Rish was convicted of helping with the plot hatched by Edwards, a small-time Kankakee drug dealer, to kidnap Small, the 40-year-old heir to a local media fortune. Edwards took him to a rural area and buried him in a 6-by-3-foot wooden box outfitted with an air pipe, but Small suffocated. Edwards made calls from pay phones to demand money, and police used call-tracing devices and surveillance to nab Edwards and Rish days after the kidnapping.
