For nearly 30 years, Nancy Rish has claimed she took no part in the kidnapping and murder of Stephen Small, a 1987 killing that horrified Kankakee and landed her a life sentence.
Rish’s boyfriend, a small-time drug dealer named Danny Edwards, lured Small from his home and buried him alive inside a plywood box as part of a bizarre plot that targeted the scion of one of Kankakee’s wealthiest and most well-connected families. The narrow pipe Edwards used for air vents proved woefully inadequate, and the box became a coffin.
At trial and in multiple appeals, Rish has maintained she never knew what Edwards was doing as he plotted the scheme, and even as he had her drive him home from near the wooded burial site and to pay phones he used for ransom calls.
During 27 years in prison, Rish’s appeals have all fallen flat. Next month, her lawyers will ask Gov. Pat Quinn to let Rish, now 52, out of prison, citing a slew of errors by her trial attorneys and a freshly signed affidavit from Edwards that states he hid his kidnapping plan from Rish. Her attorneys also will allege that prosecutors in Rish’s high-profile trial distorted facts and concealed evidence to build the circumstantial case against her.
“I have no words for the Small family. ‘Sorry’ does not even begin to cover it,” Rish said in a recent interview at Logan Correctional Center. “But I did not do anything like what (prosecutors) said.”
Edwards has maintained from the beginning that Rish knew nothing of the crime, but for years his case was tied up in appeals as he tried to stave off a death sentence — appeals he now says also were based on lies about shadowy figures who put him up to the crime. In the last decade, though, Edwards said he found God, dropped his legal appeals and battled severe heart problems. For those reasons, he agreed to sign the affidavit when approached last year by Rish’s attorneys.
The Tribune wrote a series of stories in the 1990s that explored whether Rish was guilty, raising questions about her involvement.
Rish’s clemency hearing before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, scheduled for July 8 at the Thompson Center, may be her best chance at freedom.
“The governor should let Nancy go,” said Chicago attorney Margaret Byrne, who is representing Rish. “There is no evidence to connect her to this crime. She has been in prison, basically, because she was living with the wrong man.”
A simple plan
Nancy Rish’s father was an alcoholic whom she rarely saw after her parents split when Rish was a child, court records state. She became pregnant at age 15, and married at 16, divorcing amicably three years later and sharing custody of the couple’s son, Ben. She dated other men, some who she said abused her, before she met Danny Edwards in 1985.
Edwards was married when he began courting Rish, who said she put off his advances until he turned up on her doorstep, claiming his wife had tired of his philandering — with women other than Rish — and kicked him out. They became a couple and moved into a house on the Kankakee River that they rented from Rish’s sister.
It was around that time that Edwards began selling cocaine, a business that eventually was earning him $4,000 or more a week, he said. Even before he was flush with drug money, Edwards had persuaded Rish to quit her two jobs and spend the summer idling on Edwards’ power boat and spending time with 8-year-old Ben.
“He said ‘Just take the summer off,’ ” said Rish, who had worked as many as three jobs to support herself and her son since she had dropped out of high school. “He was a pretty fast talker.”
Edwards estimates he was dealing for perhaps eight months before he was busted, with police raiding the river house while Rish was visiting friends out of town. Edwards said he had $10,000 in his hand when police arrived at the house.
He cooperated with police and made a failed attempt to set up his supplier, a move that kept him out of jail, but cost him his drug connections. But Edwards didn’t want to go back to working the trade jobs he’d had before he started dealing cocaine. So he hatched a plan.
Small was reported to then be among the richest men in Kankakee and heir to a publishing and broadcasting fortune, grandson of a former Illinois governor and neighbor of a future governor, George Ryan.
Edwards, himself the ne’er-do-well son of a respected family, grew up in the tony neighborhood near the river where Small lived. He often saw Small tooling around town in his Ferrari, and knew Small was rehabbing a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in Kankakee.
“One thing (the prosecutors) got right at my trial,” said Edwards. “I wanted money. Stephen Small had it. I wanted it.”
Edwards’ plan was simple, if only because it was so full of holes. One night in September 1987, Edwards lured Small out of the house, calling around midnight and posing as a police dispatcher, telling Small there had been a break-in at the Wright house. Edwards slipped into the garage as Small was pulling out, and pointed a gun at the tiny, soft-spoken millionaire.
They drove to a secluded spot in the woods outside town and Edwards had Small recite a ransom message onto a tape recorder.
Then Edwards buried Small in a 3-by-6-foot wooden box with two lengths of PVC pipe that he thought would allow air to flow in and out. As Small climbed into the hole, he looked up at Edwards.
“He asked me, ‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ ” Edwards said. “I told him, ‘You’re going to be fine.’ “
Stephen Small, 40, philanthropist, married father of three, likely suffocated before Edwards made his first call demanding a ransom of $1 million that night.
‘I was just numb’
Edwards and Rish had been barely a couple during the months leading up to the kidnapping. She remained dependent on him for drugs; they both had started freebasing cocaine from Edwards’ supply, she said.
Edwards had put her up in a town house in nearby Bourbonnais while he lived at the river house. As his drug money dried up, he moved into the town house, but he slept on the couch because they had been bickering, court records state.
When Edwards started building the box that would hold Small, he told Rish he was making something to hold supplies for his brother’s pool, Edwards said. There was nothing particularly suspicious about the box, which he built in the garage of the town house, Rish said, and worked on with the garage door open. Bourbonnais police officers likely passed the town house dozens of times as they drove to and from the police station just down the street, Rish said.
When Edwards asked Rish to drop him off near Small’s house about midnight on the night of the kidnapping, he wouldn’t tell her why, Rish said. He had refused to answer questions about his secretive behavior, telling her “you don’t want to know,” Rish said. At one point in the weeks leading up to the kidnapping, when she pressed him, Rish said Edwards threatened to shoot her, her son, and himself.
“I assumed it was some kind of drug deal,” Rish said. “I knew he was a drug dealer.
“If I had known what he was doing. I would have told someone. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have stayed (with him).”
Edwards told police the night he was arrested that Rish had nothing to do with the kidnapping, but he never did much to help with her trial or appeals, as he was still clinging to the lie that his Chicago drug supplier had forced him into the kidnapping. He now says he had no help at all, not even from his live-in girlfriend.
“I lied, sure. I was on death row. But Nancy had nothing to do with it. I have never wavered on that, ever,” Edwards said in a recent interview at Pontiac Correctional Center. “Don’t believe me, because I’m a liar. Look at the evidence.
“If she was helping me, why would I need the box?” Edwards said. “I couldn’t take him to a hotel for three days. Nancy would have asked ‘where have you been for three days.’
“I couldn’t tell her. She wouldn’t have helped me. I didn’t have the kind of friends where you could say ‘I need you to help me kidnap someone.’ That’s why I buried him. I figured I’d get the money and tell them where to go dig him out.”
Edwards didn’t know his plan had come apart as he climbed out of the woods and waited for Rish to pick him up. Rish said she didn’t know why he wanted her to meet him at 3 a.m. in the middle of nowhere. It was the last part of Edwards’ plan that came off without a hitch.
Within hours of the first ransom call, the FBI and a local police task force were at the Small house. A military plane outfitted with infrared cameras circled the area, searching for Small or his car. Authorities traced one of the ransom calls to a pay phone that led them to Edwards and Rish.
At their trials, a pair of veteran prosecutors from Chicago were brought in to handle the cases.
Rish’s lawyers would later submit motions in her appeals admitting to crucial missteps, including not lodging key objections, such as when prosecutor Michael Ficaro said in his closing statement that Rish made the call to lure Small out of the house, despite there being no testimony or evidence that she did. In fact, Ficaro had said in his closing at Edwards’ trial that Edwards had been the one on the phone.
“I think the jury must have believed that she lived with (Edwards) while all this was going on, so she must have known,” said Byrne, Rish’s lawyer in the clemency case. She is related to Tribune reporter John Byrne, who was not involved in reporting this story. “And Ficaro just took it over the top. That statement (about the phone call), had there been an objection, might have been grounds for a mistrial.”
Jurors deliberated for 90 minutes before returning a guilty verdict.
“I was just numb,” Rish recalled. “My attorneys told me I was going home. They said there was no case against me. It wasn’t 50-50 you’re going home, it was you’re going home.”
Clemency bid
Now, Rish’s best chance at release may be in the hands of the Prisoner Review Board and Quinn. Since taking office, Quinn has worked through a backlog of some 2,500 cases filed during the administration of Rod Blagojevich.
A statement announcing a recent batch of clemency rulings said Quinn has granted clemency in more than a third of the 2,932 petitions he has acted on, though many pardons are for minor charges and cases where defendants have already served their time but need a clear criminal record to find work or get professional licenses. Byrne, Rish’s lawyer, who has won clemency for 15 of the 65 clients she has represented, said that perhaps 2 percent of offenders who are still in prison are granted clemency.
But board members will be allowed to weigh evidence and trial conduct that the appeals court, bound by the strictures of the law, would not consider, Byrne said.
“It is a plea for mercy, not a legal argument,” she said.
Members of the Small family did not respond to requests for comment from the Tribune. Representatives for the prosecution and members of the Small family may speak at Rish’s clemency hearing, Byrne said.
In a strange coincidence, the man who built the Small family fortune was Lennington Small, who served two terms as Illinois governor in the 1920s and was criticized for granting clemency to members of the Capone syndicate.
While in prison, Rish has earned a GED and a junior college degree, and received certifications in dog grooming and cosmetology. Her mother, who was stricken with polio decades ago, is no longer healthy enough to make the four-hour round trip from Kankakee to see Rish in prison. Rish dreams that one day she might be freed so she can be a grandmother to her son’s children.
“I do let myself imagine life outside these walls,” she said.
Edwards is resigned to dying in prison, and soon. At 57, he has had three heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery and has 12 stents holding open his arteries. He gave up his appeals in 2005, after a religious conversion, and five years after Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of all Illinois death row inmates to life in prison.
“Listen, I did it. I kidnapped a man for money and buried him alive, and he suffocated and died,” Edwards said. “If that doesn’t mean I deserve to spend the rest of my life in prison, I don’t know who does.
“But Nancy? She didn’t do anything. She doesn’t belong in prison. She wasn’t even involved.”
Twitter @agrimm34
