The Illinois Fifth District Appellate Court has rejected the latest appeal filed by 71-year-old Cecil Sutherland, who continues to challenge his conviction in the 1987 rape and murder of Amy Schulz.
Sutherland, who was convicted twice and twice sentenced to death, argued that he received ineffective assistance of counsel and asked the appellate court to reverse the second-stage dismissal of his post-conviction petition and order a third-stage evidentiary hearing. The appellate court denied the request, leaving his conviction intact.
Amy Schulz disappeared on the evening of July 1, 1987, after leaving her family’s rural Marion County home to search for her brother’s dog. Her nude body was discovered the following day along an oil lease road in Jefferson County.
Investigators later linked Sutherland to the crime after he was arrested in Glacier National Park in Montana for shooting at park rangers. Authorities testified that the tread pattern on Sutherland’s vehicle matched tire tracks found at the murder scene. Dog hairs recovered from Schulz’s clothing matched Sutherland’s black Labrador, and fibers from his vehicle were consistent with fibers found on the victim’s clothing.
A Jefferson County jury convicted Sutherland of murder and rape in 1989, sentencing him to death. Although the Illinois Supreme Court later ordered a new trial, Sutherland was again convicted following a five-week trial in 2004 and again sentenced to death. In 2011, then-Gov. Patrick Quinn commuted Sutherland’s death sentence to life imprisonment as part of Illinois’ abolition of the death penalty.
Following his daughter’s murder, Dennis Schulz helped establish the Amy Schulz Child Advocacy Center in Mt. Vernon in 1990. Today, the center serves children and families in Clay, Wayne, Hamilton, Clinton, Jefferson, Marion, and Washington counties.