People v. Derr

806 N.E.2d 237, 346 Ill. App. 3d 823, 282 Ill. Dec. 262, 2004 Ill. App. LEXIS 188
CourtAppellate Court of Illinois
DecidedFebruary 25, 2004
Docket5-01-0977
StatusPublished
Cited by10 cases

This text of 806 N.E.2d 237 (People v. Derr) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Appellate Court of Illinois primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
People v. Derr, 806 N.E.2d 237, 346 Ill. App. 3d 823, 282 Ill. Dec. 262, 2004 Ill. App. LEXIS 188 (Ill. Ct. App. 2004).

Opinion

JUSTICE KUEHN

delivered the opinion of the court;

Life is short — shorter for some than others.

Dennis Oberbeck’s life was cut short on August 14, 1992, at the age of 43, when he succumbed to the kind of trauma that most men can easily survive. Oberbeck’s .377 blood-alcohol level at the time of his death might well have proved lethal all by itself. However, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy upon Oberbeck’s body felt that death was caused by more than alcohol poisoning. Superficial abrasions over Oberbeck’s right eye and about his upper lip, markings that appeared to be the product of someone’s fists, led the medical examiner to conclude that blows to the face worked in tandem with Oberbeck’s extreme inebriation to produce the cardiac arrest that ended his life.

Dennis Oberbeck’s drunkenness rendered him vulnerable to any form of trauma. As circumstance would have it, he simply could not take a punch. When John Derr, the defendant, for reasons unknown, punched Oberbeck’s face, Oberbeck’s brain ceased sending impulses to the heart. When it shut down, lifeblood ceased to flow, and he perished.

The circumstances of this untimely death remained a mystery for several years. Then, in early 1996, as the defendant’s marriage to Sherry, his wife, began to unravel, an answer to the mystery unraveled with it. Sherry broke silence to reveal a dark secret kept for several years. Her revelations to law enforcement officials explained how Dennis Oberbeck’s body ended up in the backyard of an abandoned house on the outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri.

Sherry described to the authorities how her husband summoned her in the wee hours of August 14, 1992, to a vacant Granite City dwelling that the couple owned. He showed her Dennis Oberbeck’s lifeless body on the living room floor. Sherry, a retired nurse, examined the body for a pulse, and it had none. She claimed that immediately thereafter her husband showed her a watch and a ring that belonged to Oberbeck.

Sherry also told the authorities of how Oberbeck’s corpse was loaded into her husband’s van, of how she followed her husband in her vehicle as he drove the van west across the Mississippi River, into the State of Missouri, and of how she lost her husband when she heeded a stoplight that he traversed. After watching his van disappear into the early morning darkness, she turned around and returned home. Sherry claimed to have seen her husband jettison the watch and the ring in the Mississippi River bottoms before he crossed into Missouri.

Investigators finally found an answer to the mystery of how the remains of an Illinois man, last seen just outside his favorite haunt in Bethalto, Illinois, came to rest in an unweeded garden grown to seed on the edge of the St. Louis city limits.

Several witnesses who had reported seeing a stranger with their friend, Dennis Oberbeck, the night of his demise were contacted by detectives. They were able to identify the defendant as that stranger. They saw him having what appeared to be a confrontational conversation with Oberbeck on the parking lot of Geno’s 140 Club in Bethalto at around 1:30 a.m. on August 14, 1992. It was the last time that any of them saw Oberbeck alive.

In addition to developing a number of eyewitnesses who could place the defendant in Oberbeck’s company the morning of his death, detectives procured a tape recording of a telephone conversation between the defendant and his estranged wife. They obtained an eavesdropping order that authorized them to record Sherry’s conversations with her husband and, thereafter, directed Sherry to call him. She was instructed to engage him in conversation that would corroborate her claims. During the conversation, the defendant was repeatedly angered when Sherry tried to initiate talk about Oberbeck’s death. He was obviously leery about being taped. He issued Sherry several warnings not to engage in such conversation and protested that he did not know what she was talking about. He also volunteered a self-serving proclamation that he would never kill anyone.

For all the defendant’s effort to avoid the production of an incriminating tape recording, the conversation, in its entirety, conveyed a very incriminating message. The recorded conversation clearly established the existence of a forbidden secret that the defendant did not want discussed over the phone. The Derrs shared knowledge about some unsavory and unmentionable past event in their lives, the subject about which the defendant did not want to converse. The tape’s implicit message corroborated Sherry’s belated claims to law enforcement officials.

A criminal prosecution ensued. The case that it engendered has traveled a lengthy and tortured path. The case arrives before us for a second time. Here is a look at its procedural history.

The defendant was initially charged with involuntary manslaughter and concealment of a homicidal death. The two charges were filed on January 18, 1996. On January 22, 1996, the defendant’s attorney filed a demand for a speedy trial. Thereafter, a bevy of continuance requests tolled the statutory time constraints. The trial was delayed by the defendant for more than two years. In the spring of 1998, the defendant entered an Alford plea (North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25, 27 L. Ed. 2d 162, 91 S. Ct. 160 (1970)), conceding the State’s ability to convict him of involuntary manslaughter. In exchange, the State dismissed the charge of concealing a homicidal death. The trial judge scheduled July 17, 1998, for sentencing.

On July 17, 1998, defense counsel requested another continuance, apparently engendered by a disagreement between defense counsel and the State over the terms of the defendant’s open plea. Shortly thereafter, defense counsel filed a motion to withdraw the Alford plea. On July 22, 1998, the trial judge granted that motion, defense counsel having represented that he had procured the defendant’s willingness to accept the plea bargain by assuring the defendant that he would receive probation as a punishment. The charge of concealment of a homicidal death was reinstated, and the case was rescheduled for a trial.

After several more postponements at the behest of the defendant, the case was set for a trial on November 16, 1998.

On November 9, 1998, almost three years after the original charges had been lodged and almost three years after the defendant had demanded a speedy trial on those charges, the State filed a motion for leave to file an amended information. The motion set forth that no prejudice would result to the defendant from the desired amendments because “the additional counts do not arise out of any additional facts or circumstances.” In effect, the motion set forth why the new charge was subject to compulsory joinder.

The State was allowed to file an amended information that charged first-degree murder based upon a theory that Dennis Oberbeck’s death had occurred during a forcible felony.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
806 N.E.2d 237, 346 Ill. App. 3d 823, 282 Ill. Dec. 262, 2004 Ill. App. LEXIS 188, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/people-v-derr-illappct-2004.