Authors: Mike Riley
Cold Cases Solved: True Stories of Murders That Took Years or Decades to Solve (Murder, Scandals and Mayhem Book 8)
Copyright
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Legal notice: The author and publisher of this book (and any accompanying materials) have made their best efforts in preparing the material. The author and publisher make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this book. The information contained in this book is strictly for educational purposes. Therefore, if you wish to apply ideas contained in this book, you are taking full responsibility for your actions.
Be sure to check out Mike Riley’s other books:
Hollywood Murders and Scandals: Tinsel Town After Dark
“In the late afternoon, her friends recalled, Monroe began to act strangely seeming to be heavily under the influence. She made statements to friend Peter Lawford that he should tell the President goodbye and tell himself goodbye.”
More Hollywood Murders and Scandals: Tinsel Town After Dark
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At some point in the night Reeves and Lemmon began to argue. As Reeves headed upstairs to his bedroom, Lemmon would later tell officers that she shouted out that he would probably shoot himself.”
Murders Unsolved: Cases That Have Baffled The Authorities For Years
“The body was wrapped in a plaid blanket, and placed inside a box that had once held a baby’s bassinet purchased from J.C. Penney’s. The boy was clean and dry, and recently groomed. However, he looked to be undernourished. Clumps of hair found on the body suggested he had been groomed after death.”
Murders Unsolved Vol. 2: More Cases That Have Baffled the Authorities for Years
“McLeod first stopped at a payphone, but he didn’t have any money, and so he drove to a nearby restaurant that was just opening. They didn’t have a phone, but the owner gave him money to go back and use the payphone. He drove back and called the Sarasota police. Initially he was told he had to call the county Sheriff, but he responded that he didn’t have any more money for more calls and then said, “They’re all dead.”
America’s Early Serial Killers: Five Cases of Frontier Madness
“We tend to think of those early settlers as hard working, decent people only looking for religious freedom and better opportunities for their families. However, even during those times, people existed who were depraved, evil and mentally ill. These are some of their stories.”
Lost and Missing: True Stories of People Gone Missing and Never Found
“Police launched a massive search, reaching miles away from where the children were last seen in all directions. However, no evidence or any of their belongings were ever found. Even if three children could have been swept out to sea unnoticed on a crowded beach, what happened to their towels, clothes, and other items?”
Lost and Missing Vol. 2: More True Stories of People Gone Missing and Never Found
“Interestingly, it was discovered that the same day of the three women’s disappearance, a concrete foundation was being poured at a hospital nearby. It would have perhaps been an ideal place to dispose of three bodies, but there is no evidence to support any such claim. It’s rumoured that ground-penetrating radar discovered three anomalies in the set concrete, but it has never been dug up.”
The worst thing most people can imagine is to have a loved one taken from them. All over the world, since the beginning of time people have taken each other’s lives. It’s called Murder. The word “murder” comes from the Middle English word mordre. It means to take a life in secret or unlawfully.
In the past, even with the diligent attempts and the best resources available to the authorities, many crimes including murders were never solved. In some cases the detective work was less than adequate and vital clues slipped through the fingers of those who could have solved the case earlier
.
Also, typically
two detectives were assigned to solve each case and they were responsible for all of the components required to bring a criminal to court.
As technology has improved and become ever increasingly sophisticated, some crimes that were long ago considered “cold cases” have been reexamined and actually solved! Many of them have been solved through the use of DNA matching. Some others because of guilt where people can’t keep their secret any longer and some just plain old good detective work.
The FBI has two key components that provide support to police departments requiring assistance in solving violent crimes. The Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) uses behavioral sciences and has elevated the level of sophistication involved in solving violent crimes.
The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), is the largest information repository for investigation of major violent crimes in the US. It allows law enforcement agencies to identify patterns of violent crimes. ViCAP has been in use for over 25 years.
Please enjoy the following stories of cold cases that have finally been solved. There are cases that were decades old before they were solved and some more recent. The thing they have in common is that the perpetrator or perpetrators have finally been identified, and if possible, punished for their crimes.
The families and friends of the victims can have some sense of closure to their tragedies and with hope live the rest of their lives in peace.
Victim:
Maria Ridulph
Location:
Sycamore, Illinois
Suspect:
John Tessier
Date of Crime:
December 3, 1957
Date of Conviction:
September 14, 2012
Backstory:
Maria Ridulph was the youngest of four children born to Michael and Frances Ridulph. Born on March 12, 1950, she grew up with two older sisters and one older brother in Sycamore, Illinois, a farming community of seven thousand.
Ridulph’s father worked in one of the few factories in the area. Her mother was a stay at home mom. In 1957, Ridulph was in the second grade. Just 3’ 8” tall, she did very well at school, gaining a place as an honor student. She also had awards for perfect attendance at Sunday school at her family’s church.
Her mother described her as “high strung” and “…a nervous girl”. She claimed that Ridulph was very loud when upset, and also afraid of the dark. Did these tendencies ultimately lead to her demise?
On The Day In Question:
Tuesday December 3, 1957 was an ordinary day in the Ridulph household. Ridulph had attended school that day, and had her best friend, Kathy Sigman, over to play in the afternoon.
After each girl had eaten dinner at their own house, Ridulph pleaded with her parents to allow her to go outside again. The first snow flurries of the season had started and she was keen to go outside and play in the snow. Ridulph wanted to meet her friend Sigman again at the intersection of Center Cross Street and Archie Place, a favorite hangout.
Interestingly, since Halloween someone had been scrawling obscene messages on a tree at the intersection, using chalk. However, if Ridulph’s parents knew about the messages, it did not prevent them from giving her permission to play there.
Excited to go out, Ridulph called Sigman, and after she also had permission, they met on the corner of the intersection. They played there for a while, ducking between the tree and a street pole, ‘avoiding’ headlights from oncoming cars. In the small mid-western town in the 1950’s, everyone knew everyone else, and it was seen as perfectly safe for the two girls to play outside alone.
According to a later description from Sigman, a man in his early twenties approached the girls on the corner. She described him as being tall, with a slender chin. He had light colored hair done in the famous ‘ducktail’ style of the era, and was wearing a colorful sweater. He also had a gap in his front teeth. The man spoke to the girls, telling them his name was “Johnny”, and asking if they liked dolls. He told the girls that he was twenty-four years old and unmarried.
Ridulph went into her house just three doors down and retrieved a doll to show Johnny, and then the man gave her a piggyback ride. While Ridulph was retrieving the doll, Sigman much later reported that Johnny asked her if she wanted to go for a walk around the block, or on a trip in a car, truck or bus. She told him no. Johnny then told her she was pretty, but looking back on the scene, an older Sigman says she could sense that he had his sights set on Maria.
When Ridulph returned, Sigman felt cold and so went to her own house to get her mittens, and when she returned both Ridulph and Johnny had disappeared.
Sigman immediately went into Ridulph’s home and told Ridulph’s parents that she couldn’t find her. Initially thinking that she was hiding, they sent her eleven-year-old brother out to find her. He found no trace of his little sister, but he did find her doll lying abandoned next to a neighbor’s garage. It was then that a sense of foreboding first came over him.
After searching for an hour and coming up empty handed, Ridulph’s parents called the police. Police and armed civilians were searching for Ridulph within an hour. They searched the entire neighborhood, including opening cellars and looking inside cars.
Investigation:
The initial searches failed to find Ridulph, and the case was starting to gain national attention. It even caught the attention of President Eisenhower, and the FBI arrived within two days to assist with the search. Back in 1957, there was nothing like an Amber Alert or milk carton photos of missing children. The kidnapping of a small girl at that time shattered long held beliefs of decency and safety. The case was huge news.
Police searched every car entering or leaving the small town. Citizens were urged to leave outside lights on, and to immediately report anything suspicious. Roadblocks were set up, and every single house in the town was searched. They also searched known hangouts, storm drains, public bus stations, and even set off dynamite in a quarry. They never found a thing.
Reporters from all over the country arrived in the small town, traveling from as far as New York and Chicago. The director of the FBI, then J. Edgar Hoover, demanded daily updates from the investigation.
As the only witness, and for fear of her own safety, Sigman was put into protective custody. Both the local police and the FBI were concerned that the kidnapper would come back and take or harm her to prevent her from identifying him.
Law enforcement had Sigman look repeatedly at mug shots of people who resembled the man she described, but she never picked anyone out. The police also closely examined anyone in the town and the surrounding county that had a prior conviction for child molestation. However, this too revealed no leads.
When she had been missing for three weeks, Ridulph’s tearful parents appeared on TV, pleading for their daughter’s release and for her to return home unharmed. However, there would be little further development in the case for four months, until the fateful day of April 26, 1958.
On that day, a retired farmer named Frank Sitar was searching for mushrooms with his wife, when they stumbled across a terrible find. Under a partially fallen tree they discovered the skeletal remains of a small child. The skeleton was still fully clothed, minus shoes. Based on the remaining clothing and dental records the body was identified as Maria Ridulph.
The body was found over one hundred and twenty miles from her hometown, but still within the State of Illinois. Because the case did not cross state lines, the FBI withdrew at this point.
It seems strange to us in this day and age, but perhaps the 1950’s were a more innocent time, as the coroner did not take a single photo of the crime scene, worried that the photos would be leaked to the newspapers. These days, no doubt multiple photos would be taken and may appear online. It is unknown whether the lack of crime scene photos had an influence on eventually solving the case.
Decomposition, plus damage to the remains from animals, prevented a definitive cause of death, though the autopsy revealed injuries to Ridulph’s chest and throat, indicative of being stabbed.
Though her body had been found, no further leads of note were discovered. DNA testing did not exist, and there were no further witnesses beyond eight-year-old Sigman’s description of the man they had been playing with. No one had seen him actually take Ridulph. Much of the physical evidence, such as Ridulph’s doll that the killer handled, was eventually lost to the passage of time.
The world moved on, and the case of Ridulph’s murder would lay unsolved for fifty-four years.
Current Status:
In 1994, a woman named Eileen Tessier was on her deathbed, and as a dying confession she told her daughters that she had provided her son with a false alibi some thirty-six years earlier.
Tessier’s son, John Tessier, had changed his name to Jack Daniel McCullough. His half-sister, Janet Tessier, reported him to the Illinois State Police. His other sister, Mary Pat, was also in the room, but it has been reported that even the two sisters cannot exactly agree on what their mother said.
Since the confession, Janet Tessier had been trying to find a law enforcement agency that would take another look at the case based on her information.
Two previous attempts to contact law enforcement had been dismissed. Tessier reports that she was told the deathbed confession was inadmissible in a court of law, and that there was no longer any physical evidence that could be used. It would be another fourteen years before the case would break wide open.
In 2008, the Illinois State Police took on the case, and started an extensive background check into Tessier, and most importantly, his alibi. Using a picture of him from 1957, investigators found an old girlfriend of Tessier’s.
When contacted, she reported that she had found an unused train ticket dated December 1957. The ticket was to Rockford, Illinois. Tessier’s alibi was that he was traveling to Rockford on December 3
rd
for a medical exam to enlist in the US Air Force. Police realized the ticket had never been used and it was highly likely that Tessier had in fact been in town the day Ridulph disappeared.
They established a timeline of that day, and realized that it was possible that Tessier had enough time to take Ridulph, kill her, drive her body to where it was eventually found, and then return to town. Investigators were also able to locate childhood friends of Tessier’s that placed him in town on that day.
Police found Sigman, now an adult, and showed her a lineup of six photos of teenagers, all of whom had lived in Sycamore in 1957. For the first time, it included a photo of Tessier as he had appeared then. It was more than fifty years later, but she immediately identified him as “Johnny”.
Another three years passed and in 2011 Tessier was finally brought in for questioning. He had been found living in a retirement community, working there as a security guard. Ironically, he had for the most part lived a law-abiding life. After rising to the rank of captain in the military, he retired from active duty and became a police officer in the state of Washington.
However, in 1971 he was fired and charged with sexual assault after a fourteen-year-old runaway he had taken into his home accused him of touching her and forcing her to have sex with him.
Despite the allegations, he was allowed to plead guilty to simple assault, a misdemeanor. It was after the conviction that he changed his name, allegedly to honor his mother with her surname. Many however believe it was to avoid further suspicion landing on him for other crimes.
Because of his own professional experience working in law enforcement and the military, Illinois State Police decided to bring in a professional interrogator to interview Tessier. Investigators reported that during the interview he was calm and co-operative.
However when the questions turned to his involvement in Ridulph’s murder, he is reported to have become evasive and aggressive. He refused to answer any further questions, and was arrested for Ridulph’s kidnapping and murder in July 2011.
That same month, investigators exhumed and examined Ridulph’s body, but no new evidence was found.
Wary of going to trial with only circumstantial evidence, the prosecution decided to first move forward with a case against Tessier for another sexual assault he had allegedly been involved in – the gang rape of his own sister.
With the same prosecutor taking the lead in both cases, the first went to trial in the spring of 2012. Evidence included police reports about Tessier’s interest in young girls. Witnesses included his sister, other siblings, and the girl he was accused of sexually assaulting when he was a police officer in 1971.
The defense argued that his sister’s story could not be corroborated. She had not told her story to anyone else before Tessier had been arrested for Ridulph’s murder, and there was no remaining physical evidence to suggest rape. After so many years it was highly unlikely that there would be any physical evidence to collect, whether the act was consensual or not.
Tessier did not take the stand, and after just one day of deliberations the judge dismissed the case, saying that the prosecution had failed to prove that a rape had occurred.
Undeterred, in September of 2012 the same prosecutor took Tessier to trial for Ridulph’s murder. Their argument was that at first he meant to only kidnap Ridulph, but then ended up killing her instead. Evidence included the original autopsy reports. Though, perhaps learning from the first trial, as there was no physical evidence of sexual assault, they did not raise it at all in this trial.
The defense’s argument was similar, there was no physical evidence linking Tessier to the crimes, and law enforcement was unable to prove he had even been in the area on the day in question. They also accused the prosecution of being under pressure to close the case after the alleged deathbed confession from Tessier’s mother became publically known.