"Lawyers representing Quincy's Curtis
Lovelace on Wednesday were granted access to several documents they
sought in advance of his retrial on first-degree murder charges.
In his ruling, Judge Bob Hardwick wrote documents that the
Exoneration Project tried to acquire through subpoenas "arguably could
be relevant and material, without redaction, to the pending charges."
The original documents were placed under seal into Lovelace's court
file. Lawyers for both sides will receive copies of the documents to
review. Lovelace's next court appearance is scheduled for Sept. 8, and
his trial, expected to last two weeks, is scheduled for Oct. 24.Lovelace
is accused of suffocating his wife, Cory, with a pillow in February
2006. His first trial in the case ended with a mistrial being declared
by Hardwick after the jury could not reach a verdict. Last month,
Hardwick lowered Lovelace's bond to $3.5 million, and Lovelace was
released from the Hancock County Jail on June 7. He is under home
confinement.The defense will be able to get information about
Cory Lovelace's health history from Blessing Hospital, Quincy Medical
Group and Carle Health Care, which is located in the Champaign-Urbana
area. The defense also will get access to records concerning Cory
Lovelace's death from the Adams County coroner's office, Hansen-Spear
Funeral Home and Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, which is where
her autopsy was done.The defense also will get access to some
Quincy Police Department records as well as phone logs for Quincy
detective Adam Gibson. Gibson began to investigate Lovelace's death soon
after he was moved to the detective division late in 2013. The defense
will be allowed to examine Gibson's phone records from August 2013 to
August 2014, which is when Curtis Lovelace was indicted by an Adams
County grand jury in the case. The defense is trying to find out when
Gibson had contact with Lovelace's second wife, Erika Gomez.Julia
Wykoff, who is assisting special prosecutor Ed Parkinson, said that
Gibson's first contact with Gomez about the case was Jan. 30, 2014, just
over a month after he launched his investigation. Gomez told The
Herald-Whig in February that she did not initiate contact with Quincy
police about her ex-husband.The prosecution tried to get the subpoenas quashed, with Wykoff saying the defense was going on a "fishing expedition."
http://www.whig.com/article/20160713/ARTICLE/307139643#
See story on the hung jury decision - and dueling opinions from forensic experts at the link below: "After a two-week trial and 16 hours of deliberations, jurors in Quincy,
Illinois, could not settle the guilt or innocence of one-time local
golden boy
Curtis Lovelace in the death of his wife, Cory,
reports WGEM.
The mistrial declared Friday by Judge Bob Hardwick sets the
stage for a May 31 retrial for Curtis, a former local football hero,
ex-school board president and assistant state's attorney who drew
headlines when – eight years after he reported his wife dead on
Valentine's Day 2006 – he was arrested in 2014 and charged with her
suffocation murder. In the Adams County courthouse where Curtis, now 47, had once
practiced law, jurors apparently were divided over the prosecution's
allegation that rigor mortis on Cory's body suggested that Cory, 38, had
died several hours before Curtis reported her dead, and that he was
responsible. Key
to the defense was testimony from two of the couple's four children,
sons Lincoln, now 17, and Logan, now 18, both of whom said they saw
their mother alive that morning before their father took them to school
around 8:15 a.m. Curtis said he returned home to find Cory dead in the
couple's upstairs bed around 9 a.m. A third child, daughter Lyndsay, now 22, testified she "couldn't say 100 percent that I saw her (alive) that morning,"
according to the Herald-Whig newspaper.
And the youngest, son Larson, 14, who was just 4 years old when Cory
died, recalled that he tried but was unable to wake his mother that
morning while his father was away.
The children's seemingly conflicting statements clearly left jurors guessing. Prosecutor Ed Parkinson said in his
opening statement
that "turmoil" existed between Curtis and Cory, and Cory's mother,
Marty Didriksen, testified that she knew the couple's once-storybook
marriage had
developed tensions.
But Curtis himself never took the stand to answer those charges.
And in a pretrial decision, prosecutors were barred from introducing
testimony from Curtis' second wife, Erika Gomez – after Cory died, he
remarried, divorced, and remarried again – whose 2012 split with Curtis
revealed allegations of an abusive relationship, along with Curtis'
admission that he was a recovering alcoholic and struggling financially. Curtis' current wife, the former Christine L. Brewster, has stood by his side during his ordeal and throughout the murder trial. Dueling opinions from forensic experts also planted doubts that jurors could not resolve. In the wake of Cory's death, coroner Dr. Jessica Bowman
initially raised concerns and left open the cause of death as
"undetermined." A Quincy Police detective, Adam Gibson, picked up the
open case in 2013, and took the records and photos of the scene to new
medical examiners, which led to a grand jury and then Curtis' arrest in
August 2014. The prosecution built its case with two experts, including
celebrated forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who testified that
Cory died of "homicidal suffocation," which he based in part on photos
that showed her in bed with her arms raised and bent, and frozen that
way by rigor mortis. "Her arms are not in a natural position," he said,
the
Herald-Whig reported. "You can't possibly die like that."
He said a pillow, used to suffocate her and then left in place
while rigor mortis set in, may have been the cause. He judged Cory's
death to have occurred about nine hours before Curtis reported it. The defense countered with its own experts. One of them, Dr.
George Nichols, the former chief medical examiner for the state of
Kentucky, agreed the position of Cory's arms was "a bit unusual," he
said on the stand. "But people come to rest in all kinds of different
positions when they die." And he said the onset of rigor mortis is not a definitive clue
to the time of death, and differs from person to person. "If this woman
was suffocated by a pillow, then I've missed dozens of other homicides
in my career," he said. Defense attorney James Elmore argued in his closing that Cory –
who had been fighting flu-like symptoms at the time she died, according
to statements Curtis gave to investigators – was worn down by the
ravages of bulimia and her own alcoholism. "She was knocking on death's
door and no one knew it," he said,
WGEM reported.
Charged with first-degree murder, Curtis faces from 20-60 years if convicted."
http://www.people.com/article/hung-jury-means-retrial-for-curtis-lovelace-in-death-of-wife-cory