Who Murdered The Newlyweds?

The 1986 wedding pictures of Dyke and Karen Rhoads show a predictably joyous young couple, ready for a wonderful life together in the small town of Paris, Ill.

Karen was 24 when they married, and had a job as an office assistant at a factory; Dyke worked in landscaping. There was no hint that just months after their wedding their lives would come to a violent end.

As correspondent Susan Spencer reports, in the early morning hours of July 6, 1986, a fire engulfed their home.

"My dad came over at 6 o'clock in the morning. I never will forget that. And he told me they had been killed," remembers Dyke's brother Tony. "He told me about their house burning. So we just naturally assumed they died in the fire, and it wasn't until two o'clock that afternoon that we found out they had been stabbed or murdered."

Justice moved quickly. Within a year, two men were arrested and convicted of the crime: 41-year-old Herb Whitlock, a part-time construction worker and small-time drug dealer, and his pal, Randy Steidl, 35, who also worked in construction and had several convictions for assault.

Prosecutors said the motive for the killing was a drug deal gone bad.

Both men said they were innocent, but no one was listening. That is until 1999, when journalism professor David Protess of Northwestern University gave his students the Rhoads murder as a class project. He told them to re-investigate the crime. To him, at least, the case didn't add up.

Protess has led classes on such projects before, investigating old crimes, and in ten cases they have produced evidence which helped free innocent men.

The job of finding the truth about the Rhoads case fell to students Kirsten Searer, Diane Haag, Greg Jonsson and Krista Larson.

Their professor admitted to having qualms about sending his students on this mission. "If that's the case and the two wrong guys are behind bars that means the actual killer or killers are roaming free," Protess told his students. "Number one, you're not going to stay anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the town. Number two, you're not going to tell any of the sources you talked to where you're staying. Number three, I don't want you to stay in the same place more than two nights in a row."

For the next nine months, the students would spend most weekends on the road, making the 180-mile trip from Chicago to the small town of Paris.

They would plow through police reports and court records to track down new leads and old witnesses wherever they could find them. The students interviewed dozens of people for their project.

Over and over again, the students recreated the crime scene in their minds, going back to that Fourth of July holiday weekend. "Dyke and Karen were sleeping in bed. The people came in. They attacked Dyke first, stabbing him in the back. Karen had time to wake up and maybe grab her glasses off her night stand, and then she was stabbed herself, mostly in the chest," explains Greg Jonsson.

Blood everywhere, but on the suspects.

"This young couple was tragically stabbed over 50 times. These men would've been covered in blood. There would've been blood in their automobiles, there would have been blood on their clothes. There would have been hair, fiber, something that linked them to the crime scene. Nothing did," says Protess.

Remarkably, the professor's skepticism is shared even by Dyke Rhoads' own family. "We weren't 100 percent convinced that they were the ones who did it," says Tony.

Their doubt is based on both the lack of physical evidence and on the supposed motive. The prosecutors said it was a drug deal gone bad, a theory Tony will not accept. But Dyke had met Whitlock half a dozen times, according to the testimony of a friend who had bought cocaine from Whitlock.

Tony says his brother Dyke was an occasional pot smoker and that Karen never used any drugs. "There's a big difference between somebody who's an occasional pot smoker and somebody who gets involved in with a drug deal that's gone bad, that's going cost you your life," says Tony.

The students also doubt the drug deal theory, but finding holes in this case wasn't as easy as it first seemed, because the juries heard from two people who said they had actually been there.

The students approached their assignment by immersing themselves in the little community of Paris. "My feeling was that the way an investigation like this begins is by becoming part of the culture of the town," says Protess.

Because understanding Paris, Ill. might be key to understanding who killed Dyke and Karen and whether the men convicted of this crime really are guilty.

Weekend after weekend, the students struggled with their investigation, knocking on doors and talking with the locals.

But Michael McFatridge, who prosecuted the Rhoads case, thinks the students were wasting their time. "I think when the dust settles they'll be very disappointed because, in fact, Whitlock and Steidl are guilty. I mean, they're the murderers."

But in 1986, the young prosecutor had had a tough time building a case against Whitlock and Steidl.

The students quickly learned that the investigation into the murders had gone absolutely nowhere for two months, until an eyewitness stepped forward with an amazing tale: Darrell Herrington claimed that he actually had seen Whitlock and Steidl at the scene of the crime.

And who was Darrell Herrington? He has been described to 48 Hours as the town drunk.

"At the time that would be, you know, a fair assessment. He was a big drinker," says McFatridge.

In a taped statement to police, Herrington said he woke up in Steidl's car, outside the Rhoads' home. "Apparently somebody was damn scared about something," Herrington told police. "I could hear a woman screaming and a man saying please don't hurt me or kill me, or something like that."

After using his credit card to jimmy open the lock, Herrington told police he went inside and up the stairs, where Steidl confronted him. Herrington told police Steidl had blood on him and also had a knife. "Then I looked up and saw a body on the bed," Herrington said.

"He knew certain things, at least in our minds, that were not things that the town drunk would know," says McFatridge.

Town drunk or not, Herrington was key to the investigation. But without a confession, McFatridge was stuck. "We were not going to indict or charge somebody until we had a reasonable chance of conviction. We had one eyewitness with no corroborative evidence."

But five months later that changed when, incredibly, a second eyewitness came forward with that much-needed corroborating evidence. Debra Reinbolt, a self-described drug addict and alcoholic, had told police she had not only seen it all, she had provided a five-inch knife, and even helped with the killing.

By the time the students began their investigation, Reinbolt claimed she was clean and sober. But in 1986, she says, "I always drank, I was always drugged."

So what happened on the night of July 6, 1986?

"A big mess. Everything went wrong. I mean they were just going to go down there try and scare Dyke, and then things just got out of hand," says Reinbolt.

Reinbolt says she knew Whitlock and Steidl through her drug use and claims that she saw them both stabbing Dyke Rhoads.

Asked what was happening to Karen at that point, Reinbolt says, "She's trying to get off the bed, and I had went over there and was telling her that everything would be okay."

Reinbolt says she held down Karen while they stabbed her and also claims that her husband's knife was used in the killings.

Reinbolt's story impressed police, especially when she accurately described a broken lamp found in the Rhoads' bedroom.

Two separate juries believed both the eyewitness accounts. In 1987, despite their unwavering protests of innocence, the two men were convicted. Whitlock got life and Steidl received the death penalty.

Steidl says he had no involvement whatsoever in the crime and says he wished he knew who killed the young couple.

Whitlock also maintains his innocence. "I had a little belief that there was justice in the system. I was pretty naïve. I'm not naïve any more," he says.

Although prosecutor McFatridge had recommended no jail time for the two eyewitnesses, Reinbolt served two years in prison for concealing a homicide.

Herrington was never charged, but months into their investigation, the Northwestern students found new evidence that cast serious doubts on the testimony of the state's two star witnesses.

Dyke and Karen's burned-out bedroom was a gruesome crime scene, but it produced no forensic evidence at all implicating the two men convicted of murder. The eyewitness testimony that was apparently enough for the juries wasn't enough for the students.

"It did not happen the way the state's witnesses said that it did," says Krista Larson.

For one thing, they doubted Herrington's story, which had put the murders at shortly after midnight; the students tracked down witnesses who challenged that timeline. One had been a neighbor of the Rhoads', Ben Light.

"You would think that with the house located just 100 yards away, we would have heard something," says Light.

"This crime occurred much later in the night, at a time when Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock were nowhere near the scene," says Protess.

And there's one other thing that doesn't quite add up: Herrington told police that after the murders, he was standing by the Rhoads' garage with Steidl. But Reinbolt also says she stood by the garage with Steidl. Remarkably, the two eyewitnesses never say they saw each other.

"It could have happened that way, matter of fact, must have happened that way," says McFatridge. "That argument was presented at trial to two different juries by two different defense attorneys. The juries found the defendants guilty."

McFatridge may not find this odd, but his star witness, Debra Reinbolt, sure did. "I thought, somebody's made this up, somebody's lost their mind, this is the town drunk. There is no way this man was there," she says.

But what about Reinbolt's own story? Her testimony was key to the guilty verdict. After all, she said she had seen the murders and even said she helped.

In 1996, nine years after the convictions, Reinbolt matter-of-factly stated in a sworn statement to Steidl's lawyer that she had lied on the stand. Asked by the lawyer what parts of her story were untrue, Reinbolt said on tape, "Oh, I don't know that Randy was there, I don't know that Herbie was there."

As for those impressive details she had provided about what she had seen inside the house, Reinbolt told the lawyer she had actually never been inside the Rhoads house.

But in a head-spinning reversal, Reinbolt later insisted that she actually was lying on the tape, and that her original eyewitness account of being at the scene of the crime was and is true. Is it? Well, it's pretty hard to know. Over the years, Reinbolt has changed her story more than half a dozen times.

Why has she changed her story so many times? "Basically wanting to get out of this, just wanting it over. The bottom line is I can't change a story that's true," she says.

Bill Clutter, an investigator working on the Steidl case, thinks he has proof, beyond her various accounts, that Reinbolt never saw the murders at all.

Remember that broken lamp?

"The prosecution used the lamp as the centerpiece of their evidence, corroborating Debra Reinbolt's account of what happened this night," says Clutter. "It made her believable."

Reinbolt testified the lamp was broken when she got to the Rhoads' bedroom, before fire tore through the home. After the fire, black soot covered the crime scene.

But Clutter says the broken inside parts of the lamp were white. He says had the lamp been broken before the fire there would have been soot on the pieces.

In the same 1996 statement, in which she denied being at the crime scene, Reinbolt also said police fed her the information about the lamp. "And they would come up with, 'Well, there was a broken vase or broken lamp there.' And then I'd say 'Well, okay. So there was,'" Reinbolt said on tape.

For the students, it all added up to more than a reasonable doubt, especially when they started turning up other witnesses the police never had talked to.

One of those witnesses, a woman, pointed the students in an entirely new direction.

The woman let the students videotape her, but was so frightened she asked 48 Hours to conceal her identity. "I noticed two men standing opposite of the street light by Dyke and Karen's house. Now what caught my eye was they had trench coats on in July. And it was very, very hot, and I wondered why they had trench coats on," she said.

She said she saw them around 9 o'clock the night before the murders. "And one of them was a big guy with blond hair, and the other guy was small-framed and looked like he had dark hair. But they were just standing there looking toward Dyke and Karen's house."

The woman thinks she saw the same two men the next night, the night of the murders. "This car started coming around, and it was white with a gold stripe down it. And it had Florida license plates. It would just go by, turn in front of Dyke and Karen's house, stop. And I seen them looking, you know? And then take off. They did this about ten times, just, I mean, continuously. Why would anyone be doing that?"

Across town, the students also tracked down a gas station attendant who worked the night shift and who remembered selling a lot of extra gas to a man driving a car with Florida plates. He told them he had sold someone 21 gallons of gasoline at 3 a.m. that morning, in seven three-gallon cans.

An hour later, the Rhoads' house was ablaze. Police had interviewed the gas attendant, but the Florida connection went nowhere. The police never even knew about the other witness, who over the years did not volunteer the information.

But what would the killers' motive be? The students came up with a new theory, one that focused on Karen, not Dyke.

"Karen had told several family members and friends that she had seen something at work that had scared her," says Kirsten Searer.

Karen may have seen something in the parking lot of the pet food plant where she worked, an incident involving other people from the factory. "She had seen large amounts of money and a gun put in a trunk that was on its way to Chicago," says Kristen.

According to a friend the students interviewed, Karen was very worried.

Protess wonders if there could be a link between what Karen saw and the shadowy men from Florida.

The Northwestern students didn't know it at the time, but Michale Callahan, a seasoned investigator, also would conclude that the men in prison for the murders were innocent.

Callahan's career with the Illinois State Police spanned nearly two and a half decades. He was promoted three times over the years, and in 2000, made lieutenant. He was asked to review the Paris murder investigation shortly before 48 Hours was to air a program about it.

He had no idea what he was getting into. "This is by far the worst investigation I've ever seen," he says.

In the case file, Callahan says he found hundreds of contradictions or problems: "Evidence or information or leads that weren't followed that should've been followed. Again, contradictions of what people said in these reports."

Including serious questions - questions the students also had raised - about the real motive for the murders.

"The case file basically said that this was over a bad drug deal. It wasn't over drugs. I mean, you look at Dyke and Karen. They had $200 in their savings account at the time of their deaths. They're not major narcotics traffickers by any means," says Callahan.

Like the students, Callahan was interested in those stories of what Karen may have stumbled on at work -- not just large sums of money that seemed out of place, but also a machine gun.

Callahan wondered if someone at Karen's job knew something about the murders.

Karen had told family and friends that she had seen something in the parking lot at work, something that made her afraid and she was thinking about quitting her job.

But if Karen did see money and a machine gun, what did it mean? Was there any connection to where she worked? To find out would take a new investigation.

But Callahan says that in 2000, no one in the state police was welcoming a new investigation and that in fact, when he tried to pursue one, his superiors yanked the rug out from under him.

"I was told that I could not reopen the Rhoads case. That it was too politically sensitive. I could not touch it," he says.

No one ever explained to Callahan what "too politically sensitive" meant.

Callahan says he tried to get the case reopened five separate times.

Why Callahan's investigation was blocked never was clear. In 2003, he was transferred out of investigations, and that ended his pursuit of the Paris murders for good.

But Callahan refused to give up. Instead, he sued the state police, claiming they had transferred him to shut him up, not only about the Rhoads murders, but also about reports he'd made to internal affairs, alleging inappropriate conduct by superiors.

The case against the state police went to federal court. He argued that his superiors muzzled him, and violated his right to free speech, in part because he was trying to investigate any possible connections between what Karen saw at work and the murders.

Callahan, now retired, found his vindication in 2005, when he was awarded $360,000. A jury agreed that he had been punished for just trying to do his job.

"People come to us for the truth," says Callahan. "We should always try to do the right thing."

"It's my opinion that they were framed," Callahan says.

But fortunes were about to change, with a development that the students, the cop, and the prisoners all worked long and hard for and never thought they'd see.

The students graduated years ago, feeling as if they had left one course with an incomplete grade. "We left this unfinished business, but there was nothing that we could do," explains Kirsten Searer.

They thought they had done the impossible, finding new witnesses, new evidence. Enough, they thought, to lead to a new police investigation.

But Whitlock and Steidl stayed right where they had been for more than a decade: in prison.

The student sleuths began their careers in journalism. Then, five years after they began working on the case, came the story the students wished they had been able to write.

In a remarkable reversal of fortune, a federal judge ruled that Randy Steidl's original attorney had made a big mistake in not challenging the credibility of the two "eyewitnesses," a mistake that could have affected the verdict.

All charges were dropped, and Steidl, once on death row, was now a free man.

"I'm glad the ceiling in my home is high enough to accommodate how high I jumped," Protess remembers, laughing.

As Steidl left the prison, two of the former students showed up to meet him, Greg Jonsson and Kirsten Searer.

Steidl says he was surprised to see them. "I'm really happy that David Protess and those kids got involved," he says.

But Kirsten Searer says someone was missing. "You just couldn't help feeling guilty for being there when Herb (Whitlock) was still in prison."

While Steidl's case was heard by a federal judge, Whitlock's case had stayed in the state system, where his appeals had been heard repeatedly, and repeatedly denied.

"I finally got a real judge in federal court who actually read the record for the very first time that, I believe, in 15, 16 years had ever been looked at," says Steidl.

After Steidl's success, Whitlock tried again, asking a state judge to overturn his conviction based on the same issues of questionable evidence and inadequate legal counsel. But the judge dealt Whitlock a stunning blow, ruling that his lawyer did an adequate job and that the eyewitnesses, on the issues that mattered, could be believed.

"Which means we have one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in our state's history where, based on the same pathetic evidence, one man could be free while Herb Whitlock languishes in prison for the rest of his life. And that would just be a tragedy beyond words," says Protess.

Steidl says he knows the situation could just as easily have been reversed. He says he thinks about that a lot, and only hopes that, somehow, Whitlock will eventually also be free.

Meanwhile, Steidl struggles to re-establish his life. He has a new job at a local factory and a determination to fit in, learning about all the changes that have happened in the last 17 years.

"I am still adjusting on a daily basis. It's a struggle," says Steidl.

While Steidl adjusts to life as a free man, Whitlock filed yet another appeal based both on ineffective counsel and on a new claim: the prosecution withholding evidence. This time an appeals court saw it his way. Finally, on Jan. 8, 2008, Whitlock gets the news he has waited so long to hear: his conviction is overturned. At last, he too is free.

For the first time in two decades, Whitlock turns his back on prison and is able to hold hands with his daughter. "To tell you the truth I didn't think I'd ever get out of there," he said.

A few days later, he returns to a place he once called home. "I knew it was getting in bad shape but I didn't realize how bad," he remarked, seeing the family farm.

"I'm angry, but I'm not necessarily bitter not gonna rap myself up with anger with what's been done," Whitlock said.

But Whitlock's eager to get to work, and says he going to restore the farm.

Determined to make up for lost time, he said, "I'm going to put it back to at least like it was when I lived here."

"Everybody's got to make the best out of their circumstances in life no matter what it is. That's not hokey, that's the truth," he said.

But for the Rhoads family, who always had doubts about the investigation into the murders of Karen and Dyke, justice will only come when they know what really happened that hot July night so long ago.

"It's just not something you're able to be at peace with all," says Dyke's sister, Andrea.

"It's like an open sore that just doesn't heal. The truth is still out there in my view," says his brother, Tony.

"And I think it will be found someday," Andrea adds.

Prosecutors say Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock remain suspects and could be tried again for the murders.