Julie Rea-Harper
Just yesterday in my blog about Anthony Graves I discussed the issue of tunnel vision and gung ho investigators. Well, today here is a story that not only qualifies but in my opinion at a much higher degree despite the fact that Graves sat on death row for twelve years (sixteen years in prison total) and Julie Rea-Harper spent only about half of that in prison. This case involved two different trials and when that happens there tends to be less specifics found on each individual trial. Sometimes when you dig pretty deep you can find out more things and it becomes one of those cases that you have to start piecing things together and then try to weed out what information is true and what information is false although has gone down in legend. So we'll start with what we do know as fact and that is that on the night of October 13, 1997 in Lawrenceville Illinois, ten year old Joel Kirkpatrick lost his life. Joel was visiting with his mother Julie Rea (she would later marry...