John Earl Baughman was a police officer in Illinois. Three people connected to him died across twenty-five years, in three separate jurisdictions, and he was convicted of one of them.
The first was Sergeant Dean Pence of the Flossmoor police, a long-standing friend, shot dead in Will County on July 26, 1970. A grand jury considered the case and refused to indict. The second was his first wife, Gertrude “Trudy” Baughman, thirty-six, found burned in the garage of their home in Matteson in 1984. That one reached a trial, and in 1985 a jury acquitted him.
The third was his second wife, Valerie Joyce Baughman, fifty-five, who fell from the roof of the Royal Antiguan Hotel on May 27, 1995. An Antiguan jury convicted him unanimously of pushing her, in April 1996, and he was sentenced to death. The Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in September 1997.
What makes the case worth recording is the shape of the record rather than the deaths. Two prosecutions failed and they failed in different ways: one never got past a grand jury, the other was tried and lost. Neither outcome is evidence of anything except that the state could not prove its case, and this archive does not treat them as more than that. The conviction that stands was returned in a different country, under a different legal system, on a different kind of death entirely.
He hanged himself in his cell at Her Majesty’s Prison in St John’s on May 31, 2000, days after his final appeal failed. He was fifty-eight.