The States’ evidence against Richard Wanke is circumstantial. All the time delay did was punish Wanke extra-judicially and diminish his chances of defending himself as some of the evidence to support his defense vanished over time. Bruscato had discovered no new incriminating evidence against Richard Wanke in April 2014 when he charged him. Cold-case crimes are generally charged after new evidence comes to light incriminating a suspect. Bruscato charged him in 2014, after his office predecessor, Phil Nicolosi, did not in 2008. Just as Richard Wanke was due to be released from prison in 2014, the Winnebago County State’s Attorney, Joseph Bruscato, then charged him with the Clark murder. Meantime, the Clark murder investigation was listed as an “unsolved”, cold-case murder on the Rockford Police website. It instead used prison staff to vigorously harass and investigate him during his prison term. 2008 – April 2014, Wanke was in state prison serving time for the theft of a laptop computer (an extended-term sentence the state ensured he got in 2008), and the State took it’s sweet time extending it’s investigation. It could have charged him earlier but deliberately chose to hold off doing so. Winnebago County did not charge Richard Wanke with Clark’s murder until April 2014. The legal bar tends to prosecute those cases more zealously and it’s difficult to find attorneys willing to represent those clients. The legal community and the courts tend in those instances not to be impartial. It is particularly impossible for those charged with the murder of a police officer, judge, or local attorney. It’s hard for defendants in high-profile and sensational cases to get a fair trial. Every alternative suspect police find will then later become a reasonable doubt for their case at trial. The public thinks police thoroughly investigate all leads, but once they have a person in custody police seldom investigate alternatives, because they know that they will have to disclose that information to defense attorneys. Single-minded police investigations are not unusual. The police instead picked Richard Wanke up by 5pm on February 6, 2008, and then spent the rest of their investigation trying to connect him and any of his friends to attorney Clark’s murder. His name was mentioned to police as a client who may have been unhappy with Clark, and that sufficed for the police to not question or suspect anyone else associated with attorney Clark his family, his friends, his neighbors, his business associates, and any other unhappy clients he may have had. The evidence at the murder scene did not incriminate Richard Wanke or even place him there. The police quickly within hours focused solely on a client of Clark’s, Richard Wanke, as the shooter. Some of us saw and experienced the investigation first-hand and know how deficient it was and how it’s conclusions remain unsupported. We question the substance and conduct of the Rockford Police investigation into the murder of attorney Greg Clark. 2008 murder and were influenced and convinced by the details of the media storm that followed it. Most people to this day recall Clark’s Feb. Clark’s death in a quiet up-scale residential neighborhood shocked local attorneys, created widespread public fear and speculation and made regional and national news for months. Police canvassed his neighborhood afterward and gathered reports of unknown individuals and vehicles seen entering and leaving his residential subdivision and area on the day and weeks before his murder but found no weapon, DNA, fingerprints, or any other forensic evidence at the murder scene to identify who shot attoney Clark or whether it was one person or two. Some of the cases he handled, such as divorce or conflict cases could be contentious, but he did not appear to have known enemies.Ĭlark’s sensational and violent death was not witnessed. He was a long-time general practice attorney in a small firm with his son-in-law. Greg Clark was not an outspoken or premiere attorney in Rockford. 60 year old Greg Clark was expertly shot 3 times in the back outside his home in the middle of a blizzard while he used a snowblower to clear his sidewalk. The February 6, 2008, murder of Attorney Gregory Clark is the highest-profile, memorable murder case in Rockford, IL and in Winnebago County, IL.
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