to let him hear the drug dealer’s threats.
The prosecutor told Callahan to arrest the man, but there were
about 10 bikers and Callahan was unarmed. Finally, local cops arrived
and took the drug dealer to jail.
With an intimidation conviction added to his
Class X narcotics felony, the man drew a substantial prison
sentence. But the damage to the Callahan family couldn’t be
undone. News accounts of the trial included the scary carnival
scene, and the Callahans’ neighbors in the Crystal Lake area
suddenly became leery. Tanner was no longer asked to play dates;
the family felt ostracized. Callahan asked ISP for a transfer, took
a substantial loss on the sale of his home, and moved his family
200 miles south to Champaign.
This story is one of the first things
Callahan tells a reporter, and it’s an illuminating capsule
history. Not only does it explain why Callahan left the more
intense crime-fighting environment of Chicago for a job downstate,
but the nonchalance of his tone also demonstrates the depth of his
dedication to the Illinois State Police. He doesn’t tell it
to show how tough things can get; it’s more like an anecdote
proving that things can always get worse.
To Callahan, the thug’s threats at the
carnival were nothing next to what he has endured over the past
five years from his own colleagues at ISP. In April, a federal jury
in Urbana agreed, awarding Callahan almost $700,000 in damages as a
result of his lawsuit against three officers in his chain of
command.
ISP Director Larry Trent reacted by sending his
commanders an e-mail describing the verdict as “a blatant
miscarriage of justice.”
State police attorneys have filed post-trial
motions seeking a new trial or at least a significant reduction in
financial penalties. While these pleadings are pending, these
attorneys say they can’t speak on the record about this case.
Callahan’s case began in
2000, soon after he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in
charge of investigations in a nine-county area of eastern Illinois
known as District 10. On April 14, a few weeks after landing this
position, Callahan was handed a two-page letter with a stack of
documents.
The letter was addressed to the ISP’s
then-director, Sam Nolen. It began with a statement from a witness
who had information concerning two Diablo gang members who
disappeared in 1984, as well as information about the 1986 double
homicide of Dyke and Karen Rhoads, newlyweds who were stabbed to
death in their Paris, Ill., home.
This letter presented ISP with a problem: If
the information proved true, it meant that at least one and perhaps
both of the men already convicted of the Rhoads murders should
probably not be kept in prison. Furthermore, the letter needed to
be answered because the CBS TV show 48
Hours was about to air an episode
devoted to the Rhoads case.
Callahan’s first clue about what kind
of hot potato had just landed in his lap came a few days later,
when the three state-police investigators originally assigned to
the case started calling. One by one, they asked Callahan not to
make them look bad, not to ruin their reputations. But when he
pulled the file and began sorting through the evidence, he found
too many inconsistencies to ignore.
The murders took place in the early-morning
hours of July 6, 1986, and were discovered when the Rhoads’
house burned, around 4:30 a.m. The crime went unsolved for several
months, until a pair of supposed eyewitnesses suddenly came
forward.
Debbie Reinbolt and Darrell Herrington were
both admitted alcoholics who between them had seven DUI
convictions. They approached Paris police, separately and
voluntarily — Herrington in September, Reinbolt the following
February — with stories that had a common theme: Randy Steidl
and Herb Whitlock as the Rhoads’ killers.
Herrington’s version had him hitching a
ride home from a tavern with Steidl and Whitlock around midnight.
Herrington said that he passed out in the car (he had been drinking
since noon) and awoke to discover that he was at the Rhoads
residence. Hearing a commotion, he ran to the back door and used a
credit card to jimmy the lock. Once inside, he saw Steidl coming
down the stairs, carrying a bloody knife. Steidl took him upstairs,
forced him to view the dead bodies, and threatened to kill
Herrington and his family if he told anyone.
Reinbolt’s account had her drinking
around noon and adding codeine and marijuana to the mix by evening.
She claimed to have skipped going to work at the nursing home where
she was employed as a certified nurse’s aide, instead having
someone punch in for her. She borrowed a car and went bar-hopping,
landing at either noon or 3:45 p.m. (her accounts varied) at a
tavern named Jeanie’s Place, where she overheard Whitlock
making ominous remarks to Dyke Rhoads. She was concerned enough
that, on her way home, she drove by the Rhoads home and happened to
see Whitlock outside.
In one version, she parked her car, entered
the residence through the back door, and went upstairs in time to
hold Karen Rhoads down while Steidl and Whitlock stabbed her. In
another version, Reinbolt kept driving, but Whitlock came to her
house the next morning, still wearing bloody clothes, to tell her
to keep quiet.
Though both Herrington and Reinbolt claimed
to have been present at the crime scene, neither saw the other.
Later, both recanted their statements and then recanted the
recantations.
Yet, as tenuous as their stories seem, they
held up well enough to get both Steidl and Whitlock convicted in
separate trials. Whitlock was sentenced to life in prison. Steidl
drew the death penalty, but his sentence was reduced to life when
the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that he had been inadequately
represented at his sentencing hearing.
Though Callahan had never run a
homicide investigation (his specialty was in narcotics), he was
troubled by the inexplicable holes in this case file. On May 2,
2000, he produced what ISP personnel call a “dot-point
memo,” outlining contradictions in the case. Carefully
sticking to the highlights and resisting the urge to point out
major gaffes (“They don’t arrest Reinbolt, even though
she testified that she held Karen down!” he says now), his
single-spaced memo was 10 pages long.
But his report did more than suggest that the
wrong guys were in prison. Callahan also indicated that a wealthy
Paris businessman should be investigated in connection with the
murders.
Two weeks later, in the second-floor
conference room of the ISP Armory in Springfield, Callahan
presented his findings to a half-dozen officers ranging from
intelligence analysts up to a deputy director. The reaction was
enthusiastic, Callahan says. Everybody applauded his research and
supported his contention that the investigation should be reopened.
As the meeting concluded, though, someone
asked why the attorney general had recused himself. Callahan
explained that it was probably because the Paris businessman had
made campaign contributions to then-Attorney General Jim Ryan.
“Not George?” a high-ranking
officer asked. Callahan said no, just Jim Ryan.
Back at his office, Callahan checked to make
sure that he was right. He logged on to the state’s
campaign-disclosure Web site, typed in the businessman’s
name, and discovered contributions to then-Gov. George Ryan 10
times greater than the few thousand he had donated to Jim Ryan.
Wanting to correct the misstatement he had
made at the meeting, Callahan immediately called Lt. Col. Diane
Carper, who was in charge of six patrol districts and two
investigative zones in central Illinois.
A few days later, Carper summoned Callahan
and his supervisor, Capt. John Strohl, to her office. In a meeting
that lasted less than an hour, she told Callahan that he could not
investigate the Rhoads case or any possible connection to the Paris
businessman. It was “too politically sensitive,” she
told him, adding that the order came “from above
me.”
Carper would later testify in
Callahan’s federal lawsuit that she was talking not about
campaign contributions but, rather, about the sensitive nature of
reopening any investigation, especially one in which men had
already been convicted and sentenced, in an era when the governor
was considering a moratorium on the death penalty.
But Callahan disputes Carper’s
explanation. He knows exactly what she meant, he says, because it
shocked him when she said it.
“I literally couldn’t catch my
breath,” he recalls. “I felt like somebody hit me in
the stomach.”
Michale Callahan is the kind of cop
who never wanted to be anything but a cop. Inspired by his uncle,
an FBI agent, Callahan applied for jobs with law-enforcement
agencies that offered quick entry into investigations (as opposed
to street patrol) and was hired in 1980 by ISP.
After three years as a road trooper in
Chicago, he worked about 18 months in Medicaid fraud, then became a
special agent assigned to northern Cook County, also known as Zone
3.
There, he worked a variety of undercover
assignments — everything from a storefront sting in Waukegan
to street gangs in Schaumburg, buying bombs, weapons, narcotics,
stolen vehicles, and burglary proceeds, even negotiating a murder
for hire.
“There wasn’t one day I
didn’t go out there and learn something new,” he says.
“It was a constant learning experience. That’s why I
like it so much. It’s you against the bad guy. . . . This was
the type of job you could never say you’re the best.
There’s always room to learn.”
He was so obsessed with his work that he had
almost given up on having a family when he met Lily, a flight
attendant. They married in 1988, and Callahan shifted his career
goals slightly.
“Before, I did a lot of undercover
work, and it never bothered me. Once I got married, I started
thinking about the repercussions,” he says. “I
don’t think it slowed me down, except I stopped going
undercover and started taking the promotional tests
seriously.”
By the time Tanner was born, in 1991,
Callahan was a master sergeant, no longer eligible to earn
overtime. Yet he would rush home after an eight-hour shift of
administrative work to feed Tanner, then pay a caregiver to stay
with the child while he supervised narcotics officers making
controlled buys and executing search warrants.
“I actually paid a babysitter so I
could go work for free,” he says.
And though he occasionally heard about
corrupt law-enforcement agencies, he knew that ISP would never be
one of them.
“I always felt that with the ISP,
nobody was beyond reproach or above the law,” he says.
“It didn’t matter if you were the governor or [famous
Chicago mobster] Tony Accardo; we’d always do the right
thing, and we wouldn’t bow to anybody.”
Then again, maybe they would.
When Carper told Callahan that he
couldn’t reopen the Rhoads case or investigate the Paris
businessman, she left one door open. He could “gather
intelligence” on the businessman; he just couldn’t
“go operational.”
The distinction can be confusing to
civilians. Gathering intelligence meant that Callahan could keep
track of who showed up at the man’s business and could even
use the FDIC to track his bank accounts. But he couldn’t
send an undercover officer in to make a drug buy or have a
confidential source wear a wire to record a conversation. He could
involve other agencies, such as the FBI, but he had to notify
Carper if an outside agency took operational action.
Over the next few months, Callahan
concentrated on running local narcotics task forces. But in the
background, always, he was gathering evidence on the Rhoads case
and the Paris businessman. Occasionally he would type memos
detailing new information and send them up the chain of command
hoping to get approval to revisit the case.
In 2001, after Maj. Edie Casella took charge
of Zone 5, Callahan tried again to get permission to pursue the
case. Not only did Casella agree, but she also had the intelligence
division conduct a computer-assisted analysis of the evidence
— resulting in a report that said there was no way that the
murders could have happened the way Reinbolt and Herrington
described. She presented the report on Oct. 10; two weeks later,
she learned that she was being transferred out of Zone 5.
Capt. Steve Fermon took Casella’s
place. Already familiar with Callahan’s views on the Rhoads
homicides, Fermon announced that he was transferring
Callahan’s trusted sergeant, Greg Dixon, to a narcotics task
force and assigning a younger officer to gather info on the Paris
businessman. Fermon told Callahan to focus on running the task
forces.
These two officers had worked together years
earlier with little conflict. As the superior officer, Fermon had
the duty to “rate” his underlings on an annual basis,
and he had given Callahan high marks. This time, however, they
couldn’t get along. In September 2002, Fermon’s rating
gave Callahan the lowest score of his career. Fermon also used a
minor incident to file a complaint against Callahan with
ISP’s Division of Internal Investigations. The first and only
DII complaint of Callahan’s 25-year tenure, it was closed as
unsustained.
Sometime, after 10 on the night of
Jan. 8 2003, Callahan got a call from someone in the
governor’s office. Steidl and Whitlock had each filed
clemency petitions, and this aide wanted Callahan’s personal
opinion of whether the men were guilty or innocent.
Callahan refused to answer the question,
saying that he had to check with his chain of command. When he
contacted Carper, she told him to show up at the armory the next
morning at 6.
She had invited a handful of the most
experienced investigators at ISP, along with her supervisor, deputy
director Chuck Brueggemann, and Callahan’s supervisor,
Fermon. Carper had Callahan brief the group on the Rhoads case,
then asked him to leave the room. Her selected investigators
discussed the case among themselves, and when they had a question,
they called Callahan back in. This went on for 12 hours.
As far as Callahan could tell, no decision on
how to answer the question from the governor’s aide was ever
reached at that meeting. However, he was given permission to revive
his informal work group of federal agents interested in the
investigation.
The U.S. attorney’s office
participated, as did agents from the FBI, the IRS, the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms. Callahan got his old sergeant, Dixon, back on board,
and they began holding occasional meetings.
Callahan claims this team came up with a way
to intercept phone calls between a restaurant that originally
neighbored the Paris businessman’s property and a group of
known felons based in Italy. ISPofficials vehemently dispute this
notion; their witness on that point was not allowed to testify in
Callahan’s case.
This restaurant was owned by a convicted
organized-crime figure, and Fermon stunned the other agents at a
work group meeting by mentioning that he had just taken a relative
to dinner at that restaurant. About the same time, Callahan says,
the information the group had been monitoring ceased.
Meanwhile, another investigation was launched
inside the office where Fermon and Callahan worked. In mid-April,
Equal Employment Opportunity investigator Suzanne Yokley Bond spent
two days interviewing employees about the work environment in Zone
5. When she questioned Callahan, he admitted that he had problems
with Fermon and said that he believed the captain was impeding his
investigation and had violated policy by patronizing a business
owned by a known felon.
It was a serious accusation, and Callahan
knew it. At the urging of an FBI agent, Callahan called Harold
“Skip” Nelson, director of DII, to discuss his
suspicions. Nelson arranged for Callahan to meet with DII
investigators on May 8, 2003. Somehow news of this meeting reached
Fermon that same night.
Fermon was outraged that Callahan would
suggest he had any ties to organized crime. His first reaction was
to transfer Callahan’s sergeant, Dixon, off the new task
force and back into narcotics. Then Fermon drafted two scathing
memos accusing Callahan of insubordination and requesting his
transfer out of Zone 5.
On June 16, Carper called both Fermon and
Callahan to her Springfield office and, in separate meetings, told
them that they were being reassigned. She put Fermon in charge of
the Springfield-based Medicaid-fraud unit and moved Callahan
into a job supervising road troopers. Both transfers were effective
immediately.
For Fermon, the new job required a
two-hour commute from his home outside Danville. For Callahan, the
commute differed not so much in mileage as in mindset. For the
first time in more than 20 years, he was working in patrol.
Wearing a uniform instead of business attire
went along with duties that were more routine, less creative.
Instead of strategizing with undercover narcotics agents, he kept
data on seat-belt violations and handled calls from citizens upset
about getting traffic tickets. Although he lost no rank and his pay
remained the same, Callahan knew he was being punished. But when he
consulted an employment lawyer, she told him that he didn’t
have a discrimination case.
“I was all the sudden the bad guy, just
for trying to do the right thing. That devastated me,”
Callahan says.
He had trouble sleeping, and when he did
sleep, he had nightmares. His blood pressure went up, and he felt
himself sinking into a deep depression. He tried to keep his anger
and anguish in check but failed, especially with Lily and Tanner.
“You always try to hide stuff from
kids, but you’d be surprised what they hear when you
don’t think they’re listening. I lost a lot with my son
because I fought so hard with this case,” Callahan says.
“I guess I didn’t realize that I’d become quite a
prick. I’d snap at him at a moment’s notice.”
One day, Tanner broke down and cried:
“I just wish I had my old dad back.”
Callahan says his son’s comment hit him
right between the eyes.
“I went upstairs and got in bed, under
the covers,” he recalls. It was the middle of a Saturday
afternoon.
Lily convinced him he needed help. The family
doctor gave Callahan prescriptions for sleeping pills and
antidepressants, along with a referral for counseling with a
psychotherapist.
That same month, Callahan talked to Bill
Clutter, a Springfield investigator who was working for Michael
Metnick, the attorney representing Randy Steidl. Clutter, in fact,
had written the letter to ISP that first got Callahan assigned to
reviewing the Rhoads homicides. Realizing the toll that plum
assignment took on the cop, Clutter told him to call John Baker.
“He said, ‘I know a guy
who’s very good in First Amendment law,’”
Callahan recalls.
Still, on the day he was supposed to meet the
lawyer, Callahan canceled the appointment.
“I knew it was going to be
expensive,” he says.
Lily, however, insisted that he reschedule.
“She told me she didn’t care if we end up living in an
apartment. She said, ‘You’re gonna let this eat you
apart until it kills you’ — and she was probably
right,” Callahan says.
He took out a second mortgage on his house
and made another appointment with Baker.
Callahan wasn’t the first ISP
employee John Baker had represented. Years earlier, he had won a
settlement for ISP crime-scene investigator Alva Busch, who claimed
ISP had retaliated against him for his efforts to get a wrongfully
convicted man out of prison. That man, Keith Harris, was recently
exonerated by Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
For Callahan, Baker filed a lawsuit in
federal court in Urbana claiming that his client had been
retaliated against for speaking out about a perceived breach of
public trust by law-enforcement officials. Fermon, Carper, and
Brueggemann were named as defendants.
The trial started April 15 and lasted
nine days. State police officials say they were severely
handicapped by the attorney general’s 11th-hour realization
that there was a conflict of interest and the court’s refusal
to give newly appointed attorneys an extension of time. The defense
attorneys had less than two weeks to prepare.
Jurors deliberated a little more than five
hours before deciding to award Callahan $210,000 in compensatory
damages, plus punitive damages in the amount of $276,700 against
Fermon and $195,600 against Carper.
One juror contacted by Illinois Times says that
much of the deliberation time was spent trying to find evidence to
include Brueggemann, the deputy director, in their verdict.
“There was no doubt in our minds that Brueggemann was also
guilty. We just didn’t have the proof,” she says.
“He’s obviously a diplomat who knows how to cover his
ass.”
The jurors also didn’t believe
ISP’s argument that the transfers of Callahan and Fermon were
based on that EEO investigation, which documented the fact they
couldn’t get along.
As for Fermon’s extended commute, she
had no sympathy. “So he has to drive farther,” she
says. “Boo-hoo.”
But ISP is standing firm behind Fermon
and Carper, as the director’s April e-mail demonstrated:
“Let me make it perfectly clear that I
fully support Captain Fermon and Lt. Colonel Carper,” Trent
wrote. “The Illinois State Police will never abandon those
who have been falsely accused.”
On March 19, the first day Callahan
became eligible to retire, he left the Illinois State Police. If he
had stayed a little longer, he would have gotten a 7 percent pay
increase and, consequently, a heftier pension. But, he says, he
couldn’t make himself do it.
These days, Callahan spends his time doing
home-improvement projects and fielding calls from reporters
following his story. The producers of the CBS news show 48 Hours are in
constant contact as they plan a follow-up to their 2000 episode on
the Paris homicides, and the Chicago
Tribune is planning a major
project.
ISP attorneys have appealed the judgment,
claiming that it’s more than Fermon and Carper can afford to
pay. The court gave the parties 28 days to agree on a settlement,
but the deadline passed without an offer by ISP. Fermon’s
attorney declined to comment for this story, citing pending
motions. The parties will meet in court again in October.
Callahan takes comfort in the knowledge that
he’s not the only person who believes that the Rhoads case
was bungled. On June 17, 2003 — the day after Callahan was
transferred from investigations to patrol — U.S. District
Judge Michael McCuskey ruled that Randy Steidl would probably not
have been convicted if the jury had heard all the evidence.
McCuskey gave the state 120 days to give
Steidl a new trial or release him from prison. Attorney General
Lisa Madigan elected not to appeal the court’s ruling,
effectively clearing the way for Steidl’s release.
Steidl has been free since May 24, 2004, and
recently amended his clemency petition to ask for a pardon on the
basis of innocence. He has also filed a lawsuit claiming that he
and Whitlock were framed and seeking unspecified monetary damages.
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2005.
