UPDATES BELOW...
By Lauren FitzPatrick Sun-Times Media May 04,2011
(photo: Hinsdale South High School yearbook photos show Dawn Niles and Gary Albert sitting next to one another in group shots for the school's deaf drama club and its chapter of the Junior Illinois Assocation for the Deaf)
Behind the glass doors of one of Bridgeview’s felony courtrooms, a tall white projection screen nearly blocked the action inside.
A giant TV sat near the judge, facing the jury box, and smaller TV monitors perched on the defense table. Throughout the room, hands were flying.
Accused murderer Gary Albert sat at the defense table, focusing on the face and fingers of one of several interpreters who will translate every word uttered aloud into American Sign Language during his upcoming trial.
Jury selection is scheduled to start in about a month, and at a hearing last week, Judge Joan O’Brien wanted to test some of the extra features Albert and other hearing-impaired participants in the case will rely on.
Born deaf, Albert is accused in the 1981 stabbing murder of Dawn Niles, his classmate at the Hinsdale South High School, which had a program for deaf students. He was 18 then, he’s now 48.
Niles, of LaGrange Park, was 15 and pregnant with his child when she was found in the Horsetail Slough Forest Preserve near 123rd Street and 104th Avenue in Palos Township. She had been missing for six days. She had been stabbed more than 30 times.
Her case was reopened in 2006, and Albert, her boyfriend at the time of her death, was charged in March 2008, after modern DNA tools linked him to the crime.
Albert, of Sugar Grove, reads lips poorly, a former attorney said, and needs a sign language interpreter to communicate with people. American Sign Language, rather than English, is his first language, attorneys said.
His current legal team has argued he wasn’t properly warned about his rights during a six-hour recorded interview with a Cook County Sheriff’s detective. The Chicago police officer who signed back and forth was not licensed; he was self-taught.
The judge will let prosecutors use the interview, but chided investigators last year for not giving Albert a written version of his rights or a licensed interpreter during the questioning.
So at trial, he’ll have at least three.
One will sit at the defense table, chatting with him and his attorneys, Thomas Breen and Todd Pugh.
One will perch in the open space in front of the judge, relaying every audible word to Albert.
When deaf witnesses take the stand, as is expected, one will sign questions and voice answers aloud, in the space between the witness stand and the jury box.
The third interpreter will have to fit near the witness stand, because, as the male interpreter explained aloud to the judge during the rehearsal, he can’t voice the witness’ testimony and sign it at the same time. It’s impossible to speak in one language and sign in another, and ASL isn’t English.
Fingers point out who’s talking. Hands race. Lips silently repeat the speaker’s words while eyebrows crinkle and soar to convey the tone and demeanor of the spoken voice.
So everyone in the room will have to remember to keep the sightline clear between Albert and the seated witness.
Plus the court reporter’s transcript will be projected live onto several of the screens, including the large white one facing the right half of the audience.
By the rehearsal’s end, the male interpreter is sweating, and the judge is satisfied that the proceedings afford Albert the same access to justice as anyone else.
As O’Brien leaves the bench, the defense team tests how they’ll confer privately, huddling behind the white screen that also will block their conversation from the eyes of anyone else who can read their words.
The attorneys practice a couple of key words that’ll come up a ton.
“OK,” they say, putting thumbs and index fingers together.
Then Breen hooks his index finger, deciphering another one:
“Question.”
###
UPDATE
Witnesses recall teen love affair as man stands trial for 30-year-old murder
Chicago Tribune By Steve Schmadeke Nov 15 2011
More than 30 years after the body of a pregnant, deaf Hinsdale South High School freshman was found in a forest preserve near Palos Park, her boyfriend went on trial for the murder Tuesday, with prosecutors arguing he was so intent on ending the pregnancy that he suggested she tell her mom she'd been raped.
Dawn Niles, 15, of LaGrange Park, was about three months pregnant when she disappeared on March 17, 1981. Her body, with 34 stab wounds, was later found by a fisherman on the bridle paths near Horsetail Lake, prosecutors said.
After her slaying, investigators quickly focused on Gary Albert, now 49 but then an 18-year-old senior who was also deaf and had a new girlfriend. Two witnesses testified Tuesday that they either saw Dawn leaving school that day in Albert's beat-up brown Chevrolet or walking toward his car.
Both witnesses admitted under cross-examination that police had shown them photos of only Albert's car and no others when they were interviewed after Cook County sheriff's police re-examined the case in 2006 at the urging of Dawn's sister.
Albert was charged with the murder in 2008 after DNA testing determined he'd had sex with Dawn shortly before her death. Assistant State's Attorney Kathaleen Lanahan said soil samples from Albert's car matched samples taken from near where Dawn's body was found.
"Make him accept responsibility for the murder of Dawn Niles," Lanahan told jurors.
Todd Pugh, one of Albert's attorneys, said police were so focused on charging his client that they ignored other suspects; failed to ask questions about why Dawn's family didn't report her missing for two days; and conducted an "intellectually dishonest, lazy" investigation that included the use of a "woefully unqualified" sign-language interpreter while questioning Albert.
"Over the 30 years in this case, Gary Albert has been prejudged; false assumptions have been made of him by the investigating officers," Pugh said.
Mary Augustyn, now 46 and living in Florida, smiled widely as prosecutors displayed a photo of her old friend Dawn.
Augustyn testified through a sign-language interpreter that she and Dawn were running laps during gym class on March 17 when Dawn said she was feeling sick, and they both huddled in a spot out of the view of the gym teacher for a conversation.
Dawn told her she was pregnant, but hadn't told her mother or seen a doctor, only confiding in Albert, who wanted her to have an abortion, Augustyn testified. The couple, who were in Drama Club together, had been "inseparable," Augustyn testified, but after breaking up a month earlier had been constantly fighting.
"Gary did not want to have anything to do with it," Augustyn testified. "He didn't want to support the baby."
She said Dawn told her Albert said, "Why don't you tell your mother that you were raped or that you were dating another guy?"
"Dawn was very upset with that," Augustyn testified.
"This was her first love and they'd broken up," she said, saying Dawn had seemed to have had an "emotional breakdown."
A close friend of Albert's, Robert Krueger, now 49 and living in Phoenix, testified he had seen Albert and Dawn having a physical confrontation at school sometime before she disappeared.
"I saw Gary and Dawn arguing and somehow Dawn was grabbing his arm and Gary was screaming and grabbed and slapped her and then Dawn slapped him and he slapped her back," he said.
### UPDATE
When man had sex with teen at center of murder trial in girl’s 1981 death
BY LAUREN FITZPATRICK : Chicago Sun-Times : Nov 18, 2011
Dawn Niles’ mother watched her daughter leave for school on March 17, 1981, wearing a striped turtleneck sweater she borrowed from her mom.
And when the 15-year-old didn’t come home that afternoon from the program for deaf students she attended at Hinsdale South High school, Sandra Boston assumed she was where she typically was: With her boyfriend, Gary Albert.
“I thought she was with Gary,” Boston testified Friday, more than 30 years after her middle child’s body was found in a Cook County Forest Preserve.
Albert, who in 1981 was 18 and attending the same program for the deaf, is standing trial on two counts of murder, accused of stabbing Niles 34 times because, prosecutors say, she was pregnant and he didn’t want to be a father.
Her body was found March 22, 1981, near Horsetail Lake in Palos Township, but the case went cold.
It was reopened in 2006 after DNA showed Albert had sex with Niles soon before she died, contradicting Albert’s claims at the time of her death that he hadn’t seen her in some time.
Albert, now 49 and living in Sugar Grove, denies killing Niles. His attorneys say police rushed to conclusions and ignored other leads and suspects.
Boston, now 67, said she became worried when her daughter didn’t come home to LaGrange Park the next day, either. Nor had she gone to school.
Her frantic phone calls to friends included a special call to Albert on March 19 at his Darien home through her daughter’s TTY typing machine for the deaf.
“I asked him where she was,” Boston said, trying not to cry. “He said he didn’t know. They had broke up on Feb. 18” — a month earlier.
State police crime lab analysts confirmed Friday that the sperm found in Niles matched Albert, though they couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the couple last had sex.
The sperm found was intact, forensic biologist Lisa Kell said, suggesting it had been within five days.
Defense attorney Tom Breen pushed her, in a testy exchange with Assistant State’s Attorney William Delaney, to consider a longer time frame, considering the condition of Niles’ body when it was found.
Boston said she knew her daughter was having sex with Albert. She didn’t know, she said while crying again, that the girl was pregnant.
Albert had told a friend after Niles’ funeral that he did know.
“He said that he was the real father of that baby, of Dawn’s baby,” Thomas Cole, now 50, testified through a sign language interpreter.
Albert also told Cole on March 20, 1981, that he’d last seen Niles on March 17, the last day she went to school.
“He said that he drove her off, and after that she ran away and went missing and that’s all he knew,” Cole testified.
###
Deaf man (Gary Albert) found innocent of killing deaf 15-year-old girlfriend (Dawn Niles) in 1981 : Nov 21, 2011
Source: Chicago Sun Times; BY LAUREN FITZPATRICK
Gary Albert, pudgier than his 1981 yearbook showed him and wearing glasses, walked out of the Bridgeview courthouse Monday night a free man, acquitted of the cold case murder of his pregnant, 15-year-old deaf girlfriend.
Jurors who heard five days of evidence against Albert, who 30 years ago was an 18-year-old deaf student at Hinsdale South High School, decided in less than an hour that he did not kill Dawn Niles as prosecutors had charged.
“Mr. Albert, you are free to go,” Judge Joan M. O’Brien told the 49-year-old, and once the American Sign Language interpreter relayed her words, Albert looked up at the ceiling. His mother uttered “Oh dear God” and burst into tears.
“I knew they couldn’t convict my son,” Diane Dzierzynski said. “I knew it 30 years ago.”
Niles’ family — her brother, mother and the sister who urged the reopening of the case of the murdered blonde teenager — sat stunned a minute then left the courtroom to hug and cry. They had nothing to say afterwards.
Niles, of La Grange Park, disappeared after school on March 17, 1981. Her body, three months pregnant and fully clothed, was found by a teenager riding a horse around Horsetail Lake in the Cook County Forest Preserves near Palos Park five days later.
Photographs taken of her body showed her comb still in her back pocket; her shoes remained on her feet, Assistant State’s Attorney William Delaney told jurors in closing arguments.
“These photos show she was comfortable with who she was with,” Delaney said. “Because it was Gary Albert, her boyfriend of 10 months.”
Prosecutors pegged Albert’s motive to the pregnancy. He told his girlfriend to tell her mother she’d been raped, or that she’d been going with some other boy, a high school friend testified at the trial.
While Niles was missing, her mother called Albert’s Darien home looking for her daughter. Albert told her that the couple had broken up a month before.
The DNA swabbed from inside her body in 1981 could be further tested after a Cook County Sheriff’s detective reopened the case in 2006. The semen belonged to Albert, now living in Sugar Grove, and its quality indicated he had sex with Niles in more recent days than he initially admitted.
He spoke with police in 2008 through an amateur interpreter, but prosecutors did not play the recording of the six hour interview.
“They want you to believe that semen proves he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — bull!” Albert’s attorney, Tom Breen, shouted during closing arguments. “Just bull. It doesn’t prove anything other than they had consensual sex.”
Breen pointed to gaps in evidence — no specific date of death, no murder weapon, no indication of where Niles was punched in the face then stabbed 34 times before her body was dragged to the spot where it was found. He painted Niles, to her family’s hushed indignation, as a scared runaway who could have fallen prey to a dangerous stranger.
“It would be nice if they could get the person who killed her,” Breen said, dropping his voice.
“It would be real nice.”
# http://www.suntimes.com/8984700-417/man-found-innocent-of-killing-deaf-15-year-old-girlfriend-in-1981.html
1 comment:
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