The attorney representing the McHenry County state’s attorney’s office said he wants to hear details of the confession from an Outlaws motorcycle gang member to the murders of Ruth and Morris Gauger.
Attorney James Sotos, with help from private detectives, is investigating the April 1993 murders of the elderly McHenry County couple in expectation of a wrongful prosecution suit by Gary Gauger, son of the victims. Gauger was convicted of killing his parents and sentenced to death, but his conviction was overturned in 1996.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee revealed a plea agreement in which Outlaws member James Schneider, 34, of Lake Geneva, Wis., admitted to racketeering charges that tied him to the murders of the elderly Richmond couple.
“I’ve looked the case over, and from my perspective I have a lot of unanswered questions about what happened on that farm,” Sotos said. “If something (Schneider) says can answer that, I’d be anxious to hear what his version is.”
Schneider has agreed to testify against 16 fellow Outlaws who are under a 34-count federal indictment that alleges the gang went on a violent Midwest crime spree that included the Gauger murders and bombings and robberies in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana dating to 1990. Another Outlaw, Randall Miller, of Pell Lake, Wis., was also charged with the Gauger murders.
Gauger has agreed to delay filing any suit against prosecutors or county police until the Outlaws case is resolved in court.
Larry Marshall, the Northwestern University Law School professor who appealed Gauger’s conviction, said Schneider’s confession confirms Gauger’s innocence.
“It doesn’t simply give more credence to (Gary’s innocence), it ought to be the end to any speculation otherwise,” Marshall said.
Gauger declined to comment.
Morris Gauger, 74, and his wife, Ruth, 70, were found bludgeoned and slashed to death April 9, 1993, on their farm. A jury convicted Gauger in October 1993. Three months later, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection. But in September 1994, McHenry County Judge Henry Cowlin reduced the sentence to life in prison, citing Gauger’s lack of a criminal past.
