Raymond Stewart was a spree killer who was executed by the State of Illinois for six murders committed during a week
According to court documents Raymond Stewart reign of terror began with murder of Willie Fredd who apparently witnessed Stewart committing a robbery years earlier. 20-year-old Albert Pearson would also be murdered at the same time. Kevin Kaiser, 18, would be murdered the next day and Kenny Foust, 35, would be murdered soon after. Richard Boeck, 21, and Donald Rains, 26, would be murdered during a robbery in Wisconsin to end his reign of terror
Raymond Stewart would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Raymond Stewart would be executed by lethal injection on September 18 1996
Raymond Stewart Photos
Raymond Stewart Case
During the 14 years that convicted killer Ray Lee Stewart has been warehoused on Illinois’ Death Row, he hasn’t provided even a clue about the bitterly cold days in January 1981 when he carried out six execution-style murders in the Rockford area.
And through it all, Stewart’s silence has only aggravated the pain felt by the victims’ families, many of whom have struggled to understand how and why their loved ones crossed paths with this brutal handgun-wielding killer.
They got what must pass for an answer 10 days ago, when a remorseful-sounding Stewart came forward–in anticipation of his scheduled execution Wednesday–by sending an audiotape to the mother of a man he killed inside a shopping mall electronics store.
In a 15-minute recorded diatribe, Stewart provided a disturbing glimpse of his hatred for whites, a race he blames for murdering two of his boyhood idols, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy.
“I was there to get back at Caucasians for what they had done,” Stewart, a 9th-grade dropout, said on the tape.
That hatred, he said, prompted him to kill four of his six victims during a seemingly random crime spree that lasted six days and terrorized the Rockford-area community for more than a month.
“The victims had not done anything to me,” confessed Stewart, 44, who is housed at the Pontiac Correctional Center.
“It was as if I was playing games with the police. In my way of thinking,” he reasoned on the tape, “I deserve the death penalty.”
Yet, even as Stewart suggests that his hatred of whites was his motive, his explanation is not complete, because his first two victims were black.
No matter his intentions, Stewart does express remorse for his actions.
“All these crimes were morally and legally wrong,” Stewart said on the tape. “I want to apologize.”
Stewart will be transported to Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet early Tuesday, where he is scheduled to die by lethal injection shortly after midnight for murdering four people in Rockford and two others in nearby Beloit, Wis.
Before his execution, Stewart has asked to pray with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the religious leader for Catholics in the Chicago area who only last month announced he was dying of terminal cancer and has only months to live.
In a statement issued Monday morning, Gov. Jim Edgar refused to stay Stewart’s execution. There appeared to be no compelling reason to intervene, he said.
Word of the governor’s decision came as welcome news to many of the victims’ families, who said they viewed Stewart’s prison recording as a feeble attempt to help him avoid the death penalty.
In the tape, Stewart said he killed his first two victims, both African-Americans, because one, a store owner, once implicated him in a crime in the 1970s. The other, a store employee, was shot because he tried to run, Stewart said.
He was on his way to kill his mother’s landlord on the seventh day of his spree, Stewart said, but a mysterious voice told him to stop shooting people while he was just blocks away from the intended victim’s home.
“This tape isn’t going to get Ray Lee any sympathy,” said Clara Rains, 65, whose son Donald Rains, 26, was gunned down inside a Beloit Radio Shack store.
Stewart’s sister, Faith Crocker, said although her brother’s actions are inexcusable, he should be spared the death penalty.
His brutal behavior stems from a violent childhood he experienced while growing up in Burlington, N.C., and later in the Rockford area, she added. Her father often physically and sexually abused his nine children, she said.
When Stewart was 14, his father threw him out of the house and told him to never come back, she said. To survive, Stewart dropped out of high school and drifted from one odd job to another.
Stewart spent six years during the 1970s in prison or in jail for various armed robbery convictions and thefts.
Last week, Stewart’s attorney, Joshua Sachs, made a last-ditch appearance before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, seeking clemency for Stewart.
Sachs argued the Rockford jury that sentenced Stewart to death in 1981 was never given proper instructions by the judge.
Edgar subsequently denied the petition.
On Jan. 27, 1981, at the age of 29, Stewart began to carry out what Rockford authorities have called the most violent six days in the city’s history.
“The people in this town were beside themselves,” said Delbert Peterson, Rockford’s former police chief.
The incidents began inside Fredd’s Grocery Store, a tiny market on Rockford’s west side, where police discovered the bodies of Willie Fredd, 54, and his stock boy, Albert Pearson, 20.
Each of them had been shot about five times in the head with a .38-caliber revolver.
The next day, service station attendant Kevin Kaiser, 18, was found murdered in a similar fashion inside a gasoline station 2 miles away.
Within 24 hours, Kenny Foust, a 35-year-old attendant at a second service station, was found with numerous gunshots to his upper body.
The spree ended a few miles away in a Beloit shopping mall, where Richard Boeck, 21, and Donald Rains, 26, were both found shot in the head inside a Radio Shack.
Constance Mitchell of Rockford said she has finally come to grips with the murder of her son, Albert Pearson. A long-distance telephone conversation with Stewart three years ago helped convince her that Stewart was mentally deranged at the time of the shooting, she said.
She even has forgiven Stewart for what he did.
“Ray Lee did something very hurtful to me,” said Mitchell, who in recent years has spoken out against the death penalty.
“I must learn to forgive him or I will carry this pain with me until I die. Killing Ray Lee,” she said pointedly, “will accomplish nothing.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1996-09-17-9609170158-story.html