In 2004, the investigation reached Mr. Ryan: He was accused of accepting $167,000 in cash, vacations and gifts for himself, his family and friends. Indicted on charges of fraud and racketeering, he was convicted on 18 counts after a five-month trial in 2006 and sentenced to six and a half years in prison, a term spent mostly at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. He was temporarily released in 2011 to visit his wife, Lura Lynn Ryan, in a hospital in Kankakee on the day she died of lung cancer.
The lawyer and author Scott Turow, a member of the commission that Mr. Ryan had named to review the state’s capital cases, posed a rhetorical question to reporters about the man who had plumbed the limits of power and disgrace. “Who was George Ryan?” Mr. Turow asked after the conviction. “It’s a question best put to Shakespeare.”
George Homer Ryan, the youngest of three children of Thomas and Jeanette (Bowman) Ryan, was born on Feb. 24, 1934, in Maquoketa, Iowa, where his mother’s family raised cattle. Months after his birth, his father earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Iowa and took a job with Walgreens, the drugstore chain.
After a brief posting at a Walgreens on the South Side of Chicago, Thomas Ryan was transferred to a store in Kankakee, a small city an hour’s drive south of Chicago, where the family settled and where George; his sister, Kathleen; and his brother, Tom, grew up and attended public schools. In 1947, the Ryans adopted 15-year-old Nancy Schrey after the death of her widowed father, Harry Schrey, a friend of the family.
In 1948, Thomas Ryan opened his own pharmacy in Kankakee. George, a freshman at Kankakee High School, worked there on lunch hours and weekends, making sodas, washing dishes and scrubbing floors. He also found time to play high school football and baseball.
