Murder victims' families steel themselves for clemency hearings

CHICAGO -- When Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions two years ago, Jim Dudovick was certain that the death sentence of the man who murdered his daughter would still be carried out.

Surely there would be no question about the fate of her killer, William Peeples, who burst into Dawn Dudovick's Schaumburg apartment in 1988, stabbed her more than 30 times and left her to die.

Peeples not only left a trail of blood between his apartment and hers, but DNA tests confirmed that the blood in Peeples' sink was hers.

But now, Jim Dudovick and the relatives of scores of other murder victims find themselves fighting once again for what they thought they had won long ago -- a death sentence for the killers.

'Fighting for justice'

"I thought the hell of all this was over and we could heal," Dudovick said. "Now it seems like we're fighting for justice for my daughter all over again."

Beginning Oct. 15, the Prisoner Review Board will hold hearings for at least 140 of the state's 160 death row inmates, after which Ryan will decide if he wants to commute their sentences to life without parole.

The governor ordered the hearings after a string of challenges to Illinois death sentences.

Since the state resumed capital punishment in 1977, 13 death row inmates have seen their sentences overturned, including some found innocent; 12 inmates were executed during the same period.

While that has cast doubt on the integrity of the state's capital punishment system, the families of many murder victims say their open-and-shut cases shouldn't be subject to such scrutiny.

"I tell you what this means if this happens," said Jamie Tsambikou, whose family will attend the clemency hearing for Robert Turner, who was sentenced to death for the 1985 slaying of her sister, Bridget Drobney. "It means what little justice my sister got will be undone. That will be the legacy of Gov. Ryan."

For people like Crystal Fitch, the hearings will be unlike anything they've been through during the years of trials, motions and appeals.

"There's no new evidence, nothing new," Fitch said of the case against Anthony Brown, who was convicted of raping and murdering her sister, Felicia Lewis, and killing Lewis' boyfriend, Reginald Wilson, in 1994.

'He did it'

"This is not one of those cases where DNA evidence could exonerate him. DNA tests confirmed he did it. He knows it, we know it," she said.

Prosecutors say that in case after case, the evidence against the death row inmates is as strong or -- in cases like Brown's -- stronger than ever.

"They didn't leave bread crumbs, they left whole loaves of bread," said Cook County State's Attorney's office spokesman John Gorman.

But with the hearings, family members say they can't take comfort in that evidence, as they did during the trials.

Some say the hearings have them thinking the unthinkable: That the killers whose sentences the governor is considering commuting to life without parole could someday walk out of prison.

"If they can drop them from death row, they can drop anything," said Andrea Covert, whose sister, Mimi Covert, 30, was abducted, raped and murdered in 1985 by DeWayne Britz. Britz not only confessed, he led police to her body.

The hearings come at the end of an administration that has been battered by the continuing federal investigation of the selling of driver's licenses for bribes, mostly under Ryan's watch as secretary of state. Ryan hasn't been charged, but the investigation contributed to his decision not to run for re-election.

Pueschel doesn't know what she'll say about the night Reginald and Jerry Mahaffey killed Dean and Jo Ellen Pueschel, and nearly killed the couple's 11-year-old son. Just recounting some facts she's carried around for years -- the way one man calmly drank Kool-Aid before he and his brother clubbed the sleeping couple with baseball bats -- would take a long time.

"I know I'm going to tell how Reginald was wearing my brother's crucifix," she said.

She also plans to say something else. "I want to tell them what an injustice this is to make us do this," she said. "It's a slap in the face."