The Things Kids Say

By Julie Grace/Chicago

Margaret Hampton was surprised when a Chicago Tribune reporter phoned her with the news that suspects had been arrested in the murder of her 11-year-old granddaughter Ryan Harris. "I thought it was a 17- and an 18-year-old," Hampton told TIME, "not seven and eight." Hampton's shock reverberated around the U.S. as Chicago police charged two preteen boys with the August murder in the city's grim Englewood district, declaring the pair had confessed to killing Ryan for her brand-new bicycle and molesting her body with a tree twig. But Hampton was still puzzled. Police at the scene when Ryan's body was discovered had told Hampton that "a lot of semen and stuff" had been found on her granddaughter's body. Rarely do boys the age of the suspects produce semen. Still, police detectives were adamant the boys knew too much about the murder not to be involved. But Hampton told TIME shortly after the arrests, "Those are babies, just like my other grandkids. You can't put anything past kids, but I just feel somebody else is involved."

Last Friday, Chicago prosecutors dropped the murder charges against the two boys, citing a crime-laboratory report that confirmed that semen was found on Ryan's underpants. "I was concerned about this confession from the start," says Cook County public guardian Patrick Murphy. "You're worried about kids this young saying anything. It's not like they were scared into--or coerced, or that the police said that the boogeyman is going to get you. They'd just say anything to get out of the room." One report had the boys agreeing to confess after being offered Big Macs.

Prosecutors refused to rule out the possibility that the boys would be charged if new evidence is uncovered. But police are circulating pictures of two men in their mid-20s around Englewood. The 7-year-old's mother told reporters that one of the men had offered her son to us after the murder. Her son, she said, saw the man "hurt Ryan."

There had been questions about the boys' culpability from the beginning. It was hard to imagine the pair dragging Ryan's body from the point where she was said to have been knocked off her bike with rocks across the street to where it was eventually found. Said Hampton at the time of the arrest: "There are too many adults that are nosy. They would have seen her dragged across that street."

There was dissension among the investigators as well, with the beat cops complaining about being big-footed by detectives. Englewood residents generally trust the uniformed cops, calling the detectives "slick boys." And despite public avowals, there was doubt among the detectives themselves. A violent-crimes detective called TIME before the charges were dropped to track down a potential witness mentioned in the magazine. He admitted that he believed the police may have accused at least one of the suspects wrongly. The older boy, he said, "got scared and rode away" when Ryan fell from her bike.

The boys, remanded to home detention by a judge, are free to return to school. Englewood residents are now claiming police coercion and racial bias in the case. The police deny any misconduct. "These babies just did not do this," says Shirley Blanton, a close friend of the families. Now, to celebrate, she says, "the whole neighborhood is going to have a barbecue"--except, perhaps, for the kin of Ryan Harris.

--By Julie Grace/Chicago