The Oak Park Police Department has a right to feel proud of the role they played in last week’s conviction of career criminal Rodney Adkins for the brutal 2003 murder of Catherine McAvinchey.
For three long days after McAvinchey was found murdered in her first-floor, burglarized, Washington Boulevard condo on July 31, 2003, detectives and evidence technicians labored meticulously to gather every possible piece of forensic and physical evidence in order to find her killer.
Equally important, Oak Park met with detectives from Forest Park and River Forest within 16 hours of the crime, sharing the details and asking them to keep their eyes and ears open for suspects. Five weeks later, Forest Park detectives investigating Adkins for two burglaries there saw similarities to the McAvinchey burglary, and Oak Park detectives brought Adkins in for questioning.
What followed was an intense search for a variety of stolen items that were ultimately used against Adkins in court. Oak Park investigators found some in a pawn shop on Madison in the Austin neighborhood and as far afield as Broadview and Summit, recovering some of the stolen items and interviewing potential witnesses.
Added to DNA and fingerprint evidence found at the murder scene and a neighboring burglary, along with a boot print on the broken back door of McAvinchey’s condo, the accumulated evidence built a compelling case against Adkins.
Any doubt of that was likely removed two weeks later, on Sept. 17, 2003, when Oak Park police and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office again brought Adkins in for questioning. They videotaped a remarkably detailed 58-minute-long confession, in which Adkins recounted the terrible events that transpired the morning McAvinchey died.
A jury took barely an hour to convict Adkins on murder, burglary and home invasion last week. None of that, of course, will bring Catherine McAvinchey back, nor likely ease the pain of a devastated father who has said that for all intents and purposes, he died the day he heard of his daughter’s murder.
What it does do is take off the streets, most likely forever, someone whose own life was about nothing more than victimizing innocent people in order to feed a drug habit.
Thanks to a lot of solid, painstaking police work, that case is now closed.
Now’s your chance to speak up
The River Forest village board will hold a special meeting this Monday, April 2, at 7 p.m. in the Oak Park-River Forest Room of the Koehneke Community Center at Concordia University. The purpose is to gather public input for a proposed Historic Preservation Ordinance. The village knows people feel strongly about the issue, both pro and con. That’s why it wants your comments now, before they make a final decision on what has clearly been a controversial issue.
Many people typically wait until a board makes a decision, then cry foul, claiming the decision was made undemocratically. In this case, the village board has been bending over backwards now for some time to listen to the public, and this is may be your best chance. It’s just too bad they decided to hold the meeting on the first night of Passover, one of the most important religious holidays of the year, which means most Jewish residents probably will not be able to attend.