In the Ridulph case, there was no DNA, no confession by the killer.
Christmas photo police lineup cracked#
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. But the weeks of urgent activity were followed by half a century of silence. Edgar Hoover demanded daily updates from his men and sent teletypes with detailed instructions. Reporters flocked to Sycamore from the big city papers in Chicago and New York and from the fledgling television networks. When Kathy returned a few minutes later, Maria and Johnny were gone. She asked Maria to come along, but she didn't want to go. Now it was Kathy's turn to run home, to fetch her mittens. Kathy felt a chill as Maria joined them on the sidewalk. 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. Her mother, Frances, was reading a newspaper. Maria burst into her house to find her father, Michael, in the living room watching a Western. He told her she was pretty, but she sensed it was Maria he liked more. He asked whether she wanted to take a walk around the block or go on a trip in a truck, car or bus. Kathy waited on the sidewalk with Johnny. 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. That was how Johnny won Maria over.ĭown he trotted, 20 feet to the south along Center Cross Street and back again, Maria giggling with glee on his shoulders. Photo: Court exhibit/Jessica Koscielniak/Getty Images for CNNīy 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.īut nobody could forget the piggyback ride.
Christmas photo police lineup trial#
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.Ī trial exhibit shows Kathy Sigman with the mittens she fetched from home when she returned to the corner, Maria was gone. Kathy remembers his narrow face, big teeth and high, thin voice. He wore his blond hair swept back in a ducktail. 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. 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. 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. She pleaded to go back outside as the first flurries of the season started to swirl in the night sky.Įxcited, she called Kathy on the phone: I can go outside tonight, can you? She finished off two rabbit legs, but barely touched her vegetables. Maria's family gathered around the table for her favorite supper: rabbit, carrots, potatoes and milk. It was a favorite spot they hadn't been to since summer.Īt 5 p.m. Maria and Kathy made plans to play there after dinner. 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. That wasn't Sycamore's only peculiar hint of the dirty and forbidden. Scattered on the sidewalk were half a dozen photographs of nude women. When they emerged, the man was gone - but he'd left something disturbing behind. The girls felt uneasy, so they ducked into a restaurant. After school, they went to Maria's house to cut out paper snowflakes.Ī 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 cold, with a promise of snow in the air. 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.
Sycamore and its 7,000 souls felt safe on the morning of December 3, 1957, but the feeling wouldn't last. People didn't lock their doors in this Midwestern farm town because everyone knew everybody else. It was their whole world in 1957, a time when children played hide-and-seek outside instead of watching television. They lived a few doors away from each other on a side street called Archie Place. Everyone said the second-grader was special and Kathy, who was a year older, felt honored to be her friend.
Maria was the pretty one, slight and graceful at 7 with big brown eyes that shined with warmth and intelligence.
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