1960 TRIPLE MURDER A FAINT ECHO AT STATE PARK
Art Barnum
CHICAGO TRIBUNE (1985 article)
It once ranked as the ''Crime of the Century'': three suburban housewives slain within hours of arriving at Starved Rock State Park for a midweek vacation of hiking, picnicking and amateur photography.
It was 25 years ago this weekend that park employees came upon the grisly scene: Each woman was bound with twine and beaten to death in the pristine beauty of St. Louis Canyon.
The shock waves spread from this popular nature spot 100 miles from Chicago and reverberated up and down the Illinois River as a solution to the crime eluded investigators. A suspect wasn`t caught for eight months, and he turned out to be a park employee who served meals to police and a horde of reporters at the Starved Rock lodge.
The triple homicide in 1960 marked the nadir of the park`s existence. Stigmatized by the brutality of the crime and the widespread press coverage
(Life magazine did numerous photo stories on the crime), it took most of a decade for what is now Illinois` most visited state park to make a comeback.
As tragic as the crime was, the deaths of the three Riverside women resulted in some good. What today ranks among the finest state crime laboratory systems in the country came about because of shoddy work in the Starved Rock case.
The crimes still are remembered in west suburban Riverside, a town of 10,000 that spent a year in mourning for three of its most active citizens and where a plaque dedicates part of the Riverside Presbyterian Church in their memory.
Chester Weger, 46, the killer, is serving a life term in Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, steadfastly maintaining he is innocent and routinely--18 times in all--being turned down for parole.
The victims were Lillian Oetting, Mildred Lindquist, both 50; and Frances Murphy, 47. They were the wives of business executives, the mothers of grown children and prominent for their civic involvement in Riverside.
The bond that joined them was membership in the Riverside Presbyterian Church. ''The topic is still very much alive around here and people still talk about it,'' said Rev. Roger Kunkel, pastor. ''They were the top three ladies that any church could hope to have.''
Their bodies were discovered on March 16, 1960, in a small cave at St. Louis Canyon by a search party organized after the women failed to call home during the first two days of their vacation.
Police determined that they had been slain within hours of arriving at the park on Monday, March 14. They checked into their rooms in the Starved Rock Lodge, ate lunch in the dining room and then embarked on a 1.2-mile stroll to the canyon, a geological formation that is one of the park`s attractions.
Weger, though considered one of many possible suspects, wasn`t arrested until Nov. 16 after confessing to the crimes. He was convicted of murder in Oetting`s death the following March, and prosecutors decided to not try the other cases.
''I don`t really ever expect to get out,'' Weger said in a recent interview. ''But I never did it, and there are people that know that.''
Weger, who works in the prison commissary as a clerk, maintains he confessed only after being beaten and threatened with death. Police said he knew details of the crime that only the killer could have known.
''At first everything I say now about my innocence was believed by the police and they know I never did it,'' Weger said. ''When I first heard (about the murders), I was shocked and stunned like everyone else.
''The police at the park saw me every day and I passed every test they gave me at first,'' he said, ''but the months went by and they wanted a conviction, so they beat me into signing it. I wasn`t ever at the park when it happened. I was done wrong.''
Steve Stout, a former LaSalle journalist who wrote a book about the killings, said that though Weger`s story may be polished, it is unconvincing. ''When I first talked to Chester, I came out of the prison thinking I might have a great story here about a possible innocent man in jail,'' Stout said. ''Maybe he was scared by the police, but I do believe his confession, which claimed the incident was a robbery that got out of hand.''
Towns along the Illinois River ''were up for grabs that whole spring, summer and fall,'' Stout said. ''Local stores were sold out of locks. The adage that people were afraid to walk alone outside was true.''
Physical evidence gathered at the scene by the state crime lab yielded no answers. Some evidence was lost, and criticism from both law enforcement officials and the media was loud.
''The state crime laboratory was less equipped than a high school chemistry laboratory of the time,'' Stout said. ''This crime is more important than most because it changed the system of criminal investigation in Illinois.''
Otto Kerner was campaigning for governor as a Democrat that fall and he made the crime lab an issue. ''Now research and studies from the laboratory, as well as the staff personnel, are known and used on a national level,'' said Joseph Nicol, who was appointed by Kerner to head the refurbished laboratory and is now retired.
But even as Kerner was being elected to his first term in November, 1960, the Starved Rock case was going nowhere.
''Chicago newspapers gave me a bad time,'' recalled Harland Warren, then LaSalle County state`s attorney credited with breaking the case. Warren took the evidence out of the state crime lab and sent it to out-of-state labs, where they were able to confirm a tree limb as the weapon.
''We were all disappointed,'' Warren said. ''I remembered a lesson that the great majority of solutions can be found from items at the scene of the crime.
''I put myself in a room and just sat for hours, days, looking at the evidence, just looking at it,'' Warren said. ''For some reason I decided to check out the twine they were tied up with.''
The twine was traced to the lodge kitchen, and all park employees were given new lie-detector tests, including Weger, who failed this test though he had passed two previous exams.
Today, Starved Rock State Park suffers no ill effects from the past image, officials said.
''It obvious that the crime did the park no good, and we had attendance problems for three years after the police and media left. No one wanted to stay in the lodge and no one wanted to take a hike on those trails,'' said John Blume, superintendent of the 3,000-acre park. ''Today the average visitor has no idea what went on here and no one asks me about the murders.''
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1960 TRIPLE MURDER A FAINT ECHO AT STATE PARK
