Appellate Court upholds Shadwick King conviction

Shadwick King, the Geneva man who was convicted of first-degree murder twice in the 2014 death of his wife, Kathleen, was unsuccessful in his appeal, in which he claimed that he didn’t get a fair trial.

The Second District Illinois Appellate Court in Elgin ruled unanimously Wednesday that King “was not denied a fair trial, and the evidence was sufficient to convict defendant of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In his first trial in 2015, a jury found King guilty.

Prosecutors said King strangled his wife, changed her clothes and put her body on the Union Pacific tracks on the city’s east side.

A Metra conductor saw a woman’s body on the tracks at 6:50 a.m. Sunday, July 6, 2014, just south of Esping Park, and stopped the train. Her body was found less than a half mile from where the King family lived in the 800 block of Oak Street, Geneva.

Kathleen King was 32 at the time of her death.

Shadwick King denied killing his wife.

“I never laid a hand on her, not one time,” King said at his first sentencing. “I did not kill my wife. To the day I die, I did not do it.”

His defense was that Kathleen was a runner who died of a sudden cardiac arrhythmia brought on by drinking too much alcohol, court records show.

In 2020, the Illinois Supreme Court granted Shadwick King a new trial.

The court affirmed an appellate ruling that the Kane County trial court erred when it allowed former FBI profiler Mark Safarik to testify for the prosecution as a crime scene expert witness and offer opinions in areas beyond his expertise.

Circuit Judge John Barsanti found King guilty in a second trial in 2022, then sentenced him to 30 years in prison on Jan. 13, 2023.

King, now 57, is serving his sentence at Menard Correctional Center in Menard. He has been in custody there since Jan. 30, 2023 and is scheduled for parole on May 20, 2044, records show.

According to Illinois law, King must serve the full sentence. He receives credit for time served in the Kane County jail and where he was previously held at the Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg.

In its 71-page decision, the Appellate court found “the state presented ample evidence that Kathleen’s death was the product of criminal agency in that she died of asphyxiation caused by neck compression, i.e., strangulation, and that defendant had the motive, means, and opportunity to commit her murder.”

“Accordingly, we cannot say the trial court’s guilty finding was so unreasonable, improbable, or unsatisfactory that it creates a reasonable doubt as to defendant’s guilt.”

At the time of his 2023 sentencing, Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser praised the prosecution team of Greg Sams, Mark Stajdohar and Margaret O’Brien and Geneva Police Officer Bob Pech, the rest of the Geneva department and victim advocate Linda Hagemann.