CHICAGO — The upcoming federal trial over a wrongful conviction lawsuit filed by Arturo DeLeon-Reyes in many ways promised to be an only-in-Chicago story.

The sensational double-murder and kidnapping of two small children. Allegedly coerced confessions by a reputedly corrupt Chicago police detective. A Cook County judge years later accusing the detective, Reynaldo Guevara, of telling “bald-faced lies” on the witness stand.

And then the controversial exonerations of DeLeon-Reyes and a co-defendant, despite claims by prosecutors in court — and recently under oath by former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx — that the men were guilty all along.

The trial over all of this had been set to begin Monday before U.S. District Judge Steven Seeger.

Instead, after more than eight years of intense litigation, attorneys for both sides appeared in Seeger’s otherwise empty courtroom to announce they had reached an agreement in principle to settle the case.

The amount of the settlement — which was negotiated in a series of sessions before a magistrate judge — was not disclosed in court because it is pending the approval of the City Council.

Even though he pushed the parties to continue negotiating a settlement, Seeger, who navigated a torrent of motions in the case and during one hearing put a stack of lengthy novels like “Moby Dick” on the bench to illustrate the volume of filings, told the parties he was a bit glum that the trial was off.

“It’s a long-running case that was on the precipice of trial,” Seeger said. “I think this would have been a fun case to try.”

After the hearing, the city law department declined to comment specifically on the settlement, saying in a written statement: “The City and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes have reached a settlement in principle, pending execution of a formal agreement and City Council approval. The amount of that settlement remains confidential until it is presented to City Council.”

Attorneys for the plaintiff also declined to comment.

DeLeon-Reyes’ co-plaintiff, Gabriel Solache, reached a separate settlement last month, court records show. That deal is also pending City Council approval.

The proposed settlements are the latest fallout in a scandal surrounding Guevara’s years as a homicide detective, as dozens of mostly Hispanic men have come forward to accuse him of manipulating lineups, threatening witnesses and beating them into confessing to murder.

To date, there has been nearly $150 million in verdicts and settlements in lawsuits against Guevara, with some 35 more cases pending in U.S. District Court, not counting the DeLeon-Reyes and Solache suits.

Guevara, 82, who retired in 2005 and is still pulling a $91,000 annual city pension, has repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when called to testify in court. That trend was expected to continue at DeLeon-Reyes’ trial, where Guevara was scheduled to testify remotely from his current home in San Antonio.

Unlike in criminal proceedings, attorneys are allowed to argue in a civil case that a defendant invoking the Fifth Amendment is doing so to shield himself from potential criminal liability.

The DeLeon-Reyes and Solache lawsuits are among the more controversial of all the Guevara cases because Cook County prosecutors publicly stated when dropping the murder charges that they believed the two to be guilty.

Both DeLeon-Reyes and Solache were in the U.S. illegally when the crime occurred and returned to Mexico after their release.

Before the settlement was announced Wednesday, Seeger had been ready to rule on a number of key evidentiary issues, including whether portions of Foxx’s recent deposition could be seen by the jury, and whether a certificate of innocence awarded to DeLeon-Reyes was admissible in court.

Seeger had also declined to issue a judicial order to allow DeLeon-Reyes to come back to the U.S. for his testimony — a move that undoubtedly played a role in the plaintiffs’ decision to settle.

Separate juries convicted Solache and Reyes in 2000 of fatally stabbing Mariana Soto, 43, and his wife, Jacinta, 35, and kidnapping their two children in a plot that prosecutors at the time said was motivated by a woman’s desire for a baby.

The woman, Adriana Mejia, who allegedly planned the attack in order to steal the couple’s 2-month-old daughter, is serving a life sentence in state prison and has not wavered from her original statement that DeLeon-Reyes and Solache helped her carry out the nefarious plot, which she furthered by faking a pregnancy.

Solache and Reyes later filed post-conviction petitions claiming Guevara beat them into confessing to the murders. In 2017, prosecutors took the unusual step of granting Guevara immunity from prosecution to try and keep the defendants from winning a new trial.

But that strategy backfired for prosecutors when Guevara gave muddled testimony that then-Cook County Criminal Court Judge James Obbish said could not be trusted. In his ruling, Obbish tossed out the confessions, castigating Guevara for lying on the stand and saying his testimony would no longer be reliable in any court proceedings.

“He showed what he was made of,” Obbish said then. “He tried to just weasel and wiggle himself out of a situation he wasn’t even in,” the judge said.

In dropping the charges weeks later, Eric Sussman, who at the time was Foxx’s top assistant, called it “a tragic day for justice in Cook County.”

Last month, Foxx revealed for the first time in a sworn deposition in a different Guevara-related lawsuit that she felt the same way about the allegations against DeLeon-Reyes and Solache.

“We offered Detective Guevara immunity on a case, on a post-conviction case, in which there was — we believed that the evidence suggested that — or that the defendants had committed a heinous act of murder,” Foxx testified, according to a transcript in court records.

Foxx testified that even though Guevara was granted immunity, “he then came into court and was subsequently found by that judge because he refused to testify, his memory was fuzzy, and that judge said that he would no longer be credible in any court in Cook County.”

Attorneys for Guevara and the city wanted to be able to tell the jury about Foxx’s statements at trial in DeLeon-Reyes’ lawsuit. Seeger had yet to rule on that request.

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