IL IL - Christine Dewitt, 15, Dolton, 28 May 1974

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Holy cow, you folks are truly amazing! How on earth did you find all that information?
Well, the car that the guy was in that grabbed me was not black and white, unless there was something on the driver's side, because I never saw the driver's side, only the passenger side and rear of the car.
My son in law never told me not to go speak with anyone, he was just letting me know that it was unlikely (or impossible) for investigators to be able to do anything with the information I had to offer so long after the occurance. The reality is that if I were to go into the police department and speak with a detective, they'd take a report, file it, and probably forget about it because my information is sketchy at best, and even if they had a suspect all those years ago that fit my description, there still isn't enough information I could give them that would do anything at all. Now if I had a name, license plate number, etc., they'd jump on it.
I still feel like there is a puzzle piece missing somewhere. It's just a nagging feeling. I'm going to speak with my son in law and ask him to speak to a friend of his who is a Cal City cop.
While I haven't obsessed with this for the last 30 years, I have thought about it on and off, mostly when my children were young, and now that I'm a grandmother, it is in my mind once again. To think that there are people out there, and possibly in the area my loved ones are in who do hideous things like this to innocent people, well, it makes one think of it.
 
daga said:
... The reality is that if I were to go into the police department and speak with a detective, they'd take a report, file it, and probably forget about it because my information is sketchy at best, and even if they had a suspect all those years ago that fit my description, there still isn't enough information I could give them that would do anything at all. Now if I had a name, license plate number, etc., they'd jump on it...


daga, they may have other suspects for this crime when it happened. And maybe your information and description of the car in your incident may match their other suspects. It's worth reporting it.
 
daga said:
Holy cow, you folks are truly amazing! How on earth did you find all that information?
Well, the car that the guy was in that grabbed me was not black and white, unless there was something on the driver's side, because I never saw the driver's side, only the passenger side and rear of the car.
My son in law never told me not to go speak with anyone, he was just letting me know that it was unlikely (or impossible) for investigators to be able to do anything with the information I had to offer so long after the occurance. The reality is that if I were to go into the police department and speak with a detective, they'd take a report, file it, and probably forget about it because my information is sketchy at best, and even if they had a suspect all those years ago that fit my description, there still isn't enough information I could give them that would do anything at all. Now if I had a name, license plate number, etc., they'd jump on it.
I still feel like there is a puzzle piece missing somewhere. It's just a nagging feeling. I'm going to speak with my son in law and ask him to speak to a friend of his who is a Cal City cop.
While I haven't obsessed with this for the last 30 years, I have thought about it on and off, mostly when my children were young, and now that I'm a grandmother, it is in my mind once again. To think that there are people out there, and possibly in the area my loved ones are in who do hideous things like this to innocent people, well, it makes one think of it.
Daga, 30 years later you still remember what happened, basic description of a car and his facial features. YOU may have the missing piece to the puzzle.

When I was 14, I was walking to a park 5 blocks from home to meet a friend. I heard a car driving up behind, moving slower than cars usually travel on that street. I walked to the pay phone at the convenience store that was a block before the park to call my sister and tell her someone was following me and to pick me up from the store.
While I was using the phone the man pulls up, gets out and tells me he wants to "show me his c*ck". I had no idea what that meant but saw what he was exposing and figured it out.

Long story short, my sis picked me up, we filed a police report.
My parents were contacted by the D.A. and told that I was being subpoenaed to testify against this man. I didn't think I could offer much because he didn't touch me but I agreed to go to court.

His name was Robert Bartee. At the hearing I learned he is a convicted rapist in HI, he had violated parole by moving to CA, and was suspected of raping 6 women since he'd been here. He was also the live-in boyfriend of the High school counselor where I was going to school that coming fall and he was using her car to hunt his prey. His victims would not testify against him-some said they couldn't give a positive id in a line up. I identified him from a photo line up.

Having a witness be able to put a face on the suspect was enough to get him sent back to prison.

My situation was not a cold case, but what I am trying to say is YOU saw this man's face. His brazeness would indicate that this was probably not his first time. Now we read that there were 2 murders, not just one-you are assuming there is no other evidence and no suspects. You don't know if they just needed someone to say "yeah, that's the guy that tried to grab me". You could be sitting on valuable evidence. Please reconsider going to LE

That piece of the puzzle you refer to may be in your memories from 30 yrs ago.
 
The more I think about it the more I realize that if I do nothing, I'll always wonder...and I guess it can't hurt to do something, but I have it in the back of my head that bringing it up again can hurt Chris's family. Of course I have to think of it along the lines of there being someone out there that may have hurt other people or may have ended up in prison and will get out to hurt others, because even though it was so long ago, this guy would probably still be in his fifties or early sixties, certainly young enough to still be a threat.
I think it'd be interesting for them to take another look at this whole thing. Many of us kids kept our mouths shut about everything back then, largely because of our lifestyle and not wanting our parents/police aware of what we were really doing in our spare time, which seems pretty tame by today's standards. Now that we're all adults with children and some with grandchildren, I think someone out there may be able to shed some light on what happened.
Even if I were able to positively identify the guy in photos from back then (no doubt he's changed over the years) as the guy who tried to abduct me, it's going to be a serious longshot for the police to be able to put a case together as far as connecting this man to Chris, but then again, doing nothing for that reason isn't right either, and I guess I realize that deep down, which is maybe why it's always bothered me.
Now I have to figure out who I need to speak with, because Chris's body was found in Calumet City, and my attempted abduction happened in Dolton.
 
Contact Calamet City. If you had come forward 30 years ago, Daulton may have taken a report and looked for him for prosecution, but the statue of limitations would be up now, so they won't do anything. In most states murder doesn't have a statue of limitations though, so Calamet City should still have an open case.

If at the time they located the girls, it could be that they got a fingerprint, but maybe didn't locate anyone to match the firngerprint to. If you speak up, they might go through her file, they might enter that fingerprint into the national database now (there was no national database back then, and all fingerprints had to be examined manually). So your going forward could have several benefits.

From the parents that have come here, I believe that no matter whether anyone says anything about it or not, they still hurt. They may cope with it at times by refusing to talk with it, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt. And a lot of the hurt they feel is because they feel they will never know what happened to their daughter.

Do you know if she had any siblings? We get a lot of siblings here, who when they are adults, start looking for answers. So a sibling might be approachable.
 
I think you should do the right thing, but don't be disappointed if LE does not seem eager for your information. As your son-in-law is implying, most PDs have their hands full and have to invest their time where it has the most payback. Realistically, the odds of your identifying the man after 32 years are quite low, and, even if you did identify him, it would simply be your word against his, decades later. On top of everything else, in most states the statute of limitations would likely have run out long ago. The few clues about Ms. DeWitt's murder don't square with your experience. (Certainly her story is terribly sad and yours sounds terrifying.)

Please don't think I'm trying to discourage you. Just keep in mind the realities that LE faces and don't take anything that happens personally.
 
Actually Normal is no where near Dolton/Cal City.
I was perusing the internet because of something in another thread, and I found this:
http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PubCaseSearchServlet?act=viewChildDetail&caseNum=773166&orgPrefix=NCMC&seqNum=1&caseLang=en_US&searchLang=en_US

What's so interesting about this is that where this girl was last seen, South Holland, is pretty much next door to Dolton. Where the guy who tried to abduct me in Dolton, South Holland is just a few blocks away, and it was right around the time I had my incident with a stranger (mine being in May of 74). In fact, one of the grade schools I attended was in South Holland.
I tried to find out some information as far as where in South Holland this missing girl was last seen, but I couldn't find anything. I don't ever recall hearing the story and the name isn't familiar. I'd be very interested in knowing who these kids were that are mentioned (I believe it said that two are now dead).
 
South Holland was indeed close to home...

But, after reading some of these posts, maybe we should consider some numbers. In 1970, DuPage and Will Counties had about 750,000 residents total, while Cook County had a population of 5,400,000.

On July 19, 1979, the Tribune printed a map showing that there had been 5 unsolved murders of women 15-18 in DuPage and Will Counties in 1972-1976. Ms. DeWitt was not counted because she was from Cook County. The crimes seemed to have little in common besides the age of the victim. The closest killing to Dolton-Calumet City was a dead woman found in New Lenox in 1976.

Does this suggest a pattern? It's not impossible but at the same time it's a leap. Murder was a sadly common crime even in 1976 and there is a huge pool of people in Metro Chicago.
 
daga said:
Actually Normal is no where near Dolton/Cal City.
I was perusing the internet because of something in another thread, and I found this:
http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PubCaseSearchServlet?act=viewChildDetail&caseNum=773166&orgPrefix=NCMC&seqNum=1&caseLang=en_US&searchLang=en_US

What's so interesting about this is that where this girl was last seen, South Holland, is pretty much next door to Dolton. Where the guy who tried to abduct me in Dolton, South Holland is just a few blocks away, and it was right around the time I had my incident with a stranger (mine being in May of 74). In fact, one of the grade schools I attended was in South Holland.
I tried to find out some information as far as where in South Holland this missing girl was last seen, but I couldn't find anything. I don't ever recall hearing the story and the name isn't familiar. I'd be very interested in knowing who these kids were that are mentioned (I believe it said that two are now dead).
I looked it up om mapquest and Normal, Il is 127 miles from Calumet City. Not too far, driving distance.
 
Because this area is so heavily populated and everything you could possibly want or need is always a stone's throw from here, for most people who live in the region, Normal would be considered very far away. Not that it doesn't mean there isn't a connection, I don't know.
Because northwest Indiana (where I live now) is so close to Calumet City, Dolton and South Holland, I wonder if there were any unsolved murders or missing teenage girls from that area during that time frame.
Because I'm new to this, can someone direct me as to where I could find out this information?
This is like a bizarre jigsaw puzzle!
 
The Tribune going back to the 1800s is available online at many libraries . But I think you'll be a little disappointed. Henry Wood's article on Christine DeWitt was actually very thorough and consciencious compared to most of their coverage of these cases. And the 1970s were a peak for people running away from home...

For the reasons you mention in connection with your own experience, kids often no much more about what goes on with other kids than adults do. Was there any rumor or theory around school about what happened to her?
 
Yes, there were a bunch of rumors. The one that stuck that I still hear people believing was that a member of the Outlaws bike gang did it, but I'm not so sure at all. Other than up at the woods (Wampum), I can't imagine where she'd have contact with one of those guys, even though she was up at the woods a lot (as was everyone else in that age group).
I would bet on it if they advertised heavily in this area that they're looking to talk to anyone who had been up at Wampum that day or had seen her, they'd get a lot of response because we were all so young and not at all trusting of LE back then.
 
Yes, if you change the city from Chicago to New York and the year from 1974 to 1969, that would my friends and me at that age. Our thinking was "If they can wreck your day it makes their day." How times change!

It's tantalizing that the missing pieces of the puzzle could still be out there waiting to be matched. Not that any murderers are kindly, but from the newspaper article it seems as if the killer was likely someone thuggish like an outlaw biker or gang banger. I suppose a kid could stab another kid in a flash of panic or anger but it would seem to take calculating coldness to cut their throat afterwards. But at the same time, it seems as if the killer(s) was/were panicky, and fumbled, dumping her body on one side of the street, and then dragging it across the road in plain sight.

The police chase story is interesting, too. The black-on-white car with 3 males was apparently seen in what was then the "secluded area" around Exchange and Menorial around midnight. Ms. DeWitt's body was found at 12:15 AM. In those pre-cell phone days, it likely took a little while to get the Cal City police to the scene and get a description of the car broadcast. But according to the article, the South Holland police chased such a car up the Calumet Expressway into Southside Chicago.

This is just speculation, but here's what this suggests:

1) Ms. DeWitt was hitch-hiking back to the Wampum Woods and got picked up by some genuinely bad people.

2) The killers didn't know Cal City well and dumped her body in too public a spot. Today it is a city park surrounded by houses, but then it was less populated. However, that section of Exchange looks like a traffic cut-through between two arterial streets, Sibley Boulevard and Pulaski (runs into Michigan City Road). On its west side is a huge tract of prarie land that is a utility and Amtrak right-of-way. There are a bunch of trails and access roads that were probably there in 1975 and would have been ideal hiding spots. But they didn't know this.

3) The killers stopped to try to clean themselves up and got lost. This gave time for the alarm to be broadcast and the South Holland PD to spot the car. South Holland seems to be slightly south west of where the body was found. Perhaps they had overshot the expressway and were trying to find an on-ramp.They had blood in the interior or they simply panicked when they saw flashing lights and took off.

4. The killers fled north on the expressway (94, right?), which is the worst possible direction to get away. Even when you get across the Chicago line, there is just open space and sand quarries, with no way off until 130th Street. East, south, and west are densely populated towns where they could have easily disappeared into traffic. The explanation would be that they were panicking and headed for home territory.

So my flimsy theory is that the killers were strangers not from the Dolton-Cal City area. It wasn't a canny serial killer or someone cool under pressure. It was likely a bunch of thugs out cruising the suburbs to show each other how hard they really were.

It would be awfully interesting to know!
 
OMG, her throat was cut? I had never heard that. How awful.
She was a pretty wild kid, but in a suburban sort of way, not like a runaway kid working the streets with a heroin addiction. I don't recall at all anyone not liking her. She was pretty quiet but liked to party too.
I remember the story being a little different, but I may have mixed actual news stories with rumor. I remember hearing the car was an orange camaro, and it was going south on the expressway, not north when the South Holland police were tailing it. I also remember the car being seen a day or two afterward, not the night of her murder. If it was the night of her murder, it doesn't make sense, because there just isn't a great deal of traffic (going north or south) during the overnight hours, even now.
Another thing that confuses me is that I didn't know any of the girls who hitchiked alone. It just wasn't done. Which makes me wonder if it was someone she knew from the forest preserves or the local area. I've been trying to remember anyone who drove a car like the one that was in the newspaper stories.
While her body was left on Exchange (a north/south street), Pulaski (aka 154th st) is a street that wasn't as heavily travelled then as it is now, and it begins at Chicago Rd. in Dolton (or South Park in South Holland, depending on what side of the street you're standing on) to the west, and State Line (Indiana state line) to the east. The street isn't nearly as long or heavily travelled as Sibley Blvd. Also, I'm trying to figure out how South Holland PD would see the car right after the murder going north because Cal City is northeast of South Holland. To access an on ramp going south, the killer(s) would have had to been on Pulaski driving north on Exchange to get to Sibley to get on the expressway. Even back then the ramps are very clearly marked north to Chicago and south to Dolton. Something just isn't adding up.
I tried to find online libraries and couldn't find any. Just links to newspapers, and I couldn't find any that went back that far. The fee based newspaper archives site I had checked out before and wasn't able to find anything there either.
I find it hard to believe that the girl that went missing in South Holland had no connection to Chris. I may have to wander over to the local library and see if I can get newspaper articles from that time. Maybe I can find an address of the house where the girl was at when last seen and the names of the people she was with.
If you have any links where I can find this information online, I'd be most appreciative.
 
I'd say that whatever stories you heard are as likely to be true as what was in the paper.

The newspaper articles did not actually say Ms. DeWitt was hitchiking alone. Rather, the first article said that she called her friend to ask her to go to the woods and said "Then I'll go alone" when her friend refused. About 15 minutes later she was thought to have tried the friend again. To me, this sounds like she was nervous about going alone, perhaps because she was hitchhiking. It was too far to walk, right?

The first article said that the police had traced her steps from when she left home at 6:30 until 9:00 PM. The second article said that no one remembered seeing her that night at the woods. My inference was that she never arrived.

I can search the Tribune through an online library service called ProQuest. Tomorrow I'll try to run by the library at lunch and verify the car and direction of pursuit info. I'll also search that other name you found.

The roads are confusing! It looks like there are two local interchanges on the Expressway--Sibley Blvd.--Michigan City Road (which Pulaski runs into) and 159th Street. I can't tell where Dolton ends and South Holland begins on the Google map. Can you tell me?
 
peters said:
It was too far to walk, right?

The first article said that the police had traced her steps from when she left home at 6:30 until 9:00 PM. The second article said that no one remembered seeing her that night at the woods. My inference was that she never arrived.

The roads are confusing! It looks like there are two local interchanges on the Expressway--Sibley Blvd.--Michigan City Road (which Pulaski runs into) and 159th Street. I can't tell where Dolton ends and South Holland begins on the Google map. Can you tell me?
Yes, to walk from Dolton to Wampum is too far to walk. It's (a guess) about four or five miles. It's interesting that the article said that no one remembered seeing that night at the woods. I saw her that day at the woods, but I don't remember if it was in the afternoon or the early evening. The woods close at dusk, so it couldn't have been too late. In all honesty though, it was probably during the day that I saw her, because I didn't usually go up there after eating dinner.
Pulaski runs into Michigan City road at 154th street (Pulaski is actually 154th st.). Michigan City road runs on an angle, with the on ramp going south on 94 on Michigan City road just half a block south of Sibley, and the on ramp going north to Chicago being on Sibley itself, both being very close to each other.
It's very hard to see where Dolton and South Holland are because in parts of Dolton, you can't get from one part of Dolton without going through parts of South Holland. This may be confusing, but I'll try. Dolton starts on the north bordering Chicago proper at about 138th st. to Sibley Blvd., and the west border is the town of Riverdale at Indiana Ave. The east border of Dolton at it's furthest is the expressway (94), but in mid Dolton, the east border is Michigan City road. In very far south Dolton, south of 154th St., the town borders South Holland to the west at Cottage Grove, South Holland at 154th St., South Holland to the east at Woodlawn Ave., and South Holland to the south at 158th St. In other words, where I lived in Dolton, which was south of 154th St., if I wanted to get to north Dolton, I could not have done it without going through parts of South Holland.
 
I want to take time to digest what you wrote about Dolton but I am going out in a few minutes and I wanted to summarize what I found at the library.

There were no references in the Tribune to the girl whose webpage you linked to. During the same timeframe 2 girls from Dolton did disappear and turn up dead. However, both deaths sound like suicides.

On October 15, 1969, Wendy Gunde or Gnade, a 15 year old from Ellis Avenue, disappeared after being taken to Thornridge High by her father. The October 24th Tribune reported her missing. It later was reported that she did not like school and that the police had searched for her in Old Town (Chicago equivalent of Haight Ashberry?). But in March, 1970 two boys found her purse on the bank of the Little Calumet River. South Holland fireman police dragged the river and found her clothed body, too badly decomposed to determine a cause of death, by the C&E Railroad Bridge.

On December 1, 1974, Judy Harper, 17, of Van Buren Street was found fully clothed in the Little Calumet between Highland and Hammond, IN. She had last been seen hitchhiking home from a friend's house in Highland. Her purse was found untouched on shore.

Otherwise I ran a lot of searches for Dolton, South Holland, Cal City for "missing", etc. between 1970 and 1979 and came up with nothing
 

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