Donald Lee Rains, a 26-year-old White man from Beloit, Wisconsin, was killed on February 2, 1981, during an armed robbery at the Radio Shack in Beloit Plaza. Online court records consistently place his death on February 2 rather than January 28. Rains was a customer in the store that day, while 21-year-old Richard Walter “Rick” Boeck was an employee and has also been described as the store manager. Both men were taken toward the rear of the business and shot repeatedly.
Investigators determined that each died from multiple gunshot wounds.
The killings occurred at the end of a violent series of robberies and murders in the Rockford, Illinois, and Beloit area. In the days before Rains and Boeck were killed, several people had been shot to death during robberies in Rockford. Willie Fredd and Albert Pearson were killed at Fredd’s Groceries on January 27, followed by the murder of service-station attendant Kevin Kaiser on January 28 and another fatal service-station attack on January 29. Investigators eventually concluded that the crimes were connected to Raymond Lee Stewart.
At the Beloit Radio Shack, investigators discovered that a programmable radio scanner was missing following the robbery. Three women reported seeing a man wearing a tan-colored coat in the store before the killings. Those observations became important as investigators began comparing the Beloit crime with the shootings and robberies across the state line in Illinois. The similarity of the crimes and Stewart’s subsequent flight led federal authorities to become involved in the investigation.
Authorities obtained a federal arrest warrant after alleging that Stewart had committed a series of related armed robberies and homicides and had fled Illinois and Wisconsin to avoid prosecution. Federal agents ultimately located him in Greensboro, North Carolina. Stewart was arrested on February 21, 1981. Searches authorized by federal warrants were conducted on his automobile, suitcase and rented trailer. Investigators recovered evidence that included two handguns, a programmable radio scanner and a tan quilted jacket, items that prosecutors later used as part of the case connecting Stewart with the crime spree.
After his arrest, Stewart was initially returned to Illinois to face charges there. He was later extradited to Wisconsin for prosecution in connection with the deaths of Rains and Boeck and the robbery of the Radio Shack. During the Wisconsin proceedings, witnesses who had been at or near the store testified about the man they had seen before the murders and said photographs of Stewart’s coat resembled the coat they remembered. Stewart challenged numerous aspects of the prosecution, including the searches that produced the physical evidence and the testimony of witnesses, but those challenges did not prevent the case from proceeding to conviction.
In Rock County Circuit Court, Stewart was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Donald Rains and Richard Boeck and one count of armed robbery. He received life imprisonment for each murder and an additional indeterminate sentence of up to 20 years for the armed robbery. The sentences were ordered to run consecutively, meaning one after another rather than at the same time. Stewart later sought post-conviction relief and appealed his Wisconsin convictions, raising numerous claims involving the search warrants, preliminary examination, witness testimony, evidence of other crimes, closing arguments, jury instructions and sentencing. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals rejected his arguments and affirmed the convictions and sentences in 1985.
Stewart also faced separate prosecutions in Illinois for murders committed during the same crime spree and received death sentences there. Those Illinois cases, rather than the Wisconsin sentences for the deaths of Rains and Boeck, ultimately placed him on death row. After years of appeals and an unsuccessful effort to obtain clemency, Raymond Lee Stewart was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois on September 18, 1996. Donald Rains and Richard Boeck were the final two victims of the killing spree that had begun in Rockford less than a week earlier.
