 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
People v. Derr2/25/2004
UNPUBLISHED
Life is short-shorter for some than others.
Dennis Oberbeck's life was cut short on August 14, 1992, at the age of 43, when he succumbed to the kind of trauma that most men can easily survive. Oberbeck's .377 blood-alcohol level at the time of his death might well have proved lethal all by itself. However, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy upon Oberbeck's body felt that death was caused by more than alcohol poisoning. Superficial abrasions over Oberbeck's right eye and about his upper lip, markings that appeared to be the product of someone's fists, led the medical examiner to conclude that blows to the face worked in tandem with Oberbeck's extreme inebriation to produce the cardiac arrest that ended his life.
Dennis Oberbeck's drunkenness rendered him vulnerable to any form of trauma. As circumstance would have it, he simply could not take a punch. When John Derr, the defendant, for reasons unknown, punched Oberbeck's face, Oberbeck's brain ceased sending impulses to the heart. When it shut down, lifeblood ceased to flow, and he perished.
The circumstances of this untimely death remained a mystery for several years. Then, in early 1996, as the defendant's marriage to Sherry, his wife, began to unravel, an answer to the mystery unraveled with it. Sherry broke silence to reveal a dark secret kept for several years. Her revelations to law enforcement officials explained how Dennis Oberbeck's body ended up in the back yard of an abandoned house on the outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri.
Sherry described to the authorities how her husband summoned her in the wee hours of August 14, 1992, to a vacant Granite City dwelling that the couple owned. He showed her Dennis Oberbeck's lifeless body on the living room floor. Sherry, a retired nurse, examined the body for a pulse, and it had none. She claimed that immediately thereafter her husband showed her a watch and a ring that belonged to Oberbeck.
Sherry also told the authorities of how Oberbeck's corpse was loaded into her husband's van, of how she followed her husband in her vehicle as he drove the van west across the Mississippi River, into the State of Missouri, and of how she lost her husband when she heeded a stoplight that he traversed. After watching his van disappear into the early morning darkness, she turned around and returned home. Sherry claimed to have seen her husband jettison the watch and the ring in the Mississippi River bottoms before he crossed into Missouri.
Investigators finally found an answer to the mystery of how the remains of an Illinois man, last seen just outside his favorite haunt in Bethalto, Illinois, came to rest in an unweeded garden grown to seed on the edge of the St. Louis city limits.
Several witnesses who had reported seeing a stranger with their friend, Dennis Oberbeck, the night of his demise were contacted by detectives. They were able to identify the defendant as that stranger. They saw him having what appeared to be a confrontational conversation with Oberbeck on the parking lot of Geno's 140 Club in Bethalto at around 1:30 a.m. on August 14, 1992. It was the last time that any of them saw Oberbeck alive.
In addition to developing a number of eyewitnesses who could place the defendant in Oberbeck's company the morning of his death, detectives procured a tape recording of a telephone conversation between the defendant and his estranged wife. They obtained an eavesdropping order that authorized them to record Sherry's conversations with her husband and, thereafter, directed Sherry to call him. She was instructed to engage him in conversation that would corroborate her claims. During the c
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Illinois DUI Attorneys
DUI Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|