If you lived in Riverton a decade ago, you
might remember her.
She was the woman who walked through the
neighborhood every day for more than a year. She was fat. Gradually
the pounds came off until, at last, she became a woman who turned heads.
After marrying young and spending her entire adult life as a
stay-at-home daycare provider, Constance Steinhoff was 31,
gorgeous, and ready for the world.
“I would see these women get up and go
to work, driving off in their cars every morning to offices,
wearing nice clothes,” she recalls. “I wanted to be one
of those women.”
She landed a clerical job at the Illinois
Health Care Association. She separated from her husband, whom she
would eventually divorce. She had an affair with a married man. It’s remarkable, today, how upfront she
is about everything, sitting in the dining room of her home near
Rockford, flanked by her 23-year-old daughter and her second husband, whom she married
eight years ago. For four hours, she holds nothing back. She cries only twice.
The rage? That surfaces
in staccato, her voice all of a sudden rising to near-shouts as she
recalls what her attacker — and the system — did to
her. These moments are over as quickly as they begin. She tells you that she doesn’t want
to do the victim thing. But she is a victim. That seems obvious from
the way she keeps digging her fingernails into her palms.
She is no longer pretty. All of the weight
she worked so hard to lose is back. She long ago quit her job and
is once again a homemaker. Venturing from the safety of her house
is difficult. She sometimes abandons shopping carts in stores after
a few minutes and rushes home. She says that she’s scared
whenever she comes back to Springfield, where she was born and
raised. She could have sued him — at least one
lawyer told her that she had a good case and offered to take it.
But Steinhoff wants something more precious than money. After all
this time, she wants justice.
Constance Steinhoff is the first
known victim of 45-year-old Michael A. Redpath, a man with
connections. Chuck Redpath, a brother, is a longtime
Springfield alderman. Louis Redpath, another brother, is a former
Springfield police officer who retired in 2001. Donald Redpath, his
father, was a Springfield assistant police chief who became chief
of the Springfield Park District police department. His passing
three years ago merited a resolution expressing condolences from the Illinois Legislature. Earl
Redpath, a brother, is a supervisor at City Water, Light & Power.
His sister Karen Becker and her husband, Bill, have run the Friend in-Deed
Christmas charity program for years.
The family’s ties to law
enforcement run deep. Chuck Redpath, the brother who sits on the City
Council, was deputy chief of investigations at the Illinois attorney
general’s office until he resigned in 2003 to become deputy chief
of conservation police at the state Department of Natural Resources, a
position he left in October so that he could run for state
representative (the law doesn’t allow employees in that post to
run for partisan political office).
For more than a decade, Michael Redpath also
drew his paycheck from public coffers, despite a criminal history
that would almost certainly close doors to someone without hookups.
Since 1984, he’s been charged with four assaults and been a
suspect in at least two more. He’s been arrested for driving
under the influence at least four times since 1993. His rap sheet
is a litany of case dismissals, no charges filed, and sundry wrist
slaps.
Redpath started working for the city of
Springfield in 1985. By 1997, he was a manager in the Department of
Public Works. It didn’t seem to matter what he did while he was off duty. In 1993, he
was arrested twice for DUI within a 10-day period. Each time, he
refused to give a breath test, which should have resulted in an
automatic license suspension of at least six months. But Redpath kept
his job with the city, for which he drove heavy equipment and other
city-owned vehicles.
As his criminal activity escalated, Redpath left
the city’s employ, but he soon got back on the public payroll
with the Illinois Department of Transportation. Time and again, Redpath has skated, no matter
whom he has hurt. In 1987, for instance, he was charged with
resisting, obstructing, and assault after allegedly punching a
Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy at a Southern View bar. With
the approval of Leo Zappa, then an assistant state’s attorney
and now a judge, he was allowed to plead guilty to disorderly
conduct and fined $100.
Misdemeanor assault charges were dismissed
in 1984 after a witness failed to appear in court. In 1997, a
casual acquaintance whom Redpath barely knew told Sangamon County
sheriff’s deputies that Redpath sucker-punched him after the
two got into an argument at a Springfield bar. The bartender, who
saw the whole thing, told deputies that Redpath punched the man
again, then ran away, when she 86’ed him. No charges were
filed, even though Redpath was on probation for aggravated assault.
In 2001, Redpath was a suspect in a domestic-battery case involving
a girlfriend. Again, no charges were filed.
In 1993, Redpath’s ex-wife obtained an
order of protection after he showed up at her house and began
kicking in doors and windows. The marriage lasted about a year
before the two separated, according to Helen Goulden, his
ex-wife’s mother. Goulden would not help Illinois Times locate
or contact her daughter, who thought that she would be able to
change Redpath when she married him.
“He was just
wild,” says Goulden, adding that her daughter has moved from
Springfield and that she tries not discuss Redpath with her because
she gets upset. “Thank God, he’s a part of her past.
She was afraid of him, yes.”
Last month, prosecutors in Logan County
dismissed DUI and speeding charges stemming from a February arrest,
although Redpath did plead guilty to driving with a suspended
license. Timothy Huyett, Logan County state’s attorney,
explains that Redpath has agreed to a 20-day sentence. Yes, a DUI
conviction is certainly more serious than a suspended-license
infraction, Huyett allows, but there were “problems”
with the DUI citation that prevented prosecutors from being more
aggressive.
“We just didn’t have a quality case, let me
put it that way,” Huyett says. He adds that when his office
cut the deal, his staff didn’t know about Redpath’s
prior DUIs in Sangamon County because, somehow, the court record
didn’t make it onto the Secretary of State’s database
that prosecutors use to determine whether a defendant has prior
offenses.
“We probably would have asked for more time [if
we’d known],” Huyett says.
At the time of his drunken-driving arrest in
Logan County, Redpath was on probation for a DUI in Cass County,
where prosecutors aren’t commenting. The Cass County
state’s attorney’s office has moved to revoke
Redpath’s probation — Huyett says Redpath has worked
out a deal to serve 10 days there — but so far nothing has
happened. Huyett isn’t quite sure when Redpath
will serve time for his escapades behind the wheel. If all goes as
his victims hope, he’ll soon be in prison — but
probably not for very long.
“He’s harmless”
He seemed weird, but her friend
assured Steinhoff that Michael Redpath was an OK guy.
“He was one of those macho guys who
repulses you — a Fonzie,” Steinhoff says She first saw
him at King Pin Lanes, where she used to eat breakfast and do
crossword puzzles with a co-worker who urged her to get out of the
house and live a little.
Redpath would sit within view of the two,
glancing over his newspaper and winking, she says. “He was gawking at me and eyeing
me and eyeing me and eyeing me,” Steinhoff says. “I
said, ‘He’s kind of scary.’ She said, ‘Oh
God, no. That’s Mikey. He’s harmless.’ ”
One morning, Steinhoff recalls, Redpath walked into the bowling
alley and asked her friend whether she’d told Steinhoff
something. As he walked off, her friend told her: “ ‘He
told me to tell you he loves you,’ ” Steinhoff says.
“I don’t even know him.”
That soon changed.
One night, Steinhoff finally took her
friend’s advice and went out instead of staying home with her
kids. She says that she and her friend and her friend’s
boyfriend went out to a bar, Frannie’s, near the fairgrounds.
“Mike Redpath was there,” she recalls.
“That’s where I found out his name. The Redpath name
seemed familiar to me. Everyone was talking to him. I trusted him
at the bar.”
Steinhoff would later tell police that while
she drank two beers, Redpath downed a succession of
Seven-and-Sevens — she believes that he drank at least five.
Another person who was present also told police that Redpath was
drinking one cocktail after the next. At one point, Steinhoff
recalls in police reports and an interview with Illinois Times, the
group’s conversation turned sexual. “Wouldn’t it
be neat to have a slave?” Redpath said. “I would rather
be a slave, the submissive one,” Steinhoff replied. It was
all innocent talk, she says today, the sort of banter adults
sometimes engage in while having a few drinks and certainly not a
green light.
About 8:30 p.m., Redpath said that he was
feeling dizzy and wanted to get something to eat. Steinhoff agreed
to go with him to another bar for dinner. When he saw her minivan,
he said that he was thinking of buying one just like it —
would she let him drive it and see how it handled? That’s how
he got the keys.
Before they were even out of the parking lot,
Steinhoff says, Redpath grabbed her by the hair, forced her face
into his lap, and ordered her to perform a sexual act. He demanded
that she tell him where she lived. He was slapping her in the face,
pulling her hair. “He was laughing his ass off,” she
recalls. “At this point, I thought, ‘This son of a
bitch is going to kill me.’ ”
Steinhoff says that she gave him directions
to her estranged husband’s house, but he saw through the ruse
and ordered her to tell him how to get to her house in Riverton. En
route, they passed by her sister’s home. Steinhoff spotted
her sister standing on her porch and saw a chance. She grabbed for
the steering wheel and honked the horn. Kathy Davis-Walbert,
Steinhoff’s sister, would later tell police the van was
traveling “like a bat out of hell” and that she saw a
man pushing Steinhoff away from the steering wheel. “It was very weird that she’d
drive by the house without stopping,” Davis-Walbert tells Illinois Times. I
thought, ‘Is she acting crazy, or what the hell’s going
on?’ ”
Davis-Walbert was concerned enough that she
called her sister to ask what was going on. She got no answer. By
then, Redpath was raping Steinhoff, who listened helplessly as her
sister left a message on the answering machine. Redpath was careful, Steinhoff told police.
He made sure that all of the doors to the house were locked before
attacking her. He never penetrated her but forced her to perform
oral sex and penetrate him with a sexual aid she kept in her
closet. He also shoved the device in her mouth.
“I thought I
was dying and almost passed out,” she says. “To this
day, I haven’t been able to talk about some of the things he
did to me.” Several times he slapped her and blamed her for
his failure to achieve orgasm. Midway through the rape, he noticed
a photograph of Steinhoff’s daughter and said that he wanted
to have sex with her. Getting raped was bad enough, but this was
awful beyond words — her daughter was 3 when the photo was
taken.
Steinhoff cursed him and tried breaking away, which only
heightened his rage. He slapped her repeatedly until she told him
what he wanted to hear: “He made me say what it would be like
to have sex with my daughter.”
After climaxing on her face, Redpath picked
up a phone, dialed a number and ordered her to say sexually
explicit things to the person on the other end of the line,
Steinhoff says. A Springfield recreation supervisor who received
the call and let a friend listen in told police that Steinhoff was
laughing and seemed at ease. The supervisor’s friend told
police the same thing. Not so, insists Steinhoff.
“Whoever
this man he had me call was a buddy of his,” she says.
“He had to have heard Mike in the background, telling me what
to say. There’s no way that man could mistake the fear in my
voice.” After hanging up, they got back in her minivan and
returned to Frannie’s, where she dropped Redpath off. Then
she went to her sister’s house and melted down.
Her face was red, bruised, and swollen. She
had a cut over her left eye and a scratch on her left knee, which
was also swollen. Her hair was messed up. She was trembling.
Steinhoff’s mother, who was present when she arrived, told
police that her daughter was obviously in shock and walked straight
into her sister’s room. Her sister immediately sensed what
had happened. “You’ve been raped,” she said.
“Worse,” Steinhoff answered. Then she broke down in
tears.
After calming down a bit, Steinhoff and her
sister drove to a restaurant and talked. Her sister urged her to go
to a hospital and call police, but Steinhoff was hesitant. She knew
that she had been violated, but she was also blaming herself. If
only she hadn’t gone to a bar, if she hadn’t allowed
herself to be alone with a man she barely knew — why had she
made that remark about being submissive?
“Getting into my own
car with him somehow made me feel responsible,” she says.
“I also had this guilt from the way I was raised. When my mom
found out, that was her first statement: ‘What in the hell
were you doing in a bar?’ ” After leaving her sister,
she went back to her house and stayed up all night, thinking.
Finally, she reached a conclusion: “It doesn’t matter
what I agreed to — he had no business holding me hostage by
my hair and hitting me and making me do stuff.” And so she
called the police.
At first, Steinhoff felt that she’d
done the right thing. Riverton police officer Karen Stone, she
says, seemed like the sort of person to whom she could open up. But
Stone, who declined an interview request from Illinois Times, was soon off
the case, replaced by Riverton Police Chief Craig Bangert, who is
now a sergeant in the Sherman Police Department. “I felt more
comfortable talking to a woman,” Steinhoff says. “All
of a sudden, Mr. Bangert is knocking on my door. I felt embarrassed
talking to him.”
In retrospect, Steinhoff believes that the
case was botched almost from the beginning. For one thing, she
says, police didn’t take photographs of her physical
injuries, which were described in Stone’s initial report and
medical records (no photographs were included in the case file when
the Riverton police responded to an Illinois
Times Freedom of Information request).
For another, investigators waited 10 months before contacting
Steinhoff’s sister and mother, the first people who spoke
with her after the assault. The police reports are filled with
grammatical errors and incomplete sentences. Some pages appear to
be missing from the reports provided to Illinois Times by the
Riverton Police Department. There are no documents chronicling any
interviews with Redpath.
At one point, Steinhoff says, she made a
written statement describing what Redpath did to her. When she
requested a copy of the case file from Riverton police less than a
year after the assault, the statement wasn’t in it, she says.
No written statement from Steinhoff was included in the documents
Riverton police provided to Illinois
Times. Bangert took the unusual step of asking
Steinhoff to submit to a polygraph examination less than a month
after the assault. Steinhoff says that the chief picked her up from
work and drove her to Illinois State Police offices to take the
lie-detector test. On the way there, she says, he told her that
Redpath would also be in the building but that she wouldn’t
likely see him. “As I look back, I realize I was being
intimidated,” she says. “It was all being done to make
me feel scared to death to go any further.”
She passed the test, with the examiner
concluding that she was telling the truth when she said that
Redpath forced her to have sex against her will and that she
submitted because she was afraid of him. Redpath failed a
polygraph. “It should be noted that there was also
indications of purposeful non-cooperation by acts of controlled
breathing and muscular movements on this subject’s polygraph
test,” the examiner wrote.
Lyn Schollett, general counsel for the
Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault, says that investigators
rarely ask rape victims to take polygraphs. One reason is a state
law saying that law-enforcement officials can’t require
victims to take lie-detector tests as a condition of continuing an
investigation, she says. The law, in effect since 1988, also says
that a polygraph may only be administered at the victim’s
request. “They can ask her and she can take one, but they
can’t require it,” Schollett says. “I think you
can make a pretty good argument that they shouldn’t be
pressuring a victim.”
Steinhoff gasps when the statute is read to
her. “Oh God, no,” she says. “I wish I would have
known that then. It was a horrible thing to have to go through. I
was very reluctant to do it — I told him I didn’t want
to do it. He was very, very insistent that I do that or it would
hurt my case if I didn’t. He said, ‘It gives the
state’s attorney a better reason to press charges.’ I
felt like I had to take it.”
Bangert told Illinois
Times that he needed to review
the case file before discussing the polygraph and other aspects of
his investigation. He said that he would call back but never did. Steinhoff says that she received crank calls
in the middle of the night from people who told her to keep her
mouth shut. She says that she reported the anonymous calls to the
state’s attorney’s office but that the staff
didn’t seem concerned. “They had no interest in
protecting me,” she says.
Rather than help build her courage
up, Steinhoff says, prosecutors emphasized the ordeal she would
face if she pressed charges, telling her that defense attorneys
would pry into her personal life and expose it all in a courtroom. The police weren’t much better. When
officers came to gather evidence, they took every sex toy she
owned, not just the one used in the assault, Steinhoff says. She
didn’t have a huge collection, but it was still more than any
woman would want in the hands of strangers. “Why would they
take those?” she asks. “They have nothing to do with
this.”
Weeks went by with no arrest and no word from
prosecutors or police. Then, Steinhoff says, she got a call from
Kevin Davlin, a Springfield lawyer who’s the brother of Tim
Davlin, now the mayor of Springfield. Kevin Davlin was dating a co-worker of
Steinhoff’s, but Steinhoff says that she can’t recall
any previous contact more substantive than a passing nod when
Davlin happened to be in the office. She says that he introduced
himself and explained that his girlfriend had told him about her
ordeal.
“He had no business calling me and butting his nose
in,” Steinhoff says. “He says, ‘I feel really bad
and would like to help you out.’ If I wanted to drop the
charges, he could get that done for me. He wanted me to sign a
paper.” She rebuffed him. “I listened to people in my
office who told me not to sign, that he’s not trying to
help,” Steinhoff says. Karen O’Beirne, who worked with
Steinhoff, recalls talking to Steinhoff about the rape and the
unsolicited contact from Davlin. “I remember that she said
that she had received what she considered a threatening letter from
Kevin, the attorney, or something like that,” O’Beirne
says. “She felt frightened. She felt threatened. She felt
helpless.”
Shortly afterward, Steinhoff says, she again
encountered Davlin, this time at an evening reception sponsored by
the health-care association. “He says, ‘So, whatever
happened?’ ” Steinhoff recalls. “I told him,
‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘I’m sure you probably
want this out of your life.’ I said, ‘Sure, I
definitely want this out of my life.’ ”
More time passed without Redpath being
charged or arrested. So Steinhoff called the state’s
attorney’s office, speaking with a lawyer whose name she
can’t recall. The attorney asked her to come down to the
office. When she got there, she says, prosecutors asked her whether
she knew Kevin Davlin. “I said, ‘Yeah, I know of
him,’ ” Steinhoff says. “So they said, ‘You
don’t know him? You’re not friends with him?’ I
said, ‘No. Why?’ They said, ‘This Mr. Davlin
called us and told us you wanted to drop charges and didn’t
want to pursue this.’
“I was freaked out. I said, ‘Why
would you take this information from someone other than me? I did
not say I wanted to drop charges.’ I said, ‘No, I
don’t want this dropped.’ They said, ‘Why would
he call and say that then? Why would he talk on your
behalf?’”
Davlin will neither confirm nor deny
Steinhoff’s account of his involvement in her case. He does
say, however, that Redpath — not Steinhoff — was once a
client. “First of all, anything involving Michael Redpath is
so long ago, I can’t recall,” Davlin says.
“Anything I did for Mike Redpath or on his behalf would be
protected by attorney-client privilege. I’m not trying to be
an obstructionist. Attorney-client privilege is exactly
that.”
Steinhoff says that she had the impression
that Davlin was working on behalf of her accused rapist, but
she’s certain that Davlin never told her so. “He did
not tell me he represented Redpath — I know that like I know
my name,” she says. Steinhoff doesn’t remember the names of
all the lawyers she dealt with at the state’s
attorney’s office, but she does remember meeting with Patrick
Kelley, then the elected state’s attorney and now a Circuit
Court judge. She says that she met with Kelley more than once to
ask why no charges had been brought. Kelley says that he
doesn’t recall the case.
Steinhoff also remembers speaking with a
prosecutor named Jay about the case. “That would be
me,” says assistant state’s attorney Jay Magnuson.
“I think I met with Connie once or twice.” Magnuson,
who started working in Sangamon County in January 1996, recalls
that prosecutors had already decided not to file charges when he
was asked to take another look at the case. He says that he
doesn’t recall Davlin’s interjecting himself into the
case — indeed, Magnuson says, he’d never heard the name
until Tim Davlin ran for mayor in 2003.
“We didn’t think we had enough to
prove the case,” Magnuson says. “He asked her about sex
toys, and she told him where they were. She dropped him off [after
the assault] and waves to him as he leaves. I don’t think
there was a prompt outcry. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is
tough.”
Steinhoff wasn’t pleased. Citing
Redpath’s interest in her daughter, she warned prosecutors
that more crimes were in the offing if Redpath wasn’t
stopped. “I told the state’s attorney I feared he was a
sick child molester,” she recalls. He words proved prophetic.
A plea bargain
Twelve-year-old Barbara Black was walking home from
school in February 1996 when a man parked in an alley called out,
beckoning her to his cream-colored sedan with a Springfield city
logo on the door. Nine years later, her memory is vivid.
“I walked over to the driver’s
side of the car,” Black recalls of the encounter, which took
place at the intersection of 14th Street and South Grand Avenue.
“He asked me if I wanted to go to a party with him. I
remember seeing yellow gloves inside the car, like dishwashing
gloves. I was standing right next to him. He was fairly friendly.
He grabbed my coat. I probably yanked a couple of times. I got
loose, and I took off running. I ran all the way home, a couple of
blocks away. He followed me. He even circled my house.”
Under Illinois law, trying to lure a child
into a car qualifies as felony child abduction, even if the victim
gets away. Besides describing the car to police, Black picked
Redpath out of a photo lineup. This wasn’t just a
he-said-she-said with no witnesses. Her brother got a good look at
the car as it cruised past the family’s home.
Though he
ultimately couldn’t pick Redpath out of a photo lineup, his
general description matched: white man in his thirties with a
chubby face. Eight months after Steinhoff was attacked,
Redpath was in trouble again. The case landed on the desk of Tim Young,
then a detective and now a sergeant who supervises detectives in
the Springfield police department.
Young’s reports are the
antithesis of the investigation conducted by his counterparts in
Riverton, who still hadn’t gotten around to interviewing
Steinhoff’s mother or sister when Black encountered Redpath.
He investigated promptly and thoroughly, confirming that the
city’s public-works department had just four cars matching
the description given by Black and her brother. Furthermore,
Redpath was the only employee assigned to those cars who looked
like the man seen by Black and her brother.
Three weeks after Black
first spoke with police, prosecutors charged Redpath with felony
child abduction. Redpath, who denied any encounter with Black,
seemed to hint at his connections near the end of his hour-long
interview with Young, who asked whether he had anything to add.
“He stated that he was going to talk with his family and if
he recalled anything else, he would call us back.” Young
wrote.
Nearly 10 years later, Young says that if
Redpath was trying to intimidate him, it wouldn’t have
worked. “I knew the family name,” Young says. “I
knew what I was up against when I went over there.” The
sergeant doesn’t hesitate when asked whether he believes that
Redpath was guilty. “Of course — that goes without
saying,” he answers. “I’m not going to file
charges against someone otherwise. It’s got to be beyond a
reasonable doubt in my mind.”
The case made headlines and caused a minor
sensation, in part because the city, while charges were pending
against Redpath, fired an African-American police officer accused
of having sex with a prostitute and upheld the termination after
the officer was acquitted of criminal charges. Redpath, however,
stayed on the city’s payroll, although he was transferred
from his position as a manager in the public-works department and
given a maintenance job in the fire department, with no cut in pay.
Steinhoff says that prosecutors told her that
they would use her rape allegation as leverage against Redpath in
the Black abduction case. If so, the lever proved weak. Prosecutors
agreed to a plea bargain, allowing Redpath to plead guilty to
misdemeanor aggravated assault. Redpath would not be required to
register as a sex offender. The system would treat him as a
first-time offender if he committed a sex crime in the future. And
he wouldn’t spend much time in jail: Had he been convicted of
child abduction, he’d have faced at least a year in prison;
instead, he got 180 days of work release in the county jail.
In telling the State
Journal-Register about the deal,
Schmidt, then first assistant state’s attorney, said that
Black’s family agreed to it. Eight years later, Schmidt, who
personally handled the Black case, says he “vaguely”
recalls it. “As we evaluated the case, we didn’t have
any physical evidence, and no eyewitness evidence,” he says,
notwithstanding the fact that Black’s brother saw
Redpath’s car. “We ran a risk that he would face no
consequences for his conduct. He could be acquitted. That was not
an acceptable option.”
John Sharp, Redpath’s lawyer at the
time, suggests that Black’s story changed after police
finished their investigation. “It was a situation where the
young lady had made a couple of different statements,” Sharp
says. “There were some problems that didn’t necessarily
support everything that was contained in what the [police] reports
were saying. It’s one of those things that, if there had been
a substantial likelihood of the state being able to secure a
conviction on that felony charge, there would not have been a
reduction.”
If anything, Sharp says, Redpath’s name
would have worked against him: “If they have a situation
where they have someone with a prominent name or a prominent
background, they look at those cases and want to make sure
there’s nothing that people could look back at and say,
‘You could have done this’ or ‘You could have
done that.’ ”
Black says that no one ever told her how the
case ended. Her father says that he has no memory of the case or
why the plea bargain was acceptable. Her stepmother has died.
Redpath resigned from his city job a few days
after taking the plea, but he stayed on work release, walking free
each weekday between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., after telling the
court that he had a job with a private construction company. If he
did have a job, he didn’t keep it very long. Two months after
Redpath pleaded guilty, the state successfully moved to revoke his
work release because he wasn’t employed. At the same time,
Schmidt filed a motion requiring Redpath to undergo a psychological
examination and an evaluation by a drug-and-alcohol specialist. The
psychologist’s report remains sealed. The drug/alcohol
evaluation is cursory at best.
Redpath — at the time a 36-year-old man
who’d been arrested twice for DUI four years earlier —
told a case manager for TASC (a treatment-center moniker that
stands for Treatment Accountability for Safer Communities) that he
hadn’t been a serious drinker since he was 21. He claimed
that he drank as many as three cans of beer once a week and that he
had gone more than five months without drinking even that much.
“TASC attempted to corroborate Mr. Redpath’s
self-report with his brother, but could not do so after receiving
an incorrect phone number,” wrote the case manager, who said
that he based his recommendation of no treatment on what Redpath
said and his legal history. The report does not indicate which
brother — the police officer, the alderman, or the CWLP
supervisor — could not be reached by telephone. Nor is there
any indication that the counselor looked at Riverton Police
Department reports outlining the Steinhoff rape investigation. In
those reports, which are public records, two people, including
Steinhoff, say that Redpath was drunk on whiskey the night on which
she was assaulted.
Schmidt says the jail sentence, plus two
years of probation, amounted to consequences. “He was under
the thumb of the court and the probation officer for two
years,” Schmidt says. However, he can’t explain why
nothing happened to Redpath when he sucker-punched a man he barely
knew less than a year after pleading guilty. “I’m
unfamiliar with that,” the prosecutor says. Redpath’s career with the city ended
with his conviction, but he still managed to earn a living courtesy
of taxpayers. In 1999, the Illinois Department of Transportation
hired him as a highway-maintenance worker at a salary of $2,629 a
month. He was making $2,916 a month when he left his state job in
June 2001. The state conducted a criminal-background
check before hiring Redpath, a transportation-department spokesman
says, but his misdemeanor conviction was not considered serious
enough to keep him off the public payroll.
Consequences
The Redpath name didn’t mean
anything to Rita, who lives in a town that she requests not be
named in this story. Illinois Times also agreed not to identify her or her
daughter, who we’ll call Yvonne. Just 16 years old, she has
brought Redpath to the brink of some semblance of justice.
She’s paid a horrible price.
Rita, a nurse, worked with one of
Redpath’s nieces, who set the two up. Redpath wasn’t
much to look at — balding, short, pudgy. What he lacked in
looks, though, he made up for in personality: He laughed a lot. He
had a good singing voice, which he demonstrated while driving. He
was a fine dancer. Yvonne, who was 10 when her mom started
dating Redpath in 1999, was overcoming the recent deaths of a
brother, who succumbed to cystic fibrosis, and her father, who
committed suicide. Redpath, Rita says, was “just a
buddy” to her children.
“He was great with kids,”
Rita says. “That was a big attraction.” Redpath liked
to fish, and so did Yvonne’s younger brother. “When we
first met him, he was really nice,” Yvonne says. “I had
just lost my brother and my dad, and here comes this guy. He was
somebody we were supposed to be able to trust.”
There was always something to do. On
weekends, Rita and her children would help Redpath remodel rental
homes. When they weren’t pounding nails, Redpath would take
Rita and her children water-skiing and camping. The relationship
grew close. Before long, Rita was making the 100-mile trek from her
home to Springfield on weekends and bringing her two children. He
was present when Yvonne was baptized. “I wasn’t dating
anybody else,” Rita says. After about six months, the relationship
ended abruptly with words that will forever haunt Rita:
“He
said to me, ‘I wonder what color Yvonne’s [genitalia]
is. Right then, I knew he was a pervert. I grabbed my kids and got
out of there.” But it was too late. She blames herself for
what happened to Yvonne. “I feel like I should have protected
her,” she says.
According to court documents filed by the
state’s attorney’s office, Redpath had intercourse with
Yvonne at least once in his bedroom. He also made her touch his
penis twice, according to court documents. Sitting in a conference
room at the Sangamon County Child Advocacy Center, flanked by her
mother, assistant state’s attorney Sheryl Essenburg and an advocate for
sexual-assault victims, Yvonne refuses to elaborate, except to say
that Redpath violated her near the end of his relationship with her
mother. “I don’t want to go into detail with
you,” she says. “He said, ‘Don’t tell
nobody.’ He’s a big man. I’m a little girl. What
am I supposed to do?”
The assaults remained secret until 2003, when
Rita found a letter Yvonne had written to a boyfriend that revealed
what Redpath had done to her. By then, Redpath had hurt someone
else, according to prosecutors and police reports. It happened in June 2001. Doreen (a pseudonym
to protect the identity of her daughter, who has the same last
name) says that she chanced across Redpath while she and her
children were packing up a car during a move between residences.
She’d once dated him for a few months but hadn’t seen
him for a long time. They decided to take her two daughters to
Dairy Queen for ice cream. But first, Redpath said, he had to stop
by his house to grab some papers. Doreen’s 5-year-old
daughter — call her Crystal — accompanied him inside
while the others waited in Redpath’s truck.
Several minutes passed. Crystal’s
9-year-old sister tried going inside the house to see what was
taking so long. She later told police that both the front and back
doors were locked. When she tried the front door a second time, she
told officers, it was unlocked. She found Redpath and her sister in
the kitchen. He had just given her a piece of cherry licorice. Once home and away from Redpath, Doreen says,
her daughter told her that Redpath had made her close her eyes,
then put his penis in her mouth.
Doreen immediately called
Springfield police, and Crystal repeated her story to officers. In
a report submitted to prosecutors, police wrote it up as predatory
criminal sexual assault, indicating that an adult had sexually
penetrated a child. Under state law, anyone found guilty of this
crime must serve at least six years in prison. But prosecutors
filed no charges.
Essenburg says that she reviewed the case and
determined that the accusations could not be proved beyond a
reasonable doubt. With no witnesses or physical evidence, it came
down to a child’s word against Redpath’s, and that just
wasn’t enough, the assistant state’s attorney says.
“That’s the difficulty of child sexual abuse,”
she says. “All you have is what this child can tell you. That
makes it a very tough case.”
Two years later, along came Yvonne, whose
case came to light after she and her mother spoke to a counselor,
who was bound by statute to notify law enforcement. “This was a much stronger case,”
Essenburg says. “[Yvonne] was young, but she was considerably
older [than Crystal] and able to give a clearer accounting.”
This time, prosecutors filed charges of predatory criminal sexual
assault, one in Yvonne’s case and one in Crystal’s. The
state’s attorney’s office also filed two counts of
criminal sexual abuse. Bail was set at $250,000. Karen Becker, one
of Redpath’s sisters, paid his bond. “I have no
comment,” Becker tells Illinois
Times.
Filing charges is one thing; proving them
quite another. Rather than push the criminal charges, Essenburg
filed a civil petition asking a judge to declare Redpath a sexually
dangerous person. By doing so, she could introduce evidence beyond
the accusations in Crystal’s and Yvonne’s cases. And
she did, citing Redpath’s statement during the alleged 1995
attack that he wanted to have sex with Steinhoff’s daughter.
Under state law, a person declared sexually dangerous by a judge or
jury is indefinitely confined by the state Department of
Corrections. Only after a judge or jury declares that the person is
no longer dangerous may he or she be set free. In theory, at least,
Redpath was facing decades behind bars.
It took several months for psychiatrists to
examine Redpath and render opinions that could be offered as proof
that he needed to be locked up. While the petition was pending, a
woman whom Redpath hired to clean his house called police in
November 2003. Redpath, the woman reported, asked her how she would
like to be paid, then grinned and began rubbing his crotch. Police
categorized the report as disorderly conduct. No charges were
filed. Essenburg says that she learned about that report from Illinois Times. Had
she known about it, she says, she likely would have included it in
her petition to have Redpath declared sexually dangerous.
Essenburg says that four psychiatrists
examined Redpath. (Court files, however, reflect three
examinations.) Just one doctor found that Redpath met the legal
standard for being sexually dangerous. All but one of the reports issued
by the psychiatrists are sealed. Dr. Robert E. Chapman, who
authored the only report that is open — it was filed in court
by the defendant’s lawyers — said that Redpath’s
explanations for the attacks on Steinhoff and Yvonne were
“self-serving.” In Steinhoff’s case, Chapman
wrote, Redpath said that she had lied and that his explanation was
“demeaning to the woman’s moral behavior.” After
speaking with Redpath for two hours in May 2004, the doctor opined
that he was not a sexually dangerous person.
With only one psychiatrist saying that
Redpath was dangerous, it was back to the criminal charges. Had he
been convicted on all counts, Redpath could have been sent to
prison for more than 60 years. But prosecutors balked. “What I tell victims is, going to trial
is taking a chance,” Essenburg says. “You cannot
guarantee what 12 people will do. Sometimes you decide to go for
something definite rather than take a chance on something where you
can’t predict the outcome.” And so she and
Redpath’s lawyers made a deal: In September, Redpath pleaded
guilty to criminal sexual abuse for fondling Yvonne, with the
state’s attorney’s office recommending a sentence no
longer than three years. The maximum is six. The remaining charges
were dismissed. Sentencing is set for Dec. 14 in the courtroom of
Judge Robert J. Eggers.
“That, in my opinion, was the best
terms we could get for a plea — it was that or we go to
trial,” Essenburg says. Though she played no role in the
Black and Steinhoff cases, Essenburg insists that Redpath has never
gotten special treatment from her colleagues. “I can tell you
without any hesitation that who he is had nothing to do with the
way these cases were handled,” she says. “These cases
were decided on the evidence that was available at the time,”
she says. Yvonne and her mother aren’t so sure,
but they have nothing but praise for the way in which Essenburg has
handled their case.
“I’m sure the Redpath name had an
effect on the other cases, but not this one,” Rita says.
“I’m sure, up until this time, that the Redpath name
got him tons of favors. Sheryl has done an absolutely wonderful
job. She’s looked at this from every angle. She’s done
what she could with the evidence that was there.”
Yvonne says that she was willing to testify
but was relieved to learn that she wouldn’t have to take the
stand. “I think it’s the best way to go,” she
says. Like her mother, Yvonne doesn’t believe that Redpath
got any breaks in her case or that his family helped him behind the
scenes. “If they had such influence, they would have brought
it down to nothing,” she says. “This is, by far, not
the least he could get.”
What Redpath did to her has left her
traumatized but not afraid of him, Yvonne says. That’s one
reason she and her mother plan to attend his sentencing. “I
want him to know we’re not scared of him,” she says. Yvonne puts up a brave front for a
16-year-old girl with one foot in childhood, the other in a world
none of us wants to live in. She can’t sleep in the dark
— her bedroom door must be open that so a hallway light can
keep her feeling safe, and her bedroom is set up so that she can
easily see the door. She is fast growing into an attractive woman,
but, she says, it’s hard for her to trust men, and she
doesn’t think she’ll ever put the rapes behind her.
“It’s not going to go away,” she says.
“It’s going to be with me forever.”
At one point, Yvonne downplays the
aftereffects, but her mother jumps in, running down the list of
problems her daughter has weathered: severe depression,
self-mutilation, post traumatic stress disorder, two suicide
attempts, two stays in a mental hospital, a year spent in a
residential home, leaving high school to attend night classes for
adults because she’s never really been a teenager and never
will be. How much of this is attributable to Redpath? “All of
it,” Rita answers, her voice tinged equally with anger and
sadness.
After a brief silence, her daughter opens up
a bit. Yvonne talks about how Redpath took advantage of her when
she was vulnerable, still grieving the deaths of her father and
brother, and how she’s afraid to venture outside her house at
night. “You shouldn’t be scared of being in your own
neighborhood,” she says. And she corrects a reporter who is
asking questions no teenager should ever have to face. “It’s not ‘Mr.
Redpath,’ ” she says. “It’s
‘Redpath.’ ”
It’s early November, and
Michael Redpath is in Cass County Circuit Court for a status
conference on the state’s attorney’s petition to revoke
his probation for a DUI conviction. The state moved to revoke
probation in July, five months after Redpath was arrested for DUI
in Logan County. As he waits for his case to be called, a
woman talking with someone on a hallway bench happens to mention a
girl with the same name as Rita’s daughter, saying,
“she just turned 12.” Redpath instantly swings his gaze
in her direction. Then he ambles over to a Cass County
sheriff’s deputy, shakes his hand, and starts chatting, as if
he were a friend. After a few minutes, Redpath strolls away and
stands alone against a wall.
Suddenly an Illinois Times journalist
10 feet away pulls out a camera and takes his picture for this
story. Redpath stares straight ahead for a few
seconds, as if in disbelief. Then he walks back to the deputy and
stands behind him, partially blocking the journalist’s view
and enough to prevent another snapshot. Redpath doesn’t talk
to anyone now — he just stands there, looking grim. When his
case is called, Redpath and his attorney walk down a hallway toward
a conference room where court is being held, with the journalist
trailing just a few steps behind. Redpath mutters an obscenity to
his lawyer — something about punching someone. When he
reaches the conference room, Redpath shuts the door — hard
— in the journalist’s face, then locks it.
The conference lasts less than 10 minutes. An
assistant state’s attorney agrees to postpone any action on
the probation-revocation petition until after Redpath is sentenced
for the felony matter in Sangamon County. No one says just what the
felony involves, and the judge doesn’t ask. Redpath sounds
casual as he tells the court that sentencing day is Dec. 9, five
days earlier than is the truth. Perhaps it just slipped his mind. After all, the courts have never posed a big
problem for him before.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2005.
