Judge's closed doors aren't helping get justice for Jeanine

Depending on your age, you will recognize some or all of these names: Helen Brach, Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, the Schuessler-Peterson boys, Marilyn Lemak, the Spilotro brothers, Drew Peterson.

They are all famous Chicago crime names; either murder victims, notorious murderers or in Peterson's case, a made-for-TV defendant-in-waiting.

There are two other names that fit on that list: Jeanine Nicarico and Brian Dugan. For more than 26 years, their names have been linked by hundreds of reporters in thousands of news stories, magazine articles, TV and radio segments, and a couple of books.

For anyone with a momentary lapse in memory about the name "Nicarico," the internet gives instant life to the 26-year-old Naperville crime. There are hundreds of articles and postings about Brian Dugan, who is charged with her murder.

Yet DuPage County Judge George J. Bakalis thinks he can put the Dugan genie back in the bottle. Judge Bakalis has been holding Dugan's pretrial court hearings behind closed doors.

Daily Herald reporter Christy Gutowski wrote on Saturday that Bakalis is "concerned about publicity tainting a potential jury pool" for Dugan's Sept. 22 trial.

Judge Bakalis' latest secret session lasted almost an hour and because he sealed the case file from the public and admonished lawyers not to talk, nobody knows what happened after the door closed.

If concerns about publicity are the reason for such secrecy, then my name is Fahey Flynn. Anyone old enough to tie their own shoes as of February 25, 1983 already knows the names "Nicarico" and "Dugan." Many people deadbolt their doors today because of what happened in the winter of '83 and wouldn't dream of letting their child stay home alone.

Ten-year old Jeanine Nicarico had the flu that day and stayed home from school in Naperville. Those were less threatening times, especially in the western suburbs, and Jeanine's mother felt comfortable leaving her daughter home while she went to work, only be a few minutes away at a nearby school where she was a secretary.

The details of what happened to Jeanine - her daytime kidnapping from the family's home, the rape and murder - are so well known that I will not repeat them.

There is also no need to restate more than two and a half decades of frequently cited connections between convicted child-killer Brian Dugan and the Nicarico murder.

For anyone who wasn't living in DuPage County or metro Chicago at the time, the Nicarico/Dugan case has never been off journalism's front burner. There were years of stories about wrongly-accused suspects, wrongly convicted defendants, the innocent sent to death row and prosecutorial misconduct.

There were commentaries, editorials and anniversary pieces about Jeanine Nicarico and the man who was eventually charged with her murder, Brian Dugan, who is already serving a life sentence for other killings.

Dugan is said to be entertaining the idea of a plea bargain in the Nicarico case. His thinking may be that such a deal would be the only way to escape the death penalty. If there is a plea bargain struck, then there will be no jury needed.

As cockeyed as it is under the circumstances, even if poisoning the jury pool is Bakalis' justification for conducting the public's business in private, the judge is doing no one a favor. There have been so may miscues, allegations of cover-ups, legal conniving and lives destroyed, that this is one case in which nothing should be done in secret. It is cases such as this that corrode the public trust.

Criticism of Judge Bakalis appears to be rare. A glowing 2002 profile of the jurist in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin was titled "He's known for keeping balance in tough terrain."

Bakalis, a DuPage judge since 1990, was hailed by prosecutors and defense lawyers as fair and consumed by a love for the law.

He was the judge who presided over the Marilyn Lemak trial, another "heater" case involving an infamous Naperville murder. Mrs. Lemak was convicted of feeding her three young children peanut butter laced with antidepressants and then smothering them as they went to sleep.

"You try to not let what you hear interfere with the trial - you can't react in the courtroom with the jury sitting - you just have to keep a stoic composure and maintain neutrality," Judge Bakalis was quoted as saying about his role in the Lemak case.

Lemak was a very fresh crime, having occurred less than three years before a jury was selected. The headline-grabbing publicity leading up to that trial was widespread. There was far more news coverage of Lemak's pretrial proceedings than last week's Dugan hearing and his other pretrial meetings that were closed to the media and the public.

Yet nearly all of the Lemak proceedings were done in public. And those that were closed were scorned by proponents of transparency in justice.

So, something else must be at play in Wheaton to warrant the doors being closed on Dugan.

Whatever the motivation, it is no way to honor the memory of a little girl name Jeanine, who still cries for justice.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com.