Town note
In the 1700s the area was occupied by the Potawatomi.
about 0:06:33The story
Shortly before eleven o'clock on the night of May 5, 1992, a resident driving on a secluded road in Spring Grove, Illinois, swerved to avoid a car coming straight at him. In the headlights he saw a dark-haired man at the wheel and a woman beside him, slumped over. Seven hours later, at about a quarter to seven the next morning, people out jogging in an isolated field off Rabine Drive found a white Geo Tracker standing in tall grass, thirty-five to forty feet from the road. Inside was Kathleen Twarowski, known as Kathy, twenty-one years old and three days short of graduating from Oakton Community College's physical therapy assistant programme. She had been beaten to death.
Spring Grove sits in McHenry County in the north-east corner of Illinois, about an hour and a quarter from Chicago and an hour from Milwaukee, close to the Lake County line. In 1992 it was a small commuter village of just over five and a half thousand people, prosperous and quiet, where property and violent crime both ran at about a third of the national average. Kathy grew up there. She was the eldest of three children of Bob and Elizabeth Twarowski, known as Betty, and by all accounts a bright, athletic and popular girl: four years on the girls basketball team at Grant High School, a member of the student council and the National Honor Society, and a student who wanted to work with disabled children.
He had first met Kathy when she was twelve, during rescue calls he made in her neighbourhood in rural Fox Lake, and he had turned up at her high school football games. People who served with him said he had joined the police to live out a power trip; one local prosecutor said he had disgraced the profession.
The relationship followed a pattern that became steadily more frightening. Kathy moved in with him in August 1990, they bought a house together in May 1991, and within weeks she was back with her parents. In November 1991 she turned up at the home of Helen Sabisky, a colleague who had become a second mother to her, crying hysterically with her face red, marks on her throat and clumps of hair missing; she said that this time she had thought he was going to kill her. On New Year's Eve 1991 he was waiting at the Hard Rock Cafe in Chicago although her group had chosen the venue at the last minute. On January 11, 1992, at Bogey's Night Club, he bit her on the cheek, nose and mouth hard enough to draw blood, and bouncers threw him out; her car was then found with its windows smashed and her coat stolen. In February a friend spotted his truck following Kathy's car for five miles after a night out, and in the spring he turned up uninvited at Frigate's and argued with her for half an hour.
Kathy took out a protective order in April 1992 and then, apparently embarrassed, began seeing him again in secret, parking in his garage so that her parents would not see her car. Her mother and father knew nothing of it.
Loretta Dixon, a woman he was casually seeing, telephoned at 9.15 and found him relaxed and normal; they arranged that he would help her move the next morning. The medical examiner put Kathy's death at about half past ten, roughly four hours after her last meal. At 6.45 the next morning she was found in her own car, covered in blood, her trousers open, with a pool of blood and spatter in the rear seat but none on the ceiling. She had fourteen lacerations to her scalp and seven to her face, and her teeth were broken and cracked. The pathologist said the injuries came from repeated heavy blows and that the facial wounds required a heavy metal rod-like instrument. A second expert said the marks were linear rather than those of a hammer or a baseball bat.
Told only that there was blood in the car he part-owned and that Kathy was dead, he asked where she was and invited them to check his alibis. He called the relationship 'just buddies' while saying they planned to marry. He had a scabbed gash on his right middle knuckle and a scratch on his neck, which he blamed on a log falling from the fireplace and on his stethoscope. Luminol and phenolphthalein tests lit up the living room carpet and much of the bathroom. Hairs on a push broom in his house matched Kathy's, about a hundred of them, many with broken roots, several carrying crusted blood. Fibres from a waste basket matched her socks and shirt. The fireplace poker was seized but no blood was confirmed on it.
On June 18, during a forty-minute drive to give blood, saliva and hair samples, he shouted at the officers and said, 'I did it, so what?'
Rogers received nothing for the testimony.
The retrial began in July 2003. Michelle Gast and Laura Hill repeated the stalking and biting evidence. Gary Reeney, a luminol specialist, explained the tests, while conceding they were screening tests only. A tool-mark expert could neither identify nor exclude the poker, and a defence pathologist said the weapon was a long cylindrical object rather than a poker. The defence argued there was no blood, hair or fingerprint evidence in the car and that the police had built a case on suspicion. The prosecution answered that he had two days to clean up before the search warrant and that he had missed a spot in a bathroom waste basket.