Hung Jury Sets Stage for Retrial of Former Golden Boy Curtis Lovelace, Charged with Murder of Wife Cory

After a two-week trial and 16 hours of deliberations, jurors in Quincy, Illinois, could not settle the guilt or innocence of one-time local golden boy Curtis Lovelace in the death of his wife, Cory, reports WGEM.

The mistrial declared Friday by Judge Bob Hardwick sets the stage for a May 31 retrial for Curtis, a former local football hero, ex-school board president and assistant state's attorney who drew headlines when – eight years after he reported his wife dead on Valentine's Day 2006 – he was arrested in 2014 and charged with her suffocation murder.

In the Adams County courthouse where Curtis, now 47, had once practiced law, jurors apparently were divided over the prosecution's allegation that rigor mortis on Cory's body suggested that Cory, 38, had died several hours before Curtis reported her dead, and that he was responsible.

Key to the defense was testimony from two of the couple's four children, sons Lincoln, now 17, and Logan, now 18, both of whom said they saw their mother alive that morning before their father took them to school around 8:15 a.m. Curtis said he returned home to find Cory dead in the couple's upstairs bed around 9 a.m.

A third child, daughter Lyndsay, now 22, testified she "couldn't say 100 percent that I saw her (alive) that morning," according to the Herald-Whig newspaper. And the youngest, son Larson, 14, who was just 4 years old when Cory died, recalled that he tried but was unable to wake his mother that morning while his father was away.

The children's seemingly conflicting statements clearly left jurors guessing.

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Prosecutor Ed Parkinson said in his opening statement that "turmoil" existed between Curtis and Cory, and Cory's mother, Marty Didriksen, testified that she knew the couple's once-storybook marriage had developed tensions.

But Curtis himself never took the stand to answer those charges. And in a pretrial decision, prosecutors were barred from introducing testimony from Curtis' second wife, Erika Gomez – after Cory died, he remarried, divorced, and remarried again – whose 2012 split with Curtis revealed allegations of an abusive relationship, along with Curtis' admission that he was a recovering alcoholic and struggling financially.

Curtis' current wife, the former Christine L. Brewster, has stood by his side during his ordeal and throughout the murder trial.

Dueling opinions from forensic experts also planted doubts that jurors could not resolve.

In the wake of Cory's death, coroner Dr. Jessica Bowman initially raised concerns and left open the cause of death as "undetermined." A Quincy Police detective, Adam Gibson, picked up the open case in 2013, and took the records and photos of the scene to new medical examiners, which led to a grand jury and then Curtis' arrest in August 2014.

The prosecution built its case with two experts, including celebrated forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who testified that Cory died of "homicidal suffocation," which he based in part on photos that showed her in bed with her arms raised and bent, and frozen that way by rigor mortis. "Her arms are not in a natural position," he said, the Herald-Whig reported. "You can't possibly die like that."

He said a pillow, used to suffocate her and then left in place while rigor mortis set in, may have been the cause. He judged Cory's death to have occurred about nine hours before Curtis reported it.

The defense countered with its own experts. One of them, Dr. George Nichols, the former chief medical examiner for the state of Kentucky, agreed the position of Cory's arms was "a bit unusual," he said on the stand. "But people come to rest in all kinds of different positions when they die."

And he said the onset of rigor mortis is not a definitive clue to the time of death, and differs from person to person. "If this woman was suffocated by a pillow, then I've missed dozens of other homicides in my career," he said.

Defense attorney James Elmore argued in his closing that Cory – who had been fighting flu-like symptoms at the time she died, according to statements Curtis gave to investigators – was worn down by the ravages of bulimia and her own alcoholism. "She was knocking on death's door and no one knew it," he said, WGEM reported.

Charged with first-degree murder, Curtis faces from 20-60 years if convicted.