When Innocence Is Not Enough

Julie and Joel

by Diane Fanning

If your child were murdered and you were charged with committing that homicide but you knew you were not the perpetrator, how do you cope with knowing that your innocence simply was not enough to pull you out of the vortex of a criminal justice system operating in an alternative reality?

Can you imagine anything worse ever happening to a parent?  I can't.

It is what happened to Julie Rea after the murder of her ten-year-old son Joel Kirkpatrick.  She described the intruder in her home.  She suffered injuries that the emergency room doctor said could not have been self-inflicted.  She passed lie detector test.  Law enforcement did not believe her. 

Represented by an inexperienced, court-appointed attorney, she was convicted and sentenced to 65 years in prison.

Initially, I did not believe her, either.  I did not place any credibility in what was said by Julie, her friends, her family or her attorneys.   Then, I heard the prosecutor speak.  He said that there were no stranger fingerprints in the house; that no stranger would come into the house to kill a child; that the violence of the crime proved the perpetrator was someone very close to the child; and that a person does not come into someone's home without a weapon and pull a knife out of the kitchen drawer and use it to kill.

That's when I knew Julie Rea might not be guilty because I'd been interviewing serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells for my book Through the Window.  He did all those things at crime scenes.  I didn't suspect him then but thought someone just like him could have committed the crime. 

When I wrote to Sells about what the ridiculous things the prosecutor said, without any details of names, places or dates, he wrote back asking if the crime was committed a couple days before his murder of Stephanie Mahaney in Springfield, Missouri--maybe on the 13th.  That was how his confession began.  Still, I was skeptical until Bill Clutter, investigator for the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project, found corroborating testimony in the town of Lawrenceville, Illinois.



Julie Rea and Diane Fanning

From that moment on, I was convinced and was determined to do what I could to help find justice for Julie Rea.  The Center for Wrongful Convictions and an extraordinary Chicago defense attorney, Ron Safer, became involved.  Julie got a new trial and was acquitted of the crime.  Just last month, she received a Certificate of Actual Innocence from the State of Illinois. Julie handed me the Defender of the Innocent Award from the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project--definitely the highlight of my career as a crime writer.

Whenever anyone maligns the True Crime genre or is dismissive of my writing, I will always think of Julie and the role my book played in her tragic story.  It is just one example of why I think the genre makes a significant contribution and why I feel compelled to keep writing it.

But still something was missing and that was Justice for Joel.  After his murder, if the sheriff's office would have paid any attention to reports of a suspicious stranger in town, maybe deputies could have found Tommy Lynn Sells before he killed again.  But, instead, they myopically focused on proving Julie's guilt, hid some evidence from the defense and ignored anything that did not fit their theory of the case.

Today, even though the state has completely exonerated Julie Rea, the State's Attorney's Office refuses to investigate further--refuses to find Justice for Joel.

This Sunday night, on the Investigation Discovery channel, at 10 pm Eastern, On the Case with Paula Zahn presents A Mother's Nightmare, the story of Julie Rea, her son Joel and the many people including me, who stood up to find Justice for Julie and Joel.

Throughout the trial of Casey Anthony, Diane Fanning, author of Mommy's Little Girl, writes daily about the the pursuit of Justice for Caylee Anthony on her blog, Writing Is a Crime.

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Mystery Man - Bill Clutter

by Bill Clutter

In June of 2000, I was contacted by an attorney. The lawyer explained that she represented a woman who was the target of an upcoming grand jury "investigation." Her client, Julie Rea-Harper, was a graduate student and Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University. Julie had already lost her child, and now her life was threatened.

Convinced that Julie had murdered her 10-year-old son Joel, prosecutors were planning to seek the death penalty.

For three years, the case of the Joel's death had gone unsolved, but the local sheriff and Julie’s ex-husband singled her out as the only suspect. The crime happened in Lawrenceville, a small town in southern Illinois on the Indiana border.

Julie (pictured below with Joel) described being awakened at 4 a.m. by her son’s scream. She went into Joel’s room, she said, where she was beaten by the man who broke into her home and stabbed her child to death using a knife from the kitchen butcher block. She described him having a “jerky” gait as he fled.

After hearing the news of Joel’s murder that morning, a citizen of Lawrenceville rushed down to the Sheriff’s office to report he had seen a “drifter” in town who was at a local diner. The stranger had made disturbing comments to his eleven-year-old son. “I think I saw your suspect,” he told the Sheriff. The citizen described the drifter as having “real jerky” movements when he walked. But the Sheriff told the witness that he was busy with a murder investigation and disregarded the information. The Sheriff did not even take the time to write a report.

The case of Julie Rea Harper is classic tunnel vision—when police are so locked in on one suspect, in this case, the mother, that they totally disregard other evidence that may lead them to someone else. This crime, after all, happened at the very time when Boulder, Colorado police were pointing the finger at the parents of JonBenet Ramsey. We now know there was compelling evidence that an intruder committed that crime.

Julie’s attorney had been referred to me because she was in need of a private investigator with experience in capital and criminal defense. She had been informed about a new program in Illinois called the Capital Litigation Trust Fund that just went into effect. The Fund was created after private investigator Paul Ciolino uncovered evidence that exonerated Anthony Porter, who was at one time 48 hours away from execution.

Hearing the details of Julie’s description of the assailant, I told her attorney about a drifter by the name of Tommy Lynn Sells who was facing capital murder charges in Texas for killing a child after he broke into a home at 4 a.m.--his M.O. in many other crimes. I told her that Sells would be the starting point of my defense investigation. Sells was known to travel and commit murders in Southern Illinois.

A few months after this conversation, Julie was indicted by a special prosecutor, charged with a capital offense. Julie by this time was unrepresented by counsel because her Indiana attorney was not licensed to practice law in Illinois. So Julie filed a pro se motion requesting the appointment of two capital-qualified attorneys, citing new Supreme Court rules that require the appointment of two attorneys, well qualified and experienced in criminal defense, to represent anyone facing the death penalty.

Prosecutors responded by declaring that they no longer wanted the death penalty—not because they opposed capital punishment—but because their decision made it more likely that they could win a conviction. Prosecutors were willing to abandon their intent on taking Julie’s life because it made the odds of taking her liberty more likely.

Their decision meant that Julie would not have equal protection under the law. State funding that was designed to hire experts, such as my services as a private investigator, were no longer available to her. Two years later, Julie’s family contacted the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project to request our assistance. Our Project was just beginning, and depended on private donors. We had no State funding. Julie had been convicted of Joel’s murder by a jury in Fairfield County.

Although there was no direct evidence she committed the murder, her ex-husband and chief accuser gave testimony that Julie once entertained the idea of having an abortion upon hearing news that she was pregnant with Joel. It was an allegation that should never have been allowed to influence the jury’s decision, and one that Julie vigorously denied. The daughter of a Methodist minister, she was opposed to abortion based on her religious beliefs. However, her attorney did not resist or refute the testimony of her ex. The impact of this emotionally charged testimony on the jury was unfairly prejudicial. The effect it had on the jury is best demonstrated by examining the election results of the 2004 senate race between two African-American candidates: Barack Obama and Alan Keyes. A single-issue candidate, Keyes' one difference was his opposition to abortion. Keyes won Fairfield County with 72% of the popular vote--by the same margin Obama carried the entire state.

Within a year of being convicted, true-crime author Diane Fanning published a book detailing the crimes of child serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells (pictured right). In the book, Sells described killing a boy in southern Illinois after he was released from prison in 1997, as well as his struggle to get away from the child’s mother. The details of his confession mirrored the facts of Joel’s murder.

It was the investigation of our Project that corroborated Sells' confession, leading Texas Rangers to conclude that Sells’ confession was genuine. One would have expected prosecutors and police in Illinois to seek justice when presented with evidence exonerating Julie. But they persisted in trying her again after the appellate court reversed her conviction. This time, with the presentation of the new evidence, she was granted a fair trial. Julie-Rea Harper was acquitted.

In the twenty plus years I have worked as a criminal defense investigator, the greatest satisfaction is being able to witness an innocent client walk out of prison. That satisfaction overcomes the despair one feels in the years of working on these cases, when the word justice seems at odds with what is happening to your client.

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