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Saturday, November 14, 2009 - 12:17 PM
Spreitzer pleaded
guilty on April 2, 1984, to murdering Rose Davis, Sandra Delaware, Shui
Mak, and a drug dealer named Rafael Torado. He received life
sentences for each murder, as well as time for a multitude of charges,
from rape to deviant sexual assault. Yet he still had to go to trial
for the Linda Sutton murder. He appeared in a bench trial in front of
Judge Edward Kowal on February 25, 1986, but retained his right to have
a jury decide his sentence. He admitted that he and his comrades had
abducted Linda Sutton as she was walking near Wrigley Field and took
her to a wooded field near a hotel where he was staying. He then
handcuffed her, raped her, and removed her breasts. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Then she was raped
again and left to die. His public defender, Carol Anfinson,
presented him as immature, impulsive and simplistic---a young man just
following orders of a gang leader. She asked the jury to spare his
life. In support, his relatives and associates testified that he was a
docile young man with a history of being bullied. But a friend of
Spreitzer's, the Chicago Tribune reported, testified that he
had bragged about what he had done, referring to the women as "broads"
and laughing over the fact that he had mutilated and killed several of
them. The ADA insisted that Spreitzer was "every woman's nightmare"
and that he was one of a "pack of weasels." Spreitzer's bid for
mercy failed to work. He was convicted on March 4 of aggravated
kidnapping and murder. Two weeks later on March 20, a jury deliberated
for an hour before giving him the death penalty for this crime. He
wound up on Death Row in Pontiac State Correctional facility in Joliet,
Illinois. He exhausted all of his appeals, despite claims by his
attorney Gary Prichard that he had been denied due process and that an
examination after the trial indicated that he had brain damage.
Prichard argued that the jury had not been correctly instructed. Yet,
despite the appearance that this case was now at an end, there was one
more unexpected development.  Robin Gecht While clemency was not granted to Spreitzer at that time, the Chicago Tribune
noted that as Governor Ryan was leaving office in January 2003, he
pardoned four of the 164 Death Row inmates and offered blanket clemency
to the rest, including Edward Spreitzer. The families were outraged
and vowed to fight for restoring justice. But Spreitzer had at last
won his hard-earned reprieve.
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