A 50 year mystery: who killed 15yo Judith Mae Andersen?

From the Chicago Tribune--

'57 cold case is rekindled

Fifty years after 15-year-old Judith Mae Andersen was slain, Chicago
police continue to look for answers in a pile of leads

By James Janega and Tonya Maxwell, Chicago Tribune Tribune researcher
Alan Peters contributed to this report. Tonya Maxwell is a former
Tribune staff reporter
August 9, 2007

Late on a Friday in August half a century ago, 15-year-old Judith Mae
Andersen called her parents to say she was walking home, offered a
last goodnight to a friend, stepped into the dark and was never again
seen alive.

Her dismembered body floated up a week later in Montrose Harbor,
encased in cut-down oil drums. She was the sixth child in two years
murdered in an increasingly horrified city, and as a dragnet fanned
out in her West Side neighborhood, a disgusted city official declared
the death had set Chicago "on fire."

Fifty years later the crime remains unsolved, and detectives say the
lore of the case has grown to a point where it often is at odds with
the facts. Seemingly promising leads no longer can be connected to
verifiable sources. Many presumed factors in the case -- including a
man long assumed to be a promising suspect -- aren't mentioned in any
of the police reports of the time.

As police revisit the murder of Andersen, it feels like starting over
again.

"A lot of this stuff is legend," said Detective James Hennigan, the
cold-case investigator who inherited the case last winter, with its
three file-cabinet drawers full of clues, its thousands of tips typed
on onionskin paper, the shattered family of its victim and a city's
frustration.

Without any certainty of a payoff, investigators again have exchanged
information with out-of-state authorities who have had contact with
the onetime prime suspect since he moved away from Illinois. But
police no longer are so convinced that the man committed the murder,
despite a lengthy criminal record of attacks on women for which he
served time.

The man has been named by the Tribune in past investigations but is
not being identified in this story because he has not been charged
with the Andersen slaying.

'A terrible tragedy'

As time passes, fears have grown among the victim's surviving family
that the crime, and perhaps Andersen herself, will soon be forgotten
entirely.

"It happened," said 62-year-old James Andersen, Judith Mae's youngest
brother. "A terrible tragedy. So terrible, you'd think all murders all
over the world would stop, it was so horrendous."

"Justice will be served one way or another," he said, citing religious
assurance in God's final judgment. "But someone needs to make the
world aware of the horrible things that happened in 1955, '56, '57 and
are still going on. It's a call to the world to stop it."

A series of child slayings gripped Chicago in the mid-1950s. The
first, in October 1955, was the triple murder of 13-year-old John and
11-year-old Anton Schuessler and their friend Robert Peterson, 14. On
its heels were the December 1956 murders of the Grimes sisters --
Barbara, 15, and Patricia, 13.

The Schuessler-Peterson case eventually was solved; the Grimes case
remains open, like Andersen's.

The teen disappeared on Aug. 16, 1957. After her torso was found in
one steel drum and her head and hands in another, hundreds of police
officers scoured the West Side for signs of a murder scene. Divers
linked hands and searched the bottom of Montrose Harbor for more
clues. Mayor Richard J. Daley offered a $10,000 reward for information
about the killer, and squads of newspaper reporters hit the streets --
even hiring psychics -- trying to crack the case.

A police officer lived with the Andersens for a year to protect them
in case the killer returned. A detective died believing that an
admitted sex offender implicated in another murder was responsible for
Anderson's death. He convinced Judith Mae's parents and others.

But officially, and enduringly, the trail soon went cold.

"Six months have passed. The investigative staff has dwindled
extensively. There was much effort and time expended by large numbers
of individuals," Chicago Police Sgt. Otto Kreuzer typed in a February
1958 report that he said was "not an apology or a rationalization for
failure."

"Lead after lead evaporated," he explained in the report, shown
recently to the Tribune. "Only weak summations of fact can be
prepared. Their very nature are universal in any community and cannot
lead toward identification."

New attention

On the fifth floor of a West Side warehouse, members of the Chicago
Police Department's cold case squad share gunmetal-gray desks pushed
together. The desks are topped with flat-screen computer monitors and
bulging, old manila folders. Rows of file cabinets section off the
wide room, in which men with pistols on their belts and ties dangling
from open collars work phones and databases.

Twenty detectives and two sergeants investigate 10 to 20 unsolved
cases a month, said cold case Lt. Tom Keane.

They focus on the killings that feel solvable, he said. Chiefly that
means the ones with physical evidence. But every scrap of paper on a
case is kept until there is a conviction.

Everything that is known for sure -- and much that is uncertain --
about the Andersen investigation can be found at the end of one row of
file cabinets near the back of the room, in three bottom drawers
containing tips by the thousands.

"These are the Judith Mae Andersen files," said Hennigan, kneeling by
the drawers. "Someone said to somebody that they saw something. That
kind of thing."

The papers in the drawers' folders describe neighbors' accounts of
missing boys, motorists' impressions, police bulletins from other
towns thought to be related. They include surveys that document the
mammoth effort to discover where the killer got the steel drums used
to contain Andersen's dismembered body.

Hennigan pulled out a thick folder labeled "DREAMS," a whole file in
which tipsters claimed the killer was revealed to them in their sleep.
"This one is my favorite," he said, smiling. "I've got to go with what
I have."

With Detective Michael Hammond, Hennigan has spent the last few months
reading the most promising sections of the files, figuring he has seen
less than half of them. The goal is to sift out facts that can be
followed with modern police work. Viable evidence still may exist in
storage. Somewhere in the paper file might be a person who knew or
still knows the killer.

"You'd like to find something a modern police investigation could use,
some piece of physical evidence tying together both the victim and
offender," Hennigan said.

Elsewhere, the department still has the steel cans in which Judith
Mae's body was found. Hennigan won't say whether DNA could still be
found on them, but he keeps handy the crime scene photos from when the
girl's body was pulled out.

"You don't want the guy who did that to die in peace," he said.

In recent weeks Hammond has re-established contact with Texas
cold-case authorities to determine whether Chicago's one-time suspect
had a criminal history since moving to Texas after serving time in the
Joliet Correctional Center in the late 1950s and 1960s. Texas records
show he was arrested at least once, on a 1969 concealed pistol charge
and a 1968 burglary, officials said.

The man is still alive.

It has been years since James Andersen has had contact with the police
about his sister's murder. Andersen and another brother still live in
the Chicago area, and an older brother died in 2001.

Their father Ralph Sr., a onetime bookbinder, died in 2003. Their
mother died in 2005. It took her a decade to remove Judith Mae's
clothes from the basement water pipe where they had hung behind a door
since the teenager's death.

In his garden, Andersen opened a pair of office-supply boxes full of
grainy color and black-and-white photos, showing the family when it
included his sister and, eventually, his parents later in life, on
vacations together.

The family found a sense of peace soon after Judith Mae's death,
Andersen said. Her identity was confirmed by matching her fingerprint
to a smudged print found in her bedroom. It was on a picture of Jesus,
and "that told us she was OK," he said.

"Justice will be served," James Andersen said. "But maybe not in this
life."

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jjanega;@tribune.com

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-coldcase_09aug09,0,3965792.story

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