Sun-Times Keeps a Secret
It was merely something Dowaliby’s lawyers would like to have known about–but didn’t.
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We don’t know exactly what Baumann told Rossi, because Rossi never wrote a story. But here’s Baumann’s account, as his lawyers described it months later in a petition to Judge Neville:
On or about February 15, 1990, Baumann was lifting weights in the Division One yard at Cook County Jail. Nearby were a group of Latin Kings. One of them Baumann recognized from television: Perry Hernandez, a figure in the Dowaliby investigation. “Did you do what they say you did on TV?” another of the Kings asked Hernandez. Baumann heard the name of Cynthia Dowaliby mentioned, and Hernandez’s response, “I tried to break into a window but was making too much noise so I went around the house and went inside through an open door.” Then the Kings walked off along the track in the yard. Baumann followed them and heard Hernandez say, “I hope what I told the cops about me being with a girl that night sticks up.”
In the meantime, on July 10, Judge Neville sentenced David Dowaliby to 45 years in prison.
We assume the Sun-Times does not feel vindicated.
Agent? Journalists can tie themselves in knots defining who they are by what they’re not. “She’s not an officer of the court,” editor Dennis Britton said about Rossi, more or less picking up on Green’s argument. “Given the circumstances as you have relayed them to me [he wasn’t as familiar with the particulars as Green was], she did absolutely what a reporter’s supposed to do. News organizations don’t turn their notes over to police agencies.”
