“Believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear.”
-Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”
Listening to oldies from the ’60s on a time-worn plastic radio, 51-year-old James Kelly Jr. wistfully recalls what his life had been. Marriage to the beautiful Jayne Carlson. Raising three bright and popular kids-Kristin, Kimberly and Ryan. Financial success as a vice-president at Merrill Lynch & Co. Not too long ago, he listened to music piped in to the fashionable East Bank Club and, after a workout, returned to his family at their comfortable home in Sandburg Terrace.
Nowadays, the music helps drown out the din at his current home-the Du Page County Jail. Prosecutors allege that after his marriage failed, after abusing his estranged wife, after being ordered to pay her additional divorce-settlement payments and after failing to persuade two guys named Rocky and Billy to murder her, James Kelly did the job himself. They contend that on the morning of Sept. 3, 1991, Kelly quietly slipped into Jayne’s suburban Naperville townhouse, stabbed her four times with a butcher knife that had been a wedding present and left her body to be discovered by one of their children later that afternoon.
Nonetheless, from the day he was accused of the crime, James Kelly has professed his innocence. He contends that the evidence shows he didn’t try to arrange for anyone to kill Jayne and that he couldn’t have committed the crime himself.
Kelly blames “overzealous” Du Page prosecutors, desperate to solve a homicide in a community where violent crime is rare, for accusing him prematurely and ignoring other obvious suspects, including one man from a politically prominent Chicago family. His life destroyed-Kelly has lost his job, been barred from seeing his children and been confined to a 6- by 10-foot cell for the better part of three years-he says he eagerly awaits his trial, tentatively scheduled to begin next month.
Is James Kelly a brutal murderer or an innocent victim? The public pronouncements of the authorities, widely covered by the news media, have evoked the killer image. But a review of thousands of pages of police reports, court transcripts and sworn affidavits by witnesses, supplemented by interviews with officials and the defendant himself, raises questions about Kelly’s guilt and how the case against him was built in the first place.
Twelve-year-old Kimberly Kelly was the first child home from school the day after Labor Day, her first day back after a summer vacation that had been protracted by a Naperville teacher’s strike. It was 3:20 p.m. Her mother’s brown Honda Accord was in the driveway of the family’s townhouse, a modern gray and white frame with a partial brick facade.
Oddly, the front door to the home was unlocked. Kimberly opened it cautiously, and saw, at the bottom of the stairs to her right, her mother lying on her back in a pool of blood. The wooden handle of a 9-inch butcher knife protruded from her chest.
Within five minutes after Kimberly called 911, Naperville police and paramedics arrived at the scene, one of several matching townhouses that lined the quiet block of Orleans Avenue. They quickly realized there was nothing they could do for the 38-year-old woman. Jayne appeared to have been dead for at least a couple of hours.
Sgt. Mark Carlson, a veteran detective who would assume command of the investigation, requested that the Du Page coroner’s office take Jayne’s internal body temperature to fix the approximate time of death. For reasons that would be hotly debated, it was not done.
Gently questioning Kimberly, Carlson learned that Jayne had driven her and 8-year-old brother Ryan to school that rainy morning and then planned to return home to get ready for work. Kimberly, and later the other Kelly children, would recall nothing unusual about their mother’s demeanor that morning. Jayne had cheerily taken them to school after having only a cup of coffee.
Carlson and a rapidly growing phalanx of law-enforcement agents cordoned off the home and began the tedious task of gathering physical evidence-fingerprints, fibers, hair and blood. Several prints were lifted, though none was found on the murder weapon, which had been taken from a knife set in the kitchen; a fabric impression suggested that the assailant may have worn gloves. Discovered on and near the body were gray head hairs that were dyed light brown, visibly distinctive from Jayne’s blond hair.
Police noted that blood had splattered on the wall behind Jayne’s body and that she appeared to have no defensive wounds, indicating that she had been surprised by her killer as she was on the stairs. The victim was clothed in a blue skirt, matching blazer and white blouse-the same outfit she was wearing when last seen by the children. One of her black high-heeled shoes had been jarred from her body in the attack, but otherwise she was fully clothed. Her keys and purse, its contents intact, were by her side. There were no signs of forced entry.
At 6:15 p.m., an hour after her brother came home, 15-year-old Kristin Kelly bolted from a friend’s Chevrolet Silverado truck in front of the Kelly townhouse. Kristin was met by two Naperville officers, who confirmed what she’d suspected from a television news story-her mother had been murdered. According to police reports, Kristin’s first reaction was to scream: “My father is behind this! My father set this up!”
Ushered into a neighbor’s house, Kristin told police her parents had been involved in a bitter divorce and that her father was angry over a recent court order. Her mother had told her she was “thinking about writing a will,” because she feared she might be murdered.
Kristin went on to tell the officers that she’d left early that morning to take a bus to Naperville Central High School, had attended all of her classes and then had gone to a girlfriend’s house. Her friend’s parents frantically had driven Kristin home in the Silverado after she’d caught a glimpse of her townhouse in a televised news flash about the murder.
Asked about her mother’s boyfriends, Kristin said that Jayne had regularly dated Stephen McMullen, a Chicago personal-injury lawyer and the stepson of former mayor Jane Byrne.
Arriving shortly before 10 p.m. at James Kelly’s three-bedroom condo on Chicago’s North Side, Detective Carlson joined two other Naperville officers who were questioning Kelly. According to Carlson’s report, Kelly said that he had done paperwork at home and then taken the subway to the Loop offices of Merrill Lynch, arriving “about 10 a.m.”
He told the officers that he then had lunch, met with his divorce lawyer at 1 p.m., got a haircut and returned home “about 4:30 p.m.” Kelly added that he “did not meet or talk with anyone prior to 10 a.m.,” and that he “did not drive a vehicle today,” Carlson wrote.
“I asked Jim Kelly if he would allow me to inspect his clothing that he had worn during the day,” Carlson reported. “Kelly directed me to a dark gray suit hanging on a shower door rail. A white dress shirt was hanging next to the suit, and, upon close inspection of the shirt, I observed a dark red stain (that) . . . appeared to be consistent with dried blood.” Carlson then checked Kelly’s hands and “found no cuts.”
Telling Kelly he “had nothing to worry about” if the blood on the shirt was his own, Carlson asked to remove the clothes for laboratory analysis. Kelly agreed. When asked to accompany Carlson to Naperville to take a lie-detector test and see his children, however, Kelly refused until he could talk to his lawyer.
Asking the other investigators to leave so that he could talk to Kelly alone, Carlson questioned Kelly’s unwillingness to take a test that might “rule him out as a suspect,” asserting that he was “acting unusual . . . very stoic . . . for a man who had just learned of his ex-wife’s murder and his 12-year-old daughter discovering the death of her mother.”
Carlson then demanded to know if he killed Jayne Kelly. “No,” Kelly replied. “Do you know who killed her?” Carlson asked. “No,” Kelly answered. At 12:45 a.m., Carlson left with Kelly’s clothes.
In the days that followed, police zeroed in on Kelly as a suspect. Focusing on a possible motive for the murder, they found what they believed to be a gold mine in divorce-court records and sources familiar with the Kellys’ relationship.
James Kelly, the oldest of three children raised on a 160-acre farm in Downstate Illinois, met Jayne Carlson, the youngest of six from a working-class neighborhood on the Southeast Side of Chicago, in the spring of 1973. The introductions were made by Kelly’s roommate at a time when Jayne, unbeknownst to James, was married. She soon would file for divorce and become engaged to Kelly.
Married in 1975 in Bond Chapel at the University of Chicago, where Kelly was completing his M.B.A., things had gone smoothly for James and Jayne through 1983, when the couple renewed their vows at Chicago’s Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. James, a wizard at mergers and acquisitions, fulfilled Jayne’s strivings for financial security and a stable relationship, her first marriage having failed after less than a year. Jayne had been the woman of James’ dreams-glamorous and gregarious yet committed to him and the children, whom she stayed home to raise.
As Kelly’s business ventures soared, he spent less time with the family, though he doted on son Ryan, whose soccer team he would coach. Jayne mingled with the other moms at the elite Latin School, where the children would be enrolled.
But Jayne grew restless, comparing her lifestyle unfavorably to those of the other Sandburg Terrace dwellers. According to friends, between 1983 and 1985, Kelly suffered a financial setback as Jayne became more materialistic, demanding furs, diamonds and lavish furnishings for the condo. Jayne soon began to show signs of independence from her overcontrolling husband, taking part-time jobs demonstrating products at McCormick Place trade shows.
The couple fought over money-Jayne couldn’t spend enough, and the tightfisted James wouldn’t tolerate any expense he considered frivolous-and over Jayne’s newfound freedom. Tempers flared as Jayne began spending more time outside the home, replacing her Latin School friendships with the faster-paced connections of the trade-show world.
The pair eventually separated in the summer of 1985 after Jayne claimed James lost control during an argument and pushed her down the stairs. That led her to get a court order of protection, which James subsequently violated by spitting in Jayne’s face-one of several incidents in which the police were called.
The Kellys finally were divorced in 1987 on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences.” Determined to start a new life, Jayne moved with the children (whom James saw on alternate weekends) to Naperville, where she landed a job marketing the services of an interior-design firm.
The divorce did not end the tension in the separate Kelly households, however. Court records show that Kelly questioned Jayne’s fitness as a mother because she bar-hopped and brought men home for sleepovers, and Jayne complained that her ex-husband was shortchanging her on funds she was owed. (James overcame his financial problem and now had accumulated nearly $1 million in assets.) Public spats and courtroom feuds continued through the summer of 1991.
