Debra Evans was nine months pregnant and had already named the baby. She was due to go into hospital on November 19, 1995, to have labor induced. On the night of the sixteenth she was shot and stabbed in her apartment in Addison, Illinois, and the baby, Elijah, was cut from her womb, with scissors by one account, and carried out alive. Debra was twenty-eight.
She had three other children. Samantha, who was ten, was killed in the apartment with her; one account says she was stabbed in her sleep. Joshua, who was seven, was taken away, and his body was found the next day in an alley in Maywood.
Jordan was two. He was left behind in the apartment, alive, with his dead mother and sister. James Edwards, who lived with Debra, had gone to work across the street at half past five that evening and came home at half past two in the morning to find the back door unlocked and Jordan waiting for him. Debra was on the living room floor under a blanket.
Jacqueline Annette Williams was born in 1966, or about 1967 if the age of twenty-eight given for her at the time is right. Caffey was twenty-two and Ward twenty-four. She was indicted with her cousin Laverne Ward and her live-in boyfriend Fedell Caffey on multiple counts of first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping, and the three were tried separately.
Ward was the father of Jordan and Elijah. The two children who came out of that apartment alive were his.
Police arrested Williams on November 17. She was holding Elijah, who was still alive. In her first accounts to police and prosecutors she said the baby was hers, that she had given birth at a friend's house the day before, that Caffey was the father and the child's name was Fedell Caffey, Jr. Later she said Caffey and Ward had gone to the apartment to talk to Debra about the unborn baby and to teach her a lesson, and that she had known there would be trouble. At their request she met them in the parking lot of Debra's building at about ten that night, and Caffey came out and handed her a newborn baby.
An inmate testified that Ward had told him he went to the apartment with two thousand dollars, intending to offer some of it to Debra in exchange for the unborn child, and that they argued when she would not take it. Debra's sister Katy Evans gave evidence about what Ward had said as early as August that year.
Williams was convicted of the murders of Debra, Samantha and Joshua Evans and sentenced to death on May 11, 1998. In 2003, Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of every condemned prisoner in Illinois to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and hers with them.
Caffey was convicted at his own trial in 1999 of the murders and of Joshua's kidnapping, and sentenced to death with a consecutive thirty years for the kidnapping; his death sentence too was commuted in 2003. He has maintained throughout that he had nothing to do with it, and his account has had more traction in the courts than that of anyone else involved: his lawyer, Richard Kling, turned up much of the new material, and in 2012 U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly granted him an evidentiary hearing over material the defense had not been given, including drug dealing between a DuPage County prosecutor and a key prosecution witness and undisclosed deals with other witnesses. The district court heard it, reviewed the record and refused relief, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed that refusal on September 22, 2015. Members of his family have said Williams planned and carried out the killings alone, and that she had told him she was pregnant and needed to produce a baby to stop him leaving. No court has accepted any of it, and all three convictions stand.
Samantha's best friend from the building, Amanda Raskow, who was nine at the time, came to court in 2012 with her own baby daughter to oppose Caffey's bid for a new trial. Elijah lived. He was raised downstate by his grandfather.