Third trial in Holly Staker murder starts Monday

The significance of the event went undetected at first.

A night reporter left a note on an editor's desk, characterizing it as routine.

"Waukegan has a homicide on Hickory Street," the note read. "Have someone call in the morning."

But in the more than 16 years since 11-year-old Holly Staker's raped and brutalized body was discovered in that Hickory Street apartment, nothing about the case has been routine.

Juan Rivera is scheduled to go on trial in the case in Lake County circuit court this week, for the third time.

Over the years, the case against him has been derided and defended as developments continue to unfold. Some of the same evidence used to convict Rivera - and other evidence used to overturn those convictions - is likely to take center stage again.

The crime

Holly, a sixth-grade student council member and cheerleader with an identical twin sister, was babysitting the 2-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son of a family friend Aug. 17, 1992.

The boy was found wandering in the street by a man who took him to where the child's mother was working, and that woman called Holly's mother before they both went to the apartment.

They discovered Holly's partially clad body in a blood-soaked bedroom. The 2-year-old, who had not been physically harmed, was sitting quietly in another room.

An autopsy revealed Holly had been raped, stabbed 27 times and strangled.

Investigators with the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force, formed less than a year before, spent more than 7,250 hours chasing information, questioning people and identifying suspects before a county jail inmate told them there was a man in prison in Galesburg who might know something about the crime.

Rivera, then a 20-year-old Waukegan resident serving three years for burglary, had told the inmate he was at a party near where Holly was killed Aug. 17 and saw someone there who may have done it.

Rivera was brought back to Lake County, and during five days of questioning police say they dismantled his alibis and got him to confess.

It is the confession that convinced two prior juries to convict Rivera, and that same confession will be the centerpiece of this prosecution.

"The defendant gave police a detailed account of the crime," Assistant State's Attorney Michael Mermel said. "He provided information that could have only been known by the killer, and information the police did not have until Rivera gave it to them.

But Rivera's attorneys from the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University and the powerhouse Chicago law firm of Jenner and Block have ammunition of their own to bring to the battle.

Sophisticated DNA testing on semen found inside Holly's body, the source of which was debated in the first trial and not introduced in the second, unquestionably excludes Rivera as the donor, tests showed in 2005.

Coupling that with the lack of any physical evidence tying Rivera to the crime and computer records from a court-ordered electronic monitoring system showing he was home at the time, this trial could be the one that sets Rivera, now 36, free.

"The apartment was filled with forensic evidence," said Rivera's attorney Jeffrey Urdangen of Northwestern. "Each and every piece of which excludes Juan Rivera."

Police say Rivera, who was awaiting sentencing for a probation violation after a burglary conviction, had a chance meeting with Holly on the night she was killed as she played outside the apartment with the children.

According to the confession, she invited him into the apartment, then ridiculed him because he could not have sex with her.

In the confession, Rivera says he flew into a rage, grabbed a knife from a dish drainer in the apartment, stabbed the girl repeatedly and raped her before leaving.

Although the DNA does not match Rivera, or anyone else in state and federal databases of convicted felons, Mermel said it is possible someone else may have had sex with Holly in the days before the crime.

"We did not oppose checking the databases for a match on the DNA because there is someone out there who had sex with an 11-year-old girl and we want to catch him," Mermel said at a pretrial hearing. "If I did not believe we have already caught her killer, I would not be prosecuting this case."

Leonard Cavise, a law professor at DePaul University, scoffed at the suggestion Holly would have willingly engaged in sex, and said the state should not be prosecuting the case.

"Oh, sure, 11-year-old girls have lots of sex partners," Cavise said. "The state does not only not have anything on him (Rivera), they have something on someone else and I cannot believe they are going ahead with this case."

Critical evidence

Records from the electronic monitor, which Rivera was forced to wear by the court while he was free on bond, should also prove he could not be the killer because he was at home, the defense says.

But disturbing questions about the system Lake County was using at the time that surfaced during Rivera's first trial in 1993 led court officials to abandon the program the following year.

Police say Rivera told them he regularly slipped the monitor off his ankle, left it near the box connected to his family's telephone that informed officials of his whereabouts, and then came and went as he pleased.

His 1993 conviction was thrown out, in part, because of some of the information about the monitor's unreliability that prosecutors presented during the trial. Mermel declined to comment on how he will attack the monitor defense in this trial.

However, it is clear how he plans to counter the DNA evidence that clears Rivera.

As the case was heading for a second trial in 1998, it was learned a California scientist testing some evidence for the defense had contaminated some of that evidence with his own DNA.

That revelation forced defense attorneys not to introduce any DNA evidence in the second trial, which again saw Rivera convicted and sentenced to life.

The contaminated evidence was not part of the testing that subsequently was done, which prompted Circuit Judge Christopher Starck to order the third trial in 2006. However, Mermel has made it clear he intends to call that scientist to testify for the prosecution this time.

Urdangen filed a motion to bar the testimony, and argued Mermel intended to use the contamination episode in an effort to get jurors to doubt the reliability of the evidence in Rivera's favor. He pointed out the evidence contaminated in California is not the same sample that led to Rivera getting a third trial, and there has been no suggestion the latest sample was contaminated.

He was clearly disappointed when Starck refused to grant the motion, but would not comment when asked to assess the damage such testimony would have on his case.

"I will just say that we are disappointed that so many of the rulings on the pretrial motions have favored the state," Urdangen said.

Even with the disputes, each side of the case has something to place on the table in an effort to get the jury to see things their way.

But Cavise said that, more than anything else, Rivera and his team have to be concerned that the only thing the jurors will see is a dead 11-year-old girl.

"Of the top 10 things that a jury will become emotionally involved with, a raped and murdered 11-year-old girl is number one or number two," Cavise said. "They will get angry, and they will want somebody to pay."