![]() ![]() They also presented new evidence that a serial killer of children - a lifelong drifter who was on Texas death row for a nearly identical crime - had confessed to killing Joel. She was convicted of first-degree murder in 2002 largely on the strength of the testimony of two bloodstain-pattern analysts.įour years later, Rea was acquitted at a retrial, after a legal team assembled by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago mounted a vigorous defense that challenged the state’s forensic testimony. ![]() Prosecutors used a forensic discipline called bloodstain-pattern analysis to argue that an intruder never entered her home on the night of the crime and that Rea was, in fact, her son’s killer. ![]() “Surviving your child’s murder, only to find out that you’re being accused of murdering your child, is a kind of trauma that I wouldn’t wish on any living being,” said Rea, now 50. The mild-mannered daughter of missionaries, Rea had devoted herself to her bright, inquisitive son.īut in 2000, after a protracted and deeply flawed investigation, Rea was charged with killing Joel. She had divorced Joel’s father three years earlier and was leading a quiet, uneventful life in the wake of a turbulent marriage. Her son, 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick, had been stabbed to death.Īt the time of the murder, Rea was a single mother working toward a doctorate in educational psychology. She told police that she struggled with the man, who fled. She discovered an intruder, but saw no sign of her son, in her Lawrenceville, Illinois, home. 13, 1997, Rea was jolted awake by a scream. The story remains, still, almost unspeakable. As she tries to say more, she breaks down. That is all she can muster about the worst night of her life. “I tucked Joel in, but I feel so guilty I didn’t hold him longer,” Julie Rea said, her voice welling with emotion. ![]()
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