It started as a class project for three college journalism students: Take another look at a real-life crime and see whether the right people were punished.
The assignment took the students and their professor on a six-month odyssey from the picturesque campus of Northwestern University to crack houses and prisons across Illinois.It ended Friday - graduation day - when three men who had spent 18 years in prison for murder were released based on DNA evidence and the dogged efforts of the class group.
"That four people are going to be walking out of - I want to call it a hellhole - where they've been sitting for 18 years, and to know you had some direct impact on that is a good feeling," said Stacey Delo, one of the students.
The inmates, Kenneth Adams, Willie Rainge and Dennis Williams, had maintained their innocence in the 1978 murders of a gas station worker and his fiancee. Twice, juries decided otherwise.
Six months ago, Professor David Protess, who specializes in investigating possible wrongful convictions, wrote details of four cases on the chalkboard in his investigative reporting class.
One case was included at the urging of a man executed last year. Hours before his death, the man made Protess promise to do his best to save the life of a fellow death row inmate: Williams.
His was the case Delo and fellow seniors Laura Sullivan and Stephanie Goldstein chose for their class project.
Williams, Adams and Rainge were convicted of killing Larry Lionberg and Carol Schmal, who had been abducted from the suburban Homewood gas station where Lionberg worked. Schmal was raped, then both were shot in the head.
Rainge was sentenced to life, Adams to 75 years. Williams and a fourth man, Verneal Jimerson, were sent to death row; Jimerson recently won a second appeal and is free on bail.
Legwork and determination led the women across the city to Ford Heights, known as East Chicago Heights when Adams, Rainge and Williams lived there. Sometimes with their professor, sometimes on their own, the women asked questions of those who knew the men, or knew someone who knew them. They talked to crack dealers, ex-convicts and ordinary people.
"It's kind of a weird version of the college road trip," Goldstein said.
They spoke to Paula Gray, whose testimony helped convict the three men and Jimerson. Gray had told police that she and the men killed Lionberg and Schmal, but she changed that story so often she eventually went to prison for perjury and murder.
The students also found Marvin Simpson, who said he knew the real killers and told authorities so just six days after the crime. But the police records of his interview appeared "sanitized," Protess said, and his statement never got to defense attorneys until after the students re-interviewed him.
Finally, in an interview in prison in Southern Illinois, convicted murderer Ira Johnson told the Northwestern team that he, his now-dead brother and two other men killed Schmal and Lionberg.
The students' discoveries persuaded prosecutors to agree to DNA tests on semen found in Schmal. Prosecutors said the results showed that none of the men committed the rape.