The Jack McCullough Murder Case
On December 3, 1957, 7-year-old Maria Ridulph and her playmate, Kathy Chapman, were playing on a street corner in Sycamore, Illinois, a DeKalb County town west of Chicago. A teenage boy who approached the girls and introduced himself as Johnny began giving Maria piggyback rides. Kathy left her friend to go home for mittens, and when she returned, Johnny and Maria were gone.
After friends and relatives searched the neighborhood without finding Maria the FBI, on the assumption the disappearance was a ransom kidnapping, entered the case. Over the next few weeks agents and police officers questioned more than a hundred potential suspects, including a 17-year-old boy named John Tassier who said he had seen the missing girl around the neighborhood. Tassier described little Maria as being as pretty as a Barbie Doll. When asked his whereabouts at the time of the abduction Mr. Tassier said he had been on his way to Chicago to take a medical exam before entering the Air Force. When Tassier's stepfather backed up the alibi investigators moved on to other possibilities. Not long after Maria's disappearance John Tassier entered military service.
In the spring of 1958, in a forest 120 miles from Sycamore, hikers came upon Maria Ridulph's badly decomposed body. The autopsy disclosed that she had been stabbed in the throat and chest. Because five months had passed since her death the forensic pathologist was unable to determine if she had been sexually assaulted.
John Tassier, sometime in the 1960s, changed his name to Jack McCullough. At the time he was employed in the state of Washington as a police officer. In the 1980s, after being accused of sexually molesting a teenage runaway girl he and his girlfriend had taken in, Mr. McCullough lost his police job. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor sexual offense and in return received a probated sentence.
Jack McCullough's half-sister, in 2008, told DeKalb County authorities that on their mother's deathbed in 1994 the dying woman had indicated that Jack had been responsible for Maria Riduph's disappearance and death. About two years later a woman who said she had dated McCullough in the 1950s told the police that Jack's stepfather had lied about the boy's 1957 alibi. In 2010 the DeKalb County prosecutor re-opened the 53-year-old murder case.
Cold case detectives contacted Kathy Chapman, the playmate who had been with Maria Ridulph when the teenager who called himself Johnny gave the 7-year-old piggyback rides on December 3, 1957. After viewing a collection of photographs Chapman picked Jack McCullough out of the photo-lineup as Johnny. (I'm assuming the photograph Chapman selected depicted McCullough as a 17-year-old. I'm also assuming that the physical description of the suspect she gave to the police in 1957 matched the then John Tassier.)
Detectives in Seattle where McCullough resided questioned him about the Ridulph kidnap-murder case. While raising eyebrows with the comment that he remembered Maria as a "stunningly beautiful" neighborhood girl, McCullough denied any role in her death.
When homicide investigators questioned one of McCullough's younger sisters she claimed that in 1962 when she was fourteen he and two other men had sexually molested her. (The crime, which according to the sister took place in Sycamore, led to charges against McCullough. In April 2011 a judge in a bench trial acquitted him of that crime.)
When the Ridulph case investigators spoke to members of the suspect's family they gave statements to the effect that McCullough's mother, on her cancer deathbed in 1994, uttered comments they interpreted as implicating the suspect in the neighborhood girl's murder.
On July 1, 2011 detectives arrested 72-year-old Jack McCullough at his Seattle retirement home. The prosecutor in DeKalb County charged him with the kidnapping and murder of Maria Ridulph. According to the prosecution's theory of the case, when Kathy Chapman went home to get her mittens, McCullough dragged Maria into an alley where he choked her with a wire and stabbed her in the throat and chest. According to the prosecutor the defendant had been sexually attracted to the victim.
McCullough's trial, the oldest unsolved crime in United States history to make it into a courtroom, got underway on September 10, 2012. The defendant waived his right to a jury and requested a bench trial in which the judge determined the defendant's guilt or innocence.
The prosecution's star witness, Kathy Chapman, after recounting the events of that day 54 years ago when she was seven, made an in-court identification of the defendant as the man she had last seen with Maria Ridulph. Chapman was followed to the stand by three jailhouse snitches who had been in the DeKalb County lockup with McCullough during the months leading up to his trial. One of the informants, a man named Kirk Swaggerty who was facing a 33-year prison term for a home invasion robbery that had led to a person's death, said the defendant had confessed to him. According to this witness, McCullough told him..."he was giving her [Maria] a piggyback ride on his shoulders, and when she fell she wouldn't stop screaming and when she wouldn't keep quiet, he suffocated her."
On cross-examination by McCullough's attorney, Mr. Swaggerty admitted that following his cooperation with the police his attorney had filed a motion for a reduced sentence. Because jailhouse snitches have been known to commit perjury to help their own causes, many jurors do not find them credible. To some members of a jury this point made by the defense attorney would hit home. But because this case was being tried before a judge who had allowed the jailhouse snitch to take the stand in the first place, the implication that he had lied to reduce his sentence had little impact.
Two more jailhouse informants followed Mr. Swaggerty to the stand. If these witnesses were to be believed, Jack McCullough, after keeping his mouth shut for 54 years had confessed to three men he didn't know during a period of a few months.
McCullough's defense, which could have been substantial, consisted of a handful of witnesses and just two hours of court time. The defense attorney put the physician on the stand who had treated McCullough's mother for cancer. According to the doctor, when the woman died in 1994 she was so mentally confused any deathbed utterances she made would have been meaningless. Jack McCullough did not take the stand on his own behalf. Perhaps he chose to remain silent because there were no jurors to impress. Moreover, the defense attorney, based on the weakness of the prosecution's case probably expected an acquittal.
Just how weak was the case against Jack McCullough? The prosecution, without a confession, a cooperating accomplice, a proven motive, a murder weapon, a time of death or any physical evidence linking the defendant to the victim, had no choice but to present a 54-year-old eyewitness identification by a then 7-year-old girl, vague deathbed utterances and three jailhouse snitches. By any standard this bottom-of-the-barrel evidence barely supported enough probable cause for McCullough's arrest.
On September 14, 2012 the McCullough trial judge found the defendant guilty of kidnapping and murder. Had the defendant been tried before a jury he probably would have been acquitted. This was not how our criminal justice system was supposed to work.
On December 10, 2012 the judge sentenced Jack McCullough to life in prison. He continued to maintain his innocence.
On April 15, 2016 Judge William P. Brady of the Illinois Circuit Appeals Court vacated Jack McCullough's 2012 conviction and ordered a new trial. A week later, perhaps anticipating that prosecutors would try McCullough again, the judge dismissed the charges against him.
A year later judges with the DeKalb County Circuit Court issued Mr. McCullough a certificate of innocence.
