Eric Zorn, the Chicago Tribune columnist who made his reputation writing about wrongly convicted prisoners, also made a hobby of coming up with different phrases to describe Debra Rienbolt.
When he first wrote about her in 1998, Zorn called Rienbolt “about as useless as a witness can get, no matter what you want to prove.” Months later, he described her as so unreliable that “you wouldn’t take an umbrella if [she] told you it was raining out.” And two weeks after that, in a particularly creative mood, he said she had gone on the record with “as many different answers as a Magic 8 Ball” and that her “credibility meter is now fixed at zero.”
The bad news is: All these cute expressions describe a woman whose testimony sent Randy Steidl to Death Row for two murders he did not commit.
The good news is: Thanks to the work of Springfield attorney Michael Metnick and investigator Bill Clutter, a federal judge recently vacated Steidl’s conviction and gave the State of Illinois 120 days to either release or retry Steidl.
Steidl’s case made the cover of Illinois Times in 1993 and again in 1998. But the murders for which Steidl has served more than 15 years were even bigger news in the little town of Paris. A pair of young newlyweds, Dyke and Karen Rhoads, were stabbed to death in their bed the night of July 5, 1986. The killer–or killers–then set the house on fire. The horrific crime went unsolved for months until a pair of supposed eyewitnesses suddenly emerged–Debra Rienbolt and Darrell Herrington.
Both Rienbolt and Herrington were admitted alcoholics. Between them, they had seven DUI convictions. Rienbolt also admitted a fondness for marijuana and codeine. Both Rienbolt and Herrington offered a variety of stories, and both later recanted their testimony, only to then recant their recantations. Rienbolt even repeated the sequence a third time–recanting in four-hour videotaped deposition, only to later recant that statement.
On the night of the murders, both Rienbolt and Herrington had, separately, been busy altering their brain chemistry. Herrington commenced his drinking that day at noon; Rienbolt, likewise, claimed she began drinking by noon and spent the evening having more drinks, smoking pot, and taking codeine. Both mysteriously ended up at the Rhoads residence just in time to witness the grisly murders.
Herrington claimed he had hitched a ride home from the taverns (having lost his driving privileges) with Steidl and Herb Whitlock, who stopped by the Rhoads residence around midnight. Herrington was asleep in the car when he heard a commotion. He ran to the back door of the nearest house and used a credit card to unlock the door. He would later testify that he saw Steidl coming down the stairs holding a bloody knife, and that Steidl forced him to view the dead bodies of Dyke and Karen Rhoads and promised the same treatment would await Herrington and his family if he told anyone.
Herrington did not see Rienbolt at the crime scene. But she was apparently there, at least according to some of the statements she gave police. Rienbolt gave four different versions of events to law enforcement officials.
In all, Rienbolt claimed to have played hooky from her job as a certified nurses’ aide in a local nursing home by having someone else punch in for her. She borrowed a friend’s car (whose car varies from statement to statement) and went bar hopping. She saw Whitlock and Dyke Rhoads at Jeanie’s Place tavern at either noon or 3:45 p.m. (again, there are varying versions) and overheard Whitlock making ominous remarks. She was so concerned about his remarks that, after the bars closed, she drove past the Rhoads residence, just on a hunch, and saw Whitlock outside.
In one version, she kept driving and went home, only to have Whitlock appear at dawn wearing bloody clothes and telling her to keep quiet. In another version, she stopped at the house, went inside through the back door, went upstairs, held Karen Rhoads down while Whitlock and Steidl stabbed Dyke, then saw Whitlock cut Karen’s throat.
She also had several versions of her story about a knife she handed over to police. She first described it as a knife loaned to her by Whitlock, and specked with dried blood. She later described it as belonging to her own husband, and said she lent the knife to Whitlock before the murders.
The friend Rienbolt claimed to have gone barhopping with has sworn they never went to bars together. The owner of Jeanie’s Place has sworn Whitlock and Rhoads weren’t in her tavern that day. Furthermore, Rienbolt supervisor at the nursing home has testified that she wasn’t playing hooky at all that night; Rienbolt was, in fact, working at the nursing home from mid-afternoon until shortly before midnight.
Very little of this contradictory evidence was presented at Steidl’s trial. He was represented by an attorney who had three handicaps: a tenuous grasp of relevant law, a misguided belief that he had a slam-dunk case, and a vivid fear of someone who was following him around in a yellow Cadillac with Florida plates. In fact, the counsel provided by this lawyer, the late S. John Muller, was so inadequate that it provided the basis for the federal judge’s decision to throw out Steidl’s conviction.
Judge Michael P. McCuskey’s opinion (available on-line at www.ericzorn.com) focuses on three sets of facts omitted at Steidl’s trial. First, the fact that Rienbolt was not barhopping and witnessing murder but actually at work could have been established if only Muller had called Rienbolt supervisor, Paula Cooper (now Paula Brklach) to testify. McCuskey deems this oversight “representation which fell below an objective standard of reasonableness.”
Next, McCuskey focused on the so-called murder weapon–the knife that was loaned to Rienbolt either by Whitlock or by her own husband (her statements vary). Wherever it came from, no one disputes that the knife’s blade is five inches long. Doctors who performed autopsies on Dyke and Karen Rhoads testified that both bodies had wounds six inches deep. Experts who testified later (at appeals and evidentiary hearings) testified it was more likely that the murder weapon was another knife found in the Rhoads’ kitchen sink–a knife with an eight-inch blade.
The final factor linking Rienbolt to the crime was her testimony about a lamp she saw in the Rhoads’ bedroom–a lamp she described as being broken. She even stated that she saw either Steidl or Whitlock holding a large shard of the ceramic lamp. During her recantations, Rienbolt swore that police had told her about the lamp so that she could appear to have firsthand knowledge of the crime scene. At later hearings, Metnick and Clutter presented witnesses who proved the lamp wasn’t broken until after the fire was extinguished.
Steidl’s barfly lifestyle afforded him more alibi witnesses than might be expected for the hours of midnight to 4 a.m. Witnesses placed him at several taverns, after which he left with a neighbor, Dennis Uselman, and two women. They eventually paired off into couples, and Steidl took one woman back to his apartment where they had intimate relations. Around 3 a.m., he got up and drove to a post box to mail his unemployment forms. When he returned, he awakened the woman in his bed to tell her that her friend (the other woman) was ready to take her home.
Both women testified for Steidl, but many in the courtroom were mystified about why Uselman did not appear. Muller later explained that he had not called Uselman because Uselman is deaf and mute, and Muller did not want to “put on a sideshow.”
Steidl’s death sentence was vacated after an evidentiary hearing in 1999, but the judge resentenced him to life without parole. Since the federal judge has now vacated that conviction, Steidl’s fate currently rests in the hands of Illinois State Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who can choose one of three actions: She can appeal the federal court’s decision, which would mean Steidl would continue serving time for murders he did not commit; she could decide to re-try Steidl, starting the case over from scratch; or she could simply release him.
Zorn’s latest column about the Steidl case doesn’t offer any new similes or metaphors for the story-changing, recanting, unrecanting star witness Debra Rienbolt. Instead, he offers a collection of quotes uttered by Madigan during her recent election campaign. As anybody with a television knows, Madigan’s ads trumpeted the innocence of Rolando Cruz, who “spent seven years on Death Row despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence,” the ad said. Madigan went on to say that her opponent, DuPage County State’s Attorney Joe Birkett, “continued to prosecute Cruz using coerced testimony.”
Zorn cites other campaign material in which Madigan promises, “I will never cover up the truth and stand in the way of justice.”
Metnick, Clutter, and Randy Steidl are waiting to see if she meant it.
This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2003.
