Staker trial begins with grim details

A 5-year-old boy will get bored, even in the midst of chaos.

So on Aug. 17, 1992, as the adults around him were panicking over the unexplained disappearance of 11-year-old Holly Staker, Blake Arena wandered off to one of the bedrooms in the Waukegan apartment where he lived.

He returned a short time later with the news no one wanted to hear.

"He said, 'Holly's dead,'" her stepfather Michael Kalinowski testified Wednesday. "'Holly's dead.'"

On the first day of testimony in the murder trial of Juan Rivera, a stoical Kalinowski led a Lake County jury through the darkest hours of his life.

Kalinowski said Holly and her twin sister, Heather, took turns babysitting for Blake and his 2-year-old sister, Taylor, at the Hickory Street apartment where they lived with their mother, Dawn Englebrecht, a family friend of the Stakers.

Holly had gone to the Englebrechts' apartment about 2:30 that afternoon, Kalinowski said, so that Englebrecht could leave for her job at a nearby tavern.

Around 8:30 p.m., a neighbor called Englebrecht to tell them he had found Blake wandering in the street and that they had knocked repeatedly but could not get back into the apartment.

Englebrecht called Holly's mother, Nancy Kalinowski, and both raced to the apartment. Michael Kalinowski said he followed shortly thereafter.

Waukegan police officer Steve Harvey was already there when he arrived, Kalinowski testified, and Holly's mother was "nearly hysterical" with fear.

He said after Blake returned from the bedroom, Englebrecht ran inside and emerged seconds later.

"I can still remember the look on her face to this day," Kalinowski said. "Horrified."

The little girl had been slaughtered. She was crumpled behind the bedroom door in a fetal position, naked from the waist down, and her T-shirt had been pulled up to her shoulders.

An autopsy would find 27 stab wounds, including a cluster of five around her heart, and evidence of strangulation and sexual assault.

Rivera was arrested a little over two months later after a tip from a jail inmate. He was then doing time in Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg for burglary.

After five days of questioning, during which police say a series of stories Rivera told them about his whereabouts were deconstructed, Rivera confessed to the crime.

Twice convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Rivera won another chance at freedom in 2006 when DNA testing far more sophisticated than what was used in 1992 proved beyond question that sperm found in the girl's body did not come from him.

Assistant State's Attorney Michael Mermel told the seven women and five men of the jury in his opening statement that Rivera told police things about the crime that even the police did not know.

In the confession, Mermel said Rivera told the police he had used something round and blue to break out a panel of the back door to the apartment where Holly was murdered. He said he wiped down the object with a rag to erase his fingerprints, and set it against a wall on the apartment landing. Police later found a mop with a round blue handle they suspected was the object.

"Police went back to look at the video they took the first time they were ever in that apartment," Mermel said. "And there was the mop, exactly where he had told them he put it with a rag sitting on top of it."

In his opening statement, defense attorney Thomas Sullivan asked the jurors to think of a confession as just words on a piece of paper, while DNA is a signature.

The DNA found in Holly's body did not come from Rivera, Sullivan said, and scientists working for both the prosecution and defense agree on that.

"DNA is the most highly specific detailed way to establish identity," Sullivan said. "And this DNA excludes Juan Rivera, which trumps all this talk about a confession."

The trial is expected to last three weeks, and testimony is scheduled to resume today.