On a hot July afternoon in 1998 the mostly naked body of 11-year-old Ryan Harris was found in an isolated backyard in Englewood. She’d been missing for a day. Her face was battered and covered with blood, her mouth stuffed with a pair of underpants. A folded leaf was in each nostril.
After detectives and prosecutors interrogated Durr they wrote in their reports that he denied killing Ryan but admitted masturbating near her corpse and said he’d been drawn to the backyard when he saw two “shorties” leaving it. A few reporters wrote that this meant the case hadn’t yet been solved: was Durr’s purported tale self-serving, or had the two boys really been in the backyard before him? “The mystery of who killed Ryan keeps getting more complicated,” said a Newsweek story in October 1998.
Of course, a defendant insisting he’s innocent hardly makes it so. Still, one might think Durr’s Alford plea would merit a mention by reporters, given the tortuous history of the case and the rarity of such pleas. But the reporters in the courtroom were busy with a more engaging subplot: Ryan’s mother, Sabrina Harris, was furious that prosecutors were letting Durr evade execution.
The lawyers in the boys’ suits against the city produced a mountain of information about the crime. They took more than 130 depositions, questioning the army of police officers who participated in the investigation, lawyers, forensic scientists, friends and family of the two boys, the two boys themselves. Some witnesses were questioned for more than 12 hours. Before the eight-year-old’s lawsuit was settled last year–at the City Council’s direction–it had been tried for six weeks, and dozens of witnesses had testified.
A review of the police reports also shows that there were leads detectives never fully investigated–leads pointing to neither Durr nor the two boys. There was, for instance, a 24-year-old felon who got into a fight with Ryan just a couple days before she was killed–a fight that ended with Ryan throwing a brick at him and hitting him and the man threatening to kill her. In the backyard where Ryan’s body was found a few days later, police found a bloody brick they believe was used to kill her.
Two months after the plea the case was back in the news. On June 18 the younger boy originally charged with Ryan’s murder, Romarr Gipson, was charged in a double shooting at a gas station in south-suburban Calumet Park that left one man critically wounded. At his bond hearing prosecutors disclosed that Romarr, who’d turned 15, was already facing charges for car theft and aggravated cruelty to animals. And in 2004 he’d shot an acquaintance, though that was ruled accidental. Romarr’s family used some of the $2 million it won in his lawsuit to bond him out of jail after the gas station shooting. He’s been charged with attempted murder and is being tried as an adult. The man who was critically wounded is now suing Romarr.
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The first police to arrive struggled to protect the crime scene from neighbors trying to get into the yard for a closer look. At the rear of the yard was a railroad embankment instead of an alley, and Ryan’s body was near the embankment. She was on her back, striped top and bra pulled above her breasts, lime green shorts around one ankle, and gym shoes still on her feet. Blood was splattered and pooled in the yard and on the concrete walkway just behind the house. Near the splatters were several barrettes and a brick with red stains on one corner. The detectives assumed she’d been hit with the brick on or near the walkway, then carried or dragged into the weeds by the embankment.
