Joseph Foreman Jr. was a fugitive long before the five-day manhunt that ended with his arrest on murder charges Thursday after his ex-mother-in-law’s body was found at a farmhouse in rural Kane County.
Foreman was on the run after being accused of beating his ex-wife, Lisa Payne, so severely that he knocked her unconscious and fractured her skull. Batavia police launched an intense search because Payne’s mother, Linda Duchaine, and her mini-van disappeared at the same time.
Foreman was pulled from an attic crawl space on South Jackson Street in Aurora on Wednesday, just a few blocks from where police found the mini-van on Sunday.
For eight years, police departments from Tampa to Milwaukee had been looking for the cross-country truck driver. Foreman, 37, was wanted on at least five warrants in three states. But he had eluded arrest on all of them, despite several encounters with police.
One department opted not to enter its warrant into a nationwide police database because it would have had to pay for extradition if another agency picked him up. Another department entered the warrant in the database, but with an incorrect birth date that made it largely useless. Prosecutors in Wisconsin struggled with the paperwork on a sexual-assault charge for so long that Foreman was able to flee to Illinois in January 2002.
“To say that it would have been nice for him to be arrested, well, it would have been,” Batavia Police Chief Dennis Anderson said. “But he wasn’t.”
None of it surprised law-enforcement veterans.
“I think the essential issue here is we have a pretty fragmented law-enforcement system in this country. There are about 18,000 agencies, and it is difficult to integrate them,” said Alexander Weiss, director of the Center for Public Safety at Northwestern University.
One of the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was that police departments have trouble coordinating and communicating among themselves, Weiss said, and correcting those problems has since become a much higher priority.
“I think everybody acknowledges that data systems were not very good,” he said.
On April 9, Batavia police were called to the apartment Foreman shared with Payne, 31, and their 12-year-old daughter. Payne was unconscious on the couch. Duchaine, 49, of Niagara, Wis., was missing, and so was Foreman.
Batavia police found Duchaine’s mini-van Monday in an east Aurora neighborhood. It appeared to have blood on a back seat, but tests had not confirmed that as of Thursday, police said.
A telephone tip led investigators to an Aurora home, just blocks from where the mini-van was found. Police pulled Foreman from the attic Wednesday morning. He did not resist arrest, and officials doubt Foreman attempted to flee the Aurora area.
Wednesday night, police found Duchaine’s body in a ramshackle farmhouse about 300 yards from Dauberman Road near Interstate Highway 88 in far western Kane County. Coroner Chuck West said Duchaine died of blows to the head.
Foreman was charged late Thursday with the kidnapping and murder of Duchaine and aggravated domestic battery of Payne, who remained in serious condition Thursday in Delnor-Community Hospital in Geneva.
If convicted of murder in connection with a kidnapping, Foreman could be eligible for the death penalty.
Foreman was wanted in Florida on charges of violating probation in 1996 on convictions for kidnapping, aggravated assault, grand theft and robbery with a deadly weapon. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office issued arrest warrants, but did not enter them in the FBI National Crime Information Center database, which helps police track suspects nationwide.
Lt. Rod Reder said the department in 1996 was unwilling to pay extradition costs for all but the most serious offenders–those charged with murder, sexual battery, kidnapping, robbery with a deadly weapon, drug trafficking or escape. Even though Foreman was convicted on some of those charges, the department viewed him as someone who had violated his probation, which was not serious enough to warrant the cost of transporting him back to Florida.
“You hate to put a price on prosecution, but when [extradition] comes out of the law-enforcement budget, frankly, how far do you go for what?” Reder said. “You want to do the right thing for the victim, but you have to prioritize the crimes because the system would have a hard time handling it.”
Reder said that policy was changed in 1997.
The Floyd County, Ind., prosecuting attorney’s office issued a warrant for Foreman’s arrest in July 1999 on charges he received stolen goods. That warrant was entered it into the FBI database, but because Foreman’s birth date was recorded as June 5, 1966, instead of June 3, it would not have shown up when officers ran a check.
Wisconsin came the closest to taking Foreman off the streets, but miscommunication between two counties allowed him to walk free.
In July 2000, Waukesha County began investigating an allegation that Foreman had sexually assaulted an 8-year-old girl.
In November 2001, he was convicted of misdemeanor harassment for threatening an investigator in that case. He was sentenced to 40 days in jail in Florence County, where the victim lived.
Aware that prosecutors were preparing sexual assault charges, Florence County District Atty. Doug Drexler said he called the Waukesha County district attorney’s office to tell them that Foreman was in custody.
But Waukesha County did not complete a warrant until after he was released.
“It’s unfortunate because we would’ve had him. We could’ve given him to them,” Drexler said.
Waukesha County Assistant District Atty. Lloyd Carter said he does not remember receiving a telephone call from Drexler regarding Foreman’s case.
Waukesha authorities missed another opportunity to arrest Foreman that month, when he met with his probation officer on an unrelated theft conviction in Langlade County. By the time Waukesha officials went to the address provided by Foreman’s probation officer in January 2002, he was gone.
Family members said he fled to Aurora with Payne. The couple moved to Batavia about six months ago.
His aunt Ann Wilson said the family knew Foreman had been in trouble with the law, but they thought it was behind him. The family did not know he was wanted by so many police agencies, and no police department ever contacted them to ask where he was, she said.
Wilson said Foreman and Payne had called two weeks ago during a cookout with Duchaine in Batavia.
“Everyone was having a good time, then a couple of days later this happened,” Wilson said.
