Locals recall terror unleashed by Rockford spree killer Raymond Lee Stewart

ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) – Although the Rockford region has seen its share of violent crime, few have been as terrifying as the ones that occurred in January 1981, when a man named Raymond Lee Stewart went on a week-long rampage, leaving bodies in his wake in two stateline communities.

The topic of conversation for most Rockford residents on Jan. 27, 1981, was the weather. Temperatures had recently topped 50 degrees and were currently inching toward 40.

Dixon native Ronald Regan had only been in the White House for a week, and the last thing on anyone’s mind was murder. But, at around 1 p.m., two men were shot execution style at a west Rockford grocery store.

“It was extremely scary because we didn’t know what was going on,” said Rockford resident Kathy Stemm, who was 19 at the time. “Then they even started closing stores that were open 24 hours a day.”

Police had no idea at time that the man who killed 54-year-old Willie Fredd and his nephew, 20-year-old Albert Pearson, inside Fredd’s Groceries on West State Street was 29-year-old Raymond Lee Stewart, someone they’d get to know very well over the next several months.

“When somebody does something for absolutely no reason at all, and shows no remorse, no anything, it [is] very scary,” Stemm said. “The whole community was frightened.”

After killing Fredd and Pearson, Stewart, a native of North Carolina, shot and killed two more people, 17-year-old Kevin Kaiser, and 35-year-old Kenny Foust. He had no ties to either man.

“I had just moved [to Rockford] from a small town so this was scary to me,” Stemm said, adding that she remembers feeling unsafe everywhere she went. “It was pretty scary at the time to go home, you know, watching over your shoulder. We’d just get out of our cars and run to our house.”

The stateline was shaken even further from its foundation on Feb. 2, 1981, when Stewart crossed the state line to the RadioShack at the Beloit Mall and led 26-year-old Donald Rains and 21-year-old Richard Boeck to the back of the store and shot them in the head. Six murders in as many days.

“It was within a few days of each other,” said author, historian and folklorist Kathi Kresol. “That is something. It wasn’t like one then you are scared for a couple days and it settles down and then something else happens. It was just one right after the other.”

Kresol says Stewart’s rampage left an indelible mark on the greater Rockford area. Some of the buildings, like Fredd’s Groceries, are gone, but what happened in them will never be forgotten.

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“He did these crimes in ’81, was tried in ’82, and they executed him ’96,” Kresol said. “And we are still talking about him. It’s 30 years almost. It’s coming up on 29 years since he’s been dead.”

Stewart was arrested on Feb. 21, 1981, in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The region was just starting to heal in 1982 when Stewart unleashed more fear. During his trial, he escaped from the Winnebago County Jail and was on the run for nearly two hours. Most of downtown Rockford went on lockdown while police scoured the area. Stewart was found hiding in an oil bin after being shot and wounded by officers.

“That was such a scary time not knowing where he was,” Stemm said. “Who was going to be his next victim?”

Stewart received two life sentences in Wisconsin and the death penalty in Illinois. He was executed by lethal injection on Sept. 18, 1996, at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill.

Days before he was executed, Stewart, who was Black, said in an audio recording that he committed the murders to avenge the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, two prominent figures killed by white gunmen in the 1960s.

“I was there to get back at Caucasians for what they had done,” Stewart said in the recording. “The victims had not done anything to me. …I want to apologize.”

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