MAN FOUND GUILTY IN 2000 BEATING DEATH
WHEATON - DuPage County State’s Attorney Joseph E. Birkett announced today that a jury has found Luigi P. Adamo, 26 (d.o.b. 5/28/81), of 4600 N. Cumberland Avenue, Chicago, guilty of First Degree Murder in the October 2000, bludgeoning death of John Conrad. At the time of the murder, Adamo lived at 4N419 Mountain Ash in Wayne.
On October 28, 2000, the body of thirty-one year-old John Conrad was discovered in the Pratts Wayne Forest Preserve in unincorporated Wayne Township. An initial investigation into the murder did not yield charges and the case went cold. In May of 2002, the DuPage County Sheriff’s “Cold Case Unit” began working on the case. The investigation revealed that Conrad, a homeless man who had last resided in Schaumburg, died of massive blunt trauma to the head. Through their police work, authorities learned that on the evening of October 26, Conrad met Adamo and two of his friends including Jason Reardon, at a local restaurant. None of the men knew Conrad prior to this meeting. The three agreed to give Conrad a ride and lured him to the forest preserve near Munger Road. It was at this forest preserve that Reardon and Adamo escorted Conrad to a remote location and then beat him to death with a tire iron and stole his wallet. The third man, who was never charged but did testify, fled the area before Adamo and Reardon returned to the car. In July, 2003, police arrested Adamo and Reardon and charged them each with First Degree Murder. In October, 2004, Reardon pled guilty to Armed Robbery and was sentenced to nineteen years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for his involvement in the murder of John Conrad and cooperated by testifying against Adamo. When the vehicle was finally searched three years later, the tire iron was missing and four of Adamo’s fingerprints were recovered from the underside of the spare tire near where the tire iron had been stored
“For Luigi Adamo, the murder of John Conrad was a thrill kill of a homeless man who he thought no one would care about,” remarked Birkett. “He was dead wrong. With the passage of time, crimes such as this can become more difficult to solve. Though he was a homeless man, the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office and Assistant State’s Attorneys pursued this case with the vigor and passion they would bring to any case. I would like to thank Sheriff John Zaruba and his Cold Case Unit for their outstanding work in solving this case. I would also like to thank Assistant State’s Attorneys David Bayer, Paul Marchese and Tom O’Connor for their pursuit of justice in the name of John Conrad. Lastly, I would like to commend the jury for holding Luigi Adamo responsible for the brutal murder of an innocent man.”
Adamo is scheduled for a sentencing hearing on January 31, 2008, in front of Judge George Bakalis. He faces up to sixty years in the Illinois Department of Corrections.
