BOURBONNAIS, Ill. — The middle-of-the-night call could mean just one thing: Jackie Arnold's daughter was having her baby. Gary Arnold answered the phone but handed it to his wife. She should be the first to hear the good news.
This is what she heard: Her daughter Debra Evans, 28, had been slain. Evans' fetus was missing, and her daughter was dead. One of her two young boys was missing, the other safe with police.
Sitting in her bed in the early hours of Nov. 17, 1995, Jackie Arnold learned the first details of a spree of butchery that had, unbeknownst to police, not yet ended.
This month, then-Gov. George Ryan commuted the death sentences of every condemned inmate in the state, to great praise from death penalty opponents around the globe. The Arnolds would like the world to understand the misery that came before, to appreciate what Ryan's executive order did from their point of view.
It spared the lives of people who, wanting a light-skinned black baby, shot and stabbed Evans, sliced her full-term fetus from her womb, stabbed her daughter to death in her bed, kidnapped one son and later stabbed him to death too. Evans probably was still alive when they cut out her baby, an autopsy showed.
That baby is still alive. Elijah Evans is 7 and lives with his 9-year-old brother, Jordan, cared for now by Debra Evans' father, Sam Evans. The older boy saw the killers cut open his mother. He was 22 months old and spared, police believe, because the killers thought him too young to make sense of the mayhem, and because one of them was his father.
It became clear from his nightmares, the family says, from his terror when he saw anyone who looked remotely like the killers, that he understood much of what was happening.
"It's not about closure," Jackie, 53, said of why they wanted the killers executed. "You can't give me closure -- not in this life. They deserved to die. George Ryan played God."
Ryan, a conservative Republican who left office Jan. 13 after one term, dramatically reinvigorated the national debate over the death penalty as he changed from proponent to opponent, placed a moratorium on executions and, two days before he left office, emptied death row.
As heads of state and Nobel laureates have lauded Ryan's actions, which reduced the death sentences of 164 inmates to life in prison without parole, and three others to 40 years, Ryan has received little support from Illinois residents.
