On Aug. 29, 1991-less than a week before the murder-Cook County Judge Sheldon Gardner indicated that Kelly might have to pay Jayne an additional property settlement of $168,000 to compensate her for previously hidden business assets. The judge also increased Kelly’s child support obligations to $3,072 monthly from $1,644 and denied his request to increase visitation so he could coach Ryan’s soccer team.
At the hearing, Kelly became angry when the judge issued his ruling concerning Ryan. “I want to see my children!” Kelly declared, a transcript showed. “I had four years of helping my son become an excellent soccer player. You’ve taken that away from me.” The judge concluded the session by setting a date for a final hearing to decide the payment of the additional funds: Thursday, Sept. 5. Had James finally snapped after the Aug. 29 hearing, the authorities wondered, murdering his ex-wife to escape suffering the final blows from the divorce?
It was little Ryan, unwittingly, who would provide investigators with their next important lead. Questioned briefly at 10:45 p.m. on the night of his mother’s murder, the boy told police his father picked him up every other Saturday in a rental car from Fender Benders. In fact, Ryan said, he’d spent this Labor Day weekend at his father’s and had been driven there and back in a Fender Benders car.
Checking rental-car records, police found that Kelly had rented two cars that weekend. He used one to transport Ryan and returned it on Labor Day. That same day, without Ryan’s knowledge, Kelly rented a 1991 Mercury Sable from Econo-Car, returning it at 10:45 on the morning of the crime. Econo-Car records indicated the Mercury was driven 79 miles, only 10 or 15 miles more than a round trip between Kelly’s condo and Naperville.
Believing that Kelly had lied to them about not driving on Sept. 3, investigators closely checked his alibi for that day. Several co-workers, indeed, placed him at work at 10 a.m., and Kelly’s whereabouts afterwards seemed well accounted for. Detective Carlson, however, timing the drive from the Naperville crime scene to the Merrill Lynch office in downtown Chicago at roughly 50 minutes, concluded that Kelly still had the opportunity to commit the crime-if he murdered his ex-wife immediately upon her return home after dropping the children at school.
Canvassing Jayne’s neighborhood, police grew frustrated when no eyewitnesses placed James or the Mercury Sable near the crime scene early that day. But two days after the crime, they got a surprising lead concerning a witness of a very different sort.
On Sept. 5, Constance Smith, the ex-wife of Billy Kelly, James’ 49-year-old cousin, called the Naperville police to report that her former husband had bragged about his involvement in an aborted plot to murder Jayne Kelly. The authorities confronted Billy with the allegation and, in exchange for immunity if he told them the truth, Billy promised to cooperate.
Billy swore that, about 18 months earlier, cousin James had contacted him for the first time in 28 years to find out if he knew anyone who could “arrange the murder of his ex-wife.” Billy and a “Rocky Devito from Detroit” had volunteered their services, Billy contended, and accepted $3,000 from Kelly to fatally stab Jayne while the children were out of the house. (Rocky Devito’s real name was LeRoy Cerda. He may have been from Detroit, but he definitely was now residing in the Cook County Jail awaiting trial on charges of auto theft.) The men had no intention of killing Jayne, Billy insisted, but they took James’ money, anyway.
Mistrustful of Billy, who had a criminal record that included armed robbery, the authorities decided to put him to a test. At 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 6, Billy accompanied officers to the Naperville police station to make a tape-recorded phone call to Kelly.
Billy was first to bring up the murder. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked Kelly. “I don’t know,” Kelly replied. Then, after Billy pushed to see his cousin right away-expressing concern about what “Rocky” might say-Kelly agreed to meet him in the lobby of his building.
Heading for Chicago’s North Side with an entourage that included Detective Carlson and Assistant State’s Atty. Joseph Birkett, an intense career prosecutor, Billy Kelly was equipped with a tape recorder and a wire so the authorities could monitor the conversation with James. After speaking to James for about 15 minutes in the lobby of his building, Billy returned to the car.
While the authorities’ listening device proved faulty-they were able to hear only static-the recording was audible enough to hear James ask Billy not to go to the police because “they’ll think it’s me” who did it. And James seemed too chummy with the likes of Rocky and Billy to be an innocent man, investigators believed.
When Kelly’s bank records showed two large cash withdrawals totaling approximately $3,000 around the time the would-be hit men said they’d met with him, they concluded that their case had become rock solid and would include murder-for-hire charges.
Other possible suspects would be questioned, foremost among them Stephen McMullen, who acknowledged having an intimate relationship with Jayne that included overnights at her Naperville home. The handsome 40-year-old Chicago bachelor, his light brown hair graying at the temples, maintained his youthful appearance by working out at the East Bank Club, often with Jayne, whom he’d met at a party on a yacht. McMullen told two officers assisting in the investigation that he’d dumped Jayne a few months earlier when she insisted on getting married.
After the breakup, McMullen said, a “distraught” Jayne had called him to report that she might be pregnant with his child but later had her lawyer inform him that it had been “a false alarm.” According to McMullen, the two had last seen each other at the East Bank Club, three weeks before the murder.
McMullen told the officers that he’d been in California over the Labor Day weekend and hadn’t flown home until the afternoon of the crime. Accepting his alibi without checking, police dropped McMullen as a suspect.
Recently reflecting on his sole interview with police, McMullen said, “When the officers arrived at my house, I asked if they wanted to ‘Mirandize’ me, and they said, ‘Naw, that’s not necessary . . . we know who did it,’ meaning Jim Kelly.” McMullen added: “They asked for my airline ticket, which I couldn’t find, but I told them the truth. . . . I was in the (Palm Springs) desert on Sept. 3. I used my calling card from there, which could prove my alibi. That seemed to satisfy them, and they just left, which surprised me since Jayne’s old boyfriends . . . myself and several other guys she dated . . . should have been considered suspects as much as her ex-husband.”
McMullen went on to say that police didn’t ask him-and he didn’t mention-Jayne’s strict rules concerning Kelly’s access to the house. “Jayne gave explicit instructions to the kids not to allow their father inside and to never let him have a key,” McMullen said. “When I slept over . . . as late as June or July of ’91 . . . she made sure that place was like a vault. Only people she knew and trusted could get in, such as family members.”
As with McMullen, however, police failed to check out family members, including Kristin Kelly, a troubled teen who had first implicated her father as the killer. The authorities would not bother to determine whether she had, in fact, attended her high school classes on the day of the murder.
A close friend and lockermate of Kristin’s, Carrie Bluhm, recalls that she first saw Kristin on Sept. 3 about 10 a.m. in a school hallway. The next time she remembered seeing her friend was at Jayne’s wake, when Kristin, sobbing in her arms, said: “My Dad didn’t do this. My Dad didn’t do this.”
(Kristin, and other members of Jayne Kelly’s family, said they would not discuss publicly any aspect of the evidence in the case until after the trial. Joyce Carlson, however, one of Jayne’s sisters, repeated the family’s long-stated view that James is “absolutely guilty.”)
On the morning of Sept. 19, 1991, Du Page County State’s Atty. James Ryan, without waiting for a grand jury to complete its investigation of Jayne Kelly’s murder, held a press conference to announce the arrest of James Kelly under a warrant issued by a Du Page County judge. The warrant charged Kelly with first-degree murder and solicitation to commit murder for hire. (Two weeks later, a grand jury would return indictments in the case.)
Ryan, who at the time was publicly cultivating statewide support to run for the U.S. Senate (he eventually ran successfully for Illinois Attorney General), congratulated Naperville police on their “intensive investigation” and promised to seek the “maximum penalty” under the law against Kelly, including the possibility of a death sentence.
Kelly would be held without bond at the Du Page County Jail and barred from having contact with his children. The children would move to Schererville, Ind., to live with Jayne’s brother and his wife. Life for the entire Kelly family would be in limbo until the trial, scheduled for early 1992. But surprising legal and evidentiary twists would delay that trial for more than two years.
With maddening slowness, forensic findings trickled in, each more disappointing than the last for authorities.
No fingerprints lifted at the crime scene matched James Kelly’s. None of his hair or fibers from his clothing was found at the scene, and there was no transfer of hairs or fibers from the scene to James or the rental car that authorities believed he had used in the crime. Three hairs were found not to match Kelly’s or anyone else’s in the family, including the only dyed light brown hair that was testable.
Then, on April 24, 1992, the long-awaited DNA test on the blood stain on Kelly’s shirt came back-negative. The blood definitely was not Jayne’s; it perhaps was James’. Measuring less than an inch long, the streak of blood may have resulted from a paper cut on a finger of his right hand, which Kelly remembered the following day. The cut was apparently too small to be noticed by Detective Carlson when he examined Kelly’s hands during the interrogation-telling Kelly he’d have “nothing to worry about” if the blood on the shirt was his.
Even worse for the state’s case, the coroner’s report indicated that Jayne had 150 cubic centimeters of semisolid material in her stomach, indicating that she’d probably eaten a light meal at least two hours before she was murdered. Since all three children had recalled that their mother had consumed only coffee that morning, this finding suggested that Jayne may have eaten after dropping the children at school. If that were true, it would have been impossible for Kelly to kill Jayne and return to Chicago by 10 a.m., when his alibi was airtight.
Suddenly, the question of Jayne’s time of death had become crucial for determining Kelly’s opportunity to commit the crime. Yet on no other question would the authorities themselves be more divided. A controversy ensued that pitted the Naperville police against the Du Page County coroner and the coroner against his own forensic pathologist.
Naperville Detective Carlson, in sworn testimony at a pretrial hearing, stated that he had asked the Du Page Coroner, Richard Ballinger, to take Jayne’s body temperature to help determine when she died. But in a recent interview, the coroner disputed Carlson’s testimony. “He (Carlson) absolutely didn’t ask me to do that test. Maybe he asked one of my deputies, but not me,” Ballinger claimed.
Ballinger, in turn, accused Naperville police of failing to contact the coroner’s office for “about an hour” after the body was discovered. According to Ballinger, “Our ability to determine when the victim died was hampered by our lack of immediate access to the scene. When my deputy finally arrived, they wouldn’t let him inside,” Ballinger complained. “I personally had to go there before they let us inspect the body.”
The coroner’s Case Chronology appears to support Ballinger’s assertion. The log indicates that Naperville police first called the coroner’s office 59 minutes after learning about the murder, and it was not until 5:06 p.m., almost two hours after the discovery of the body, that a deputy coroner pronounced Jayne dead.
(A spokesman for the Naperville police department, Capt. Robert Marshall, recently said, “I won’t comment on Mr. Ballinger’s allegations because I don’t want to publicly say anything that could jeopardize the case before it goes to trial.”)
Ballinger also disputes the importance of taking Jayne’s body temperature for assessing when she died. “We don’t use body probes anymore because they’re imprecise . . . and they could destroy a pristine crime scene,” he asserted.
However, Dr. Lawrence Blum, who performed Jayne’s autopsy for Ballinger’s office, disagrees. When asked at a pre-trial hearing if “it would have been helpful to you to have had a temperature test done on the body . . .?” Blum testified that, if the test were done properly, “it would be helpful . . . sure.”
And Detective Carlson, a police officer for 17 years, confirmed under oath that it is standard practice for such tests to be conducted when the precise time of death is unknown.
Further clouding the issue of time of death, the report of Jayne’s autopsy indicated that the coroner’s office failed to analyze the composition of her stomach contents to see when she may have had her last meal. When asked about this omission, Coroner Ballinger said, “I don’t want to comment further about this case until it comes to trial.”
Scrambling to prove that Jayne had been murdered early enough for Kelly to have no alibi, the authorities responded by widening the window of opportunity. Immediately after the murder, Naperville police told the news media that Jayne was killed “after 9 a.m.,” a conclusion reached when investigators learned that Jayne likely dropped Ryan off at school shortly before it started-at 8:45 a.m.
Later, undoubtedly after realizing the difficulty Kelly would have had to (a) commit the crime at that hour, then (b) dispose of all the physical evidence, then (c) make the long drive to the Loop during rush hour traffic on a rainy day-all before 10 a.m.-the police rolled back the clock. The arrest warrant, described by James Ryan in his press conference announcing that the crime had been solved, asserted that Jayne had been murdered “after 8:20 a.m.”
