Suspected spree killer's wife wants reward
MORRISON -- The wife of a man accused in a two-state killing spree that left eight people dead last summer says she's entitled to some of the reward money offered for her husband's capture.
Holly Gaul Sheley tells Sauk Valley Newspapers she was the "biggest lead" in Nicholas Sheley's eventual capture last July outside a bar in the southern Illinois community of Granite City.
The FBI recently gave two Granite City residents $5,000 each in reward money for recognizing Sheley at the bar, leading to Sheley's arrest there without incident moments later.
But Holly Sheley insists investigators already knew her then-fugitive husband was in that area because she successfully encouraged him to call his attorney, who she says convinced Sheley to surrender.
Holly Sheley acknowledges her cooperation with authorities came begrudgingly after they supposedly holed her up inside a hotel until her husband was captured, secretly taping each of the couple's telephone conversations.
Holly Sheley said she feared authorities might kill her husband.
"I begged (Nick) to turn himself in, because I was scared of what they would do to him if he came back here," she told the newspaper earlier this month while jailed in Whiteside County in a drunken-driving case. "I didn't want to have to explain it all to my children."
Nicholas Sheley fathered two children with Holly Sheley, is stepfather to two others and had two other children with his first wife.
A worker at the Whiteside County Sheriff's Department told The Associated Press on Monday that the jail does not offer telephone interviews with inmates. Holly Sheley, who during the newspaper interview insisted she was not bound by a judge's gag order in her husband's case, is scheduled for release Tuesday.
Ross Rice, a spokesman for the FBI's Chicago office, said Holly Sheley has not formally approached the FBI to stake a claim to at least part of the reward. If she did that, Rice said, the FBI would review it.
Nicholas Sheley, 29, of Sterling is charged with the bludgeoning deaths last June of six people in Illinois and two people in Missouri. A prosecutor in one of the Illinois slayings is seeking the death penalty.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is jailed in Knox County on $10 million bond.
Holly Sheley says the reward money could help Sheley's six children who she said are suffering because "they no longer have a father around to do the things a father should do."
Mike Kuelper, the police chief in Rock Falls, where four of the killings happened, said the woman's push for reward money leaves him "very upset."
"This is the same young lady quoted in the paper saying that (Sheley) is a wonderful man when he's not doing drugs and that she allowed him to do drugs in front of the kids," Kuelper said. "He is accused of killing eight people, and now she feels she deserves money."