SYCAMORE, Illinois (CNN) – Chapter 1: A child is taken
Maria was the pretty one, slight and graceful at 7 with big brown eyes that shined with warmth and intelligence. Everyone said the second-grader was special and Kathy, who was a year older, felt honored to be her friend.
They lived a few doors away from each other on a side street called Archie Place. It was their whole world in 1957, a time when children played hide-and-seek outside instead of watching television. People didn’t lock their doors in this Midwestern farm town because everyone knew everybody else.
Sycamore and its 7,000 souls felt safe on the morning of December 3, 1957, but the feeling wouldn’t last.
That first Tuesday in December started like any other for Maria Ridulph and Kathy Sigman, with a short walk across the street to West Elementary School. It was cold, with a promise of snow in the air. After school, they went to Maria’s house to cut out paper snowflakes.
A few blocks away, a man in an overcoat spotted two other girls walking along State Street by the public library and tried to strike up a conversation. It was 4:15 p.m. The girls felt uneasy, so they ducked into a restaurant. When they emerged, the man was gone — but he’d left something disturbing behind. Scattered on the sidewalk were half a dozen photographs of nude women.
That wasn’t Sycamore’s only peculiar hint of the dirty and forbidden. Since Halloween, someone had been scrawling obscenities in chalk on a tree and stop sign at the intersection of Center Cross Street and Archie Place. Maria and Kathy made plans to play there after dinner. It was a favorite spot they hadn’t been to since summer.
At 5 p.m. sharp, Kathy went home. Maria’s family gathered around the table for her favorite supper: rabbit, carrots, potatoes and milk. She finished off two rabbit legs, but barely touched her vegetables. She pleaded to go back outside as the first flurries of the season started to swirl in the night sky.
Excited, she called Kathy on the phone: I can go outside tonight, can you?
Kathy lived in a white cottage at the end of a long driveway, and her family was the first on the block to own a clothes dryer. Her freshly laundered jeans still felt warm as she met Maria at mid-block and they raced in the dark to the massive elm tree on the corner. They were playing “duck the cars” — scurrying back and forth between the tree and a street pole, trying to avoid the headlights from oncoming cars — when a good-looking young man approached. He wore his blond hair swept back in a ducktail. Kathy remembers his narrow face, big teeth and high, thin voice. She’d never seen him before.
Hello, little girls, he said. Are you having fun?
He asked whether they wanted piggyback rides and gave his name as “Johnny.” He told Kathy and Maria that he was 24 and wasn’t married.
Do you like dollies?
The girls nodded.
By the time these events were recalled in a Sycamore courtroom 55 years later, memories had faded and many details noted in police and FBI reports were lost to time.
But nobody could forget the piggyback ride. That was how Johnny won Maria over.
Down he trotted, 20 feet to the south along Center Cross Street and back again, Maria giggling with glee on his shoulders. When it was over, she ran to her house, three doors away at 616 Archie Place, to fetch a doll for the next piggyback ride.
Kathy waited on the sidewalk with Johnny. He asked whether she wanted to take a walk around the block or go on a trip in a truck, car or bus. No, she told him. He told her she was pretty, but she sensed it was Maria he liked more.
Maria burst into her house to find her father, Michael, in the living room watching a Western. Her mother, Frances, was reading a newspaper. Maria picked out a favorite doll from the toys piled by the door, but her mother suggested she take an older rubber doll out into the snow instead.
Kathy felt a chill as Maria joined them on the sidewalk. Now it was Kathy’s turn to run home, to fetch her mittens. She asked Maria to come along, but she didn’t want to go.
When Kathy returned a few minutes later, Maria and Johnny were gone.
The trouble with cold cases
The kidnapping and murder of Maria Ridulph is the nation’s oldest cold case to go to trial. It required family members to turn against one of their own and haunted a small town for 55 years. Even now, the case may not be over.
Maria was taken in a more innocent time — decades before Amber Alerts and photos of missing children on milk cartons became part of our cultural landscape. In 1957, the kidnapping of a little girl shattered everyone’s sense of safety. It was huge news.
Reporters flocked to Sycamore from the big city papers in Chicago and New York and from the fledgling television networks. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover demanded daily updates from his men and sent teletypes with detailed instructions. President Dwight D. Eisenhower followed the case. But the weeks of urgent activity were followed by half a century of silence.
Secrets often lie at the heart of crimes that remain unsolved so long they are said to go “cold.” Most are cracked by advances in science, or by someone’s need to come clean.
In the Ridulph case, there was no DNA, no confession by the killer. This mystery was solved by circumstantial evidence amassed over four years by bulldog cops and other outsiders who came to Sycamore to stand up for a little girl whose life was stolen.
But it is difficult to reconstruct the past in a courtroom. People die, memories fade and facts can become distorted by the passage of time or shaded by personal grudges and agendas.
As tough as it is to build a cold case, it may be even harder to defend one. Imagine trying to explain what you were doing a year ago. Now imagine trying to explain what you were doing a lifetime ago.
The man convicted last September of kidnapping and murdering Maria Ridulph maintains his innocence. His wife of nearly 20 years and his stepdaughter say he was sacrificed to bring peace of mind to Sycamore. An appeal has been filed and likely will take two years or more to be heard.
Winning a conviction in a crime that occurred in 1957 is a remarkable accomplishment — proof that no one should get away with murder, even if justice takes 55 years. But a close examination of the case by CNN raises questions about the strength of the evidence, the motives of some of the witnesses and the ability of the court system to fairly and accurately reconstruct history.
The case was reopened after a dying woman implicated her own son 36 years after the fact. Her words, as recalled by two of her daughters, were somewhat cryptic, and there’s no way to seek clarification. Even the daughters don’t agree on what she said. And, separate from this crime, two siblings had powerful reasons to fear and despise their half brother.
Much of the physical evidence in the case was lost or destroyed over the years, including Maria’s doll, which was handled by her killer. Instead, prosecutors relied heavily on evidence that in the past has often proven unreliable: eyewitness identification and the testimony of informants.
Eyewitness identification is not as simple as it might seem. Factors influencing misidentification include the witness’s distance from the perpetrator, the lighting at the crime scene and the conditions under which a witness later views a lineup. Jailhouse informants bring their own baggage: They’re criminals, or at least accused of crimes, and can be looking to trade testimony for leniency.
In the Ridulph case, three inmates locked up with the suspect told different stories about how he described killing Maria: by dropping her on her head, or by suffocating or strangling her while trying to silence her cries.
Yet a forensic pathologist testified Maria was stabbed.
The eyewitness whose testimony was crucial in winning a conviction was a child when she saw the kidnapper for just a few moments. More than half a century passed before she picked him out in a photo lineup. She is certain she chose the right man, but others question whether she picked up cues from the investigators and tried to please them with her choice. They wonder whether the photo itself — slightly different from the others she was shown — could have prejudiced her.
Illinois is second only to Texas in mistaken eyewitness identifications, according to the Innocence Project, which began its work in 1992. Faulty identifications played a role in 24 cases — more than half of the state’s 43 wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA evidence. Nationwide, 75% of 309 wrongful convictions involved faulty eyewitness identifications; 15% were based partly on the testimony of informants who later recanted or were proven to have lied.
It was the job of Judge James Hallock to sort everything out. The defense requested a bench trial, and so prosecutors had to prove guilt to just one person, not 12. That one person, Hallock, had little experience with murder trials.
Hallock’s verdict in this case came after four days of testimony. It was based, the judge said, on the credibility of the eyewitness and the jailhouse informants.
He expressed confidence that his decision would be upheld on appeal.
The goal in every trial is a fair hearing of both sides. And in most trials, witnesses take the stand to recount what they saw with their own eyes, what they heard with their own ears. But in cold cases, those witnesses often are dead.
When that’s true, prosecutors and defendants are sometimes forced to rely on second-hand evidence known as hearsay. And in some states, including Illinois, the law is evolving to allow hearsay evidence under exceptional circumstances.
In this cold case, a hearsay statement that favored the prosecution was allowed into evidence; other hearsay evidence that favored the defense was kept out. And so, a mother was able to accuse her son from the grave, but his alibi, buried in thousands of pages of old FBI reports, was never presented in court.
A man was convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life. A victim’s family embraced long-awaited justice, and Sycamore breathed a sigh of relief. But was the courtroom reconstruction of history unfairly one-sided?
Was justice really served?
‘I can’t find Maria!’
“Mah-reeeee-ah!”
Kathy ran up and down Archie Place, calling her best friend’s name as a gentle snow fell on the evening of December 3, 1957. There was no sign of Maria.
Kathy rushed up to a side door at the Ridulphs’ house, where Maria’s big brother, Chuck, was spinning records on the hi-fi with his friend Randy. Maria’s lost, she told them. I can’t find Maria!
Chuck and Randy set out down Archie Place, all the way to the corner of Fair Street, by the elementary school. The boys saw a police car go by and realized — too late — that they should have stopped it. They headed back home.
By then, Kathy had told her mother about the nice man who called himself Johnny. More details emerged as Maria’s mother, Frances, and Kathy’s mother, Flora, exchanged several frantic phone calls.
Maria’s father was reluctant to summon police because he didn’t want to be embarrassed if she had just wandered off. About a year earlier, Maria had strayed several blocks away to Elmwood Cemetery while playing. She turned up just as a search party organized.
But Frances Ridulph let worry overrule her husband. She drove to the Sycamore police station to report her daughter missing. It was 8:10 p.m.
Chuck continued looking for Maria, but the 11-year-old wasn’t yet sure how concerned he should be about the little sister he walked to school every morning. He traipsed down a long driveway and through a garden that opened onto a field. Then he circled back to the alley that ran behind their home, where a sense of foreboding overcame him. There, next to Ida Johnson’s garage, a searcher spotted Maria’s doll.
That evening, men pounded on the door of 227 Center Cross Street, the home of Ralph and Eileen Tessier. Ralph ran the hardware store, and the men wanted him to open up so they could gather up flashlights and lanterns to use in the search.
The Tessiers were a large family crammed into small quarters about two blocks from the Ridulphs. Eileen was Ralph’s Irish-born war bride who’d sailed to the United States on the Queen Mary with her son John from an earlier marriage. Together the couple would have six children: Katheran, Jeanne, Mary Pat, Bob, Janet and Nancy.
The girls resented the way their mother seemed to favor John. At 18, he was artistic, a bit of a dreamer. He seemed to get a pass with her even when he screwed up. He was expelled for pushing a teacher and calling her an unsavory name. But in their mother’s eyes, he could do no wrong.
Ralph Tessier, who had just arrived home from picking up 12-year-old Katheran at a 4-H social, joined the men in the search that night. Eileen headed to the armory, where the women were making sandwiches and coffee for the searchers. Before they left, the couple locked the front door, even though the key had been lost for years. The back door didn’t lock at all, so Ralph jammed it shut with a board.
The girls huddled with Bob inside; they’d have to let their parents back in when they returned.
They said they saw no sign of John.
In the days to come, police would knock on the door and question Eileen Tessier about the events of December 3. The older girls stood back and listened as their mother told the officers something they knew wasn’t true: John was home all night.
‘I know she is still alive’
The headline on the front page of Sycamore’s afternoon paper screamed the bad news that everybody in town already knew: “Missing Girl, 7, Feared Kidnapped.”
Foul play was suspected, but there were no clues. When she vanished, the newspaper said, Maria was wearing a brown, three-quarter-length coat, black corduroy slacks, brown socks and freshly polished saddle shoes. She was 43 inches tall, weighed about 55 pounds, and wore her hair in a wavy brown bob with bangs.
The man who called himself Johnny, police said, wore a striped sweater of blue, yellow and green. He had long, blond hair that curled in the front and flopped onto his forehead.
Already, there were conflicting reports about the exact time of Maria’s disappearance. Was she snatched closer to 6 p.m.? Or did it happen later, at about 7? Police and FBI reports, as well as news accounts from the time, contain details that support both scenarios.
Sycamore’s police chief, William Hindenburg, told FBI agents that Kathy and Maria went out to play at 6:02 p.m., but the DeKalb County sheriff said Maria didn’t call Kathy and ask her to come out and play until 6:30. Maria’s mother later altered her original estimate, saying the girls could have been outside as early as 10 minutes to 6.
When the case was reopened half a century later, every minute would matter.
As the days passed, Maria’s mother pleaded with the kidnapper for her daughter’s safe return. “God forgives mistakes. We would, too,” Frances Ridulph, 44, said, using the media to send a message to whoever might have her daughter. Maria was “nervous,” she said, a nail biter who could quickly become hysterical if things didn’t go her way.
Maria would make a noise if something seemed wrong, her mother said. And no kidnapper “would put up with that for long.”
“Whoever took her away hit her weak spot. He played with her,” the frantic mother added. On television, she delivered a message to her baby: “Don’t cry, Maria. Above all, don’t cry. Don’t make a fuss. We’ll be with you soon.”
Maria’s father, Michael, who earned $80 a week at a wire and cable factory in Sycamore, scolded reporters camped out at the police station: “For God’s sake, quit saying she is dead. I know she is still alive. Nobody would have any reason to kill her.”
Later, he pulled one reporter aside and explained, “I want fathers to help look for my little girl.”
Chuck Ridulph accompanied his dad to the fire station on the morning of December 4 and was assigned to a search team. Hundreds of people fanned out over the fields surrounding Sycamore. Others opened car trunks and cellar doors.
“People were even carrying guns,” he recalled.
In a neighborhood called Johnson’s Greenhouse, where new streets were going in, Chuck was asked to climb down a manhole because he was the only one in the search party small enough to fit. Later, searchers joined hands as they walked in a line through the frozen cornfields where Sycamore High School now stands. They found a gunnysack of abandoned kittens, and that unnerved Chuck. Other searchers discovered a torn, bloody petticoat in a farm field, but it was not Maria’s.
Two FBI agents took up residence in the Ridulphs’ parlor. A half dozen crop-dusters and military planes circled the sky, searching. The J-11 Roping Club sent riders out on horseback.
Local police with bullhorns urged residents to keep their porch lights on and report anything suspicious. The Illinois State Police set up half a dozen roadblocks; railroad cars, motel rooms and the bus station were searched — as was every house in Sycamore.
Maria’s doll and blue hairbrush were shipped off to the FBI lab near Washington for analysis. So were her schoolbooks, a toy oven, a tin saxophone and records of songs such as “Three Little Kittens” and “The Farmer in the Dell.” They bore witness to a childhood interrupted.
Her little friend, Kathy Sigman, found herself under 24-hour police guard. The family doctor checked her for signs of sexual molestation. The newspapers ran a picture of Kathy showing off her mittens and pointing to the corner where Maria was snatched.
Kathy spent hours poring over mug shots of ex-cons and what police called “known perverts,” but she didn’t see Johnny. She remembers the shouting reporters and flashing camera bulbs that appeared every time she was escorted to a police lineup. At first, she enjoyed the attention, but as the case dragged on she felt exposed, like she was being put on display.
She recalls her mother bending down, placing her hands on her shoulders and looking her square in the eye.
Remember his face, Kathy, she said. You have to remember his face because you are the only one who can catch him. You are the only one who knows what he looks like.
‘We have found exactly nothing’
There was no ransom note. No phone call from the kidnapper. Authorities believed Maria’s abductor had a twisted motive: He was a sexual predator.
The police chief was certain nobody from Sycamore would do such a thing. It had to be the work of a trucker or someone else passing through. The FBI wasn’t so sure. As its investigation revealed, there was no shortage of potential suspects in town.
Hindenburg, the police chief, told reporters his men had rounded up and questioned “all known sexual deviates.” They looked into a local Peeping Tom and followed tips about men nicknamed “Commando” and “Mr. X.”
Investigators dug up a collapsed grave at Elmwood Cemetery. They traced freight cars that passed through Sycamore the night Maria went missing. They scoured lovers’ lanes, drained a lake, set off dynamite in a quarry. And still they came up empty.
“We have chased down countless clues, and we have found exactly nothing,” said a frustrated Carl A. Swanson, the state’s attorney. FBI agents came and went, according to a writer for one of the Chicago papers, “checking into everything with the quiet persistence of bulldogs.”
Three days after Maria vanished, an anonymous female caller alerted the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office to a boy named “Treschner” who lived in the neighborhood and fit the suspect’s description. A pair of FBI agents showed up at the Tessier home on December 8.
Ralph and Eileen Tessier acknowledged that they had talked about how their son, John, fit the general description, but they insisted he was not in Sycamore when Maria was taken: He was 40 miles away, in Rockford, enlisting in the U.S. Air Force.
Phone records seemed to verify their story. Someone had made a collect call from Rockford to the Tessier home at about 7 p.m. John Tessier and his parents said he called for a ride home. This was the second alibi Eileen Tessier had given for her son. Earlier, as her daughters listened, she’d told Sycamore police that John was home all night.
Nobody questioned the young Tessier sisters, and they kept silent.
‘Unusual individuals’
After a week of fruitless searching, authorities alerted residents to look out for scavengers: “It is entirely possible that her body has been discarded in a field or a nearby farm. Be alert to large gatherings of buzzards and crows, and if a body is located make sure nothing is touched.”
The FBI was running out of steam.
“Our temporary office at Sycamore has been functioning for two weeks. Per diem cost for 29 agents is $3,600,” Chicago’s supervisor wrote in a December 15 memo to Hoover. They’d tracked down 250 leads and processed 200 suspects — “all with negative results.”
Agents still had about 125 leads to go.
The Chicago G-man found it “most peculiar” that such a rigorous investigation had not turned up a suspect. The locals were passing on tips about “all of their homosexuals, queers and fairies, etc.” when the FBI was looking for “sex deviants of a different kind,” the supervisor wrote in the pejorative and politically incorrect language of 1957.
Agents were hampered by the “sheer volume” of leads, he stated, adding this observation: “I have never seen as small a city as Sycamore with such a large volume of these unusual individuals.”
Hoover urged them to keep going: “This case must receive continuous, aggressive, imaginative, investigative attention.”
The best evidence they had was Kathy’s story. Some of the details varied — did Johnny have a missing tooth or a gap in his teeth? But she never wavered on the core facts. An agent described her as “the most completely mature little girl I have ever seen,” seemingly fearless during questioning and police lineups. “She has remained steadfast,” he reported, even though the FBI’s bulldogs had “ridden her hard.”
It was a somber holiday season in Sycamore. The local papers carried front-page stories about the Ridulphs, including a large photo of Maria’s family sitting by their Christmas tree. Her mother had bought a typewriter for Maria and wrapped her other gifts.
Their leads exhausted, the FBI agents packed up and went home for the holidays. With no new developments, the case dropped from the headlines, but folks in town remained jittery. One Chicago newspaper noted at the end of January that Sycamore was afflicted with “a wound that won’t heal.” The place had changed, and not for the better.
“Let a strange man walk down an alley in Sycamore today and the police are likely to get a call,” said James E. Boyle, an assistant prosecutor who went on to become state’s attorney, and then a judge. “I tried to help two young girls across a busy intersection the other day. They just looked at me wide-eyed.”
The giant elm tree on the corner of Archie Place and Center Cross Street was cut down. Sycamore settled into a fugue state.
Looking back, Kathy remembers her childhood in two parts: Before Maria was taken, and after.
“We were safe before, but not afterward,” she said. “People can disappear in big cities but somebody doesn’t disappear in a small town like Sycamore.”
‘There wasn’t much left to her’
Maria was found in the spring, 120 miles from home. A man scrounging for morel mushrooms found her skeleton tucked under a fallen tree on Roy Cahill’s farm off U.S. 20 outside Woodbine, not far from the Iowa border.
Birds and animals had fed on her corpse, clad only in a black-and-white checked shirt, an undershirt and brown socks.
At a coroner’s inquest, Frank A. Sitar, a retiree from Minnesota, described the scene he encountered on the afternoon of April 26, 1958:
“I thought it was an old deer hide. I came up to it then and I could see some bones and I thought somebody had shot a dog. Then I looked closer, and it looked like human bones. I noticed the jacket, but I didn’t pay any attention to it until I noticed the skull. Then I started to look further, and I noticed the hair. And I saw then that it was a little girl.”
He walked back to the car, told his wife, and they drove to a farmhouse and summoned authorities.
“There wasn’t much left to her,” observed James Furlong, the 28-year-old rookie coroner of Jo Daviess County. Son of the local funeral home director, he’d never handled a murder case before. No crime scene photos were taken, he said, because he didn’t want them “slobbered all over the front pages.”
Neither the autopsy nor the inquest determined a cause of death, beyond “suspected foul play.”
Frances Ridulph always said if a child’s body was found wearing brown socks, it would be Maria. Sure enough, the size and manufacturer’s information stamped on the instep of Maria’s socks could still be read. Her mother touched the patch she’d sewn on the black-and-white flannel shirt, recognizing the material. Dental records confirmed what the family already knew.
Maria was laid to rest in a small white casket on a warm spring day. An overflow crowd, at least 300, filled the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. John. Her friend Kathy was there under police guard.
Maria was remembered as a bright little girl who had a perfect attendance record at Sunday school.
“This little girl has entered into everlasting peace, probably on the night she was taken,” said the Rev. Louis I. Going. “Maria was taken out of life through unusual circumstances, but nothing could deprive her of God-given salvation.”
The church organist played “Jesus Loves Me.” It was Maria’s favorite hymn.
The trail goes cold
The disappearance and death of her best friend never left Kathy. Nothing could fill the space where Maria once was — the games, the laughter, the shared secrets. She was left with survivor’s guilt and the social stigma of being connected to a notorious crime.
“It robbed me of my childhood,” she said recently. “I was labeled. I was the girl who was with Maria. A lot of parents wouldn’t let their girls play with me. They were afraid he’d come back and take their child.
“I couldn’t wait to get out of Sycamore. It bothered me my whole life why he took her and not me. For years I would ask myself, ‘Was she prettier than I was?’”
Kathy’s family moved away from Archie Place in 1961 to a subdivision on the outskirts of town. When a young man named Mike Chapman met her at a bowling alley, his mother tried to talk him out of dating her. “Don’t you know who she is?” the mother asked. “She’s the one who was with Maria. Can’t you find someone else?”
But Mike wanted only Kathy, and she knew he was the key to a new life. They left Sycamore in 1969 and married in San Antonio, Texas, where Mike attended technical school. They moved around a bit, then settled in Tampa, Florida, before returning to Sycamore to care for aging parents. They raised three children.
Kathy says her own parents were so overprotective she felt like a prisoner. As a mother, she went the other way, letting her kids make their own decisions and their own mistakes. The couple now lives in St. Charles, about a half-hour drive from Sycamore.
No matter where they went, Kathy looked back over her shoulder.
Johnny was still out there.
Chapter 2: A trail of women wronged
John Tessier left his parents’ house in Sycamore, Illinois, for good on December 11, 1957 — eight days after Maria Ridulph disappeared.
He says he didn’t often think about what happened to the little girl who lived around the corner. He remembers talking with her just once. But he never forgot her.
More than half a century later, police and prosecutors would find it disturbing how Tessier’s voice softened every time he spoke of her beauty and those big brown eyes. He’d smile and his own pale blue eyes would get an odd, faraway look as he told people she was “lovely, lovely, lovely” and “like a little Barbie doll.”
John Tessier is Jack McCullough now. He is 73 years old and recently met with CNN at a state prison in southern Illinois. He told the story of how he protected Maria that one time they met.
He was about 13, he said, and she was tiny, about 3, when he found her wandering alone at the corner of busy Center Cross Street, the very spot from which she would disappear four years later. He said he told her to go home and stood in the middle of the street and watched for cars as she trotted up her driveway and got safely inside.
“You gotta understand,” he said, “we boys protected all of the children in the neighborhood. When Maria was taken, it was an affront. Our lives would never be the same after that. Our neighborhood wasn’t the same anymore.”
Sycamore was changed forever by the Maria Ridulph case — one of the few indisputable facts in the oldest cold case to go to trial in the United States. The case was controversial from the start: It was built on circumstantial evidence, the time of the kidnapping is in dispute and an alibi the defense calls “ironclad” was never presented in court.
Five decades after Maria was kidnapped and killed, cops would call the crime “Sycamore’s 9/11.” It shook the place that hard. But while the town of 7,000 struggled with its loss of innocence, John Tessier spent most of his life elsewhere.
He joined the Air Force, and then the Army. He attended officer training school and served in battle in Vietnam as a lieutenant, twice winning the Bronze Star. He’d always felt destined to be a soldier, he told CNN. After all, John’s grandfather served in Britain, and his mother was in the Royal Air Force, one of the first female searchlight operators during World War II.
In one of his earliest memories, he is being carried up a flight of dark, narrow stairs in London on the back of a soldier. He believes it was his father, killed in the war, giving him a piggyback ride.
With both parents in the military, he spent his youth in the English countryside, in the care of an elderly couple and isolated from other children as war ravaged London.
When he was about 7 and his mother brought him to Sycamore, Tessier seemed an odd duck. He didn’t know how to act around other children. He walked the streets wearing camouflage pants and waving a wooden sword — “Commando,” the neighborhood kids called him. He loved the popular Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” He identified with it.
“My name was Johnny and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to come home the hero,” he told CNN. “My DNA is protector.”
That statement reveals an alarming disconnect between how he views himself and how others who crossed his path describe him.
Some say he was a screw-up. To others, he was a masterful manipulator. To some women, especially the younger ones, he was a lecher and worse, a menacing sexual predator. Later in life, he did settle down with a woman who, with her daughter, came to view him as he always viewed himself — as a mentor and protector.
The FBI showed an interest in John Tessier during the early days of the Maria Ridulph investigation in Sycamore. But 50 years would pass before authorities would look for him again. The four-year investigation took agents with the Illinois State Police from Sycamore to Seattle.
When it was over, Johnny came shuffling home in shackles.
The alibi
Today, police would call him a “person of interest,” someone they want to question. But in 1957, long before televised murder trials and the threat of litigation from people mistakenly tied to crimes, 18-year-old John Tessier was a suspect, pure and simple. Then again, so were 100 other people.
A woman who would not give her name called the sheriff’s office with a tip on December 6, three days after the kidnapping. She told deputies to check out a boy named “Treschner,” who lived not far from Maria and fit the description of the kidnapper who called himself “Johnny.” The FBI found no one named Treschner but zeroed in on John Tessier.
The story of the early investigation is contained in thousands of pages of FBI reports, but most of them remain sealed because of an ongoing investigation the Justice Department would not discuss. CNN obtained about 15 pages from the public court file in Sycamore, and another 200 pages from the National Archives through a public records request. They spell out Tessier’s alibi.
He said then, and he says now, that he was in Rockford, Illinois, some 40 miles northwest of Sycamore, when Maria was kidnapped and that he called home for a ride. His parents backed up his story, and it was supported by a single, indisputable fact: Somebody placed a collect call from Rockford to the Tessier home at 6:57 p.m. on December 3, 1957. The caller gave his name as “John Tassier,” the operator noted.
But almost from the beginning, the timing of Maria’s disappearance was in dispute.
If she was taken around 7, then Tessier seemed to have an ironclad alibi. But if she was grabbed closer to 6:15, then his alibi didn’t cover him. He could have driven from Sycamore to Rockford by 7 p.m. before dumping her body.
Nobody disputes that John traveled December 2 to Chicago to take a physical examination at the military recruiting station on Van Buren Street.
A chest X-ray found a spot, and he failed. He spent the night at a YMCA and returned the next morning for another physical, which he again failed because of the spot, a scar from a childhood bout of tuberculosis.
Tessier said he walked around Chicago the afternoon of December 3, stopping in at a couple of burlesque shows, and then took the 5:15 p.m. train to Rockford, about a 90-minute trip, to drop off paperwork at the recruiting station there.
Recruiters verify that he showed up at their office between 7:15 and 7:30 that evening, after they had closed. He talked with at least two recruiters about getting a note from his doctor to address the spot on his lung. One recruiter told the FBI he thought the nervous young man was a “narcotic,” a drug addict. The other remembered him as “a lost sheep.”
A third recruiter, Staff Sgt. Jon Oswald, met with Tessier the morning of December 4 at the Rockford office. The recruit had a fresh cut on his lip and made small talk, saying it was a good thing that he was not in Sycamore the previous night because of “the disappearance of the girl,” Oswald recalled for the FBI.
Tessier also told the recruiter he’d never be considered a suspect because his girlfriend’s father was a deputy sheriff. And then he showed Oswald his “little black book.” It contained the names and addresses of girls in Sycamore, as well as their bust and hip measurements.
The FBI questioned Tessier on December 8, and two days later gave him a lie-detector test. Asked whether he ever had sex with children, Tessier admitted being “involved in some sex play” with a younger girl but said it happened years earlier. He said he’d outgrown it and had no relationship with Maria, although he acknowledged he knew her from the neighborhood.
Those details and his peculiar behavior with the recruiters didn’t seem to raise suspicions at the time. Nor did his mother’s contradictory stories: She’d told local police her son John was home all night December 3, and FBI agents that he was in Rockford that evening.
The more precise question was: Where was John Tessier between noon and 7 p.m. on December 3? Records placed him at the Chicago recruiting station that morning, but his whereabouts remained unaccounted for until he turned up at the Rockford recruiting station at about 7:15.
The FBI had only his uncorroborated version of what he did that afternoon.
Did he pass the time in Chicago and take a 5:15 train to Rockford, as he said? Or did he somehow make his way back to Sycamore?
An acquaintance recalled decades later that he spotted Tessier’s car in Sycamore that afternoon, before Maria vanished. The Pontiac was hard to miss — it had flames painted on the sides — but the man didn’t see who was behind the wheel.
‘No evidence of guilty knowledge’
Tessier remembers that his mother was crying as he went off to talk to the FBI on December 8. He says he comforted her, telling her everything was going to be all right.
He told the FBI that after he made the collect call from Rockford he killed time at a restaurant, waiting for his stepfather to pick him up. He remembered having to run back to the recruiting office to pick up a shaving kit he’d left behind.
Ralph and Eileen Tessier told the FBI that Ralph drove to Rockford to fetch John at about 8. Years later, John’s half sister, Katheran, would come forward to dispute the timeline her parents gave, saying her father was in DeKalb, the town next to Sycamore, taking her to a 4-H social that lasted from 5 to 8 p.m. She recalled coming home to find the street lined with police cars, and soon after that, her father was opening up the hardware store to supply flashlights for the search.
But back in 1957, the Tessiers’ story seemed to check out. John passed the lie detector test; the FBI’s expert concluded that a teenager wouldn’t have been able to conceal his involvement in the crime.
“The recorded reactions on the polygraph did not reflect evidence of guilty knowledge or implication by Tessier in this matter,” the polygraph examiner concluded. An FBI agent closed out his report on December 10 by noting: “No further investigation is being conducted regarding the above suspect.”
John Tessier’s name was scratched off the list. He left Sycamore the next day.
‘Consistent in screwing up’
It is not unusual for people who leave the military to gravitate toward police work. The macho culture, the command structure and the discipline seem a natural fit. But if John Tessier rose through the ranks in the Army, he was a washout as a cop.
Tessier was in his mid-30s, a captain fresh out of the Army and living in Washington state, when he graduated in June 1974 from the King County law enforcement academy and found a job in the small town of Lacey, near Olympia. The job had its perks. It allowed him to portray himself as rescuer and hero — particularly to women.
A marriage that produced a son and a daughter had fizzled. As a Lacey cop, he found his second wife, Laura.
She was a student at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and came from money. Her father was looking for off-duty cops to moonlight as bodyguards. Newly single, Tessier jumped at the chance. It wasn’t long before a romance blossomed.
They were married for three years but broke up, he said, “because I cheated on her.”
By 1979, he was working for a much larger department in Milton, near Tacoma, where he continued to indulge his interest in the ladies.
Police Chief Harold Burton viewed Tessier as inept and insubordinate and fired him for tipping off a drug suspect. Tessier fought the case, prompting the chief to document his complaints in a letter to the city’s lawyers.
The police station was constantly receiving calls from Tessier’s bill collectors, Burton wrote, and he loudly told dirty jokes in restaurants during breaks.
And then there were the women.
“Five incidents have been brought to my attention involving local women, three of which were contacts made as a result of police involvement,” the chief wrote. They included a woman Tessier arrested for drunken driving; she later moved into his apartment. Another woman called police about someone slipping obscene photographs through a window; Officer Tessier responded, and before long they had struck up a relationship. The chief said he personally had seen Tessier’s car parked all night outside her apartment.
Tessier got involved with a third woman who worked for the city and was going through a divorce; the drama spilled over into loud barroom arguments with the woman’s ex, the chief wrote. There also was the woman he brought to a town party: She had been arrested for prostitution.
And, Tessier took topless photos of a 17-year-old waitress “in a Playboy type pose.”
“Tessier is not very well liked by his coworkers and several complaints have been received about his conduct from other police departments,” the chief wrote. He added that Tessier’s infractions weren’t serious. “But,” the chief said, “he is consistent in screwing up.”
Tessier was reinstated, but it wouldn’t last long. In just weeks, a teenage runaway would end his police career.
‘They made me feel like dirt’
Michelle Weinman says she fled the wrath of her father and ran into the hands of a man who would abuse her in his own way.
She was 15. He was a cop.
CNN usually does not name the victims of sexual assaults, especially underage victims. But Weinman, now 46, agreed to tell her story on the record and to be photographed. She says stepping out from behind the stigma has helped her heal.
She’d lied about skipping detention at her high school on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington, and knew her father would punish her. So she ran away. She was joined by a friend who knew a Milton policeman who said they could stay with him. The girls slept on a hide-a-bed in the living room of John Tessier.
He was in his 40s by then, but he wasn’t playing the father figure. “He was as old as my own father, but he would try to be the cool guy,” Weinman told CNN. He took her to the movies, out to dinner, to the mall. He taught her to drive in his squad car at a park overlooking the city. He let her work the lights and siren, and that was exciting. He made sure she stayed in school.
He bought her the first record album she ever owned, Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But first, he made her promise she’d be good.
He taught her how to dress and apply makeup. She thought that part of their deal was strange, but he was a police officer, so she trusted him.
“I was raised to fear God, trust police officers and respect teachers,” she said.
Then came the massages: She’d lie on the floor while he moved his hands over her back.
He told her she could work in a massage parlor when she got older. He pulled down her pants and rubbed her buttocks. It was creepy and made her uncomfortable, but she never said anything to anyone.
Weinman felt grateful for a place to live.
During the weeks the girls stayed at his apartment, Tessier made a habit of kissing them goodnight. One evening, he gave Weinman’s friend “a boyfriend kiss.”
“And she said, ‘Does he do that to you?’ I said, ‘Gross, no.’”
Weinman assumed if any funny stuff happened, he’d focus on the other girl, who was more developed, more mature. But then one night, Weinman says, he came for her.
She was asleep on the sofa bed. He whispered in her ear, waking her. Before she could figure out what was going on, she said, he was performing oral sex on her.
“I couldn’t stop it. I think I just lay on the couch and froze. I couldn’t scream. I was so scared. I was ashamed.”
She told her girlfriend, and a counselor pulled Weinman out of class the next day. Police questioned her, but they didn’t seem to believe her.
“They were really, really mean to me,” she recalled. “They scared me so bad. I didn’t know how to tell them what had happened. So they started yelling at me. This one particular guy started yelling at me and telling me I was nothing but a tramp, telling me he was going to make it look like I wanted it, that I begged for it. That they were going to make my life hell, that they were going to drag me through the mud.”
There was no medical exam, no counseling, not even a female police officer to question her, she said. “I was turning in a police officer for violating me in the most vulgar way. They made me feel like dirt. They made me feel like I didn’t deserve to be happy.”
The investigators, all men, worked for a larger department from a neighboring town, Weinman said. But they made no secret that they were not happy she was accusing a cop.
John Tessier was charged with statutory rape but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge: communication with a minor for immoral purposes. He denied then and denies now that he sexually assaulted Weinman, and says he took the deal because he couldn’t afford a lawyer. He was placed on probation for a year and quietly resigned from the Milton Police Department on March 10, 1982.
Weinman said she blocked the experience from her mind for more than 30 years — until an agent with the Illinois State Police walked into the bar where she works and asked about John Tessier.
‘He let me go’
Tessier was a struggling photographer in the early 1980s when one of his models introduced him to Denise Trexler. She was getting out of an abusive relationship and needed a protector. Tessier liked that she was well-educated and held a steady job as an engineer designing electrical systems for Peterbilt trucks.
She owned a nice house, and she had class.
Tessier quickly installed himself as a bodyguard of sorts. He moved into her house in Tacoma and within three months they were married.
It’s a time in her life she’d rather forget; it’s a time he won’t talk about, except to say he won’t badmouth Trexler. She spoke briefly over the phone with CNN. She is retired now and happily married to someone else.
She recalled how Tessier became controlling and emotionally abusive soon after they exchanged vows. Her knight in shining armor was manipulative and “on the emotional level of a 4-year-old.”
“You know the type,” she said. “They reinvent themselves to make themselves look good or convince you who they are. They find someone with some money and their status looks good. And they move on in. They’re self-centered, egotistical asses.”
As he had with Michelle Weinman, Tessier taught Trexler how to dress and apply makeup the way he liked. He told her he kept her around so he would seem “respectable.”
To maintain control, he constantly ran her down.
“You’re never good enough, pretty enough,” she said. “You always have to look your best. Your makeup has to be perfect. You’re controlled, you can’t get out. If you want to get out, you’re going to die.”
She learned not to believe a word he said.
He did not talk about his family much, but she did meet his parents when they visited Seattle. She found them to be “wonderful.” She had the impression that her husband was slightly afraid of his mother. She seemed to be the one woman he respected: “You didn’t mess with her. She said something, he did it.”
She never met any of his half sisters; Tessier told her he didn’t like them.
“We never talked about the past,” she said. “Whatever he told me, it probably wouldn’t have been the truth.”
He never mistreated her sexually, she said. In fact, their relationship was mostly platonic.
They stayed together on and off from 1983 until 1989, when he told her he’d met someone else. She didn’t put up a fight.
“He let me go,” she said. “I feel really lucky.”
Asked whether she ever saw any signs of sexual impropriety, Trexler recalled two incidents she found particularly disturbing. They involved his daughter from his first marriage, who stayed with them for a short while when she was about 12.
One morning, she found Tessier and his daughter in the kitchen. He was holding a banana in a particular way and making sexually suggestive comments.
Later, while looking for something in a desk, she felt the drawer catch. She ran her hand along the bottom.
Taped to the underside was a recent picture of Tessier’s daughter. She was nude.
Chapter 3: Bulldogs on the case
Eileen Tessier was dying, and there was one secret she would not take to her grave. She’d kept it for 36 years — much too long.
“Janet,” she called out, according to her daughter’s courtroom account many years later. There was urgency in her voice.
Janet Tessier rushed to her mother’s hospital bed. Eileen’s blue eyes were wide open. She grabbed Janet’s wrist and spoke again.
Those two little girls, and the one that disappeared, John did it. John did it, and you have to tell someone.
Janet knew immediately what her mother was saying: that Janet’s half brother John had kidnapped and killed Maria Ridulph. The second-grader’s unsolved murder had haunted their hometown of Sycamore, Illinois, for decades.
Was this a confession, an unburdening of the soul, as Janet believed? Or could it be the ramblings of a dying cancer patient, a mind fogged by morphine?
Either way, it was a breakthrough moment in a case that cast a long shadow over Janet’s childhood. The words Eileen Tessier spoke on her deathbed compelled her daughter to “tell someone” many times. It would take her nearly 15 years to find someone who listened.
Janet was just a baby when her 7-year-old neighbor vanished three weeks before Christmas in 1957. She grew up knowing there were bogeymen out there. Even in sleepy Sycamore, strangers could grab little girls off the street and make them disappear.
On Saturdays, kids from the neighborhood would walk to a matinee at the movie theater downtown. Afterward, they’d go around the corner for ice cream cones, then stop at the Sycamore police station and stare at the wanted posters. It passed for excitement in a small town.
Janet would study the sketch of “Johnny,” the man suspected of snatching Maria, but nothing clicked. It was the photo of Maria that truly haunted her. “I would stand in front of the poster and stare at her face and I would close my eyes and clench my fists and pray really hard that God would find the bad man that killed her,” Janet recalled half a century later on a radio show.
Over the years, she heard her older sisters recount the night of the kidnapping. They said police later knocked on their door, and they listened as their mother said something they knew was not true: that John was at home the night Maria disappeared.
The scene at their mother’s deathbed confirmed these suspicions. They knew she often lied to protect John. But had she literally let him get away with murder?
Eileen Tessier died on January 23, 1994; some 300 people attended her funeral. But John was not welcome. His siblings told him to stay away.
The family’s darkest secret had finally surfaced. Now the story of “Johnny” and Maria was Janet’s burden to carry.
Case closed?
Janet had seen her brother’s scary side.
She was 21 and trying to figure out what to do with her life when John, the big brother she’d grown up believing was a war hero, invited her to come stay with him in Tacoma, Washington, and help with his photography business. He was in his late 30s and just divorced for a second time.
They were fetching coffee on the way to a photo shoot when she made what she believed was an innocuous remark. He turned and looked at her with an expression of “utter hatred,” she recalled during her March 30 interview on the Money Matters Radio Network. He suddenly seemed like a different person, and she couldn’t understand what had triggered it. Seconds later, John acted like nothing had happened.
Another time when they argued, she said, he pulled out a gun and laid it on the table. He said he would kill her and tell everyone she ran away. That he would dump her body where nobody could find it.
She packed and headed home.
Now, all these years later, her mother’s words tugged at her conscience and wouldn’t let go.
She called the Sycamore police several times, she said, and got the bureaucratic shuffle. Other family members urged her to just let it be.
It’s an old case, they told her.
Just forget about it.
She pushed it to the back of her mind for a while, but it never really went away.
One day, she called the Chicago office of the FBI on a whim. Agents referred her to the original jurisdiction, Sycamore. Again, she didn’t get anywhere. In October 1997, as the 40th anniversary of the crime neared, it became clear why. A detective, Patrick Solar, had identified a suspect and declared the case closed.
Using an FBI offender database, Solar had linked the crime to a transient truck driver with a history of enticing and sexually assaulting girls in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The suspect, who also worked as a Ferris wheel operator, was dead. He’d been investigated in Pennsylvania for the 1951 murder of an 8-year-old girl but never convicted. The child had been sexually assaulted, and her body left in the bed of a pickup truck. Solar noted that the crimes were similar and concluded that the suspect physically resembled “Johnny.”
The people of Sycamore had never wanted to believe that one of their own could be capable of such a terrible crime. Solar’s sleuthing gave them all the proof they needed: A stranger was to blame.
Solar told CNN that he never would have suspected John Tessier. He knew the family; for years, John’s stepfather painted the insignias on the sides of Sycamore police cars. Solar said Janet never spoke to him about her suspicions. Had she, he would have checked his files and seen that John Tessier was investigated and cleared by the FBI in 1957. He would have told her he needed more to go on.
The Ridulph case had occupied Solar for years. A decade earlier, when he had identified yet another suspect, Solar had gone in search of Kathy Sigman, the girl who was with Maria and saw the kidnapper. He wanted to show her a photo of the man he believed to be Maria’s killer.
By then, Kathy was in her mid-30s, married and a mother. The disappearance and death of her friend had haunted her all her life. When the detective asked where he could find Kathy, her father told him enough was enough — to just “let sleeping dogs lie,” Solar recalled.
Someone did give Kathy an article about Solar’s 1997 investigation and his claims to have solved the Ridulph case. She never read it. She sighed, folded up the paper and put it away in a drawer. She was relieved to think that “Johnny” was dead. He could no longer hurt her.
‘I’m putting my bulldogs on this’
A decade later, Janet Tessier met the author of a book about an unsolved murder. Mark Lemberger’s “Crime of Magnitude” details the 1911 abduction and slaying of a 7-year-old girl.
How does a person look into an old murder case? she asked him.
Janet seemed nervous, stressed, Lemberger recalls, and her body and voice trembled as she spoke. She told him what her mother had said on her deathbed and seemed desperate to lift the weight of the secret she had held for so long.
Her mother insisted she tell someone, she said. But no one she had approached would listen. What more could she possibly do?
You have to find the right investigator, Lemberger told her. Someone who would pursue the case with “the tenacity of a bulldog.”
Janet’s father, Ralph, had long discouraged her from dredging up the past. But after he died, she decided to try the police one last time.
She found a tip line on the Illinois State Police website and typed this e-mail:
“Sycamore, Illinois. December 1957. A seven-year-old child named Maria Ridulph vanished. Her remains were found in another county several miles away in early spring of 1958. I still believe that John Samuel Tessier from Sycamore, IL — AKA Jack Daniel McCullough — was and is responsible for her death. He is living in the Seattle/Tacoma Washington area under the name Jack Daniel McCullough.
“I’ve given information to the person responsible for the cold case in Sycamore. I’ve done this a few times. Nothing is ever done.
“This is the last time I mention this to anyone. What information I do have makes Tessier /McCullough a viable suspect, and worth looking into. I’m not going to keep doing this over and over. It’s exhausting and it dredges up painful, horrible memories.”
At 1:04 p.m. on September 11, 2008, she hit “send.”
The frustration in those last lines caught the eye of Tony Rapacz, a state police commander based in Elgin. He wasn’t sure how seriously to take the tip. But he’d been a cop for 25 years, long enough to know that even a scrap of information can lead to something big.
His first phone conversation with Janet lasted 45 minutes. She began by telling him she was just a year old when the events occurred.
OK, here we go, Rapacz thought. Not a good sign.
But then Janet described how her mother was dying when she told her it was her brother who kidnapped and murdered Maria.
He sensed there just might be something to what she was saying.
“I can’t promise you anything,” he told her, “but we’re going to try.”
“You’ve got to try,” Janet pleaded.
“I know,” he responded. “I was afraid you were another crackpot when you called.”
“Do you think I am?” she asked.
“No.”
And then he said something that sent a shiver down her spine:
“I’m putting my bulldogs on this.”
‘Sycamore’s 9/11′
Larry Kot and Brion Hanley were the commander’s bulldogs.
Kot is a mild, scholarly man of 57; he doesn’t carry a badge or a gun and is not the type to shrug on SWAT gear and kick down doors. He could easily be mistaken for an accountant or a high school principal. In his off hours, he’s a town alderman.
He’s also a detail guy well known in Illinois State Police circles for his photographic memory and ability to find anyone or anything on the Internet. In his role as a civilian analyst for the police, he assembles the bits and pieces of a case into a seamless timeline. He connects the dots.
Kot had never heard of the Ridulph case. But a quick Google search clued him in. This unsolved case had been a big deal.
Hanley joined the case a couple of weeks after Kot. A special agent with the investigations division, the 41-year-old Hanley favors college football jerseys and turned-around ball caps when he works undercover, which is most of the time. He usually has a wad of chewing tobacco parked in his cheek. His open, friendly face seems to get people talking.
The early stages of an investigation are the most tedious: tracking people down and getting them to open up. Hanley’s legwork began with Janet Tessier and her siblings, who were scattered from Illinois to Wisconsin to Kentucky. None had good things to say about John, especially Jeanne.
Hanley was surprised by how open she was, how articulate. Maybe it had something to do with her work: She taught college classes in communications, counseled parents of dying children and was active in the community of sexual abuse survivors. Whatever the reason, Jeanne spilled the details of what she said was another family secret.
John sexually molested her while they were growing up, she told Hanley, and forced her to stand watch while he molested other neighborhood girls in the bushes and in a stairwell at West Elementary near their home. She said he raped her and offered her to his friends while he was home on a military leave. At the time, she was 14.
(Janet and Jeanne Tessier declined to speak with CNN, which does not usually identify victims of sexual assault. But Jeanne Tessier has openly discussed her allegations against her brother in Sycamore’s local newspaper and in a network television interview. Her account here is drawn from court transcripts and other public records.)
Hanley knew Jeanne Tessier was an accomplished woman who would make a credible witness. He also found that many of the people he wanted to talk to were alive, healthy and willing. It helped that Maria’s murder had been such a transformative event. People remembered it.
Hanley came to think of the case as “Sycamore’s 9/11.”
Many of John Tessier’s old high school friends still lived within a few miles of the town. Some told Hanley that Tessier was supposed to pick them up at a hobby shop the night Maria vanished but stood them up. Tessier’s sisters said he wasn’t at home that night as their mother reported to police — or the next morning. His oldest sister, Katheran, said she didn’t see his car that day, either.
Years earlier, Tessier had told the FBI that he and a high school classmate helped search for Maria the night she was kidnapped. He added a curious detail: He said they’d found some dirty magazines and turned them over to police.
Hanley poked holes in that story, too. He found the classmate, who told him he never saw Tessier. And, the witness added, had he found any dirty magazines as a teenager, he would have kept them. Sycamore police had no record of anyone turning in magazines, smutty or otherwise.
And then there were the piggyback rides. Maria’s ki