Repeat Offender: Ruth loved riding the bike paths of the State Forest near her home. But predators lurk in those woods and some of them are human.
Stalker: He was the creepy guy next door. Teresa knew he had a thing for her but she figured he was harmless. She was wrong... dead wrong.
Precious: The mutilated corpse of a little girl turns up in a field. Years later, the identity of her killer emerges. It’s a shocker.
Wanted Man: He was an upstanding citizen, president of the local water board. He was also a fugitive from justice, wanted for a particularly brutal murder.
Amateur Hour: The police had tried for decades to solve the murder and had failed at every turn. Now, the victim’s sister wants to take a run at it.
In Life or in Death: A little girl disappears on her way to school. Half a century will pass before the truth of her vanishing is finally revealed.
Message 22: A popular hostess is butchered in her own home. Who killed her? The clues are right there, on her answering machine.
Cold Cases: Solved! Volume 12
An Unfinished Life
When Kristina Wesselman was 14 years old, she was part of the honor guard chosen by her school to appear at a campaign event for then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Rather than being overawed by the occasion, Kristina – Kristy to her friends – took it all in her stride. That was typical of the girl, a confident, outgoing teen who did well at school, excelled at sports, and was popular among her peers. At Glenbard South High School in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, she played on the volleyball and softball teams (even though she’d have preferred to play football). She was also elected as vice president of her class.
In the summer of 1985, the now 15-year-old Kristy was taking summer classes at school. On July 21, she arrived home from class and announced to her mom that she was going to walk to the store to buy a soda. It was just after 3:30 when Kristy left the house. Sandy Wesselman expected her daughter to be back in no more than ten minutes. The store was nearby. When Kristy didn’t return, Sandy assumed that she’d run into some friends and decided to hang out. It was a lovely summer’s afternoon. No kid wants to be indoors on a day like this.
In the modern age, a parent concerned about the whereabouts of a child can quickly allay those fears by calling their cellphone. But this was back in the 80s. Cellphones were but a distant dream. Still, Sandy wasn’t unduly concerned. Kristy was a responsible teen. She knew to be home in time for dinner.
But when evening fell and there was still no sign of Kristy, Sandy did start to worry. She started calling her daughter’s friends, getting the same answer from all of them. None of them had seen Kristy. Her concerns rapidly turning to desperation, Sandy walked to the store to look for her daughter. The clerk knew Kristy well. He confirmed that she’d been in earlier and had bought a soda and a chocolate bar. He hadn’t seen her since. Sandy then hit the streets, walking the neighborhood for hours without success. At 01:50 a.m., she called in the police.
Officers quickly descended on the area, listened to the desperate mother’s anguished story, and then spread out to continue the search. They covered much of the same ground Sandy had, talking to the store clerk, rousing Kristy’s friends from sleep to question them, covering every inch of blacktop in the neighborhood. Nothing. Kristina Wesselman seemed to have vanished into thin air. By midday, the next shift of officers took over. One of them decided to track the exact route Kristy would have taken on her way home.
The first thing the officer noticed was a path leading through a field that stood between the Wesselman residence and the store. This was a shortcut frequently used by the local kids. It made sense that Kristy would have taken this route. The officer started down the path, which had high grass and weeds to either side. He was only a few yards in when he spotted a place where the vegetation was disturbed. Then he saw a swatch of pale skin, and then, among the weeds, a body. Kristy Wesselman had been found.
For Kristy’s mom, Sandy, this had all the elements of a waking nightmare. Her daughter, the youngest of her four children, was dead. The details of her final moments were too horrific to even contemplate. Kristy had been pulled from the path, sexually assaulted, stabbed eight times. Police officers quickly sealed off the area and brought in a forensics team to process the scene. They found very little that would pass as evidence. The only real lead was that Kristy’s pearl ring was missing. The police quickly alerted pawn shops in the area in case the killer tried to sell it.
Meanwhile, Kristy’s body had been transported to the county morgue, where a rape kit was performed. This yielded the perpetrator’s biological material, but that was of limited use in 1985, with DNA profiling still in its infancy. For now, the sample would remain on ice, waiting for some scientific breakthrough.
With no physical evidence to work with, the police focused instead on finding potential witnesses. Something was odd about this case. The murder had occurred in broad daylight, close to a busy road and quite a few houses. Several people had seen Kristy leaving the store, but no one had seen her enter the field. A family who were barbecuing in their backyard nearby had heard nothing. How was that possible? Surely Kristy would have screamed if she’d been accosted.
All of this led the police to believe that the killer was someone local, someone who knew that the path across the field was used as a shortcut. Perhaps he’d been hiding in the tall grass, waiting for a likely victim to pass. Perhaps he’d targeted Kristy specifically, following her from the store. Maybe she knew him. Maybe that was why she had not called out until it was too late.
Following this line of reasoning, investigators started looking into any male who might have known Kristy. When that failed to yield a viable suspect, they switched their attention to known sex offenders living in the area. This process took three long years and got them no closer to finding their killer. There was some better news on the forensics front, though. DNA technology had made rapid advances during that time. In 1988, investigators decided to test every male with even a tenuous link to Kristy, comparing their DNA against the crime scene sample. Everyone they approached agreed to submit to the test, everyone but one man. His name was Dana Henry.
Henry was 34 years old in 1988. His only connection to the crime was that his house bordered the field. The reason for his refusal was simple. He considered it an invasion of his right to privacy. To the police, that refusal made him look guilty. They obtained a court order compelling him to comply. When Henry still refused, he was charged with contempt of court and locked up for several days. That had the desired effect as he eventually agreed to be swabbed.
Dana Henry’s profile went to the lab. Investigators were confident that they had their man, but they were wrong. Henry’s DNA did not match. His stand really was a matter of principle. It had come at a cost, though. His legal fees of $50,000 had almost bankrupted him, and he’d also suffered damage to his reputation. Despite his exoneration, many locals believed that he was guilty. Why else would he refuse to co-operate with the police?
Over the next 12 years, the investigation into Kristy Wesselman’s death remained at a standstill. In 2000, the killer’s DNA was uploaded to the FBI’s CODIS database, where it failed to find a match. It was submitted several more times over the next 15 years, a necessary step since the database is constantly updated. Kristy had now been dead for 30 years, twice as long as she’d been on this earth. Hope was dwindling that there’d ever be a resolution. Her killer appeared to have gotten away with murder.
Then, in 2015, everything changed. That was the day that the DeKalb County police got a notification from the FBI. A match had been made. Their suspect was a 62-year-old man from Champaign, Illinois, recently arrested on a domestic violence charge. His name was Michael Jones.
Champaign is a small town 150 miles south of Glen Ellyn. Jones, it seemed, had lived there all of his life. He wasn’t local to Glen Ellyn as the police had always believed. In fact, he’d never appeared on their radar at all, not as a suspect, not as a witness.
So, who was Michael Jones? Turns out, he was a man with a long history of violence against women. His first run-in with the law came in the mid-70s, when he was arrested for assault. The charges were later dropped. Jones, however, had not learned his lesson. Just a year later, he was again under arrest for attacking a woman, leaving her unconscious in a hospital parking lot. This time, the consequences were more serious. Despite claiming diminished responsibility, he was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. That should have seen him behind bars until the late 80s, but Jones was released on parole in 1983.
Jones married in ‘84, but his wife left him 10 years later, citing his unhealthy interest in underage girls. He was in trouble again in 1999, when he was arrested for assaulting a relative of his new girlfriend. The police also learned that Jones would often take long road trips on his motorcycle, usually heading north to visit relatives in Chicago. Those trips would have brought him close to Glen Ellyn, an outer suburb of the Windy City. Investigators now believed that he’d likely stopped in the town on that summer’s day in 1985, spotted Kristy Wesselman, and decided to attack her. He’d followed the teenager to the field and ambushed her there, probably putting a hand over her mouth to stifle her screams.
Michael Jones was arrested and charged with Kristy Wesselman’s murder in 2015. A fresh DNA sample backed up what the previous one had shown. This was the man who had dragged the teenager from the path, raped her, knifed her to death. Already, investigators were starting to wonder whether Kristy was his only victim. Given his volatile temper, his history of violence against women, his obsession with young girls, it does not seem a stretch to imagine that he’d done this more than once. Those long motorbike rides would have provided the perfect cover.
For now, though, Jones had just one murder to answer for. He initially denied everything, insisting that he had never been to Glen Ellyn in his life. By the time the matter came to trial in 2018, though, he was singing a different tune. Facing the prospect of life without parole, he decided to plead out. The agreement did not require him to provide a full confession, and Jones wasn’t inclined to do so. We will never know for certain what happened in the field that day.
Michael Jones might have thought that the plea bargain would spare him the prospect of life behind bars, but he was wrong in that respect. “You are evil incarnate, a real-life Jekyll and Hyde,” Judge George Bakalis told the killer, as he sentenced him to 80 years behind bars. The judge also ruled out parole for Jones, setting his earliest release date at 2095. Jones will never be free again and will die in prison, where he belongs.
That was a bittersweet victory for Kristy’s family. During her witness impact statement, Sandy Wesselman commented that if only Jones had served his minimum term back in the 1980s, her daughter would still be alive. Sandy also shared the poignant memory of attaching Kristy’s Communion pin to her older daughter’s wedding dress so that Kristy could have some small part of that family milestone. “The pain of having a child murdered is life-shattering,” she told the packed courtroom. “What she would have become will forever be an unfinished book.”
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