Chester Weger was jailed for 59 years for one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the state. Now released from prison, with the help of well-known lawyers, his task is to prove his innocence. In the effort to excuse the "hungry rock killer".
On February 21, 2020, prisoner C-01114 Chester Otto Weger walked out of the remote Pinkneyville Correctional Center into the cool air of a cloudy morning. This is the 21,646 days in prison for the longest prisoner in the state. This will also be his last time.
When he ceased to be a free man in 1961 and became known as the "Hungry Rock Killer", Wegg was only 22 years old. He was a former Marine who was a continuous smoker, avid hunter and fisherman, and was married. Has two young children. In those days, he had James Dean's swooping unkempt head and slim figure, even if it wasn't the face of a matinee idol. But now, at the age of 80, he is showing signs that he is in reinforced concrete cages across Illinois—in Stateville, Maynard, Pontiac, and Graham— The time is limited. He weighs only 113 pounds, his pale scalp is surrounded by a circle of short gray hair, and he doesn't bother to comb his hair anymore. Emphysema made breathing difficult, and the pain of rheumatoid arthritis restricted his activities.
Three months ago, the Illinois Prisoner Review Committee met to determine Weg's fate. Will he be released on parole, or will he continue to be sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder related to one of the most notorious cases in Illinois history: the triple murder in Starved Rock State Park in 1960? He had long known that the board wanted him to express remorse, and failure to do so would almost certainly ruin his chance of early release. But year after year, he refused at 23 hearings after he was granted parole half a century ago. He said that he claimed to be innocent, and that is what he insisted on. This unshakable position made his 24th hearing's conclusion even more shocking: a 9 to 4 vote in favor of the release.
When the prison door opened, Wegg saw his beloved sister Mary Pruitt, as well as her husband and two daughters, who had lobbied the prisoner review committee for the man they affectionately called Uncle Otto. Later that night, at dinner, Wegg will be reunited with their children, Rebecca and John, 3 and 1 year old, when their father was locked up. Pruitt, who was still a teenager during Weg's trial, yelled in court as he read the guilty verdict. For many years, she wrote, called and visited frequently, but during his 59 years in custody, she was not allowed to hug her brother.
Wegg's family agreed that they had never seen him smile like that day. The prospect of freedom after such a long time is exciting - and, for an institutionalized person like Wegg, it is terrible. He said that the glimmer of hope that came on this day kept him alive, and he was alone in his cell in many dark nights. When he doubted whether he could live to see this day really come, he had been comforting him.
Wegg wore a dark hooded sweatshirt and carefully folded himself into the passenger seat of his niece's gray Honda SUV. This vehicle drove Wegg across the plains of southern and central Illinois to the St. Leonard Ministries, a halfway dormitory in Chicago, where he would initially live as part of his parole. Through the windshield, he saw a strange new world speeding by. He marveled at the peculiar futuristic vehicles on the highway. These vehicles are guided by voice maps on wireless phones and have more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft. He missed too many moments, from the moon landing to the entire life cycle of the Internet, as well as the funerals of his parents and the birthdays of almost all children. He knows very little about fast food. Once Honda drove into McDonald's drive-thru, Wegg ordered his first post-release meal, a biscuit sandwich.
During the 300-mile journey, Wegg’s thoughts, as usual, traversed the fog of decades of imprisonment, and returned to the tragic and distorted events that led to his imprisonment.
On March 14, 1960, three women from the Western Suburbs Riverside—wives of Chicago corporate executives and prominent members of the Riverside Presbyterian Church—departed for the most scenic location on the Illinois River in LaSalle during the midweek holiday. One of the picturesque attractions in Starved Rock County is 90 miles southwest of Loop. They were attracted by the park’s glacier-carved sandstone cliffs and canyons, spectacular waterfalls, and wooded trails that meander through 1,500 acres at the time, just as there are still more than 2 million visitors every year. Two days later, these women were reported missing. They were found dead shortly thereafter, their bodies lying in a cave in a scenic canyon.
This crime made headlines around the world and triggered the most resource-intensive raids in the history of the country at that time. But it wasn't until a few months later, when the investigation was stalled, that the authorities focused their attention on Wegg, who had worked as a dishwasher in the hotel kitchen during the murder. Faced with constant surveillance and repeated interrogations, Wegg finally broke down and pleaded guilty one month after proclaiming his innocence. He quickly repented and testified that the police coerced him. But by then it was too late, and his conviction was mainly based on his own words.
This is just the beginning of one of the most well-known and heated criminal justice legends in Illinois history. This is a heartland black story that has been staged over three generations, sparking countless articles, a book, and most recent An HBO documentary. I was born and raised in the quaint riverside town enclave near Hunger Rock in the Illinois Valley, where most of my family still lives. The murder case was given the mythical color of folklore, telling a story. The sepia-toned ghost story is in the quiet tone around the campfire. However, the terrible story told by the people in the town is too simplistic. It is actually a tricky epic about crime and punishment, full of conflicting narratives, questions of reasonable doubt, allegations of misconduct, and many more. Alternative theory. Wegg's release from prison opened a wild new chapter.
"I don't want to die when people think I have committed a crime I have never committed."
Many men in a similar position may decide to spend the rest of their lives quietly, enjoying the glory of the family, and trying to make up for lost time. But now that the day of liberation has finally come, Wegg is very clear about his next move. He has been telegraphing it for half a century. As early as 1972, before Wegg's second parole hearing, a member of the prisoner review committee visited him at the Stateville Correctional Center and asked him if he planned to release him. Wegg replied without thinking that he would prove his innocence by all legal means.
And now he has this opportunity. In October, his pro bono lawyer—a senior trial lawyer experienced in innocence cases—was approved by the LaSalle County Circuit Court to submit evidence found at the crime scene for DNA testing. Weig hoped that the analysis would help him finally clear his own guilt—perhaps by revealing the identity of what he called the real murderer.
"This is the only thing I want," he told me over the phone one night while pushing for the test. "What I want is more important than anything."
Before his family secured him a permanent home in LaSalle County, he spoke in his temporary residence at the time, near the West End Jesse Brown Virginia Medical Center. He talked about prison food (not as bad as you think), his recurring dreams (mainly about family), his desired career (police, weirdly), and the simple pleasures of his new freedom (buy Convenience store sweets). The production line is troubled by static electricity. The 82-year-old man never said unnecessary words. He was taciturn and spoke softly.
But one thing he said was loud and clear: “I don’t want to die when people think I’ve committed a crime I’ve never committed.”
For 60 years, Wegg has been making the same declaration. The difference now is that he finally has a chance to prove it.
The first sign of a problem is that the call to Room 109 is unanswered.
On the night of Monday, March 14, 1960, George Ortin called the hotel in Starved Rock State Park and checked in with his wife Lillian. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered it.
That morning, 50-year-old Lillian and two friends, 50-year-old Mildred Lindquist and 47-year-old Francis Murphy jumped into Murphy’s gray Ford station wagon and left them in Riverside High-class family life. After the church service on Sunday, they planned this trip on a whim-a leisurely four-day trip to Hungry Rock.
Around 12:30 in the afternoon, these women checked into the adjacent room of the hotel. In the restaurant, they had a lunch of fried noodles, juice and coffee, as well as cakes and dessert sundaes. They went back to their rooms and changed into clothes suitable for the sunny but cold weather that day. Then the three set out for hiking, with only cameras and binoculars.
This will be the last time they have been seen alive.
A few months before the trip, Lillian had been monitoring George. George left Bell Telephone Company in Illinois due to a heart attack, where he served as the head of internal audit. Mildred and Francis believed that their friends should stay away from the house and get some rest and relaxation in the magnificence of nature. But before Lillian left George on Monday, she made a promise to her husband that she would call later that night to make sure everything was fine at home.
When the call did not come, George called the hotel and asked for his wife's room. The operator tried to connect him, but no one answered. By Tuesday night, George still hadn't heard from Lillian. He tried several more times, but no one answered the phone in room 109. The front desk on duty told George that he was welcome to leave a note for his wife. George said that the information is simple-call home immediately.
On the early morning of Wednesday, March 16, George tried again to contact his wife, but failed. He felt a heat wave of panic sweeping over him. Where are Lillian and the girls?
Around 6:45 in the morning, George's brother Herman was an accountant living near Berwyn, and it was heard that it was difficult for him to get in touch with Lillian. Herman started his own efforts. When he couldn't make a call, he asked the front desk clerk to check the women's toilet. At this moment, the clerk reported an unpleasant discovery: the bed in the room looked neat, as if she had not slept, and the lady's bag was still in the room. Herman then asked to check whether there was a station wagon in the parking area with a Riverside sticker on its license plate, and was told that the vehicle was indeed parked in a place near the main entrance of the hotel. The serious reality of the situation can no longer be denied: his sister-in-law and her friend are missing.
At that time, Herman called Francis' husband, Robert Murphy, vice president and general counsel of BorgWarner, and Mildred's husband, Robert Linquist, vice president of Harris Trust & Savings Bank. They have not heard from their wives since they went to Hungry Rock. Murphy contacted LaSalle County Sheriff Ray Eutsey to report the women's disappearance. He also notified three friends of the family and Virgil Peterson, director of the Chicago Crime Commission, a civic-minded business leader organization determined to fight organized crime. As a former FBI agent, he has a deep relationship with law enforcement. Peterson told Murphy that he would call the Illinois police chief to help find missing women.
Late Wednesday morning, teams of state and local police and volunteers dispersed on the hungry rock. By then, a severe winter storm had entered the area, dumping several inches of snow, which increased the challenge of traversing the rugged terrain of the park. Despite the bad weather, a group of volunteer boys from the nearby Marseille juvenile delinquent forestry camp took only about 90 minutes to find the beaten and bloody bodies of Lillian, Mildred and Francis on the floor of a shallow hole. St. Louis Canyon is one of the most scenic places in the park, just over a mile from the hotel. The two women were naked, tied up with twine, and brutally beaten beyond recognition. Outside the cave, in the shadow of the 80-foot-high sandstone wall of the canyon, blood and other evidence were enveloped in rapidly accumulating snow. The only eyewitness seemed to be the waterfall in the canyon, which was frozen into a huge icicle.
This is not the first time blood has been spilled on a hungry rock. In fact, the park was built on the site of the Native American massacre. In 1769, according to legend, the Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes surrounded a group of people in Illinois (they were responsible for assassinating the chief of Ottawa Pontiac) and trapped them on a cliff-which actually left them lacking food and water . When the Illinois tried to escape, they were brutally killed, and some were hit to death.
In 1960, after the terrible discovery of three murdered women, dark clouds of fear and paranoia descended on Hungry Rock and the Illinois Valley. One or more killers were at large, and the entire community had never considered locking the door before and suddenly locked them up. According to a report, a resident of Utica said: "We have read about such tragedies in faraway places, but think about it now at our doorstep!" As the bloody details of the massacre began to spread, As a local columnist put it, a group of dumbfounded citizens began to ask: "What kind of human animal can do such a thing?"
From the moment when the three female nurses by the riverside appeared in Hungry Rock, investigators found that the murderer or the murderer was extremely stressed. The brutal and seemingly random nature of the triple homicide, the idyllic public environment of the state park, and the prominent social status of the victims made this story the focus of the news media. The Associated Press even called the murder "No. The first news report in the world today." A mobile radio telephone vehicle dispatched an emergency telephone trailer to downtown Ottawa. "Life" magazine will introduce the murders in two special pages. The case has made headlines in the Chicago Daily Tribune and LaSalle County newspapers for several months, and its readers are anxiously paying attention to every development.
In the dazzling light of the media spotlight-or perhaps in response to censorship-at all costs. LaSalle County authorities, including Sheriff Ray Eutsey and LaSalle County State Attorney Harland Warren, insisted on leading the investigation. But Governor William Stratton ordered the State Department of Public Safety, which includes the State Police and the Criminal Identification and Investigation Bureau, to assist in one of the largest raids in the state’s history to date. "State officials," the Tribune reported, "said that Sheriff Eutsey will acquire as many of the 1,100 soldiers in the state as he deems necessary."
The brutal and seemingly random nature of the triple homicide, the idyllic public environment of the state park, and the prominent social status of the victims made this story the focus of the news media.
That night, the bodies of these women were found and they were transported to the Hulls Funeral Home in Ottawa. Within a few hours, two pathologists from the Bloomington-Normar area performed an autopsy. When official news broke that these women had died of severe head injuries, those who witnessed the murder scene that night would not be surprised. One of the more puzzling findings is that Francis's fingertip was severed and did not recover.
In the temporary war room set up in the hungry rock hut, the police began an interview blitz to find clues. Among the hundreds of people, all were hotel employees and guests; passers-by living in 17 nearby motels; known fur poachers; the van driver seen near the entrance to the canyon on the day of the incident; a man was murdering He was found in the park a few days before the incident, and soon after he was arrested for chasing high school girls in Utica. Sheriff Eutsey even found a Minister of Travel. She made some movies while driving through the park on the day the woman was killed; the priest flipped through the movies, but no substance was produced.
When looking for clues at the crime scene, use weed killers to help melt snow, and use mine detectors to locate anything buried in the ground. Investigators used the women’s blood-stained clothes, the length of twine used to tie their wrists, and other traces, including strands of hair and cigarette butts, as evidence. They also found a three-foot-long branch covered with blood and hair; they speculated that the club — 4 inches in diameter and weighing about 10 pounds — was the main weapon. In addition, they found three items that were also stained with blood: a pair of binoculars, split in half; an Argus C-3 camera from Mildred Lindquist; and a camera bag with a broken camera bag.
It is hoped that these women may have captured an image revealing the identity of the murderer on the 35mm color film in the camera. After the film was washed, the investigator's attention immediately turned to three exposures. One exposure featured a smiling Mildred posing in the foreground of the trail. The second shows Francis in front of a frozen waterfall. The third added a weird black spot near the left edge of the picture, which some investigators interpreted as the shadow outline of a man. Further analysis determined that the "mysterious man" was nothing more than a visual illusion caused by the outline of the canyon cave.
The Chicago company that hired the victim’s husband—Borg-Warner, Harris Savings and Trust, and Illinois Bell Telephone—provided a $30,000 joint award to provide information that led to the murderer’s arrest and conviction. Nicholas Spiros, the hotel’s long-term operator, invested US$5,000, bringing the total today to more than US$300,000.
Emails and phone calls flooded in, but the most reliable piece of information seemed to be provided by a LaSalle car dealer. He recalled that he was driving along Illinois Highway 178 at about 2 pm on March 14th. , The road was close to the entrance to the St. Louis Canyon, when he saw a tan and beige Chevrolet Bel Air lying down where the three women were standing. A young man got out of the car and started talking to the woman. Another man stayed in the car. The dealer's description of the first person: Approximately 25 years old, 5 feet 8 inches, 165 pounds, red-brown wavy curly hair, wearing a yellow-gray jacket and blue pants that may be denim.
After reviewing the evidence, the director of psychiatry at Stateville Prison provided investigators with a "sketches" of the types of possible killings: a semi-reclusive man aged between 25 and 30, physically strong, and possibly motivated to kill. Satisfy sexual impulses.
But to many people’s surprise, as part of the pathologist’s examination, the victim’s vaginal smear revealed negative sperm. This suggests that these women may not have been raped as originally assumed. This discovery shifted the focus of possible motives from sexual behavior to robbery. This shaky hypothesis was partly supported by the crime laboratory’s claim that Lillian’s wedding ring and engagement ring could not be found. Investigators began to contact the pawnshop to see if the jewelry was hit.
In late March 1960, a frustrated Eutsey told reporters: "Many of our clues have gone to dead ends. We will solve this case. I don't know where or how long it will be. But we will."
Like all employees of Starved Rock Lodge, Chester Weger was questioned by the police in the days and weeks after the murder. Among the bustling law enforcement officers, the 21-year-old is a familiar and friendly presence. After investigators moved their headquarters out of the cabin, they sometimes asked for a pot of coffee or bread rolls, and from time to time, Wegg would deliver orders from the kitchen. Wegg is an avid outdoor enthusiast, and he has a broad knowledge of the trails of Starved Rock. Since he was a child, he has cherished the peace and freedom he felt when he walked in the woods, a feeling of being close to fellowship with God.
He was born in Derby, Iowa in 1939, the only son of the six children of Herschel and Juanita Wegg. When he was 2 years old, the family moved to Illinois. They live in the suburb of Oglesby, near the Vermilion River, in a two-bedroom house without indoor plumbing. Weig sleeps on a folding sofa bed in the dining room. "I now know that we are poor," sister Mary said. "When we grow up, we never know. We are like other kids, we think." Herschel works as a seasonal painter and raises raccoon dogs, while Juanita worked as a housekeeper at Starved Rock Lodge for a while. The family really depended on the land for their livelihood, eating only the meat they hunted, and growing vegetables in a large and abundant garden. As the only boy, Wegg established a particularly close relationship with his father. In the woods behind the house, Herschel taught his son how to catch raccoons and minks and how to skin the animals before hanging them to dry.
In 1952, when Wegge was 12 or 13 years old, he was arrested for statutory rape in Oglesby. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board documents mentioned this incident, but the details have been edited due to the age of the persons involved. Wegg claimed that he got in trouble because he put a white cloth into the vagina of a girl who was raped by someone else. "I was told to plead guilty," he wrote in the prison autobiography reported by the Tribune in 1963. "I did it. I got the pass." In other words, he was sentenced to probation.
It was discovered in Weger's background that the incident first put the dishwasher on the radar of the investigation. In an earlier interview with the police, Weg mentioned to the state police that he knew a shortcut from the St. Louis Canyon "somewhere behind the waterfall." If they find it helpful, he proposes to show them the route. A soldier later testified that as they explored the area around the waterfall, Wegg stopped, pointed to a cave and asked, "Is that the place where the woman lay?"
Less than a week later, the police officer stopped Wegg in the cabin and asked if they could accompany him to the apartment in LaSalle, where he lived with his wife and two young children. They told him that they wanted to take a picture of him wearing a deerskin jacket, decorated with leather tassels, like things in Davy Crockett's wardrobe. Wegg agreed. After the photo was taken, the police cut a few tassels from the coat and sent them to the Illinois Crime Laboratory in Springfield.
At this time, the crime laboratory has begun to conduct polygraph tests in the court office of State Attorney Warren. As early as 1960, polygraph results were not accepted in court due to unreliability, but the authorities often used them to help guide investigations. No less than two dozen subjects were tested. Wegg has undergone six tests. After each item, the examiner concluded that he did not conceal any relevant knowledge and did not commit murder.
In late April, because the triple homicide had not been solved, the Illinois Crime Laboratory came under fire for improper investigation. For several weeks, the understaffed and underfunded laboratory could not find Lillian's ring—until a deputy found their evidence in her gloves. Another missing piece of evidence, Francis' reading glasses, was found in the pocket of her jacket. The laboratory did not report bloody fingerprints on women’s clothes in time. Allegedly, it also mistaken the hair in Lillian's hands for female hair; subsequent inspections revealed that the source of the information was two men-one is a young man and the other is a middle-aged man.
The dispute will lead to a large-scale reform of the laboratory. But at the same time, the evidence in the Starved Rock case was transferred to the Michigan State Police Crime Laboratory for re-examination. The detectives felt that they had returned to the first stop. By mid-May, the search for the hungry rock killer had become the most extensive and expensive raid in Illinois police history. All in all, according to a report in the Tribune, the state police invested a total of 21,360 man-hours to find the killer. Where did it come from?
Emil Toffant, director of the Special Investigations Department of the State Police, said: "Our relationship with the murderer is no closer than the day the body was found." "In a murder case, hard work doesn't mean much. . You must catch the murderer, and we haven't done it yet—not yet."
Warren, the state attorney, may be the strongest critic of the investigation. After all, it was he who decided to send the physical evidence to the Illinois Crime Laboratory, although the state police preferred FBI laboratories and facilities related to the Chicago and St. Louis police departments. In the summer of 1960, the Starvation Rock investigation was relatively stagnant, and the timing couldn’t be worse for Warren’s political prospects: the election in early November was looming, and his Democratic opponents did not make voters forget the most notorious crimes. The county’s history remains unresolved. Solved, the killer is still at large.
At the end of the summer, Warren decided to take matters into his own hands. The prosecutor became a detective. Taking into account the evidence he recovered from the Michigan laboratory, Warren focused his attention on the blood-stained twine used to bind women. This made him very curious, what rope was used by the hungry rock hut. One day in September, he went there to collect samples. In the kitchen, he found some coils that looked like twine. This finding was enough to convince amateur detectives that the murderer was someone who could enter the kitchen.
In order to narrow the range of potential suspects, Warren set up a polygraph in a large hut on Starved Rock. He hired an examiner from John E. Reid & Associates. This Chicago company will soon popularize Reid technology, which is an interrogation method based on psychological manipulation and is still widely used by law enforcement agencies to induce falsehoods. Famous for confession. After several employees were tested, Wegg was the next one. He left the cottage in May and got a job as a painter. After the test was completed, Wegg left the cabin. According to legend, the examiner looked at Warren and said some variations of "He is your man".
More than six months after the murder, Wegg has become the main suspect in the investigation.
In the early morning of September 27, LaSalle County Sheriff’s Deputy William Dummett and Assistant State Attorney Craig Armstrong took Weg away from his father’s home in Oglesby and took him to Reid headquarters in Chicago. When John Reid himself sat on the table opposite Wegg, it was already wee hours. For the next two to three hours, Reid discussed the hungry rock case with him and performed a polygraph test. When Reid concluded that Wegg was misleading, he spent hours trying to convince him to tell the truth. But despite the pressure, Weig insisted that he had nothing to do with the killing.
In the afternoon and evening, Reid and an assistant continued to interrogate the young man. In a test, Wegg later testified and Reid instructed him to answer "yes" to every question, including questions about murder. He refused. At another point, Reid threatened to inject Wegg with the serum of truth.
Around midnight, Wegg finally left Reed's office. But the trial did not end. In the front seat of Dummett’s Chrysler, Wegg was sandwiched between his deputy and Armstrong. Dummett told Wegg that if he did not sign a confession, he would be sentenced to electric chair.
"Chester," Dummett said, according to Wegg, "you have to ride a thunderbolt."
"I won't sit on a chair," Wegg replied, "because I didn't kill anyone."
Dummett later denied making a threat, but Armstrong refuted his statement in the stands, saying that the exchange did happen.
At about 2 am, Dummett’s Chrysler drove into the parking lot of the LaSalle County Courthouse. In his office on the fourth floor, Armstrong asked Wegg for another four hours of interrogation. Even though Wegg continued to protest his innocence, he was still very polite and amiable. He agreed to Armstrong's request to take off his shirt so that the assistant state attorney could take a picture of his figure and the tattoo on his left arm: "Rocky," a nickname. When Armstrong asked him to appear in the police lineup, he also obeyed. A lawyer for Wegge later pointed out that the 21-year-old man was photographed standing with inmates in the county jail, and none of them appeared to be under 40.
At dawn, investigators told Weg that they wanted to obtain some of his clothes, and these items would be sent to the FBI crime laboratory. He agreed. When Armstrong and his deputy, Wayne Hess, drove Wegg home, it was already around 7 in the morning. In the humble apartment, Wegg took out the deerskin jacket they requested. Then Armstrong asked if he and Hess could see through this place. Wegg said yes. The assistant state attorney began to open the drawers and cabinets, looking for the rope; he found a few, but they were all very good, completely inconsistent with the thicker rope found at the crime scene.
Finally, Armstrong and Hess drove Wegg to his father's home in Oglesby, where he has been living. During the ride, Wegg began to doze off. For more than 24 hours, he has remained awake while enduring intermittent interrogations. And within 24 hours he has insisted that he did not kill the three women.
Soon after, Warren and Utsey asked the state police to monitor Weg for 24 hours. The reason for the statement is public safety. But the round-the-clock tail may actually be part of Warren's broader strategy to terrorize Wegg's confession. Evidence for this view came to light in 2009, when Warren's daughter Anne Warren Smith (Anne Warren Smith) served as her father's legal secretary from 1981 until his death in 2007, when she signed an oath Book, proving the authenticity of the handwritten notes she found during the screening. Approval of documents from former state attorneys. A plan to frame Weg was scribbled on two undated yellow paper. The affidavit includes a transcription: "Inquiry-how do you prove Weg's presence," the note begins. "Let the man confess and convince him. What do you do. State Attn. Sheriff's Office. Start Psychology [sic] War A. Night + daytime put a tail on him, knowing [sic] is being followed. B. Investigate further Background. Focus on one person. [...] Plan to pick him up at 5:30 or 6 pm and have [...] two deputies take him to the 5th floor, where he will be interrogated for 15 hours."
In mid-October, the details of the rotation of eight state police officers began to monitor Wegg day and night. The police lurked in a car outside his apartment. They followed him to the tavern and bowling alley. They will appear at the scene of his painting work and take pictures of him. When he went to paint a minaret in a nearby Peruvian town, they sat outside the church and looked at him.
At about 6 pm on November 16, 1960, Dummett and Hess picked him up in his apartment, and Weg was under constant surveillance for a month. At the court, the representatives sat Weg down and asked him again if he was involved in the Hunger Rock murder. Once again, he told them that he didn't kill anyone.
During the interrogation, Sheriff Eutsey went to the justice of the peace—a local grocer named Louis Goetsch—to obtain an arrest warrant for Weger. This was very unusual, a lawyer for Wegg later argued. Magistrates usually preside over weddings, and their jurisdiction is limited to misdemeanor cases. In felony cases such as triple homicide, the possible punishment is death, and the circuit judge is usually the appropriate power to determine whether there is a possible cause of arrest.
What evidence does the authorities have at this time? The ordinary twine in the kitchen of the cabin is similar to twine found to be wrapped around women's wrists, but investigators could not find any experts to prove that they are the same. There is a Weger deerskin jacket, which he wore for several years before and after the killing. Investigators sent it to the FBI laboratory, which concluded that it contained a small amount of human blood, although the amount of blood was so small that it could not be type-matched with Weger or any woman. Some hotel employees also began to recall seeing scratches on Wegg's face after the murder, although neither they nor the officials who initially questioned Wegg reported these marks.
At about 9:30 p.m., Wegg was informed of the charges against him, including three murders in Starvation Rock, and two other incidents in Mattison State Park: the robbery in July 1959. Case and September 1959. Wegg was told that the victims in these cases were selected from the lineup he had worked with earlier. Under these circumstances, he will never be tried.
Back on the third floor, the delegates continued to interrogate Weg. It was at this time in the evening that Wegg later testified that Dummett basically gave him two options: confess, be sentenced to life imprisonment, and be released within 14 years. Or be executed without pleading guilty.
At 1 am, Eutsey brought Weger's wife and parents to talk to him. Herschel Weger testified that the sheriff took him aside and told him that if his son pleaded not guilty, he would go to the "little green house", which he interpreted as a reference to the electric chair. Herschel said that standing outside the interrogation room, he could hear Dameeter repeatedly saying to his son: "You know you did it. Why don't you say frankly that you did it? Why do you treat your wife and children like this, Why do you treat your father and mother like this? Tell us frankly about it."
Herschel later testified that he was then sent into the room to talk to his son. He asked Chester if he had committed murder. Chester looked at his father and said, "No, Dad, I don't." Herschel then asked Eutsey to postpone interviewing his son until he could find a lawyer the next day. The sheriff ignored his request. Before the Wegg family left the court, his wife kissed him. His mother hugged him and said that he should tell the truth.
Shortly before 2 a.m., after being interrogated for most of eight hours, Weg looked at Dummett and Hess. "Okay," he said according to his testimony. "You have to confess, I will give you one."
Weg then provided a version of the incident to the police. When things got out of control, he tried to rob the three women. In the next 15 hours, he provided confessions to no less than four officials. In his confession, he said how the episode unfolded:
When he was off work in the afternoon, he was walking towards St. Louis Canyon and met these women. He grabbed a strap from a person, thinking it was a wallet, but it was tied to binoculars. The belt is broken. He said that at this time, one of the women hit him with binoculars or a camera. The other attacked him with a sharp object, perhaps a comb. Then, somehow, he was able to calm the women down and convince them to follow him into the canyon. He told them that once they returned to the canyon, he would let them go. Back in the canyon, the women agreed to let him tie them up. He used the kitchen rope in his pocket. He didn't steal anything from the woman, and then started walking away. At that moment, one of the women broke free and attacked him. He picked up a branch, knocked the woman unconscious, and dragged her body into a cave. He was worried that he would kill her, and then beat the other two people to death with a club to eliminate witnesses. Then the first woman he hit awoke and hit him with binoculars. He retaliated with branches and binoculars. Above his head, he found a red and white Piper Cub plane, and worried that it was a police plane. So he dragged the bodies of the other two women into the cave. "Then I took off this lady's coat, if I remember correctly," Wegg said, "all I can say is put this coat here to make it look like rape." When asked When he took off a woman's pants and tucked them under her petticoat like a crime scene, he said, "I don't know." He checked the money in their pockets and left the scene without finding anything. He washed the blood from his hands in the stream or in the snow, and then returned to the hut to continue his night shift.
On the morning of his confession, Wegg was taken to the county jail at around 3 o'clock in the morning. Four and a half hours later, he was shackled and taken to the St. Louis Canyon, where he repeated the crime he described in his confession to law enforcement officials and news media audiences.
Two days later, Wegg withdrew his confession while discussing his case with Joseph Carr, the public defender appointed by the court, in prison. "I'm not even there," he told Karl. "I don't know anything about murder." He claimed that the statement he made to officials was based on detailed information provided to him by Dummett, including the crime scene photos shown to him by his deputy, and what he heard around the hotel Newspaper reports and conversations.
The following month, a judge dismissed Wegg's pre-trial motion for a confession. Regardless of coercion or not, his own words will be the country's most powerful weapon against him.
The trial began in February 1961 at the Limestone County Courthouse in downtown Ottawa, just a few blocks from the park where Lincoln and Douglas held their first historic debate. On the first day of testimony, 100 seats in the courtroom were full, and dozens of curious members of the public stood against the wall. Trying the case in front of Circuit Judge Leonard Hoffman was newly elected state's attorney Robert Richardson, a rather green trial attorney given the office he held. As his first assistant, Richardson chose Anthony La Culha, he was a A 27-year-old native of the Illinois Valley, who has just graduated from the John Marshall Law School, he has never tried a murder before. In the absence of witnesses or physical evidence that clearly linked Wegg to the crime, the prosecutor used his confession as the cornerstone of the state's case. For these reasons, they would stand before a jury of seven women and five men and demand that they sentence him to death.
However, privately, the prosecutor expressed doubts about the completeness of Wegg's statement. "I read the confession on the night we were preparing this case," La Cullia later recalled, in 2010 at the Illinois Institute of Continuing Education of Laws (IICLE) event about the Starved Rock murder. . "I said,'Bob, this can't happen this way. It's absolutely ridiculous to happen this way.' He said,'Well, what are you going to do? I said,'Well, it's nothing— —I’m going to tell the jury that this is what happened. Because, in the final analysis, at the end of the confession, he said, “I killed them. "This is what we need. We need him to admit that he killed women. It's not how he did it."
Richardson and La Culha decided to sue Wegg only for the murder of Lillian Orting. Their idea is that if they lose, they can judge him for the death of the other two women. "I am concerned about the confession. I want to test this confession with the judge and the jury," La Culha explained to the IICLE event audience. "This is a risk, because if we don't confess, all we really have is the splashed jacket and scratches."
Defending Wegg was a Marseille lawyer named John McNamara. He was a former assistant state attorney of LaSalle County. Wegg’s father hired him with the proceeds of the sale of two raccoons. In his closing speech, McNamara aimed directly at his deputy William Dummett. McNamara told the jury: "The only evidence of how [murder] might have happened was a confession as evidence of Chesterwig, but he denied these confessions." "Every word in that confession indicated this. It's a cunning lie. William Dummett first told a lie, and then if Chester pleaded guilty based on his theory, he would be willing to give his life for Chester Wegg."
After less than two days of deliberation, the jury found Weg guilty of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The verdict came on March 3, which is Wegg’s 22nd birthday. Newspaper headline writers were very happy about this coincidence: "Weige treats life as a birthday gift." The jury members later explained that they chose life imprisonment instead of the death penalty because they believed it was a greater punishment for outdoor people. It was not until 1972 that Wegg was eligible for parole.
When Wegg was taken out of the overcrowded courtroom, the crowd in the gallery suddenly moved forward, wanting to take a closer look at this man they can now openly call the killer. Being escorted into the conference room, the newly convicted man was overwhelmed by the buzzing of TV cameras, the crackling of flashing lights, and the chanting questions of reporters.
"Chester, do you still think you were framed?" a news reporter asked.
"I know I am," Wegg replied.
"You said people lied to you. What are these lies?"
"They will come out in time."
In the early days of his imprisonment, Wegg still believed that he would be released soon. In his opinion, the serious injustice in his eyes is impossible to hold. But days have become months, months have become years, and years have gradually become decades. A few years after Wegg was sentenced, when the bounty for the case was distributed, State Attorney Warren accepted $11,500, while Dummett and Hess’ deputies each accepted $5,000. Six years later, Wegg confided to his wife Joan that she continued her life wisely. She filed for divorce. By the mid-1970s, Wegg's post-conviction options were almost exhausted. His case has been heard twice in the Supreme Court of Illinois, first in 1962 and then in 1971. In 1977, his request for a hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.
Even though he explored all the legal ways to get out of prison, Wegg was adjusting to life in prison. He is almost always in a job, from an assembly line chef to an art supplies dispenser. He was proficient in the binding industry and rose to the position of lecturer in a prisoner's binding factory. He acquired professional skills in bookkeeping, paperwork, and inventory control. He taught himself to paint with oil paintings, often depicting the wooded landscapes of his youth that he missed so much. He read eagerly: history, philosophy, magazines and the Bible, always the Bible. In 1985, after receiving eighth grade education and imprisonment, Wegg received a GED.
But year after year, the prisoner review committee will reject his parole. Each time, Anthony Raccuglia, one of the prosecutors, would write a passionate letter opposing the release, which did not help Wegg’s case. Until his death in 2019, La Culha sometimes even drove 130 miles to Springfield from LaSalle, where he kept his private clinic, and read his letter aloud in front of the board of directors. He wrote in 2012: "If Chester Wegg is released on parole, it will prove that he continues to think he is innocent." Going to hell, he will undoubtedly play a very important role. "
Around the turn of the century, Wegg became interested in stories about how to use DNA testing to save people from wrongful convictions. Emerging forensic technology began to see him as the best opportunity for freedom. The Illinois Office of the Defender of Appeals quickly appointed Wegg as the new public defender, Donna Kelly. She is a meticulous and tenacious lawyer who quickly became one of Wegg's most fierce advocates. Just reading the record of the 1961 trial will convince Kelly that Wegg’s innocence claim is not only valid, but that he was the victim of countless injustices during the investigation.
In April 2004, Kelly filed a motion for DNA testing of various evidence items collected in St. Louis Canyon in 1960. The LaSalle County State Attorney's Office opposed the motion and responded, stating that the projects may have been in storage for more than 40 years.
An assistant state attorney named Brian Towne is responsible for investigating the history of evidence custody. As a friend and protégé of Anthony Raccuglia, who later became the county's chief attorney, Towne spoke with any official who might have kept evidence for the past four years. His discovery was disastrous for Weige's DNA testing requirements.
After the trial, the evidence was put in the filing cabinet, and the victim's bloody clothes were mixed with Wegg's clothes. Raccuglia told Towne that the state’s prosecutor’s office allows “many individual groups, including many high school classes, to view physical evidence during class trips or citizen travel.” The evidence will be displayed, “Anyone in the group wants to pick up evidence and view it. Evidence or anyone who examines the evidence in some way can do so without wearing gloves or any other protective measures to prevent contamination." Raccuglia estimates that hundreds of people have been exposed to the evidence.
In July 2004, Kelly withdrew the test motion and turned to a new task: seeking the then governor Rod Blagojevich's pardon for Weg. In her 50-page leniency petition filed in 2005, she criticized the confession as "completely unreliable" in many ways. Wegg often used tentative language when recalling critical moments of crime, such as "I think" and "I don't know." He also mistaken key details, and later signed multiple corrections to the confession transcripts, which she believed seemed to be guided by a deputy to fill in the differences. Most importantly, the narrative provided by Wegg seemed far-fetched. Kelly argued: “Chester’s confession allowed him, although unarmed, to persuade women who kept their cameras and binoculars to return to the canyon to release them as he promised. ," she wrote. "The three women-two of whom allegedly betrayed him by hitting the attacker-now suddenly become complacent and agree to return to a cold, snowy canyon area surrounded by 80-foot-high steep rock walls. Against humanity, because they are afraid of an unarmed person."
Kelly also quoted a 2002 story from the LaSalle County News Tribune in the petition, in which La Cullia surprisingly admitted that the prosecutor had concealed evidence of Lillian Ordin’s sexual assault in order to avoid destroying Wegg’s confession. Motives for robbery. Kelly outlined two major investigative misconduct cases in the background of Dumit's deputy, which she believes added weight to Wegg's statement that he was coerced to plead guilty.
However, the strangest part of the petition was a sworn testimony by Wegg, in which he revised his alibi on the afternoon of March 14, 1960. During the trial, he testified that when he was off work that afternoon, he wrote in the Wow Room of the Pow Hungry Rock Lodge in the basement, took care of the stove, played pinball, and listened to music on the jukebox. Now, suddenly, he said that a friend and waiter in the hotel, Stanley Tucker, drove him to downtown Oglesby, where he cut his hair. The petition also includes an affidavit from the barber Ben Franklin, who swears that Weg was in his barber shop that day.
Why did he provide verifiable alibi just now? According to Weg, when investigators first asked him where he was during the crime, he told them to hitchhiker with Tucker to Oglesby. Later, after the police informed him that Tucker (he was the suspect himself) no longer confirmed his story, he felt pressured to fabricate an alibi.
In the affidavit, Wegg also claimed for the first time that during the interrogation before the confession, Dummett pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger, while Utsey hit him in the abdomen and with a Billy club. Groin, fetters with flashlights and handcuffs.
As for the biological evidence found at the crime scene, Kelly argued that it did not point to Weg. Among thousands of pages of case documents, she stumbled upon a report from the University of Washington laboratory in November 1960. It contains test results on hair, including those found in Francis Murphy's gloves. The laboratory concluded that none of them matched Weige. But the jury has never heard of such evidence.
Governor Blagojevic rejected Weg's petition in 2007. But nothing failed. Kelly’s revelations triggered widespread reconsideration of the case, and public support for Wegg’s innocence proposition has also risen. A few years ago, the Illinois Innocence Project in Springfield handled this case briefly. In 2016, the last living juror of the trial, Nancy Porter, told the Tribune that she now found Wegg’s confession unbelievable. May overwhelm three women.
David Raccuglia, the son of prosecutor Anthony Raccuglia, began to question the belief instilled in him since he was a child that the man his father was convicted was like a villain. "When I was a kid, I was afraid of Chester Weger," said 62-year-old Raccuglia, the founder of American Crew, a men's grooming company. "When I was 5 years old, my grandmother told me that if Chester was released from prison, he would hurt me and my family."
But after the leniency petition, he said, "I started listening to Donna Kelly's story for the first time." He decided to start a fact-finding mission of his own. He read the transcript of the trial and other case documents. He also began to correspond with Weig, and finally asked if he could be seen in prison. The two men established an unlikely friendship. Raccuglia soon started filming interviews with Weger and planned to make a documentary. He accumulated dozens of hours of footage, some of which were compiled into a documentary series about the case and Raccuglia's own contradictory journey to find the truth, "Hungry Rock," which premiered on HBO on December 14.
Like Raccuglia, I grew up in the valley of Illinois. In a parking town 15 miles west of Hunger Rock, for most of my childhood, I saw Weg as a ghost, a symbol of fear. When I was 10, maybe 11, I went to the library to borrow the original text about killings: The Starved Rock Murders, a peculiar little paperback book published by local newspaper reporter Steve Stout in 1982. He has always Talk bluntly about believing that Wegg is guilty since then. I didn't know that such violence had ever been to the park where I participated in many school field trips, where the family members were already married. Twenty-five years later, when flipping through the 1960s microfilm newspaper in the local library, I often saw headlines on the front page about the progress of the Hunger Rock survey, and a few pages later an advertisement for the grocery store Malooley's. My grandfather ran with his brothers. , Selling pork butt barbecue at 39 cents per pound.
One recent afternoon, I called my 85-year-old uncle Ronald Malooley, who worked in that shop when he was a child. I want to know that he remembers the emotions of the residents of the area after the murder. He paused, took a deep breath, and then told me something he had never shared before. In the early 1950s, when he was a teenager, he had found a job among a group of "Gandhi dancers." Railroad workers with meager wages repaired railroad tracks, replaced rotten sleepers, and leveled slopes. One hot summer day, a skinny, pale child came to work. He introduced himself as Chester Weger and immediately took off his shirt. The next day, he came to work with the worst sunburn my uncle had ever seen. "I always thought he was a little bit off the base. Yes, I don't know, there is no moxie. He is an outsider," my uncle told me. "But I can't say that he looks like a murderer."
In the 16 years since the leniency petition, one of the most significant side effects has been the spread of alternative theories about the Hungry Rock murder. Kelly’s investigation pointed out that there was a lack of irrefutable evidence against Wegg—and this vacuum has been filled by armchair investigators eager to raise other potential suspects and scenarios. Some people sneered at the juvenile offenders who found these female bodies. Why did the boys find the crime scene so soon after the search started? Others shared images of old news stories about a man in LaSalle County who hid stolen guns in a cave in Starved Rock before Chicago was surrounded. Did Riverside’s wives stumble upon something they shouldn’t have seen during the hike?
Others believe that the murderer is someone the victim knows intimately. They referred to a report by William Jansen, a 25-year-old graduate of the Michigan State College of Criminology. When they fell into a dead end, the state police took him to re-examine the case. Jensen concluded that these murders were “not so much a sexual crime as a retaliatory crime” and suggested that friends, family and business partners be questioned.
Through the petition, Kelly himself suspected another man: George Spiros, the son of the operator of the Hungry Rock Hotel at the time of the murder. Spiros lives with his father in a house in the park, not far from where the women were found dead. His alibi was not fully checked out, but he passed the polygraph. In May 2005, two weeks after Kelly submitted her findings to a team of prisoners review committee members who advised the governor, the 73-year-old was found dead in his residence in Starved Rock. The obvious cause was a gunshot wound that he caused. Kelly told the Ottawa Times: "I think this man is the suspect in this well-known case. This is suspicious. Now he is dead."
The petition includes more red meat for those who want to become detectives: an affidavit describing dying confession by the Chicago police. Mark Gibson said that he and his partner were sent to the Rush Presbyterian Church. In 1982 or 1983 at Luke Hospital in the Near West End. When they arrived, a nurse told them that a woman who had died of cancer wanted to "clarify her conscience." She grabbed Gibson's hand and told the police officer that when she was young, she was with friends in a state park near Utica, Illinois, "something happened", "things got out of control", and "they dragged away the body." . Before the police got more details, the woman's daughters arrived and shouted the police to leave, calling their mother "crazy".
This will not be the only dying confession related to the Hungry Rock murder. In 2008, the first meeting of the Committee for the Release of Chester Weger was held at the Redick Library in Ottawa. The founders Robert Petre and David Marsh got together because of their research on the case. They began to send their findings to the prisoner review committee, participate in Wegg's parole hearings, and held public meetings to demand Wegg's release. In 2013, before Wegg’s 18th hearing, Marsh posted an interview on the Hungry Rock Murder Facebook page with a woman named Alice Warner Bohm in the Illinois River Valley. The younger sister of Harold "Smoky" Warner, she is a notorious felon in the area. Boehm said that before his death in 2005, Wrona told her that he was involved in the murder and Weger had nothing to do with the crime.
As a channel for sharing her own extensive research on the case, Cathy Carroll launched the Facebook page of Friends of Chester Wegg in 2013. Although she grew up in LaSalle County, Carol knew almost nothing about the Starvation Rock murder before the fall. Rabbit hole. The 58-year-old Wheeling resident suspected that the riverside women might have been the victims of the mob attack. She pointed out that their husband had close ties with Virgil Peterson, who, as the head of the Chicago Crime Commission, tried to fight organized crime. At the time these women were killed, LaSalle County had a reputation as a safe haven for Mafia-related vices (especially illegal gambling).
A few years ago, Carol started communicating with Weg. In a reply, he thanked her for the Christmas card and book she gave him. He praised the wisdom of Plato and Kant, and put forward some esoteric, albeit ambiguous, ideas on Christian theology. He seemed to be preoccupied with lies, liars and ignorance. He quoted Jeremiah 5:21 as saying: "You ignorant people who have eyes cannot see, and ears cannot hear. You have to listen."
Embedded in eight pages of neat handwriting is one of the only sentences that directly address his case. It is said that he was framed for the murder of Lilian Orting. In Carol's view, this is a message that Wegg hopes people like her will continue to share with the world, and this message goes far beyond the walls of his prison cell.
A few years ago, Andy Hale drove 300 miles from Chicago to the Pinckneyville Correctional Center to introduce himself to Chester Wegg. The lawyer recently read a newspaper article about the 21st rejection of parole by the Illinois Prisoner Review Board. He knew almost nothing about the murders of Weger or Starved Rock, but he was struck by the story of a prisoner who, after more than 50 years in custody, resolutely refused to plead guilty-even to ensure his release. "This persistence left a deep impression on me," Hale said. After discussing the case with Weger and doing some research, he was convinced that this man was wrongly convicted. Soon after, he began to serve as Wegg's public interest lawyer.
In some ways, Hale's representation of Weg is a strange choice. There was a lot of noise, and the city of Chicago began to hire him as an external legal counsel to defend the Chicago police on civil rights issues, including police brutality and wrongful conviction proceedings. Some of these lawsuits were brought by black men who claimed that they were tortured into false confessions by the police under the supervision of the infamous Chicago police commander Jon Berg.
But when he met Weg, Hale also began to represent the other party in such cases. In 2014, he produced and starred in a documentary "Murder in the Park" about the wrong conviction of Alstory Simon, who was convicted of double murder in Washington Park in Chicago in 1982 15 years in prison. At the center of the film is the role played by Northwestern University’s Medier Innocence Project in the process of Railroad Simon, which aims to provide the acquittal of a death row inmate named Anthony Porter. For a while, Hale helped represent Simon in the acquittal's $40 million lawsuit against Northwestern University, and finally settled for an undisclosed amount. Hale also took over the case of Cleve Heidelberg, who killed a Peoria County police officer in an attempt to rob a drive-in movie theater in 1970. Due to Hale's investigative efforts, Heidelberg's conviction was finally revoked 47 years later. "Because I have been defending the police over the years, I have the unique qualifications to analyze such cases, dig out and make some progress," Hale said. "I know what evidence should be. I know what the police should do."
In the fall of 2017, while studying Wegg's case in depth, he hired a lawyer named Celeste Stack from his company to provide assistance. As a former prosecutor who worked in the Cook County State Attorney's Office for 30 years, Stack specializes in cases involving DNA testing, especially those in which people who were convicted before the rise of modern forensic medicine require re-examination of evidence. She and Hale quickly realized that this was where they needed to focus their efforts to excuse Wegg. "As we obtain more documents and understand the case, we gradually believe that this must be a false conviction," Stark said. "We hope that there is still evidence to help us prove this through forensic tests."
In order to prove that the evidence in the Weger case can still produce demonstrative information after testing, Hale and Stack needed to find a laboratory to meet the challenge of reviewing improperly stored and improperly handled items for more than half a century. Decades. They don't have to see farther than the northwestern suburbs. Located in Elgin, Microtrace specializes in analyzing trace evidence: hair, fibers, dust, soil, paint, glass-any material that can be inspected under a microscope. The laboratory is known for doing more with less and for proposing new methods for cases that have baffled other investigators. Its resume includes some of the most high-profile cases of the past 30 years: Unabomber, Oklahoma City bombing, JonBenét Ramsey, Green River Killer.
Hale contacted Samuel "Skip" Palenik, the founder of Microtrace, who is a forensic microscope expert. He often quoted Holmes and his horseshoe-shaped beard made him feel like a police detective. When the lawyer mentioned that his client was Chester Weger, Palenik was stunned. He explained that the Starved Rock case inspired him to devote himself to his work. Growing up in the Southwest area near Midway Airport, Palenik was an intellectually curious 13-year-old when the triple homicide began to make its way on the front page of his parents' Chicago Sun Times. Every morning at breakfast, he reads the latest details of the investigation, and he is fascinated by the idea that he can gather clues to solve high-profile detectives. Now in his 70s and about to retire, Parenik is amused by the poetic symmetry, and his career may end due to some small contributions to the case.
"As we obtain more documents and understand the case, we gradually believe that this must be a wrong conviction," said a lawyer for Weig.
In August 2020, six months after Weg’s release, Hale and Stark filed a petition with the LaSalle County Circuit Court requesting a forensic examination. Circuit judge Michael C. Jansz questioned the chain of custody of these items. The same is true for Colleen Griffin, an assistant state attorney from Will Prosecutor.
Their concern was based on the mishandling of evidence exposed during Weger's initial DNA test bid. When his then attorney Donna Kelly withdrew her motion in 2004, she commented in court that the chain of custody evidence was "completely unreliable." Her words are now being used against Wegg's new team to challenge their demands.
To answer these concerns, Hale and Stack turned to Palenik of Microtrace and his son Christopher, who followed his father into the family business. The Paleniks reviewed the inventory report created in 2004 and stated that it appeared to include evidence items that were complete, identifiable, and suitable for forensic testing. They also pointed to other cases where Microtrace was able to recover evidence from rough-looking items such as broken microscope slides. In the 16 years since Weger’s first attempt to examine evidence, forensic technology has continued to evolve. For example, by allowing the extraction of genetic material from hair shafts, it is now possible to perform mitochondrial DNA analysis on degraded samples decades ago; earlier techniques required roots. But to determine whether The People v. Weger's crumbling filing cabinet is still valuable, the Paleniks concluded that the only way is for Microtrace to conduct a preliminary review.
In June last year, his team filed a lawsuit in an Ottawa court less than three miles from where Weg was tried. "Girl Scout 205 has easier access to evidence than me," Hale said. "I didn't see the jacket. Some kids tried this jacket." As he was pacing in front of the judge's bench, he bent down, picked up a trash can, and held it high. "The country wants it to sound as if all the evidence is in this trash can, and it's messed up and completely worthless. If I take the hair on Mrs. Murphy's gloves out of the trash can, it will fall, even though it is in the trash can, Pa Mr. Lennick can test it. We can test it, and it will have forensic value-a huge forensic value. It can solve the entire case."
The judge agreed to let Microtrace take a look-not a comprehensive DNA analysis, if approved, it will be carried out by a company specializing in genetic testing, but an important first step in this direction. By the end of that month, the LaSalle County Sheriff’s Office had taken out the filing cabinet from the evidence room. Weger's team and Microtrace spent two days and six hours cataloging each piece of evidence, and there were approximately 313 unique exhibits. In the top drawer, they found four pairs of Wegg's blue jeans. In the bottom drawer was a cloth bag containing Wegg's buckskin jacket and Lillian's clothes with brown blood stains on it. Some key evidence was missing, including the clothes of Francis and Mildred, and all three weapons suspected of murder-tree branches, cameras, and binoculars.
They were pleased to find that most of the trace evidence such as hair and fiber samples were intact, preserved and installed in a specially designed wooden box under labeled glass slides-60 years later, scientifically and their manufacturing It was just as useful that day. "Those glass slides are engraved with diamond nibs on the glass to tell you what's inside," Hale excitedly reported to Judge Jance at a state hearing in July. "Frankly, we think the evidence is amazing." Weger's team narrowed the requirements for DNA analysis to nine projects. Including: Lillian's left hand fingers and right hand glove hair, rope found in the cave and four cigarette butts at the scene.
In late September, Wegg appeared in the LaSalle County Court for the first time since his sentence in 1961 to hear the judge's decision on whether these items can be tested. Throughout the summer, his niece found him a rental house in LaSalle. It was a simple two-story white cottage with gray shutters in the corner. He was not warmly welcomed by the local media. His return triggered a front-page photo of his residence in the News Tribune, next to the headline in all capitals: "New Neighbor." Outside the court before the hearing, Wegg was sitting in a wheelchair, surrounded by Hale and his family. He was wearing bright white New Balance sneakers, a short-sleeved golf shirt and gray sweatpants, with a fleece jacket over his knees like a blanket. A thin plastic tube from the oxygen tank reached into his nostril, and a tube protruded from the bottom of his right trouser leg. Next to it was an electronic ankle monitor.
"Today is an important day for us," Hale said to everyone. "The culmination of several years of work, and the results of Chester's 60 years of fighting for innocence. Let us continue to conduct forensic examination of these evidences, and justice will be served. Chester, your spirit is with us today. You are from Did not give up fighting. I know you have been looking forward to appearing in court on this day. You have been fighting for almost seven years to clear your name. I think this is one of the reasons why you are still alive."
Related: How old is the prison? Last week, Illinois released the 80-year-old Hungry Rock Killer. Is continuing to imprison prisoners his age to help public safety, or just for money?
Related: How old is the prison? Last week, Illinois released the 80-year-old Hungry Rock Killer. Is continuing to imprison prisoners his age to help public safety, or just for money?
In the end, Youngs said he needed more time to consider this issue. In late October, Wegg was again brought to court. This time the judge is ready to rule. He approved the DNA inspection of eight of the nine exhibits. In early December, a representative of Microtrace watched the sheriff’s deputy pack the evidence and sent it to Bode Technology, the nation’s largest private forensic DNA laboratory in Virginia. The results may be announced as early as February 8, which is the date of the next hearing on the case.
If Wegg’s DNA is not found on any of the objects, Hale said he and Stark would argue that the conviction should be cancelled. The results may also reveal personal data that matches another suspect (perhaps someone whose genetic information is stored in the FBI database). In any case, if the test finally excludes Wegg as the perpetrator, the judge can decide to immediately release him from responsibility. But it is more likely that it will take months or even years of hearings before a decision is made—Weig and his family worry that if his health deteriorates, he may not leave this time.
When the judge had read his verdict, Wegg sat in a wheelchair stoically. At that moment, he never came close to clearing his name-but he seemed unmoved. This is a man who seems to understand that even after living in prison for nearly 60 years, his most difficult battle has just begun.
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