After serving more than a quarter century in prison for a murder he and others have maintained he did not commit, Chicagoan Alton Logan emerged from a Cook County court today cleared of all charges. Assistant Illinois Attorney General Richard Schwind announced that after a thorough investigation, the state could not meet its burden of proof in the case, which began on January 11, 1982, with the shotgun murder of Lloyd Wycliffe, a Cook County Department of Corrections sergeant.
Wycliffe was killed while moonlighting as a security guard in a McDonald’s restaurant on Chicago’s South Side. The case leapt to national prominence this past January when two public defenders came forward and said that their client, the recently deceased cop killer Andrew Wilson, had confessed to them in February 1982 that he had murdered Wycliffe. They had kept that secret for 26 years, bound by ethical rules governing attorney-client confidentiality. After Wilson’s death last November, they came forward in an attempt to clear Logan.
Logan was released from prison in April, but prosecutors still maintained he was the killer and declined to drop charges. Logan’s public defenders demanded a trial date be set. That ended today when prosecutors asked the court to drop all charges. They did not apologize. Logan has been in financial limbo since he was let out of prison, unable to get a job because the murder charge hung over his head.