One of the nation’s oldest cold cases, dating back to 1957, is unresolved yet again after an Illinois court vacated the related false conviction against Jack McCullough in mid-April. McCullough, a former policeman, was released after serving nearly five years of a life sentence for the 1957 abduction and death of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph. Ridulph was kidnapped off a street corner near her house in Sycamore, Illinois on December 3, 1957. Six months later, her remains were discovered some 40 miles away in the city of Galena, Illinois. So what happened in the nearly six decades between Ridulph’s disappearance and McCullough’s 2012 conviction at the age of 72?
McCullough has maintained all along that he was nearly 40 miles away from where Ridulph was last seen. With the perseverance of a public defender turned state attorney, Richard Schmack, McCullough’s conviction was overturned and he is now a free man. But the road to justice was anything but a clear and easy path. An intense six-month review by Schmack found numerous errors and blatant injustices by nearly all parties involved, including judges, investigators, the FBI, police chiefs, and prosecutors. One has to also question the reliability of evidence and the memory of witnesses some 55 years after an event. Because of the time elapsed, most of McCullough’s witnesses were dead, which made it impossible for him to present his alibi evidence.And let’s face it: everyone involved wanted a resolution and for justice to be served to offset this tragedy that rocked the sleepy small town of Sycamore.
There are quite a few interesting points to this case, the first that McCullough became a suspect to the murder 55 years after Ridulph’s abduction largely in part to his dying mother’s alleged words on her death bed. One of McCullough’s sisters claimed her mother told her:
“Those two little girls – and the one that disappeared. John did it, John did it, and you have to tell someone.”
The 2008 statement was originally admitted at the 2011 trial, despite the mother’s doctor testifying that she was on morphine and noted as “pleasantly confused” and disoriented in the doctor’s notes on the mother, who was dying from cancer.
Jumping back in time, the 1957 FBI investigation included interviews with 20 witnesses, and concluded that Ridulph disappeared between 6:35-6:45p.m. Schmack uncovered phone records which proved McCullough placed a collect call to his mother from a pay phone 35 miles from Sycamore, at an Air Force recruiting station in Rockford, Illinois. The time of the call? 6:57 p.m. Given that it was December in the Midwest, it would have been impossible for McCullough to travel 40 miles in icy conditions in only 22 minutes. Schmack concluded that McCullough could not possibly have been in Sycamore at the time of Ridulph’s disappearance.
But when the case reopened in 2008, an Illinois State Police Investigator told the grand jury that indicted McCullough that Ridulph disappeared “a little bit after 6:00p.m.”, which disproved McCullough’s alibi.When Schmack reviewed all the dated testimony and evidence, some of which was erroneously never admitted into evidence, he realized that such a misstatement was paramount to the case, and kept digging.
Former testimony cited McCullough’s sister claiming she returned home from a party at 7:00 p.m. on December 3 to a full-blown search underway for the missing child. However, when Schmack took a closer look at the Sheriff’s Department documents, FBI interviews with Ridulph’s mother, and dated notes from Sycamore’s police chief, he realized that Ridulph’s disappearance wasn’t reported to authorities until 8:10p.m.
Back to McCullough’s alibi: recruiters at the Air Force location in Rockford, Illinois also confirmed McCullough’s whereabouts during the alleged abduction time frame, supporting his alibi. But in a 2012 pretrial hearing, an assistant state attorney argued that such reports amounted to hearsay because they contained no firsthand observations by law enforcement. The judge agreed, and ended up barring those supporting statements from being presented as evidence to support McCullough’s alibi.
The 2011 affidavit used to arrest McCullough was even questionable; it included inaccuracies of the time frame which were counteractive to decades-old FBI reports. Instead of a lineup of suspects, Kathy Chapman, the childhood friend that was with Ridulph at the time of her disappearance in 1957, was presented with images of suspects. But this was not a level playing field: of the six individual high school senior photographs laid out for the lineup, five of the men were professionally photographed wearing suit coats with a light background. However, McCullough was expelled from that high school and didn’t participate in senior photos; instead, the snapshot presented him in street clothes (not a suit coat) with a dark background, making him easily the odd man out from an unbalanced lineup.
Despite all these injustices, McCullough would still be behind bars if it wasn’t for the careful analytical review by Schmack. But, no good deed goes unpunished: Charles Ridulph, Maria’s brother, is petitioning for a special prosecutor to be appointed for a retrial. He claims that Schmack made a promise to drop charges against McCullough while campaigning in 2012, and argues such a promise creates a conflict of interest.
Schmack’s office is preparing response to the accusation, and the case for a special prosecutor is due back in court June 23. McCullough’s charges were dropped without prejudice, meaning the case potentially could be retried. McCullough also plans to sue the state of Illinois for the suffering he endured from five years of false imprisonment.