Julie Rea
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You know what happened? Now, let's uncover why. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Lawrence, Illinois, a quiet town in rural America. Violent crime never happens in this little town. At 4.30 a.m. on October 13, 1997, neighbors woke up to a banging door.

Their neighbor, Julie Ray, is screaming for help. Someone, a stranger, broke in and kidnapped her son. Police rush to the scene. After a short investigation, police find her son. He's lying in his bed, motionless. The 10-year-old boy has been stabbed to death with a kitchen knife. Police have some questions for Julie Ray.

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 140, The Julie Ray Story. ♪

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Around 4.30 a.m. on the morning of October 13, 1977, police officers were called to a small ranch-style house in Lawrenceville, Illinois. Lawrenceville is your typical rural, small American farming town in southwest Illinois. With a population of only around 5,000 people, Lawrenceville is a quiet place.

It's known for its miles of cornfields and only three stop signs across the entire town. Lawrenceville's tiny town center only consists of a few coffee shops, a few bars, and a grocery store. Violent crime in this small town was non-existent, so Lawrence County police officers were surprised when they received a phone call about a missing child.

A couple called the police saying that their neighbor, 28-year-old Julie Ray, had woken them up by banging on their front door. When they answered the door, Julie told them to hurry up and call the police because she couldn't find her 10-year-old son, Joel. The neighbors said Julie had bruises all over her arms and on one of her eyes. They also said that one of her arms was bleeding.

Julie said someone had broken into her house, attacked her, and then had taken her son. Two officers from the Lawrence County Police Department showed up at Julie's house. The officers were met by Julie, who was hysterically crying in the house's front yard. One officer stayed outside with Julie while the other one went inside the house.

The officer entered the house through the garage and into the kitchen. He passed through the kitchen into the hallway towards the back bedroom of the house. When he got inside the bedroom, he saw a small boy lying in a pool of blood. He was stuck between the bed and the side of the bedroom wall. It was Julie's son, 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick.

Joel had been stabbed multiple times across the chest and front part of his body. When paramedics arrived at the house, he was pronounced dead. Lawrence County police officers went outside to the front of the house to tell Julie they had found her son. But he'd been murdered. Someone stabbed him to death inside of his very own bedroom.

The news came as a complete shock to Julie. She was immediately brought down to her knees and started crying hysterically. Joel, her sweet-year-old 10-year-old boy, was her only son.

Once Julie calmed down enough to talk, officers were anxious to get her side of the story. They needed to know everything she and Joel did that day to determine what might have happened and who might have done this. Julie told the officers that she was asleep in her bedroom when she heard screams.

At first, she said she didn't know who the screams belonged to because it was a scream she had never heard before. She also wasn't exactly sure where the noise was coming from. Her first thought was to go check on her 10-year-old son, Joel. He was sleeping in his bedroom across the hallway from hers. So she got out of bed and walked towards Joel's bedroom.

When she got to his room, Joel wasn't in his bed. Before doing anything else, she said a man wearing a ski mask jumped across the bed towards her. The man started attacking her, and the two of them got into a physical struggle. The man began to run towards the garage to get out of the house, but Julie said she was trying to stop him from getting away.

They continued to fight through the hallway, into the kitchen, and eventually the garage. When they got to the garage, Julie said the man had briefly removed his ski mask before running out of the house. She told the police that after the man ran away, she started looking for her son around the house, but she couldn't find him anywhere. So then she ran to the neighbor's house across the street who called 911.

As Julie provided her initial statement to the police, crime scene investigators were already inside the house collecting evidence. Before daylight, investigators already seemed to have their first suspect in Joel's murder. Immediately, Lawrence County detectives focused their attention on Julie.

Detectives within the Lawrence County Police Department weren't experienced in these types of homicide cases. Homicides are extremely rare in the county. So Lawrence County officials called in the Illinois State Police Department to help in the investigation. One of the first observations crime scene investigators noticed was how neat the inside of Julie's house was.

Julie stated that she and the intruder were involved in a physical struggle that started in Joel's bedroom and went through the house to the garage where he eventually got away.

But when the investigators walked through the entire house, they didn't see any signs of a struggle. None of the furniture was turned over. No picture frames on the wall fell to the ground. The entire house was spotless. It just didn't look like you'd expect a small house to look if, in fact, a struggle occurred.

Investigators also didn't find any signs of a forced entry, and nothing was reported stolen from the house. The more they looked at the home, the more they suspected that Julie's story didn't match the scene. By early afternoon, Julie Ray became suspect number one in her son's murder. Julie shared 10-year-old Joel with her ex-husband, Len Kirkpatrick.

Julie and Len had gotten married when they were only teenagers. They met when they were 15 and got married when Len was 18 and Julie was 17. Julie and Len's parents were good friends and worked as missionaries in Africa together. When Julie's parents moved back to the United States, Julie and Len stayed in touch.

Since Julie was still a minor, she was only 17 years old, her parents had to legally sign off on the marriage in order for the two of them to get married. Less than a year after they tied the knot, Joel was born, a goofy and funny kid who was also brilliant. His teachers in school described him as the smartest student they had.

Joel was also sensitive and caring, the type of kid everyone wanted to be around. When Joel was seven, Julie and Len filed for divorce in September 1994. Julie was a PhD student working towards her graduate degree in education, and Len was working on starting a career in law enforcement. The separation and divorce was messy.

After months of going back and forth to the court, a judge ordered that Len get residential custody of Joel. This decision upset Julie because she wanted full custody of their son. But the court ultimately decided that Len would get residential custody in Joel's best interest while Julie could get him on the weekends.

This was because Len had already remarried and would have two parents at home, while Julie was a single mother. Len eventually moved on with his new wife, and Julie purchased a home in Lawrenceville, Illinois. Although the divorce was muddy, they both agreed to raise Joel the best they could together because of just how much they loved him.

If Illinois State Police officers weren't suspicious enough because they didn't think Julie's story matched the crime scene, they became even more suspicious after they found the murder weapon. The knife used to stab and kill Joel was determined to be a steak knife from the knife block inside of Julie's kitchen. The knife was a wedding gift from Julie's ex-husband, Len.

The knife was concerning to investigators for many reasons. Number one, the knife belonged to Julie. This meant the killer came into the house that night without a weapon. Number two, the knife seemed to have been placed neatly on the floor. Police didn't find any blood spatter around the knife. It looked like someone had simply placed it there.

If the knife had been thrown to the ground like you'd expect it to have been, investigators believed they would have found some blood spatter around it, but they didn't. When investigators spoke with Julie's neighbors, they told the officers they thought her behavior was strange that morning.

According to Julie's neighbors, when they opened the door, Julie made an odd comment about the injury to her arm. Then, when the neighbors looked at her bloody arm, she said, Don't worry, you can touch it. I don't have AIDS or anything.

The neighbors told investigators that Julie's behavior just seemed odd. She wasn't acting like someone who had just found out that her son was abducted or if she had just been attacked by a random intruder. The police submitted Julie's clothes to be tested. When the results came back, they found traces of blood on the back of the shirt and the shoulder.

The traces of blood were compared to Julie and to Joel's blood, and the results revealed that the blood drops on Julie's shirt belonged to Joel. When Julie told her story to the detectives, she never mentioned touching or coming into contact with her son at any point that day.

After she fought with her attacker, she said she had ran across the street to have the neighbors call 911. According to Julie's own story, her own account from that day, she thought someone had abducted her son. No part of her story mentioned coming into any type of physical contact with Joel.

So why would traces of his blood be found on the back of her t-shirt? The more the police looked at Julie Ray, the more they became convinced that she was lying. And the more convinced they became that there was no intruder. She killed Joel. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. Illinois state investigators had several questions. Who breaks into a house for no reason? Nothing was reported stolen. Who enters a home to commit a murder but doesn't bring a murder weapon with them?

The knife used to stab and kill Joel came from Julie's kitchen, who murders a 10-year-old boy but leaves behind an adult. Then there was another part of Julie's story. She told investigators that right before her attacker got away, he briefly lifted the ski mask from his face so that she could see him.

Why would someone take off their mask so that the surviving victim could get a good look at him? The police brought Julie down to the station for questioning. They sat down and told her that they thought she had done it as soon as she got there. Her, you made the whole story up about the intruder. We think you killed your son.

But Julie stuck to her original story. She said everything was true. She didn't kill her son. When investigators sat down with Julie, they made her retell everything that had happened that day, starting from the day before.

Julie told investigators that it was her weekend to have Joel. Since she had joint custody with her ex-husband, she usually had Joel on the weekends. During the week, Joel would stay with his father. That particular weekend was a holiday weekend. Columbus Day was Monday, so Joel didn't have school that day. Usually, Joel would return to his dad's house on Sunday evenings.

But this week, Julie had asked her ex-husband if Joel could stay at her house an extra night that weekend because of the holiday. That morning, Julie told investigators that she and Joel had gone to the park together. They brought a blanket to lay in the grass and watch the clouds. After the visit to the park, they stopped to get a milkshake before heading home.

Once home, Julie invited a girlfriend who also had a son around the same age as Joel. As Julie and her friend talked in the kitchen, Joel and the other boy watched the movie Aladdin in the living room. Julie said that Joel came into the kitchen at some point and told her he wasn't feeling well. So Julie's friend and son said their goodbyes and left. Then Julie got Joel ready for bed.

After saying their prayers, something she said they did every night together, she tucked him into bed, turned off the lights, and closed the bedroom door. Julie told investigators that she always made sure she locked the front door at night. But on that specific night, she couldn't remember if she locked the door from the garage to the kitchen or not.

During the night, she was awoken by screams. Suddenly, she was attacked by the masked intruder. When Julie spoke with the detectives, she reminded them that she had seen the man without his mask. At the police station, she worked with a forensic sketch artist who created a sketch of the man based on Julie's description.

The police circulated the sketch throughout the community in hopes of identifying him. As soon as the sketch was released, the police received dozens of tips. From the first time in the investigation, the police thought maybe someone other than Julie had committed this murder. One woman called the police and said that she sold a bus ticket to a man that looked like the sketch.

Someone else said they saw a man down by the railroad tracks that looked like him. A group of teenage kids said some kids at a party bragged about killing someone earlier that night and the kids were supposedly covered in blood. Rumors swirled around that teenagers on meth had killed Joel.

But when Illinois police looked into each of these claims, they all turned out to be dead ends. None of them led to Joel's killer. So the police kept going back to their original suspect, Julie Ray. Throughout the investigation, Julie was cooperative with the police.

She was interviewed by state police officers on three separate occasions, and she agreed to take two polygraph tests administered by an independent agency not associated with the police department. And she passed both of them. The police found themselves stuck at square one as the months passed. Although they suspected Julie of the murder, they had no solid evidence linking her to it.

They also didn't have any evidence that anyone else killed Joel. So when the leads dried up, so did the investigation. And sadly, the case went cold. Joel's murder rocked the community of Lawrenceville. This was such a brutal murder for a small town. Random, cruel murder just doesn't happen.

For months, Illinois state investigators worked on the case, but as much as they worked on it, there wasn't enough evidence to arrest Julie or anyone else. So the investigation into Joel's murder turned cold for the next three years. Julie tried her best to move on with her life, but struggled.

Not only has she lost her only son, but many people, including the Illinois State Police Department, still believed she was the killer. She sold her small ranch house in Lawrenceville and moved out of state to Indiana. The attack that she claimed happened that night left her traumatized. Even getting a service dog to help with her trauma, she still had trouble sleeping at night.

While living in Indiana, she agreed to go on a blind date about a year and a half after Joel's murder. The blind date was with a man named Mark Harper. Julie and Mark hit it off, and they married in 2001. Although she tried to escape what happened in Lawrenceville, the cloud of suspicion continued to haunt Julie.

While Julie was trying to move on with her life, Ed Parkinson, an Illinois state special prosecutor, was assigned to Julie's case. In May 2000, three years after the murder, Ed Parkinson began looking into Julie as a suspect.

He already knew the state police had long suspected her in the murder, but he needed to research the case independently to decide if criminal charges could be pursued. When he analyzed all the evidence, he came to one conclusion. Julie must have done it. Although he didn't have any physical evidence, he felt there was enough circumstantial evidence.

To put it frankly, Julie's story just doesn't make any sense. When first responders got to the house, the only signs of a forced entry were found on two doors with broken glass, the garage door and the door leading from the garage to Julie's kitchen. The broken glass had fallen on the outside of both doors.

If someone broke in, you'd expect to find glass inside, not outside the house. Prosecutor Ed Parkinson believed this proves that Julie staged the entire scene. But there was more incriminating evidence. Julie said that her and her attacker got into a physical fight throughout the house.

But not a single object inside the house looked out of place. No furniture was knocked over, and all the pictures hung perfectly on the walls. Finally, the murder weapon.

Ed Parkinson was quoted as saying, quote, to believe her, you would have to believe that this assailant came into her house in the middle of the night without a weapon, in dark clothes, hiding his identity by the use of a mask for the sole purpose of killing a 10-year-old boy. And after he had accomplished his result, he pulled off the mask to reveal his identity to her.

Nonsense. End quote. A grand jury was assembled in May 2000 to hear all the evidence the state had collected against Julie. If a grand jury agreed, the state could proceed with criminal charges. If not, they would have to go back to the investigation. After a week of hearing evidence, an Illinois grand jury agreed with prosecutor Ed Parkinson. They issued an indictment against Julie Ray.

In October 2000, Julie was arrested on two counts of first-degree murder. After three years of little movement, this was a significant moment in the case. Following the indictment, Julie turned herself in and anxiously awaited trial so she could prove her innocence. A year and a half after the indictment, Julie went on trial for her son's murder.

After exhausting her life savings on private counsel while waiting to go to trial, Julie was represented by two public defenders just about when the trial was going to begin.

Julie was initially given two attorneys because under a March 2001 death penalty reform decision issued by the Supreme Court, when someone faces the death penalty, they're required to have two qualified attorneys to represent them. But just days before Julie's trial began, the prosecution announced they no longer intended to seek the death penalty.

This meant that Julie wasn't entitled to two attorneys or any of the other resources that death penalty defendants get, like the Capital Litigation Trust Fund. So instead, she went to trial with one public defender. The prosecution's case relied heavily on circumstantial evidence, but they also claimed to have the forensic evidence to back up their story.

Not only did the state use Julie's story about what happened that night against her, but they also called her character into question. Prosecutors had Julie's ex-husband testify about how Julie considered getting an abortion when they got pregnant with Joel.

This was an important part of the prosecution's narrative because this trial took place in Wayne County, deep in southern Illinois. Historically, Wayne County is deeply conservative with strong opinions about abortions. Then came the forensic evidence.

The state hired two bloodstain experts to testify against Julie. The first blood expert was Rodney Englert, a retired law enforcement officer from Portland, Oregon. Englert testified about the cast-off pattern of blood found on the nightshirt Julie wore that night. When the nightshirt was tested, cast-off patterns of Joel's blood were found on two sections of the shirt.

When droplets of blood are flung from an object, they create a distinct pattern. This pattern is referred to as cast-off. In stabbings, blood cast-off can occur when the attacker swings the blood-stained knife back before inflicting another stab.

Experts can tell the direction of the impacting object by the shape of the spatter. For example, the tail of the spatter points in the direction of the motion. Experts can also count the number of arches in the spatter to determine the minimum number of blows or stab wounds.

Englert testified that Julie could have only gotten Joel's blood on her nightshirt if she was the one doing the stabbing. When she stabbed Joel, this caused blood cast-off patterns to appear on her nightshirt. The prosecution also reminded the jury that in Julie's story, she never touched her son that night. So how could she have gotten cast-off blood on her clothing?

The second expert for the prosecution was Dexter Barlett. Like Englert, he also testified that she had to have been the attacker because of the location and shape of the blood spatter found on Julie's nightshirt. According to both experts hired by the prosecution,

The only scientific explanation for the transfer of Joel's blood onto Julie's clothing was that she was the person doing the stabbing. Julie's defense presented a much different story to the jury. They pointed out that there was no evidence of a cleanup. If Julie stabbed her son, wouldn't there be strong evidence of a cleanup?

But when the police drained Julie's shower drain and septic tanks, they didn't find any traces of blood. And besides the two small traces of cast-off blood on the nightshirt, the police didn't find any other traces of blood anywhere else on Julie's clothes. Luminol was used over every piece of clothing she wore that night, and they didn't find anything.

If Julie stabbed Joel, the defense argued you'd expect to see a lot more blood, not only on her clothing, but also in her drains. But Julie's defense didn't persuade the jury. After only five hours of deliberation, the jury found Julie guilty of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to 65 years in prison.

Julie never testified at her trial. Despite her desire to take the stand and tell the jury her story, her defense attorney advised against it. So when making a decision, the jury only had the forensic evidence to consider. And in Julie's case, the evidence was overwhelming.

The state presented two blood stain analysis experts to testify about what they described as cast-off patterns of Joel's blood on the nightshirt. For most jurors, this is powerful testimony.

Anytime the prosecution can put an expert on the stand to testify, it will persuade the jury. And when it came to Julie's defense, they didn't put any experts on the stand to talk about the blood spatter. All the jury had to consider were the two experts hired for the prosecution.

Both said that the only way the blood could have gotten on Julie's nightshirt was if she was the one doing the stabbing. Following the trial, Julie was sent to prison to serve her 65-year sentence. She maintained her innocence from the moment of her arrest up until she was sent to prison.

She stuck to her original story that a man wearing a ski mask broke into her house and killed her son. Not long after Julie began serving her sentence, the case was covered extensively by ABC's 2020. When 2020 reported on the case, she delivered a desperate plea for help, insisting that she wasn't a murderer.

The episode aired on May 31st, 2002, just weeks after she was sentenced. The episode caught the attention of Texas-based crime writer Diane Fanning. Diane Fanning watched the 2020 episode and found herself intrigued by Julie's story.

She was captivated because she was writing about a serial killer, Tommy Lynn Sells, when she watched the episode. And after she heard Julie's story, she thought it sounded a lot like some of the crimes committed by Tommy Lynn Sells. The story was remarkably similar to Sells' M.O.,

In December 1999, Tommy Lynn Sells was arrested for sexually assaulting and stabbing to death a 13-year-old girl.

But that wasn't Sells' only crime. Between early 1980 and December 1999, police investigators believe that Sells might have murdered at least 22 people. But according to Sells, that number isn't correct. Because according to him, he's claimed to have killed more than 70 people.

As part of her writing, Diane Fanning was in contact with Sells, who was in prison at the time. He had received the death penalty in the case involving the 13-year-old girl. Although he suspected of many murders, he was only ever convicted of one in which he was sentenced to death. So while Sells was in prison awaiting execution, Diane Fanning began corresponding with him for her work.

After she watched the 2020 episode, she wrote Sells another letter. And in the letter, she said she heard about a case involving the stabbing death of a 10-year-old boy from Illinois, and she thought the story sounded a lot like his M.O.,

Without providing him when this murder happened, Sells wrote back and asked if this murder happened two days before his Springfield, Missouri murder. On November 14th, two days after Joel's murder, Sells kidnapped and killed 13-year-old Stephanie Mahoney, a murder he quickly confessed to the police.

After Diane Fanning confirmed the date, Sells wrote back with a full confession. He said that on the night of Joel's murder, he had entered a stranger's house in the same area. He stabbed someone repeatedly while the person slept. And then he said he got into a physical fight with a woman as he escaped and ran out of the house.

Sell's story perfectly matched Julie's original story, the narrative that prosecutors said you'd have to be crazy to believe. One year later, Diane Fanning's book about Tommy Lynn Sellers, Through the Window, was released. In the book, she detailed his confession to the murder for which Julie was convicted.

This led to the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University to get involved. Once the Center for Wrongful Convictions read Fanning's book on cells, they contacted Julie in prison. They agreed to represent her in her appeal. They also had the Chicago law firm Schiff Hardin agree to help on the case pro bono.

For them to be successful on appeal, they had to validate Sell's confession. They needed enough evidence to persuade a judge that Sell's confession was credible. And if it was, then Julie goes free. Julie's defense team identified an eyewitness during the investigation into Sell's confession.

This witness, Alan Berkshire, said he saw Tommy Lynn Sells in Lawrenceville, the town where Julie and Joel lived, on the weekend Joel was killed. They also spoke to Sandra Wirth. Sandra Wirth was the woman who told the police that she sold a bus ticket to a man who matched the suspect Julie described to the police.

She sold the ticket to a man headed to Nevada two days after Joel's murder. The location in Nevada is very relevant because Texas Rangers placed cells in this particular part of Nevada after Joel was killed.

So this means that the witness who called the police to report the man all those years earlier about selling the bus ticket was in fact correct. On October 24th, 2003, Julie's attorneys presented their evidence supporting Sell's confession to the appellate court. In total, they presented 53 points of connection that they found throughout their investigation.

At the hearing, Diane Fanning, the author, testified on how Sells confessed to Joel's murder after she wrote to him. Former state police crime scene investigator Alva Bush pointed out errors that the state's two blood spatter experts made at the original trial. The defense also played an audio tape recording of Sells' confession to Joel's murder.

In the audio tape, Sell provided details about the murder that only the person responsible would know. Sell said that during the struggle with Julie, she grabbed onto his leg to prevent him from getting away. This was something that Julie detailed in her story.

The hospital that treated Julie after the incident noted carpet burns on Julie's leg. Yet another detail that completely matched up with Julie's original story. On June 24, 2004, more than two years after her conviction, the appellate court found the evidence compelling enough and ordered Julie's conviction to be vacated. The court also ordered that Julie be immediately released from prison.

But Illinois state prosecutors weren't going to let her go that easily. Immediately following her release from prison, prosecutors filed paperwork to recharge Julie for the murder. They sought to convict her for a second time. Two years later, in June 2006, Julie's second murder trial began.

In her defense, Julie's attorney relied heavily on Sell's confession to Joel's murder and the state's error about the blood spatter evidence. In addition, the defense called into question the state's expert credentials and their interpretation of the blood evidence.

At the first trial, the two experts testified that Joel's blood could have gotten on Julie's nightshirt only if she was the person stabbing him. But during the second trial, Julie's defense presented much evidence that contradicted this claim. They argued that the original interpretation of the blood evidence was faulty.

As a result, Julie was convicted on erroneous blood spatter analysis. Following a two-week trial, the case was put in the hands of the jury. Julie's fate would be decided by a jury for a second time. After 12 hours of deliberation, the jury found Julie Ray not guilty.

The jury's decision in the second criminal trial meant that Julie was formally acquitted of her son's murder and she could never be held to stand trial for it again. According to the Illinois State Innocence Project, Julie Ray was convicted of a murder she didn't commit based on unreliable blood spatter analysis. If it weren't for the faulty testimony of two self-proclaimed blood spatter analysis victims,

Julie would have likely never been convicted in the first trial. But instead, she was found guilty based on mainly unreliable forensic evidence. In 2009, a report was released by the National Research Council of the National Academies. The report highly criticized blood spatter analysis and its reliability.

The report concluded that except for DNA, many commonly used forensic techniques had not undergone the necessary testing to establish sufficient validity and reliability to support many claims made in criminal trials. And this includes blood spatter analysis.

The report said, quote, the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous, end quote. It went on to report, quote, in general, the opinions of bloodstain pattern analysis are more subjective than scientific, end quote. Joel's actual killer is believed to be serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells.

But proving that in a court of law won't happen despite his full confession. On April 4th, 2014, Sells was executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. Before his execution, he confessed to killing more than 70 people, including Joel.

In 2010, Julie was officially exonerated, and in 2011, she moved to Tennessee to try to move on with her life for a second time. Today, she lives a quiet life and advocates for women wrongfully accused of crimes. The Illinois Innocence Project maintains that Julie Ray was convicted on bad science.

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