Kathleen Zellner: Geneva Woman's Death On Train Tracks Wasn't Murder

GENEVA, IL —A verdict in one of suburban Chicago's most high-profile murder trials, the mysterious July 2014 death of 32-year-old Geneva resident Kathleen King on the Union Pacific railroad tracks near her home in Geneva, is just days away.

On Friday, after taking a month's worth of trial testimony under advisement, Kane County Judge John Barsanti will announce his verdict whether Geneva insurance adjuster Shadwick King is guilty of first-degree murder in the death of King's wife.

The Kings had been married for 12 years and had three children when Kathleen King died eight summers ago in early July 2014.

Her death marked the first homicide in Geneva since the mid-1970s. However, her husband Shadwick King's attorney, world-famous wrongful conviction attorney Kathleen Zellner of Downers Grove, insists her client is not guilty of any crime in the death of his wife.

Zellner contends that Kathleen King's death was not the result of homicide.

Kane County's prosecutor can't even show Shadwick King was with his wife at the time of her death, Zellner emphasized.

"And one of the things I think that's just extraordinary about the case ... let's talk about staging," Zellner told the judge during the July 11 closing arguments. "Who would stage a homicide by dressing somebody in jogging clothes and not putting them by a jogging path?

"Who would stage it by putting them on railroad tracks? I mean, she might as well have been put in her swimming suit. There's no correlation between dressing her in jogging clothes. There's jogging paths all over. There's bushes. Why wouldn't you just put her there? Why would you put her up on the railroad tracks? The idea of staging is to mislead."

During this summer's Kane County bench trial, Kane County prosecutor Greg Sams argued that Shadwick King needs to be sent back to prison for killing his wife eight years ago.

At the time of his wife's death, Shadwick King was 46.

"It's true that the physical evidence, the digital and electronic evidence, and the defendant's own words were what the people of the state of Illinois were going to use to prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of first-degree murder," Sams declared during his closing arguments. "We have done that, your honor."

In 2015, Shadwick King was convicted at a jury trial of killing his wife and putting her body on the Union Pacific Railway tracks less than three blocks from their Geneva home on Oak Street.

King, now 55, was sentenced to serve 30 years in prison, but the state's highest court overturned his conviction and sentence in January 2020 due to several errors Kane County prosecutors made during the first trial, including allowing a former FBI profiler to testify as an expert witness on crimes scenes when he was not qualified.

During this summer's re-trial, prosecutor Sams asserted that the physical evidence proves that "the railroad tracks was a crime scene. The railroad tracks was a crime scene because it was a staged crime scene," the prosecutor insisted.

The discovery of Kathleen King's iPhone at the railroad tracks further solidifies that her death was a homicide, Sams argued at the re-trial.

"I want you to look at that iPhone and see how that iPhone is perfectly placed on the opposite side of where Kate's body was found and is perfectly propped up against two railroad spikes," Sams pointed out to Judge Barsanti. "If Kathleen had had some type of cardiac arrhythmia as the defense tells you, if this had been some type of sudden event, with her body being on the other side of this railroad track ... that phone would either still be in her hand or it would be on the ballast rocks on that side of the tracks. It would not be perfectly placed and propped up against those two spikes."

As for Shadwick King's defense, Zellner presented trial testimony from Dr. Larry Blum, an internationally recognized board certified forensic pathologist who has performed thousands of autopsies. Blum has testified as an expert witness in hundreds of criminal trials.

During closing statements, Zellner stressed that Shadwick King was always cooperative toward the Geneva police upon learning of his wife's untimely death back in 2014.

"And over the course of two interviews, he denies any culpability 126 times," Zellner declared. "There is no admission of guilt. When he first comes into the interview, he's had 45 minutes of sleep. Both Mr. King and Mrs. King have had a lot to drink. He's probably, over the course of that evening ... had about 12 beers.

"He's transported to the scene or to the police department, and he's not told what's happened to his wife. He simply knows that she's deceased and the police want to speak to him."

Zellner asked the judge to play a portion of her client's videotaped interview with Geneva police. Barely 30 seconds into the interview, Shadwick King is overcome with grief, she noted.

"What he does is what all innocent people would do in that situation," Zellner told the judge. "He volunteers information ... He tells them about Billy Keogh. He tells them that when his wife got back from the Army, she's been texting Mr. Keogh. And it turns out, she has texted Billy Keogh 3,499 times in the couple weeks since she gets home, around 200 texts a day.

"Here's something really remarkable, I think about the case," Zellner continued. "Neither Mr. King nor Mrs. King have any defensive injuries. Zero. None. There's no defensive injuries that any expert has defined in this case. Unless we take the hypothetical of (a prosecution medical expert witness) that there was this maybe struggle where she got little marks under her chin.

"So this case is devoid of the typical findings that you would find in a strangulation case. And we don't have the two experts in agreement about the strangulation. We have complete confusion on what they've offered, and they're contracting each other."

During closing arguments, Zellner told the judge, "what we know from the cell phone ping is her cell phone and Mrs. King at 6:34 a.m. are up on the railroad tracks and four minutes later, the train sees her. Why would anyone bring a body out into the open where everyone would see you carrying her and then deposit it on the tracks?

"You've got to get out of there. There's airplanes going over. There's people out jogging. There's people on Route 25. No one is going to notice. Well, no one did. I mean, because it never happened. It's just a figment of the prosecutor's imagination ... why would you go to all the trouble to dress her? That is just so ridiculous. It makes no sense. There's many ways to dispose of a body, in water, in the forest, you know, with Lyme. I mean, there are all kinds of things. You might as well put her on a stage, you know. And then you got her dressed in a way that people are going to immediately notice. You know, wow, what is a jogger doing up on the railroad tracks? And the police said they could barely walk up there. They were losing their balance.

"So that theory that this was staged just absolutely is not credible," Zellner told the judge. "It's illogical and there's no proof of it."

Related Patch coverage: Geneva Man Accused Of Killing Wife Gets New Trial Date