vermontaigne
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Well, it's funny you should mention that, because although this Jane Doe was tentatively linked to the murder that Jason Strong was convicted of--body found in state park land in Waukegan, not far south of the Wisconsin border, and only about half a year later--the conviction in that murder, of Mary Kay Sundelin, troubles some.
Jason Strong was connected to the murder of Mary Kay Sundelin by a fellow named Jeremy Tweedy, who claimed that Strong had picked up Sundelin along the highway, and with a friend, Jason Johnson, had disrobed her and tied her to a bed (which Tweedy said she permitted), then tortured her in the motel room in which he lived, and beat her with a booze bottle. Tweedy claimed that he'd left after he witnessed this, returning several hours later, to find Strong and his pal carrying the body to his vehicle, to get rid of it. He'd helped them carry the body (why you'd need someone to help 2 other people when she was so tiny, we don't know) to the vehicle and gone for the ride, but got out before they disposed of her in the forest. He was sentenced to 2 years for his part in abetting the crime of disposal, and for covering up evidence.
Two of these guys worked in an 'adult book store' near a strip club on I-94. Tweedy told some version of his story, which had many versions, to a policewoman posing as a prostitute outside of this strip club. He apparently told a lot of versions of his tale to investigators. After these guys were put away, though, other information surfaced. After Sunderlin disappeared, but before her body was identified, her family hired a private investigator to see if they could find her. She was a dependent adult with mental challenges, and her parents and siblings were legal guardians. Unbeknownst to them, she had married a guy with a criminal record, who was also mentally challenged. How that could occur without permission of her guardians, assuming that thy were guardians in the legal sense, I don't understand. The PI also discovered that certain caretakers, a woman and her daughter, had accessed Sunderlin's accounts through her ATM card, withdrawing several hundred dollars just before she went missing. Someone posing as her sister attempted to get a replacement card for her account after she went missing, but failed. The mother died in 2005, and the sister refused to speak to the Chicago Tribune when they wrote a piece criticizing police for not re-opening their investigation in light of the PI's information and Jason Strong's attempt to get a new trial on that basis, and because he claimed that his confession had been coerced. The court ruled against a new trial, at any rate, even though Tweedy's many versions of the events were very leaky.
It was on the basis of Strong's supposedly coerced confession that it was determined that his motive for killing Sunderlin was that he had caught her rifling through his possessions after taking her to his motel room. Somehow, it was established, though, that the shirt she was found wearing belonged to Strong. Strong's counsel did not dispute that she'd been killed in Sunderlin's room, but offered the strange defense that Sunderlin had gone into his bathroom while the deceased was partying there, and re-emerged to find her dead at the hands of Johnson and Tweedy.
In both cases, the deceased had been tortured and was found to be malnourished, but in the case of Racine County Jane Doe, the abuse was thought to have occurred over the period of 2-4 weeks, which would have been hard to conceal in a motel room, one would think. The two disposal sites are about 30 miles apart, both close to I-94/41. In both cases, the victims were found wearing men's clothes.
I'll not disparage the police work of the undercover officer who got Tweedy's initial story, but I will point out that it was great good luck to have gotten a random someone to volunteer information outside of Baby Dolls strip club, and I agree with the Tribune writer that justice might have been better served by re-opening this investigation to get more information regarding the various parties connected with Sunderlin, particularly as they might have shed light on what happened to Racine County Jane Doe. I'd like to know, for example, just what the relation was that put the mother and daughter in some caretaker capacity for Sunderlin. Were they contracted through local social services? Did they have background checks? What actual forensic evidence linked Sunderlin with Strong, Johnson and Tweedy?
