Curtis Lovelace was walking out of his law office in downtown Quincy, Illinois, when he spotted the stranger waiting by his car.
“I recognized him to be a police officer,” Lovelace recalled about the day in August 2014 that flipped his life upside down. “So my natural inclination was to reach out and shake his hand. ‘What can I do for you, officer?’”
Lovelace had spent seven years as an assistant Adams County prosecutor before moving into private practice, and had worked closely with local cops for years.
“His first words were: ‘Put your hands on the car. You’re under arrest for the murder of your wife.’”
Cory Lovelace had died on Valentine’s Day eight years earlier, at age 38. Curtis found her on their bed that morning.
They were high school classmates who married after they graduated from college in 1991. Cory was a full-time mother to their four children, dancing with them to ABBA and corralling them for school and sports programs.
Her cause of death had been ruled “undetermined,” but at the time she died, Cory had a severe liver disorder and other health issues.
Because Lovelace had previously been a prosecutor there, the Adams County state’s attorney’s office had an obvious conflict of interest that disqualified it from bringing the allegations to trial.
Instead, the case was dispatched to Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit.
The unit’s two dozen attorneys are supposed to be a select group, brought in when local prosecutors have personal or political conflicts.
But in Lovelace’s case, the special prosecutors failed to disclose that it took five tries for their lead investigator to find a pathologist who would testify that Cory was murdered. Withholding potentially exculpatory evidence is a violation of the so-called Brady rule, a constitutional obligation prosecutors have to turn over any information that might point to a defendant’s innocence.
Lovelace’s case exemplifies a wide range of alleged misconduct by Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit over the past two decades.
The unit has tried murder cases that evaporated because the special prosecutors withheld evidence, used discredited jailhouse informants, or had conflicts of interest, Injustice Watch found in a review of court records.
Leaders of the Special Prosecution Unit declined to comment for this series and did not respond to detailed written questions.
Lovelace was ultimately acquitted, but the charges devoured years of his life. He spent 21 months shuttled between county jails, separated from his new wife and kids. Teachers at his children’s schools waged bets on the trial outcome, Lovelace recalled. Townsfolk with no apparent connection to his case delivered harsh judgments about him on social media. Lovelace family cars were egged and tires flattened, once with a saw blade left hanging from the wheel.
“Family, people I thought were friends — relationships [were] broken and done that are never going to be mended,” Lovelace said.
Lovelace, 57, said he believes a lack of accountability is the fundamental structural flaw with Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit.
“Ordinary state’s attorneys run for election every four years, so voters provide a basic if fragile check and balance on that prosecutor,” Lovelace said. “When it comes to the state Special Prosecution Unit, you don’t even have that.”
Shopping for an expert witness
Adam Gibson was a canine officer with the Quincy Police Department until his dog retired in 2013.
He took a short training course, then was promoted to detective. On his own initiative, he began to peruse closed case files — including Cory Lovelace’s.
The forensic pathologist who conducted Cory’s autopsy noted her preexisting conditions, including decades of alcohol abuse and bulimia, and marked steatosis of the liver — a buildup of fat that can lead to liver failure and death. Quincy police had closed the case without any indication of foul play.
But as Gibson reviewed the photos of Cory in the case file, he concluded she had been suffocated. He was struck by the way her arms were slightly raised above her chest.
“It did not appear to me that this could’ve been a natural death,” Gibson told “48 Hours” in 2016.
But a first responder had moved Cory’s arms to attach a probe after arriving at the scene, court records show.
Today, Gibson told Injustice Watch he could not comment on the case “based on a court agreement. No one will be able to comment.”
After reopening Cory’s case, Gibson zeroed in on her husband as the prime suspect, court records show. Nine months later, it was Gibson standing by Lovelace’s car, waiting to arrest him in downtown Quincy.
“I was thinking, this is going to be cleared up by the end of the day. There has to be some big mistake here,” Lovelace recalled.
Instead, his case was assigned to Edwin Parkinson, who had joined Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit in 1994 after a decade as the Morgan County state’s attorney.
Parkinson had already faced allegations of using bad forensic evidence to obtain at least one conviction. In 2002, he used disputed bloodstain-pattern analysis to convict Julie Rea, a single mother in Lawrenceville, Ill., of murdering her 10-year-old son. Two years later, a serial killer in Texas confessed to the crime. After a new trial, Rea was exonerated and given a certificate of innocence in 2010.
Lovelace was an unlikely suspect for an unlikely murder. A hometown high school football star and co-captain of the University of Illinois team, he was a civic leader who had served 12 years on the Quincy School District board.
But that didn’t stop special prosecutors from requesting a $5 million bond — meaning Lovelace would have to pay $500,000 to get out of jail, an impossible sum.
To build their case, Gibson and a deputy coroner, James Keller, “began to shop around for a forensic expert who would bolster the case against Curt,” in the words of a later federal appellate court opinion that recounted their actions.
The first two experts were emphatic that Gibson was misinterpreting the evidence, but Gibson made no record of their opinions, the appellate court ruling said.
Gibson next turned to Dr. Jessica Bowman, the initial pathologist, but “she refused to change the official cause of death from ‘undetermined’ to suffocation, even in the face of Gibson’s intensive lobbying in the form of numerous phone calls and several multi-hour meetings,” the appellate court said. “Gibson, yet again, made no report memorializing Dr. Bowman’s skepticism. But he did later assert, apparently without any factual basis, that Bowman ‘felt during the initial autopsy that suffocation was the cause of death.’”
A fourth potential expert, Dr. Shaku Teas, also concluded that the condition of the liver and other evidence made a natural death most likely. “Dr. Teas saw no reason to believe Gibson’s murder-by-suffocation hypothesis. Gibson instructed Dr. Teas not to prepare a report, but she was troubled by his approach to the case and did so anyway. She later testified as a witness for Curt’s defense,” the ruling said.
In their fifth attempt, Gibson and Keller “took a more aggressive approach. Rather than providing Dr. [Jane] Turner with an accurate and complete picture of the evidence and allowing her to draw her own conclusions, they provided her with selected background ‘facts.’”
None of these behind-the-scenes investigative maneuvers were disclosed to the judge, jury, or defense at Lovelace’s 2016 trial, court records show.
Prosecutors are required to disclose exculpatory evidence under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland. Even if the evidence was withheld by a police investigator, it falls on prosecutors to turn over Brady material.
As the jury deliberated, Parkinson took Lovelace’s attorneys aside and offered a plea deal, Lovelace recalled.
“I would potentially only have to serve seven years,” Lovelace said. “They said: ‘You’re probably not going to see your children graduate, but if you do this, at least you might be able to go to their weddings or see your grandchildren.’”
But Lovelace’s new wife, Christine, whom he married just months before he was arrested, was adamant. “She said: ‘Absolutely, absolutely not. You’re not going to plea.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ and she said, ‘We’ll figure that out.’”
After two days of deliberations, the jury was deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial. Special prosecutor Parkinson decided to retry the case.
The retrial
This time the Lovelace defense had help from an unexpected source. Evan Parke, a lawyer who grew up in Quincy then moved to Washington, D.C., had been following local news reports about the trial.
Parke had never met Lovelace, but he was skeptical about the prosecution’s handling of forensic experts and wanted to understand the facts. Parke filed dozens of public records requests that eventually unearthed the emails from experts warning Gibson that his suffocation theory was unsupportable. Parke gave the emails to Lovelace.
The emails’ disclosure briefly halted the retrial and led to a flurry of closed-door meetings with the judge. Gibson said he attempted to give a key email to Parkinson during a bathroom break between hearings, court records show. Parkinson denied any handoff of the emails.
Avoiding questions about a possible Brady violation being aired in open court, Parkinson agreed to a stipulation that his investigator, Gibson, was not telling the truth about having disclosed his emails to prosecutors. This time, the special prosecutors turned over all the exculpatory evidence that had been hidden in the first trial.
Just before the retrial was set to begin in 2017, the special prosecutors offered Lovelace a new deal, Lovelace recalled: He could plead guilty to felony gross negligence, get credit for time served, and walk free that day.
In chambers, the judge admonished Lovelace to accept. “The judge is like, ‘Mr. Lovelace, come on. I’ve been involved in a lot of these cases. You’re going to regret not taking this,’” Lovelace recalled.
Lovelace said he couldn’t plead guilty to a murder that never happened. So they went to trial again.
This time the jury acquitted him after just two hours of deliberation.
Lovelace later filed a lawsuit against the Quincy Police Department and Adams County. In the course of that lawsuit, the federal appellate court issued its stinging opinion detailing misconduct by Gibson, Keller, and Parkinson. Local authorities ultimately settled the case for $4.5 million, while denying wrongdoing.
But aside from that opinion, there was no public reckoning for the devastation inflicted by the Special Prosecution Unit on Lovelace and his family. No lawyers were disciplined, no hearings were held, and no government officials demanded accountability.
Keller, the deputy coroner who worked with Gibson to build the case against Lovelace, resigned in 2018 amid criticism over his practice of keeping poor people’s remains until their relatives could pay $1,000, according to local news reports. Keller was charged later that year with having hydrocodone in his home without authorization. That case was handled by the Special Prosecution Unit, which negotiated a plea deal for 24 months of non-judgment probation that enabled him to travel to Cancun, Mexico, for a vacation shortly afterward. Keller declined to comment.
Parkinson and the other special prosecutors fought giving depositions in Lovelace’s 2018 civil case but were ultimately forced to answer questions under oath. Parkinson said in his deposition that he took his obligations to disclose exculpatory evidence “very” seriously. He said he still believes Lovelace was guilty.
“We thought we had a solid case,” he testified. “I was always convinced.”
Parkinson remains a contract attorney for the Special Prosecution Unit, handling 19 cases in four counties in 2024, the last year for which data is available.
Now practicing law in Texas, Lovelace represents defendants in postconviction hearings as he works to rebuild a life blown apart by Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit.
He said he has learned from people who stood on the other side of the prison bars and bright legal lines he once enforced as an assistant state’s attorney.
“These are people with enormous strength and durability,” Lovelace said. When he is introduced to an exonerated former inmate today, he finds himself saying: “I could have easily been you.”
Disclosure: The law firm that represented Lovelace in his 2017 retrial, Loevy & Loevy, has also represented Injustice Watch in Freedom of Information Act litigation.
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