Spared killer could still face death

Spared once, not out of the woods

By Jeff Coen
Tribune staff reporter

April 25, 2004

Andrew Urdiales is evil, prosecutors like to say, a genuine serial killer who was convicted of taking the lives of two women in Chicago and pleaded guilty but mentally ill Friday in the slaying of a third Illinois woman.

Urdiales was found guilty by a jury in Cook County after the panel heard how he allegedly coolly confessed to the stabbing and shooting deaths of Lynn Huber of Chicago and Lori Uylaki of Hammond, whose bodies were dumped in Wolf Lake. Sent to Death Row in 2002, his sentence was commuted to life in prison when former Gov. George Ryan granted clemency to everyone awaiting execution in Illinois last year.

But Urdiales, a 39-year-old former Marine, still faces capital punishment for the 1996 Livingston County slaying of Cassandra Corum, 20, of Hammond, and he may become the only person in the mass-clemency group to wind up being put to death here anyway.

The body of Corum, a young mother, was found in the Vermilion River more than seven years ago after authorities were led to it by Urdiales, who also allegedly confessed to killing five more women in California.Judge Harold Frobish will decide in a hearing beginning May 3 whether to accept the plea of guilty but mentally ill in the Corum case, but Urdiales still would face a capital sentencing hearing before a jury May 10 even if the plea is finalized. A finding of guilty but mentally ill does not change the potential sentence in the case, but it could give Urdiales' lawyers better footing to argue for a life sentence.

Urdiales, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, has been held up as the kind of defendant for which the ultimate punishment should exist in the state. But to his lawyers, Urdiales has the kind of history of abuse and mental illness that should preclude even him from being executed.

Jurors already are being selected in Livingston County, and whether that panel is presented evidence in a trial with an insanity defense or just its sentencing phase, they are expected to hear from dueling experts who take different positions on whether Urdiales' alleged mental illness is significant enough to spare his life.

"You can't deny that he has admitted to killing eight women and given detailed statements about these things that checked out," one of his lawyers, Jay Elmore of Peoria, said before the tentative plea was entered. "There were bodies where he said there would be bodies.

"But the way I like to think about it is, `How do we punish Andrew Urdiales?' Do we punish him by executing him, or is he incarcerated for the rest of his life? How do we punish the mentally ill?"

Just days after Urdiales' sentence was commuted in Ryan's mass clemency for Death Row inmates, Livingston County State's Atty. Thomas Brown said publicly that he would work to have Urdiales sentenced to die again. Brown, who will try the case himself, called Urdiales a true serial killer and said it was not a hard decision.

The Cook County prosecutors who handled his Chicago cases said they have no doubt that Urdiales is not insane and that he deserves to be condemned. His crimes were planned in detail, and Urdiales took steps to avoid being caught and to conceal evidence, they said.

As the rapes and murders allegedly were carried out over time, Urdiales became more and more careful, they said. Assistant State's Attorney Michael Hood remembers the cruelty of them and how Urdiales once complained to a psychiatrist that his victims' cries for mercy were cliches straight out of horror films.

"This is a cold, calculated, killing machine," Hood said recently. "He honed his craft."
During the clemency hearings in Chicago in the months leading up to Ryan's decision, Chicago prosecutors went to great lengths to convince members of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board that Urdiales deserved no mercy, even going so far as to bring in a juror who heard his Cook County case.

Juror Patricia Freund said last fall that she was horrified by the crimes, and she was convinced Urdiales, who was a Marine radio operator during Operation Desert Storm and a security guard when he returned to Chicago, was not insane. "The prosecution proved its case by a landslide," she said.

Uridiales' attorneys said they are prepared to defend him, even though his case has been held up as being among the worst of the worst. They plan to call some of the same experts who testified in Cook County, and they will throw out a veritable laundry list of mental illnesses, including paranoid schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, disassociative disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Any serial-killer case is going to be used as a poster child for the death penalty," said Stephen Richards, one of Urdiales' lawyers and a lawyer in the Death Penalty Trial Assistance Division of the Office of the State Appellate Defender. "However, (Urdiales) has serious mental health issues and suffered abuse. You can't just look at what the number of murders is."

A number of new reforms have taken hold in Illinois since Urdiales was last sentenced to death. The jury that would sentence him would have more leeway to consider emotional and physical abuse in his background. The jury also would be given the simpler instruction to consider whether death is "the appropriate sentence," and not whether there are "no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude" a death sentence.

Some are ready for Urdiales' fate to finally be resolved. Victim Cassandra Corum's father, Frank Stone of Alabama, said the family is upset that Urdiales was caught up in the governor's sweeping act of mercy.

"Hell yes we are," Stone said. "We think [Urdiales] deserves whatever he gets and should not be off Death Row. A jury found him guilty of two murders and put him there--why is he so special?"

Prosecutors have said Urdiales' crimes reach back at least to January 1986, when Urdiales was a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton in California. A 23-year-old fine arts student named Robbin Brandley was found stabbed next to her car after a community concert on campus.

Urdiales learned to be more careful, prosecutors have said, choosing some victims with riskier lifestyles, stripping them of clothing and identification, taking the murder weapons with him and leaving the bodies in secluded areas or bodies of water.
The break for investigators came in 1997, when Urdiales was still living on South Commercial Avenue with his parents.

A Hammond prostitute called police after quarreling with Urdiales about his desire to handcuff her and drive her to Wolf Lake, and Urdiales had been arrested for having a gun. Ballistics testing matched the gun to the Uylaki and Huber murders, and Urdiales was arrested. As he was being questioned, he allegedly began admitting to all the murders, including those in California.

The interview session was not videotaped. If it had been, Urdiales' lawyers have argued, everyone would have seen his odd body language and rambling speech.
The Livingston County jury that will hear his next case may or may not be convinced of his insanity or mental illness. If they are, Frank Stone said his family will have to look west for the justice they want.

"They have the death penalty in California," he said. "So we feel like we'd have a few more at-bats."

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