IL IL - Judith Anderson, 15, Chicago, 16 Aug 1957

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Not sure if this link's been posted - I looked but couldn't find it..

http://www.quirkyworks.com/judith_mae_andersen/chronology/

Anyway, The Four Scientists Club site had an investigation going for Judith Mae (whihc seems to have quickly petered out). Here's an interested quote:
Judith Mae Andersen (15) visits the house of Nancy O'Brien (16) at 222 N. Kenneth Ave. to discuss Kenneth Blevins, a sailor residing at the Norman OK Naval Air Station, who had been dating them both. "I told her Ken and I were going to get married," Nancy reported. "To prove it, we telephoned Ken in Oklahoma."
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Which sound a lot to me like there was some animosity between the two girls. I mean, going to the home of a romantic rival is pretty confrontational. "To prove it"... sounds like the outcome of a confrontation to me.

So we have the jealous rival, a fickle-minded player of a sailor (who might, being a sailor, have a clue about how to seal metal drums a certain way?) ... and the jealous rival's object of jealousy is murdered execution-style, bullets to the back of the head...

It's not unfeasible in my mind that Nancy could have shot Judith (with her dad's old gun, maybe??) in a fit of jealous rage, then had Kenneth come help her dispose of the body.

Then there's the very cagey Elena... who asked the boys present that night not to say they'd all been together, and is pretty inconsistent in the details of her story.

I have to ask myself if Elena knew Nancy O'Brien and if so, how well.

Does anyone think it odd that Kenneth sent a letter to --Elena-- regarding Judith Mae, with a message confirming his love for Judith, which arrived the Monday following her death?

-- Why send it to Elena? How'd he know her address, or feel familiar enough to send a letter for Judith there? Was Elena's house the rendezvous point for them? Was Kenneth there that night..? Was Kenneth playing Elena -and- Judith..? The guy certainly had no shame in that regard.

I'm sure some of the answers are here in this thread.. but they're worth looking at closely, I reckon.
 
Beware this story by Ed Baumann and John O`Brien. Though it may have some useful info, the short section on the Percy murder has 15-17 inaccuracies in it. A few of those were tough to avoid given what was publicized about the case. But some are just silly, like the statement that the state police moved into Percy's house. Most are just inaccuracies that have been told and retold over and over again.

For instance, in the Anderson case they write "...despite testimony that Cook had flunked the lie test." Since when were/are lie tests admissible in court?

Chief Patrick Deeley, referred to in the story, was Chicago's Chief of Detectives. I am told by a former Chicago cop, who eventually became the city's Superintendent of Police, that Deeley's wife was a madam in the First Ward. And every week or so he got a payoff from the mob. Of course, in those days that was not unusual in Chicago. Might still not be unusual for Chicago, ha ha.
 
I was thinking about garages and repair shops with welding equipment. My local garage has old oil drums out the back.
 
I thought about that, too. I worked in a print shop in the early 80s and they used 55 gallon drums for trash cans. But those were significantly bigger than the one in the case here, or no?
 
The one in this case was cut down in a certain way common to folks who work in the military when sending drums overseas (IIRC at this late hour...) and the top folded over, so it looked smaller but was still a 55 gallon drum.

The other container was a 5 gallon oil tin.

Really, I think the way her body was disposed of is... well, it's bizarre, of course, but there's just something kind of off about it.

Why cut the body up and do this elaborate thing with the two containers?

Why not just weld the first drum shut, rather than cutting the large one down so the parts didn't fit..? This is why I'm seeing inexperience - he cut the drum down, then realised the body wasn't going to fit when the top was folded over (so did he have access to cutting equipment but not welding gear and thus the choice to cut it down, maybe? or was he just doing what he knew best - but then, you'd think he'd know the volume would be decreased.. ), and the second container was an impromptu fix for that problem.

I have to wonder, too about how the body was stored.. and where... and why.
 
Traces of calcium carbonate and calcium silicate phosphate were found in the bucket. These chemicals are used in steel making and as an asbestos substitute.
What I found interesting is this

Calcium silicate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'One of the most successful materials in fireproofing in Europe is calcium silicate. Where North Americans use spray fireproofing plasters, Europeans are more likely to use cladding made of calcium silicate. High performance calcium silicate boards retain their excellent dimensional stability even in damp and humid conditions and can be installed at an early stage in the construction programme'

Joseph Abbatacola worked in sheetmetals and was constructing air ducting the evening Judith went missing. If you read the account of who was where and what on the first page you will see he had inconsistancies in his whereabouts that night. Eventually passing a lie detector.
Remember he had European decent so would be more familiar with using the above chemicals as cladding. What about the drum and bucket belonging to the Abbatacolas and that's why nobody reconised it, only the family would remember it and if they were keeping quiet...well, you see what I mean.

Edited to add this link, photographs and more info here
http://www.quirkyworks.com/judith_mae_andersen/
 
It looks like Joseph was killed in 2005 by a hit and run on Grand Avenue west of York Road, Bensenville.
 
Thanks, Ausgirl. I didn't realize that about the drum. Robin Hood, that is interesting about the steelmaking aspect. I'd like to know more about that. Of course, in the Chicago area at that time there was quite a lot of that going on.

Like any case the cops throw a lot of resources at, I'm sure a lot of people were investigated for this one. Lord knows what this guy's reasons were for disposing of the body the way he did. Were both containers in the same area at the same time initially or did he risk coming back later to leave the second one?

I've been interviewing several retired LE members here, including a former homicide detective who worked the north side of the city. He certainly remembers this one.
 
joellegirl said:
I also have to say it is so neat how we have Google Maps Street View and Google Earth. I can finally see the area this took place. There isn't a street view of Judith's home (only satellite birds eye view) but there is of the Elena's house (not sure if it is exact but I can see how the area looks like). The homes look to be built late 19th early 20th century, so the neighborhood probably hasn't changed that much in looks since 1957.
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Indeed, I had similar thoughts when I looked at the pictures of the area on google map street view. For some reason it showed the alley behind the homes instead of the street front but it's enough to get a feel of the place. Appears to be oldish but well-kept neighborhood. Looks safe now but often these areas have been subject to gentrification in the late 20th century and house higher-income families. Not sure how safe it was for a teen girl to walk that alley late at night a half century ago.
 
wfgodot said:
I bet they checked, though I don't know. If they didn't, that was a huge omission regarding an interesting clue. They seem to have done everything thoroughly though. I miss the newspaper reporting of the time as it, too, was amazingly thorough. These days, LE releases next to nothing and reporters rarely dig.
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Thorough maybe but apparently not immune from gross exaggeration. It reported that the police had investigated 109,000 homes and 500,000 (half a million) garages. In 1957 that amounts roughly to one third of all the dwellings in Chicago and more garages than the whole state of Illinois contained. Granted, it may be the police that stretched their involvment a bit (like when they substantially inflate the street value of drugs seized in a bust nowadays) but jeez Louise, the public is not that gullible. 109 homes and 50 garages is probably much closer to the actual numbers.
 
shadowangel said:
As to the question of the body being cut up---This was fairly common in cases where the killer was inexperienced, panicked, and attempted to dispose of the remains. Cutting up the body, in the mind of the killer, might make it more difficult to identify, but in the hurry to be seperated from the act the killer doesnt complete the 'job' (as possibly evidenced by the state of the body). There being two containers used in this case might point to the killer being assisted in the disposal of the body.
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Personally I tend to think that cutting up the body hints at a single perpetrator because of the logistics involved in disposing of the body. I imagine the killer would be seeking an appropriately secluded area and in Chicago that meant either a long drive beyond the suburbs with a body in the car, or the much closer lake. Unless he was an emotionless sociopath (rare even among murderers) the guy would likely not have been willing to take the risk of driving a long distance with a corpse in his vehicle. Further indication of this is the fact that he appears to have driven to the shore to survey the dump site prior to returning later with the body.

Most people, especially people living near a large body of water, know that a corpse will not remain underwater for very long unless something keeps it from resurfacing. So the murderer knew that he couldn't simply dump her in the lake. Apparently he thought (wrongly) that placing the body in a relatively heavy metal container into which he would cut slits to let water in would cause it to sink, and securing the container with a lid would keep the body inside. I think this is more likely than the theory that the slits were designed to let buoyancy-promoting decomp gases out. This was long before CSI, the vast majority of people knew nothing about such details unless they were undertakers... or combat veterans, an avenue that might be worth exploring I suppose, though I don't believe in that possibility that much.

The victim weighing in a 150 lbs the perp knew that unless he had help he could never handle the weight of a full-size drum with the whole body inside. Cutting it up in smaller pieces had the double benefit of lessening both weight and bulk by allowing the use of smaller containers. Last but not least indication that he was alone: he backed up to the water to dump the drum, probably straight out of the trunk, because he couldn't carry it any distance. The most likely exaplanation for being this sloppy is that he was on his own.

With regards Elena's family being involved, this does not seem to fit the MO, which involved a handgun. Prohibition days were long gone by then, and only a small minority of homes had air conditioning. In August in Chicago most people would sleep with windows open, and 4 shots late at night in a densely populated area, someone would have reported it, especially considering that someone reported it even when the police test-fired shots in the middle of nowhere.

Considering all this I think that the possibility that an armed rapist unknown to the victim and her entourage was cruising along the street, spotted Judith standing alone at a bus stop and forced her into his car at gunpoint should be seriously considered. Perhaps the reason the victim wasn't raped, as far as the Coroner could tell, was due to the perp having deviant sexual inclinations. In the oh-so-innocent-and-pure 1950's anything other than basic intercourse was probably considered "deviant" and tabu by the press, if I am to believe certain sarcastic comments by author Jack Kerouac. Another possible explanation for the supposed lack of evidence of sexual assault is that the killer could not overcome Judith, described as having been unusually strong.

As for Elena's contradictory statements what I sense could be something that is relatively common among teens when questioned by police regarding a crime involving a friend or relative. Not being mature enough to realize the seriousness of the consequences of hiding details they may have knowledge of, they will sometimes lie because they don't want their parents to know they have seen such and such people or been at such and such place they know their parents don't approve of. They are in effect more afraid of their parents than they are of the police, some with good reason, some not.
 
RobinHood, where is the source for the calcium carbonate and calcium silicate phosphate information said to be found in the bucket for this case?

Thx.
 
Winward1 said:
RobinHood, where is the source for the calcium carbonate and calcium silicate phosphate information said to be found in the bucket for this case?

Thx.
Click to expand...

''The metal bucket containing the head, hands and one arm was "16 inches high and a bit more than a foot in diameter," the paper said. "This also had been slit, apparently with a chisel, and the edges folded over to hold the cover in place."

According to the Tribune, the bucket contained "traces of calcium carbonate and calcium silicate phosphate."

The bucket was marked En-Ar-Co Motor Oil, National Refining Co., Cleveland, Ohio, and was of a type that had not been manufactured in about 10 years. Police said the bucket was so unusual that they could not find another one to show to potential witnesses.

The Tribune later said that the killer made four slashes in the side of the bucket, about 4 to 5 3/4 inches long without using the hacksaw. There was no lid, so he pounded down the flaps over the head, arm and hand, the Tribune said''

From page one, Scriptgirls long and informative post.
 
Going back to the oil drums Joseph (Elena's brother)worked in a sheet metal plant of some sorts. So the traces of the chemicals still make it fit with the Abbatacola family being involved. I have brought up in my previous posts.
 
Gunther Toody said:
The answer to this case probably lies with Barry Zander Cook.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-04-21/features/9102050601_1_free-man-friend-andersen-case

He admitted to the murder while in prison to an undercover cop posing as another inmate. Cook had underdeveloped genitalia (hence, Judith not raped) and was already serving time for attacks on women and was suspected in other murders.
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I've been trying to find a photo of Cook but have been unsuccessful so far. Anybody else have one?
 
A new book (link below) on the Valerie Percy homicide reveals a suspect in that case was previously investigated for the Anderson case by Chicago Police. As the book points out (though it is unknown whether Chicago investigators were aware of it), the suspect's father owned a steel business in Chicago. And there is reason to believe he may have been in possession of old ammo (CPD believed Anderson was shot by someone using old ammo.)

Amazon.com: Sympathy Vote eBook: Glenn Wall: Kindle Store
 
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