Under the terms of a long-awaited settlement, Ogle County taxpayers won't be reimbursed for picking up the tab for a civil case that began more than five years ago.
A settlement approved last week officially closed the Mary Jane Reed exhumation case.
Reed was shot and killed in 1948. Her brother, along with an Oregon businessman, had requested her body be exhumed in 2005 in an attempt to solve the murder.
According to the agreement signed last week, the county will not pursue getting payment for the exhumation from the brother, Warren Reed, 67, Rock Falls, and the Mary Jane Reed Foundation in exchange for the plaintiffs dropping a contempt of court lawsuit against three county officials.
Judge Stephen Pemberton signed an order Sept. 2 dismissing all pending legal issues in the complicated exhumation case.
"It is hereby adjudged and decreed that all pending matters in this cause are dismissed with prejudice and the clerk of the court shall close this file," the order read.
"With prejudice" means the plaintiffs cannot reintroduce the matter.
Warren Reed and the Mary Jane Reed Foundation, headed up by Oregon restaurant owner Mike Arians, agreed to drop their motion asking the court to find sheriff Greg Beitel, coroner Louis Finch IV, and state's attorney John B. Roe in contempt of court.
The motion alleged that the officials had not turned over to Reed and the foundation some of the x-rays and reports from the autopsy conducted after Mary Jane was exhumed in August of 2005.
In return, the county officials dropped their motion to force Reed, Mary Jane's sole surviving sibling, and the foundation to pay for the 2005 exhumation of the Oregon 17-year-old.
"Everybody agreed to stipulate to dismiss their filings and that file was closed by the circuit court," said attorney Tom Meyer, Rockford, who represented the county officials. "This ends it as far as we are concerned."
Arians said the case could have been closed in March when he received the final x-rays.
"The x-rays are what I wanted all along," he said Sept. 3. "We got want we wanted. We can put this behind us now."
Costs associated with the exhumation and subsequent motions total $11,741, all of which has been billed to the county.
The sheriff's department spent $2,126 for wages for deputies and highway department personnel involved in the exhumation.
The coroner's costs totaled $4,389, including digging up the gravesite, a casket and vault to re-bury the body, the autopsy, and tests.
In addition, the county hired Meyer to represent Beitel, Finch, and Roe in March of 2008. As of Sept. 4, his fee came to $5,256.
Beitel said now-retired detective Rich Wilkinson spent 200 hours re-investigating the murder case in 2005.
Mary Jane failed to return home after a date on June 24, 1948. She and Stan Skridla, 28, Rockford, apparently her companion on the night she disappeared, were subsequently found shot to death.
Skridla's body was discovered the next morning on County Farm Road south of Oregon. He had been shot five times.
Mary Jane's body was found four days later in the ditch along Devil's Backbone Road west of Oregon. She had been shot once.
The double murder has never been solved, although the new investigation of the case in 2005 pointed to possible culprits.
The exhumation case began in January of 2004 when Reed and the foundation filed a petition to have Mary Jane's body exhumed from its grave in Daysville Cemetery for a post mortem examination and forensic testing.
At the time Reed said he hoped that with modern-day technology, the body would yield clues that would lead to his sister's murder being solved.
Pemberton granted the petition on April 8 of that year. Part of the order was that exhumation costs would be paid by the Reed family and/or the foundation.
Six weeks later, then-sheriff Mel Messer and then-coroner Darrell Cash filed a petition to intervene in the exhumation, and that was also granted.
Messer and Cash asked that the because the murder case was still open, the exhumation and any subsequent post mortem examination be conducted according to law enforcement and judicial procedures, and that they be allowed to be present during the procedures.
Attorney Jeffrey Hammerlund, who represented Reed and the foundation, later argued in court that the county officials were, in effect, agreeing to pick up the tab when they asked to intervene.
Arians has maintained that the remains of two different people were buried in Mary Jane's coffin.
He hired Linda Klepinger, a professor emeritus in anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 2007 to examine the skull and several vertebrae he said came from Mary Jane's casket.
Klepinger's report said the skull and one vertebra did not match up with the other vertebrae and appeared to come from different people.
Arians said Sept. 3 that he has experts looking at the x-rays taken of Mary Jane's remains after the exhumation and plans to reveal their findings in a press conference in the near future.
"They've already had some pretty hair-raising comments," he said.