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Plea deal for Palatine man accused of murdering 14-year-old?

A plea deal may have been reached in the case of a Palatine man charged with murdering a 14-year-old runaway in 1997 and then dumping her body in a southeastern Wisconsin nature preserve, according to court documents.

James P. Eaton, 38, is scheduled to appear in Racine County court Tuesday morning for a plea hearing stemming from the killing of Amber Creek, a Palatine girl who disappeared in January 1997 after leaving a Chicago juvenile home where she had been living. Her partially clothed body was found dumped in the woods about two weeks later with a plastic garbage bag over her head and a human bite mark on her neck.

Phone calls to the Racine County district attorney's office and Racine County sheriff's office were not returned Monday.

Eaton initially pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse after his April 2014 arrest in connection with Amber's murder.

Authorities say the arrest ended a 17-year investigation into the teen's slaying. According to court documents, Eaton came up on investigators' radar when an Oklahoma state crime lab re-examining cold cases matched his thumbprints with those recovered from the bag over Amber's head.

While keeping Eaton under surveillance, Racine County detectives on March 22, 2014, watched him smoke and discard two cigarettes outside the downtown Palatine Metra station, court records state. They recovered those cigarettes, took DNA samples off them and later matched those samples to DNA recovered from the crime scene, according to the criminal complaint against Eaton.

Eaton's trial was delayed several times over the past two years while his lawyers, two public defenders, and the local district attorney's office prepared their cases. A jury trial was set to finally begin Nov. 28.

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James P. Eaton
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