Guilty verdict for man charged with murder of downstate informant

A Bloomington, Ill., man was found guilty Friday of the murder of a downstate woman whose body was found in the basement of an abandoned building in Lawndale in 2012.

Marquelle Palmer drove Michelle Woods to Chicago in May 2012 and plied her with drugs and alcohol as she ducked a subpoena to testify against Palmer’s brother in a drug case. When Palmer learned that Woods still was talking to police, he shot her, Cook County prosecutors said. Woods’ body was discovered by police in the trash-strewn basement of a house in the 1500 block of South Sawyer Avenue.

Palmer, who already is serving a 14-year sentence on a federal conviction in connection to his role in a Bloomington-based drug ring, claimed he had come to Chicago to buy drugs. Prosecutors used cellphone records to show Palmer’s movements around the city, including “pings” that placed him in the proximity of the vacant greystone where Woods’ body was found two weeks after her missed court date.

Woods, a drug addict with five children, had family members who reported her missing around Mother’s Day, and plastered “missing” signs around Bloomington, Assistant State’s Attorney Marilyn Salas-Wail said during her closing arguments on Thursday.

“Melissa Woods was a mother. She was a sister. She as a daughter. She meant something to those people,” Salas-Wail said to jurors, as she stood in front of a monitor showing Woods’ body in a crime scene photo. “She was not a junkie piece of trash, and she should not have died alone and scared and helpless on the basement floor of an abandoned building.”

The case against Palmer was almost entirely circumstantial. No DNA evidence, nor a murder weapon, was found. Prosecutors leaned heavily on the cellphone data, and the testimony of a recovering drug addict who had traveled to Chicago with Woods and Palmer. That witness said Palmer told her that he learned during the trip that Woods still planned to testify against his brother and that Palmer said he was going to kill Woods and “throw her in the lake.”