Man pleads guilty but mentally ill in stabbing deaths of prominent Edwardsville couple

A 27-year-old man accused of stabbing to death a prominent Edwardsville couple in 2019 has pleaded guilty but mentally ill to first-degree murder in one of the most notorious criminal cases in the city’s history.

Madison County Circuit Court Associate Judge Neil Schroeder accepted the plea at a hearing Tuesday, immediately after ruling that Zachary Capers was fit to stand trial following mental-health treatment by the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS).

A year ago, Schroeder had found Capers unfit to stand trial for the murders of Lois and Michael Ladd.

“Yes,” Capers answered in a barely-audible voice Tuesday afternoon when the judge asked if he understood that he must serve 100% of his 60-year prison sentence at a correctional facility capable of treating his mental illness, with credit for four years served.

“Mr. Capers, I need to make sure you understand that this guilty-but-mentally-ill plea means that the Department of Corrections will periodically assess your mental-health condition,” Schroeder told him.

“They may provide you treatment if they deem it necessary, but they also may deem it not necessary, so there’s no guarantee that you will receive treatment.”

Capers had been accused of stabbing chiropractor Lois Ladd, 68, and her husband, contractor Michael Ladd, 79, multiple times on March 17, 2019, in their secluded home on North Kansas Street in Edwardsville.

Nearly 40 of the couple’s friends and relatives attended Tuesday’s hearing, which lasted less than an hour. Some stared at the floor or straight ahead. Others wiped tears from their eyes.

After the hearing, Dodie Ladd Levi, Michael Ladd’s sister, said she was going to be on “pins and needles” for 30 days because Capers could withdraw his guilty plea during that time, but otherwise she felt justice had been done “as much as could be expected.”

“If we had gone for a jury trial, and we got 12 like-minded jurors, we probably wouldn’t have gotten more than 60 years anyway,” she said.

Three counts dismissed

Two sheriff’s deputies led Capers into the courtroom at the Madison County Criminal Justice Center in Edwardsville on Tuesday. He wore a black-and-white-striped jail uniform, handcuffs, leg irons and black glasses. He had grown a full beard and short dreadlocks.

A handful of Capers friends and relatives attended the hearing. He didn’t look back at them, even when his sister yelled, “Love you, brother,” as he was being led out the door.

Under the plea agreement, Schroeder dismissed three other counts of first-degree murder related to the Ladd case, as well as felony and misdemeanor charges from his past.

Special Assistant State’s Attorney Crystal Uhe told Schroeder that if the case had gone to trial, the prosecution would have argued that Capers broke a bathroom window, entered the Ladd home and stabbed the couple in the early morning hours of March 17, 2019.

“(The medical examiner) determined that Michael Ladd died of stab wounds to the neck and chest, 29 in total,” Uhe said. “Lois Ladd died of stab wounds to the head and neck.”

Uhe said shoeprints at the scene matched Capers’ boots; blood on the boots matched Michael Ladd’s DNA; surveillance video showed Capers buying latex gloves at a convenience store; and pieces of latex gloves in the Ladd home contained DNA from Capers and the couple.

The plea agreement was reached after a private meeting between prosecutors and members of the Ladd and Buchta families last week. Lois Ladd’s maiden name was Buchta.

Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Haine attended Tuesday’s hearing.

“We had many meetings with the family,” he said. “It’s been a four-year saga. They’ve been through hell, and the closure that this (sentence) brings is something very important to them, and it insures that there are no more delays. We’ve been ready to go to trial for years.

“This is a life sentence, but in no sense is it going to bring justice here. This is a horrible wound to the community.”

Several Ladd family members submitted victim-impact statements to the judge. Levi was the only one who chose to read her statement aloud on the witness stand at Tuesday’s hearing.

Levi said she grew up in an “amazing” family with 10 children. She explained how Michael Ladd, her older brother, took charge when their father died of cancer. He was 27, and she was 16.

Levi described Lois Ladd as more like a sister than a sister-in-law and noted that she and Michael Ladd were active in Edwardsville Rotary Club and many other good causes in the community.

“Losing Mike was certainly one of the worse catastrophes of my life, and I will never recover,” Levi said, fighting back tears. “One does not recover. One simply goes forward.”

Focus on mental health

Questions about Capers’ mental health pervaded the murder case from the beginning due to his history with law enforcement, his handwritten motions described as “incoherent” by his former attorney, and other behavior. He was believed to be homeless at the time of his arrest.

Capers’ jury trial had been postponed several times by April 18, 2022, when Schroeder granted a motion by Public Defender Mary Copeland’s office, which is representing him, asking for the court to appoint an independent expert to evaluate his mental health.

The motion referred to written messages that Capers had sent to family members and an interview conducted by Daniel Cuneo, a clinical psychologist retained by the defense.

“A defendant is unfit (to stand trial) if, because of his mental or physical condition, he is unable to understand the nature and purpose of the proceedings against him or to assist in his defense,” according to a “fitness standard” in the Illinois Code of Criminal Procedure” of 1963.

The court appointed St. Louis clinical psychologist Anita Bazile-Sawyer to evaluate Capers. Based on her report, Schroeder found him unfit to stand trial on June 6, 2022, and remanded him to IDHS custody for treatment.

Capers was sent to Chester Mental Health Center, according to court records. An IDHS report dated Nov. 15, 2022, stated that he had “attained fitness.” The report is sealed, so no information is publicly available on his diagnosis or the nature of his treatment.

A “notice of change in status” showed that Capers returned to the Madison County Jail in Edwardsville on Nov. 28, 2022.

“This individual was not adjudged incompetent at the time he or she was ordered hospitalized,” according to a box checked by Travis Nottmeier, unit director at the Chester facility.

After Capers returned to jail, Copeland and Assistant Public Defender Delani Hemmer retained Cuneo to conduct another evaluation. It took several months to get his report, according to court records.

The original purpose of Tuesday’s hearing was for Schroeder to determine if Capers was fit to stand trial.

Both the prosecution and defense agreed to findings in reports by Cuneo and an IDHS psychiatrist that Capers was fit to stand trial. Neither side called witnesses. Schroeder asked Capers if he was taking medication for his mental illness, and he answered, “yes.”

Motive still unclear

Prosecutors at Tuesday’s hearing included Assistant State’s Attorney Lauren Maricle and Uhe, an attorney with the State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor’s office. She was a Madison County assistant state’s attorney before running unsuccessfully for state’s attorney in 2020.

Haine’s office brought in Uhe to work on the Capers case as a special assistant state’s attorney on Dec. 28, 2022, according to court records.

“It was basically because of my knowledge of the case,” she said. “I was involved in the beginning. I’m the one who charged it. So for continuity, for the victims’ sake, (Haine) brought me back to kind of see it through.”

In February, Capers filed a hand-written Freedom of Information Act request, asking the court to provide him with copies of “any and all legal documents” related to the case.

Capers was arrested on March 17, 2019, in Staunton on an outstanding warrant on unrelated charges and taken to the Madison County Jail. The following day, police connected him to the Ladd murders.

Former Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Gibbons charged Capers with four counts of first-degree murder, and a grand jury later indicted him. He pleaded not guilty.

“This is a brutal and heinous murder,” Gibbons said at the time.

In the coming months and years, prosecutors never discussed a motive for the killings, and they didn’t do so at Tuesday’s hearing.

“We wish in every case we could have a better idea of why,” Haine said. “One of the tragedies in these situations is you don’t know why. But our goal (in the Ladd case) is to make sure this incredibly dangerous individual is in prison for the rest of his life, period.”

Victim late for work

The bodies of Lois and Michael Ladd were found on Monday, March 18, 2019, after Lois Ladd failed to show up for work at her chiropractic office. The couple had been last seen on March 16 at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the Stagger Inn Again restaurant and bar in Edwardsville.

The Madison County Sheriff’s Department arrested Capers in Staunton on Sunday, March 17, 2019, on an outstanding warrant for failure to appear at his Jan. 22 trial on 2017 felony charges of forgery and possessing a stolen vehicle.

Also on March 17, 2019, Capers was charged with trespassing on a deputy sheriff’s property in rural Worden and obstructing a peace officer by allegedly fleeing to avoid arrest before he drove to Staunton, and he received a ticket for possession of drug paraphernalia.

Former State’s Attorney Gibbons announced the murder charges at a press conference on March 19, 2019. Officials had called in the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis to investigate.

“(The Ladds) are absolutely innocent and wonderful people, whose lives are lost and who leave behind an amazing family, a tremendous number of friends and community members who know and love them,” Gibbons said at the time, noting that he personally knew the couple.

Also speaking at the March 19, 2019, press conference was Jeff Connor, the Major Case Squad’s chief deputy commander on the Illinois side. Now the Madison County sheriff, he attended Tuesday’s hearing and witnessed Capers’ guilty plea.

“It’s an honor to be able to serve the family with this type of justice,” he said. “For four years, they’ve been agonizing over this.”

A BND investigation found that Capers had more than 35 contacts with law enforcement in Madison County communities between September 2017 and March 2019. Some reports mentioned suspicious, odd or disruptive behavior, such as staring into store windows, standing in the street or yelling at people at the library.

In two cases, police officers described Capers as a “possible 10-96,” which is code for mental subject. In one, they transported him on a voluntary basis to Gateway Regional Medical Center in Granite City, which has an inpatient psychiatric unit.

In February 2020, after being charged with the Ladd murders, Capers filed three handwritten motions in Madison County court asking for a “closed” hearing to get the charges dismissed and mentioning his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

Capers hadn’t consulted his attorney, former Public Defender John Rekowski, now retired, about the motions.

“They’re basically incoherent,” Rekowski told the BND at the time. “And given that circumstance, I have no idea what Mr. Capers is thinking or what he’s trying to do.”

Rekowski, who hadn’t ruled out an insanity defense, said Capers wasn’t “functioning on the level that a court expects a defendant to be operating on to be able to assist in his case and work with his counsel.”