A man convicted of a fatal 2000 attack in North Chicago should get a chance to argue for a retrial based on new genetic testing and revelations about a detective’s sex life, his lawyer said in a petition filed this week in Lake County.
Marvin Williford’s efforts to get a new trial were previously rejected in 2018 after DNA on a two-by-four used to beat Delwin Foxworth was linked to an unidentified man’s semen from the rape of 11-year-old Holly Staker in her 1992 killing in Waukegan.
In denying Williford a retrial based on that evidence in 2018, Lake County Judge Daniel Shanes was quoted as saying the DNA link to Holly’s killing didn’t show Williford was wrongly convicted and was of “salacious value.”
Holly Staker.
Sun-Times file
Williford’s attorney David Owens says additional DNA testing — along with the discovery that Williford and a detective on the case were in sexual relationship with the same woman — casts even more doubt on his conviction.
A female witness told police on the night of Foxworth’s slaying that the killer was “yellow- skinned,” which Williford isn’t, Owens said in a filing last week. At trial, Williford, who’s Black, argued he wasn’t the “yellow-skinned” man.
“New DNA genealogical analysis adds tremendous forensic support for this argument,” said Owens, an attorney with the Exoneration Project.
Tests have excluded Williford from DNA found on the two-by-four and other crime-scene evidence, according to Owens.
He said the female witness’s identification of Williford as the killer — based on photos the police showed her — was flawed. “The witness hesitated substantially before settling on the picture of Williford,” Owens said.
Owens also said one of the detectives on the case lied in police reports about the circumstances of his conversation with an informant who said Foxworth owed Williford money. Williford became the only suspect in the case.
A woman present during that conversation was having an extramarital affair with the detective, Owens said. And Williford says he was in a sexual relationship with the same woman.
Jennifer Blagg, a lawyer for Williford, interviewed the woman, who said that after Williford was convicted, the detective told her “that’s what he gets for having sex with my girl,” according to an affidavit Blagg signed Jan. 25. The woman refused to sign an affidavit, Blagg said.
A status hearing in Williford’s case is scheduled for Thursday in Lake County Circuit Court.
In January 2000, Foxworth was held at gunpoint, beaten with a board and bound to a chair. He refused to give the robbers money, was doused with gasoline and set on fire. He died in a nursing facility in 2002. Williford didn’t confess and no physical evidence tied him to the attack, his lawyers say. A separate challenge to Williford’s conviction is pending in federal court.
Clockwise from top left: Juan Rivera, in white, greets his half-brother Miguel Diaz, his father Juan Rivera and his mother, Carmen Rivera, after walking out of Stateville Correctional Center in 2012.
Richard A. Chapman / Sun-Times
Holly was raped and killed while babysitting two younger children. In 2011, an appeals court overturned Juan Rivera’s conviction in her killing. Rivera got a $20 million settlement in a wrongful conviction lawsuit he filed against Lake County authorities.
Since then, no one’s been arrested in Holly’s killing, but Waukegan police chief Keith Zupec told WFLD-Fox 32 in August 2022 of “a little more complicated lead that we are working … but a very strong viable lead.”
A judge denied Williford’s request for Lake County authorities to divulge the details of the investigation into the identity of the person whose DNA was found on Holly’s body.
“Williford does not know the extent of the investigation undertaken by the Waukegan Police Department,” Owens said in his recent court filing.