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Tag: Jack McCullough

  • 1957 Murder: Jack McCullough Appeals Murder Sentence

    It was one of the oldest unsolved crimes in history to go to trial, and now there is an appeal.

    In 2012, Jack McCullough was sentenced to life in prison for the 1957 abduction and slaying of Maria Ridulph, a seven-year-old schoolgirl. McCullough allegedly abducted Ridulph from a northern Illinois street, then choked her and stabbed her to death.

    But McCullough is saying that the prosecutors relied on fallible recollections from witnesses, in particular the star witness of the trial, Kathy Chapman, who was playing with Ridulph the night she was abducted.

    The appeal is 72-pages long and makes the claim that Chapman, who picked out McCullough from an old photograph, could not have had her childhood memories so seared in her mind that she would be able to identify McCullough as the killer five decades later.

    “Responsibility for [Ridulph’s] kidnapping, abduction, and murder needed to be proven by competent evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, and not by appeals to sympathy or the romance of the 1950s,” the appeal says, from an article written by The Associated Press.

    According to prosecutors, McCullough approached the girls as they were playing on December 3, 1957. When Chapman ran home to get mittens, McCullough dragged Ridulph into an alley, choked her and stabbed her in the throat and chest.

    McCullough was a suspect in the 1950s but had an alibi. He said he’d been traveling to and from Chicago to get a medical exam.

    How McCullough was eventually arrested is remarkable.

    In 2008, police received word from McCullough’s half-sister that McCullough’s mother, on her deathbed in 1994, said that she knew her son had killed Ridulph. That led to charges and an eventual arrest.

    The appeal disputes the claim, saying McCullough’s mother could not have been coherent enough to make that statement and if she did make the statement, the appeal disputes the basis in which she could have known the statement was true.

    Prosecutors have about 30 days to file a response, after which oral arguments will be scheduled.

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  • 1957 Murder Cold Case Appealed by Lifer

    1957 Murder Cold Case Appealed by Lifer

    In 2012, former police officer Jack McCullough was convicted of the 1957 kidnapping and murder of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph, a case that ran cold for almost 60 years. Now an Illinois court is considering an appeal filed by McCullough, whose lawyers claim that an eye-witness to 1957 events was having a “romantic notion.”

    A key witness of the crime was Ridulph’s childhood friend Kathy Sigman Chapman, who is now in her sixties. Chapman claimed she had seen McCullough, then a teenager, giving Ridulph a piggyback ride in Sycamore, Illinois before she disappeared. In a 72-page appeal, McCullough’s lawyers contest that Chapman’s memories of Ridulph’s vanishing were so deeply ingrained into her mind that she could have mistakenly identified McCullough five decades later. The case was once the oldest unsolved murder in the United States, before McCullough, formerly John Tessier, was arrested in July, 2011.

    Chapman testified during the trial that on December 3, 1957, a teenager who called himself Johnny had approached her and Ridulph. Chapman went home briefly to get mittens, and upon her return both Johnny and Maria were missing. Ridulph’s body was found the following spring roughly 120 miles away. The case received national attention, and the FBI became involved under J. Edgar Hoover.

    Here is a 48 Hours documentary on the case:

    The case was reopened decades later, after Janet Tessier, McCullough’s half sister, contacted Illinois State Police. Janet Tessier had been a caretaker of McCullough’s biological mother Eileen Tessier, who had been dying of cancer. On her deathbed, Tessier’s mother confessed that McCullough murdered Ridulph. McCullough was then arrested at a retirement community in Seattle where he’d lived and worked.

    Prosecutors said McCullough, now 74, choked Ridulph with a wire and stabbed her, and he was found guilty. Though, McCollough’s lawyers have testified that Eileen Tessier, who was in the end stages of cancer, was sedated, “emotionally disturbed,” sometimes “basically comatose” and at other times “pleasantly confused.”

    McCollough’s appeal states that by allowing prosecutors to introduce “irrelevant, but highly prejudicial evidence, no rational trier of fact would have found the defendant guilty.”

    Image via YouTube