Convicted murderer Katrina Giles gets medical 'furlough' (2024)

HARRISTOWN — A female felon who took park in planning a vicious double murder — and then conspired to provide her killer brother with an alibi — isn’t spending all her time behind bars.

Officially, Katrina Giles, 32, isn’t due for parole until Aug. 10, 2046, after she would have turned 55.

But prison records checked April 8 showed she was out of the Logan Correctional Center on “medical furlough”, something usually granted to inmates requiring specialized care or who are gravely or terminally ill.

Department of Corrections records rechecked Tuesday now show Giles is back in custody at the Logan prison, and don’t say how long she was gone or whether she will get to leave again.

In a statement to the Herald & Review, Illinois Department of Corrections spokeswoman Naomi Puzzello said: “Medical furlough means an individual was transported to an outside doctor or hospital for medical reasons. However, they are still in IDOC custody.”

Giles had confessed to first-degree murder for her part in enabling the frenzied shooting and stabbing deaths of Cindanett “Cindy” Eaton, 57, and her 23-year-old daughter Lindsey J. Eaton, killed in their Harristown home around 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 5, 2011.

The murders were carried out by Giles' brother,Timothy R. Giles, then 27, a U.S. Marine whose actual target was Casey Eaton, another of Cindanett Eaton’s daughters with whom he had just lost a child custody battle. Casey Eaton, then 27, was asleep with her family and her infant daughter and a 7-year-old daughter from a previous relationship when Giles smashed his way into the house.

Casey Eaton was shot twice and suffered more than 40 stab wounds before being left for dead. Police had later burst in to find her lying face down and unconscious on her bed in a vast pool of her own blood. Timothy Giles confessed to murder and attempted murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole on April 4, 2014.

Katrina Giles' role in the killings was helping her brother carefully plan the murders and purchasing pre-paid cell phones and other equipment as part of the scheme. After the crimes, she texted Timothy Giles current girlfriend from a location in Centralia pretending to be him with the aim of giving him an alibi; and she continued to lie for him immediately after the crime while being questioned by detectives.

Later, in intercepted phone calls she made from the Macon County Jail, she was recorded admitting “that she didn’t think she would get in trouble and that the plan was to kill the people in the house,” police said.

Giles had originally been sentenced to 50 years in prison at her sentencing hearing Nov. 2, 2015, the sentence to be served at 100%.

“I think that it is basically a life sentence,” then-Macon County State’s Attorney Jay Scott had said afterward as to why he had agreed to that penalty in return for the defendant’s confession. Giles had changed her plea to guilty on the day her jury trial was about to start; if she had been convicted by the jurors, she would have faced the same life without parole punishment as her brother.

But that 50-year sentence didn’t last too long. Giles appealed, accusing her defense lawyer of “ineffective assistance of counsel”, and the Fourth District Appellate Court agreed. The case was sent back to Macon County Circuit Court for “further proceedings” in a decision handed down in July 2020.

Giles appeared back in court in Decatur in January of 2023, represented by Chief Public Defender Michelle Sanders. Special Prosecutor Charles Zalar reached a negotiated new deal with the defendant who agreed, again, to plead guilty to first degree murder. But this time she got a reduced sentence of 20 years, plus an extra 15 years because a firearm had been used in the crimes, for a new total sentence of 35 years.

LAST DAYS

And while IDOC spokesman Puzzello won’t discuss individual medical histories of prisoners like Giles, she was asked under what circ*mstances an inmate deemed to be terminally ill might be let out of prison in their last days.

She referred the Herald & Review to a web page detailing the “Joe Coleman Medical Release Act” in answer to those questions.

The law came into effect in January of 2022 and is named for an Army veteran who died of prostate cancer while incarcerated. The new law allows for prisoners who are terminally ill to request early release if they are expected to die within 18 months or are so incapacitated with disease they can’t handle the tasks of daily living.

All such requests have to be approved by the Prisoner Review Board and must include an evaluation from a “medical practitioner.”

Other IDOC guidelines on medical furloughs, ushered in during the COVID pandemic, define such furloughs as “a temporary leave of absence from secure custody” for offenders “determined to be either of limited physical mobility or terminally ill.”

The guidelines further state that terminally ill offenders can be furloughed to either a “health care facility or a home-setting that demonstrates the capacity to meet their medical needs.”

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker had touted the Joe Coleman law as a humanitarian gesture that would allow prisoners’ families to “say goodbye to their loved ones the way we all hope to get to do when the time comes”.

However, Pritzker was soon under attack by critics who claimed the Prisoner Review Board wasn’t granting enough releases: a little more than 50 had been allowed by August of 2023, after the Review Board turned down some two-thirds of the requests it had received state-wide.

Pritzker had hit back and said the new law was working properly. “I’ve encouraged the Prisoner Review Board to do the right thing, to encourage release whenever it’s appropriate,” he said. "But we’re not just going to push everybody out the door..."