A Danville man whose death sentence was commuted in 2003 by then-Gov. George Ryan has died from medical issues while in prison.
Charles Silagy, 69, died this month while in custody, said Lindsey Hess of the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Silagy had been in prison since 1980 — spending about 23 of those years on death row — for the murder of his girlfriend and her sister.
Five days after the two women’s bodies were discovered on Valentine’s Day morning, Silagy confessed.
He told investigators that he began choking girlfriend Cheryl Block, 32, in the truck as they drove home from a strip club where they’d gotten into an argument. After stopping the truck and continuing to beat, kick, then stab her with a pocketknife, he left her body and returned to the trailer the two shared with Ms. Block's sister, Anne "Marty" Waters, 29, and stabbed her to death as well.
A Vermilion County jury convicted Silagy of the crimes five months later.
Nearly 40 years since his conviction, Silagy was an inmate at the Pontiac Correctional Center when he was pronounced dead at OSF Saint James Medical Center in town, according to Livingston County Coroner Danny Watson.
Watson said the cause of death was “medical.”
Silagy had been one of the state’s longest residents of death row in January 2003, when Ryan commuted the sentences of 157 inmates scheduled to die. Eight years later, former Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois.
Silagy was originally sentenced to die three years after Illinois reinstated its death penalty in 1977. His execution by electric chair was scheduled for Nov. 7, 1980.
Though he had fired the public defenders representing him after his conviction and asked the jury to sentence him to death, he eventually changed his mind in prison and filed legal documents to have his conviction overturned.
Over the next 20 years, Silagy’s post-conviction case was heard in various court hearings but ultimately ended with him still on death row three years before Ryan’s commutation of his sentence.
