Richard Walter “Rick” Boeck, a 21-year-old man, was killed on February 2, 1981, while working as the manager of a Radio Shack at Beloit Plaza in Beloit, Wisconsin. Online and court records consistently place his death on February 2, rather than January 28. Boeck was inside the store with customer Donald Rains when Raymond Lee Stewart entered the business during what became the final attack in a violent multiday crime spree that had begun across the state line in Rockford, Illinois.
Stewart forced Boeck and Rains toward the rear of the Radio Shack. Both were then shot multiple times. They were discovered dead inside the business, with gunshot wounds that included wounds to the head. A later Illinois Supreme Court account of the investigation described the Beloit Plaza incident as an armed robbery in which two victims were murdered, one suffering five gunshot wounds and the other four, although that court summary did not identify which number of wounds belonged to Boeck.
The Beloit murders came at the end of a series of killings attributed to Stewart. On January 27, Willie Fredd and Albert Pearson were killed during a robbery at Fredd's Groceries in Rockford. The following day, gas-station attendant Kevin Kaiser was murdered, and another service-station attendant, Kenny Foust, was killed on January 29. After several days without another known killing, the violence resumed in Beloit with the murders of Boeck and Rains. The similarities among the crimes and the movement of the offender between Illinois and Wisconsin led investigators to coordinate across jurisdictions, with the FBI becoming involved in the search for Stewart.
Investigators ultimately focused on Raymond Lee Stewart, who had a criminal history that included armed robbery. Evidence showed that after the killings he left the region and traveled to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he stayed with his cousin, Florence Crosby. On February 20, 1981, a federal warrant was issued charging Stewart with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. FBI agents arrested him the following day in the parking lot outside Crosby's apartment as he was about to enter a Buick. Subsequent searches of his belongings, automobile and a U-Haul trailer produced revolvers, ammunition and other evidence that investigators used in the prosecutions arising from the killing spree.
Stewart was prosecuted separately for the Wisconsin killings. In Rock County Circuit Court, he was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Boeck and Rains and one count of armed robbery stemming from the Radio Shack robbery. He received a life sentence on each murder conviction and an additional indeterminate prison term of up to 20 years for armed robbery. Stewart was also prosecuted in Illinois for murders committed during the same spree and received death sentences there.
Years later, Stewart spoke publicly about the killings and acknowledged that his victims had done nothing to provoke him. In a recorded statement made shortly before his execution, he offered explanations involving anger, revenge and hostility he said he had felt at the time of the murders, and he apologized for his crimes. Those later statements did not change the outcome of his cases. His efforts to avoid execution in Illinois were unsuccessful, and Raymond Lee Stewart was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on September 18, 1996, more than fifteen years after the murders of Richard Boeck and Donald Rains.
