Killings that stunned a nation

THE two women clinked glasses at a barbecue party and congratulated each other on their respective happiness: both were pregnant and, by a coincidence, due to deliver their babies in the same week, four months later. One, Jacqueline Williams, even marvelled at how much larger and further along was her acquaintance, Debra Evans. That was last July. A month later, in the same lowly Chicago suburb, the 28-year-old Williams, a nurse's assistant, attended a baby shower thrown by friends and relatives to celebrate the pending arrival. Among the gifts she accepted for her baby were blankets, clothes and an impressive new car seat. Last week, Williams - who by now was looking ready to give birth, was telling her neighbours that the child was due any day. And, good to her word, the proud mother showed up at home last Friday morning with a new-born boy in her arms. In most cases, such tales of domestic happiness are routine. But Jacqueline Williams' story had a bitter, macabre twist: the baby was not hers, and the mother who had borne it was lying dead, viciously murdered, in another part of town. That woman was Debra Evans. Awash in guns and drugs, and close to drowning under the rising tide of violence, America has become increasingly immune to the daily diet of murder and social disintegration dished up by television news. But the murders of 28-year-old Evans, her 10-year-old daughter Samantha, and her son Joshua, aged eight, have horrified a nation which believed it was past the point of being shocked. The case has also thrust to the forefront the eternal political debate on America's disappearing moral fabric. House Speaker Newt Gingrich held aloft a news article on the Evans killings and told a Republican audience that the ultimate blame for the brutal act lay with the welfare state, and a criminal system which had failed to protect innocent citizens. Whatever sociologists or politicians will find to say about the case, the police believe they have already found the people who wielded the gun and the knives. They arrested Williams, her boyfriend Fedell Caffey, and her cousin Levern Ward, claiming the trio hatched a plot to kill Evans and steal from her the child Williams desperately wanted to possess. The details of that late Thursday night at Evans' lowly apartment paint a scene as shocking as the murder trail of Charles Manson's followers in the late 1960s. Ward, who had previously been involved with Evans and fathered her 18-month-old son, Jordan, took Williams and Caffey to her home, where police believe she invited them in. An altercation took place, said the authorities, after which the men shot Evans in the head, leaving her to die in agony while Williams took a knife and, using her limited medical knowledge, sliced open her abdomen and removed the baby from her womb. The trio did a messy job of tying its umbilical cord, say prosecutors, but the baby boy - who was due to be born naturally only four days later - survived. But the carnage had only just begun. The men then went to Samantha's room, where the sleeping daughter was stabbed to death. The three killers then turned their attention to the eight-year-old Joshua, who had witnessed the shocking events. For unexplained reasons, they allowed him another few hours of life, taking him back to an apartment overnight. But when they decided he knew too much, Caffey and Ward made a failed attempt to poison him, then stabbed him to death in their car before dumping his body in an alley. The trio seemed to have made no attempt to cover their tracks. Their first error was to leave the toddler Jordan unharmed at the crime scene. Police, knowing the boy to have been fathered by Ward, immediately began looking for him. They soon came to the apartment of Williams, finding her with the kidnapped new-born, and arrested her. She is said to have made a full confession, saying she and boyfriend Caffey wanted a child together, and they had murdered Evans to achieve their aim. The murder mystery is full of dark, unexplained corners. Why, for example, was Williams, who had at least two previous illegitimate children, compelled this time to mount an elaborate pretence of pregnancy and then seek out another woman's child? And when did the three suspects hatch the plot to murder Ward's former lover? Even the authorities were shocked by the viciousness of the crime. 'If you gave a horror fiction writer a blank piece of paper, he couldn't come up with something like this,' said local chief prosecutor Joe Birkett. A grieving father, Sam Evans, agreed. 'I was in Vietnam and I never saw anything like this. This is right there with Manson and [serial killer John] Gacy.' Mr Gingrich took the Evans killings as a textbook indictment of the decaying social fabric of America today. 'This happened in America. It happened in America because for two generation we haven't had the guts to talk about right and wrong,' he said. 'This is not an isolated incident. It's barbarity after barbarity, brutality after brutality. And we shake our heads and say: what's going wrong? 'What's going wrong is a welfare system which subsidised people for doing nothing; a criminal system which tolerated drug dealers . . . and we end up with the final culmination of a drug-addicted underclass with no sense of humanity, no sense of civilisation.' The Speaker's apocalyptic words drew criticism from Democrats, who accused him of indulging in pseudo-sociology, and from Evans' family, which said it wanted sympathy, not criticism. But his comments struck a chord, especially with white Americans, whose fear of drug-related violence grows ever deeper. They also bore a close relation to the atrocity of which he spoke. All three of the suspects are perfect stereotypes of the African-American as a threat to society. Caffey is a known crack dealer and has previous convictions for gun-related offences; Ward had passed through jail several times, in between which he met Evans and fathered the child Jordan. Most recently, he had even passed through the notorious 'boot camp' system, which is designed to rehabilitate offenders through severe, military-style discipline. Despite holding down her medical job, Williams also had previous convictions, twice for theft and once for forging cheques. The victim, Evans, was indeed a welfare mother, the kind vilified by Mr Gingrich as part villain of the piece. She had moved through a series of dingy apartments, relying on the state to support herself and her three children. But there was another side to her, a deeply religious side, which he failed to mention. Friends and colleagues remembered Debra Evans as a caring, Christian woman who would often invite them to accompany her to her local church. She had also been raised in a perfectly comfortable middle-class household. But what started Evans on the slippery slope to poverty and welfare dependency was an early pregnancy, when she was only 18, followed by a string of bad choices when it came to men - the last of which, Levern Ward, proved to be deadly. 'From my take, she had low self-esteem and was trying to provide herself with a family to love,' said an old high school boyfriend, David Schrader. 'She wanted to be a full-time mum, but she just kept getting involved with the wrong guys and getting pregnant.' Where Mr Gingrich's analysis of the ills of the welfare system breaks down, according to critics, is that had Debra Evans managed to break into the job market, it could not have saved her from the bloody fate caused by her one-time association with Ward and his psychopathic friends. Even out of the carnage, some hope lives on. Despite the violent backdrop to his entry into the world, Debra Evans' new-born baby, weighing in at 2.72 kg is, in his own small way, a miracle. As his mother had intended, relatives have given him the biblical name Elijah. Police suspect his natural father may also be Ward, but are conducting genetic testing to find the truth. If Ward is the father, he may never live to see his second son grow up. Prosecutors have charged all three suspects with murder and intend to seek the death penalty. Meanwhile, flowers, teddy bears and other toys continued to pile up at a make-shift shrine outside the apartment where a young woman and two children lost their lives in a manner that even America is at a loss to explain.