Who doesn’t love a mystery? And this one could very well wind up as a River Forest cold case.
More than four months ago, Trustee Tom Dwyer filed a report with the River Forest police asking the department to look into who fraudulently signed his name and his wife’s names on petitions to place an advisory question about a township-village merger on the ballot.
The question asked voters whether the village and township should merge. And for Dwyer, who this spring switched positions on support of legislation to merge the two entities, he didn’t doubt that something was amiss.
“I looked at them and saw my and my wife’s name,” Dwyer said last summer. “They were not our signatures.”
The mystery of Dwyer’s wife’s signature was resolved in late August – a voter verification review found that the signature of Amy Dwyer was genuine.
But so far the other whodunit remains. “There should be some sort of closure about this,” Tom Dwyer said. “I’ve never been contacted for anything about this.”
Here’s what Wednesday Journal has learned so far.
Police Chief Greg Weiss said he took the report and that, plus petitions for the ballot question from Dwyer. Noting he didn’t think it was appropriate for his office to be “caught in the middle of that” because Dwyer was a trustee, he said he looked into which agency might be appropriate – state police, attorney general’s office, Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.
He eventually sent it on to the State’s Attorney’s office. He couldn’t remember the exact title of the unit he sent it to, “public integrity or election fraud,” Weiss said.
Weiss said a month later he spoke with the State’s Attorney’s Office, which told him it might be a conflict to investigate it because Trustee Tom Cargie, who circulated petitions, is a lawyer in the state’s attorney’s office. Weiss said he was told that the matter was sent on to the Attorney General’s Office.
A spokesman for the state’s attorney’s office couldn’t verify if his agency ever had the illusive packet.
The police chief learned more than a month later that the attorney general’s office wouldn’t investigate it either because of the potential conflict in the state’s attorney’s office. The best agency to handle it, he was told, was the Cook County Sheriff’s police.
A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said she would look at it from her agency’s end. So far, results to learn anything haven’t been successful.
But the sheriff’s police doesn’t know anything about it, a spokesman said. “Our investigators know nothing about this. We’re reaching out to see who may have it,” the spokeswoman said.
“This is just as much of a mystery to me,” Weiss said. “I offered a liaison from our office and no one has called me to find out more about this.”
Wednesday Journal also contacted Lt. Greg Kilduff, head of internal investigations with the Illinois State Police. He said his agency would not likely investigate it. “If a local officer were involved in a shooting we might investigate it,” he said. “On rare occasions we might investigate it if a situation gets too messy or sensitive, but that would be few and far between.”
When Dwyer received word that his name appeared on a petition, he sent a letter to the Illinois State Board of Elections, filed an objection with the local election board as well as a criminal complaint with the police.
The advisory question was challenged by Pierangela Murphy and Patricia Marino, a member of the township mental health board, who filed objections with the local election board. A signature verification by the Cook County Clerk’s office concluded that backers of the advisory referendum gathered 349 valid signatures, 26 short of the 375 signatures needed to gain a place on the November ballot.