Delia D'Ambra (0:01)

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Delia D'Ambra (1:27)

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Delia D'Ambra (2:27)

Hi park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D', Ambra and today's case is one that I think is a true testament to understanding just how massive. An undertaking it is to investigate a multi victim murder and how tricky a case can be when the suspected murder weapon is a piece of nature. The story takes place in Starved Rock State park in Illinois, which is home to 13 miles of trails that loop along the Illinois River. Its unique name comes from a Native American legend that dates back to the 1760s. The legend details the history of a bitter battle for power between two indigenous tribes that resulted in one tribe taking refuge on a massive rock inside of the park. The story goes that while the group was cornered by their enemies for several days without access to food or water, they all starved to death. And thus starved Rock State park got its name. The park is heralded as one of Illinois's most beautiful destinations. Its big attractions are canyons that feature vertical rock walls, sandstone bluffs and access to waterfalls. These sights are just as enchanting during the winter months as they are in the summer and spring because everything, including the waterfalls freezes over and the canyons turn into essentially ice caves. In March of 1960, a violent killer cornered three middle aged women near one of these scenic areas and left a bloody trail of clues that led police straight to him. But in recent years, some have questioned if there's much more to the story than meets the eye. The Starved Rock murders, as they're often referred to, is a case that I covered years ago when park Predators first came out. But just this year, new developments and court hearings once again surged it back into the headlines. So I decided to revisit this story with updated reporting that will likely leave you with some answers, but perhaps even more questions. This is Park Predators. On Monday, March 14, 1960, a man named George Edding said sometimes pronounced otting dialed the telephone number for his wife Lillian's room inside Starved Rock Lodge in Oglesby, Illinois. It had only been a few hours since 50 year old Lillian had left their home in Riverside, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and made the hour and a half or so drive to the park. The mother of two was on a four day vacation with two of her friends, 47 year old Frances Murphy and 50 year old Mildred Lindquist. George was eager to hear how his wife and the other women's road trip had gone and if they were settling in well for their stay. This was Lillian and her friend's first trip together after what was said to be a hard and trying winter. You see, a few months earlier, George had suffered a heart attack and in the aftermath of that, Lillian had been caring for him at home. In addition to balancing all of her other social activities in Riverside. So she was due for a fun getaway with her girlfriends. According to coverage in Life magazine, all three women were very close with one another and they each had their hands full serving on education boards together and participating in garden and reading clubs. All their families actively attended a Presbyterian church outside of Chicago where they raised their children and grandchildren. But when George dialed his wife's room, the phone rang and no one picked up. According to reporting by the Chicago Tribune, the women's plan was to spend their first day of vacation, which was Monday, March 14, walking the trails in Starved Rock State Park. At the time, George was a high ranking supervisor for Illinois Bell Telephone Co. And he liked to make sure that he and Lillian stayed in touch whenever they were apart, especially since he'd just had that heart attack. According to the Daily illinite, Frances husband, R.W. murphy was a lawyer and vice president for a worldwide automotive parts supplier in Chicago. Mildred's husband was the vice president for a large bank in the city. According to more reporting by the Chicago Tribune, there was no question that the women had the necessary funds and supplies for their four day getaway. When Lillian didn't pick up on Monday afternoon, George figured that the women had probably just stayed longer in the park than they'd planned. And so the next morning, Tuesday, March 15, he tried calling again, but no one answered. When he phoned the number for the lodge's front desk, a staff member told him they hadn't seen Lillian or the other two women that morning, but would send someone up to Lillian's room to leave a note for her to call George. According to the coverage, a bellboy for the lodge went up to the room with a card to hang on the doorknob. It's unclear from reports, though what exactly the message on the paper hanger said, but it was something to the effect of, you have a message downstairs and George has been calling. The fact that George couldn't get a hold of his wife or any of her friends concerned him. So he decided to call the other women's husbands to see if they'd spoken with their wives. But the news wasn't comforting. The other men revealed to George that they hadn't heard from their wives either since the trio had left Chicago. At that point, the husbands decided each of them would call the lodge back the following morning. Their collective concern for their wives only grew stronger throughout Tuesday night because they learned from watching local weather reports that the forecast for the greater Chicago area predicted a blinding snowstorm that was going to descend on starved Rock State park that night. On Wednesday morning, March 16, after the snowstorm hit Frances Husband called the lodge to check on the women. But once again, none of the staff reported seeing them come or go from their rooms. Shortly after that is when the workers for the hotel got into the women's quarters and found that none of their beds appeared to have been slept in. The sheets and linens were all freshly made and none of the towels had been used and none of their luggage was unpacked. All of those things indicated the three women had never stayed the first night in their rooms. Staff then went outside and checked the lodge's parking lot and found Frances station wagon parked in a spot. Her car was the vehicle that the three women had carpooled in from their homes and according to Steve Stout's reporting, it was covered in snow when it was found, so almost like it hadn't been moved in days. At that point, the women's husbands agreed that after two days of not hearing from their wives, something was definitely wrong and they alerted the local police. According to the Daily Illini, by midday on that Wednesday, the La Salle County Sheriff's Office and the Illinois State Police organized several search parties to start walking the trails in Starved Rock State park to look for the missing women. One group, which was made up of young men from a nearby youth camp, set out on the snow covered trails in rocky terrain. The weather conditions had deteriorated over the past two days, so these searchers were having to plod over very narrow snow covered trails with sheets of ice and slippery rocks hidden underneath. Shortly after launching the search parties, the group of young men from the youth camp found all three women dead in the snow. Their bodies were tucked a little ways into a cave in an area of the park known as St. Louis Canyon, about a half mile away from the Starved Rock Lodge. According to coverage by the Daily Illini, the scene was gruesome. The victims skulls had all been bashed by some sort of large object and there were trails of blood on the ground and in the snow around their bodies. They were each laying face up and it was clear that their hands and feet had been bound with some kind of twine. The only major difference was that the binding around Frances ankles had seemingly come undone, which indicated that at some point she might have had the chance to run away or attempted to run away. Not far from the bodies, searchers found the women's purses, a broken camera and a pair of binoculars with traces of blood on them. Right away the Illinois State Police were called in and began assessing the crime SCENE the state police's chief, William Morris, told reporters that he suspected it would have been very difficult for one person to overtake all three women at the same time, especially if they'd put up a fight. He said based on his initial observation of the crime scene, it was possible whoever had killed the women might have been part of a group of perpetrators. The state attorney for the region, a man named Harlan Warren, agreed and told news reporters that he was convinced, based on the brutal nature of the murders, that more than one person was involved. He did speculate, though, that if it was one person, it was likely a man who was strong enough to overpower three victims at once. And just as a note here, Mildred, Lillian and Frances were not frail women by any means. They were middle aged, average height and maybe even on the taller side and would have been capable of fighting off an attacker if they needed to anyway. Immediately after their bodies were found, Chief Morris called investigators from the Illinois Bureau of Investigation to help search the cave for clues and figure out if any of the victims had been sexually assaulted. According to Life magazine's reporting, Mildred and Lillian had their pants and underwear removed. Their clothing had also been torn in several places, and the killer or killers had placed their winter coats between their legs. One of the victims also had a tuft of short hair clutched in her hand. After making these observations, officers removed all three of the victims bodies and transported them to the nearby town of Ottawa for autopsies. As I was researching the case, though, it appears the medical examiner never formally ruled on whether any of the victims were sexually assaulted. However, later coverage did state that none of the victims had been sexually assaulted. I have to assume, and so did author Steve Stout, who wrote a book on this case called the Starved Rock Murders, that sexual assault kit collection and technology at the just wasn't advanced enough to make that determination for certain in 1960. But like I said, it appears a later study of that detail confirmed none of them had been sexually assaulted. One thing that was clear, though, at that time was that the killer had used something large like a club or some sort of blunt object to inflict the victim's head injuries. So investigators fanned out around the cave and looked for a potential murder weapon. But finding any further clues like that was challenging because like I mentioned earlier, between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, 8 inches of snow had fallen in the park, and a lot of the area near the cave had been covered with snow. So to get at what was beneath all that, investigators used brooms, like actual straw brooms. You'd store in your house to turn over the recent snow blanket. And if that wasn't cringeworthy enough. According to a news report featured in a documentary about this case, investigators also used flamethrowers to melt some of the snow at the crime scene. I know, I have so many thoughts about their decision making process there, but let's keep going. I feel like this is exactly what crime scene tech classes nowadays would tell you not to do. But Again, this is 1960 and no one back then was really thinking about crime scene preservation or DNA or anything like that. Police officers continued to use these methods to cone through the snowdrift, sweeping back and forth, trying to uncover any additional evidence they believed could be related to the crime. In one news report from that time, the anchor says that after burning up one section of snow, investigators found a small piece of aluminum foil, which they concluded was the wrapping to a roll of film. The film itself, though, was no longer intact, likely meaning it had been burned away. After a few hours of blowtorching and sweeping snow away like this, deputies located a three foot tree limb that had been buried beneath fresh snow. It was frozen solid and had dried blood caked on one end. They also found a long icicle from the cave that appeared to have traces of blood on it too. At that point, investigators considered both of these items as potential murder weapons. Back inside the cave where the women's bodies had been found, blood evidence investigators saw there seemed to indicate that that was not the location where the women were initially attacked. According to coverage by the Chicago Tribune, there was some blood found inside the cave and on the walls, but not a lot, certainly not the amount you'd expect to see if the cave was the site where the women had been bludgeoned to death. So the lack of blood in the cave told the state police that the killer may have murdered the women elsewhere. For example, a clearing in the woods then left them there and possibly returned later to drag their bodies into the cave to prevent someone else from finding them. Feeling the pressure mounting to find a suspect, investigators tried to backtrack the women's last known movements. Records from the lodge, as well as interviews with staff there confirmed that right before Lunchtime on Monday, March 14, the three victims had checked into the lodge and eaten lunch together. Then, shortly after 1pm they were seen dressed appropriately for a hike and leaving the lodge. That was the last known sighting of them before they were found two days later, dead in the park. As you can imagine, the horrific nature of this crime sent people in the immediate area into a panic and there was palpable fear that a killer was on the loose and could potentially strike again. Because of this, the state police's search for the suspect or suspects was ramped up significantly. LaSalle county deputies set up roadblocks in and around the lodge and all the streets leading to the state park. They stopped everyone who came and went and asked them to be on the lookout for people, most likely a man who may have a scratched face or injuries consistent with having been in a tussle or fight. Naturally, authorities focused a lot of attention on the guests and employees at Starved Rock Lodge. On the Thursday and Friday after the murders, detectives rounded up everyone who worked there, as well as park rangers from the area, and asked them to take polygraphs. According to news reports, most everyone did, and they all passed. Interestingly, though, during one of those interviews, a worker told authorities a strange and interesting story about a 21 year old dishwasher from the lodge named Chester Weger, who'd shown up to work on March 15 with some scratches on his face that appeared to be fresh. Now, this information obviously got the police's attention, and so they quickly got a hold of Chester for an interview. According to news reports, Chester told the police that he'd accidentally cut himself shaving before coming to work on the 15th, and that's why he had that noticeable gash on his chin. He told the police that during the time frame of the murders, he was in the basement of the lodge stoking a coal furnace and writing letters. Now, authorities had no reason to suspect Chester was lying to them at that point because they had no tangible proof he was involved. Well, not really. According to an article in Life magazine, they did notice a large dark stain on his leather jacket that they thought looked a whole lot like blood. When they asked Chester for the jacket, he gave it to them, and investigators quickly sent it off for testing. A few days later, the state lab determined the blood was animal blood, so not human. At that point, detectives pretty much stopped looking at Chester as a suspect and moved on with their investigation. After that, state police decided to cool it with the interviews and polygraphs for a bit and turn their attention to the physical evidence they'd collected from the crime scene. One item they suspected was going to be important was Lillian's camera. You know, the one that had been left severely damaged and partially buried in the snow. The strap on the device was completely broken, which made authorities suspect it had likely been ripped away from her, causing the strap to snap in the process. According to Steve Stout's reporting, Lillian's camera was an Argus C3, which at the time was known to take good quality pictures. Whenever a photo was taken on that particular device, the operator had to manually wind a knob on the top of it to advance the film roll to the next available frame. But oftentimes, if you didn't twist the knob all the way, frames of film would overlap on one another. This usually resulted in what authorities eventually referred to as a triple exposure. When officers processed the film from Lillian's camera, they realized that the women had taken several pictures throughout their hike. Most of the images showed them bundled up, posing in front of overlooks in huge rocks or waterfalls. But authorities noted that the last picture on the roll was a triple exposure, Meaning Lillian didn't twist the knob on the top of the camera all the way before snapping the photo. The picture showed Frances and Mildred standing in front of a frozen waterfall with trees in the background and lots of snow piled around them. That image was overlaid onto another frame of film. So it looked kind of ghostly and unnatural. Both the state police and the La Salle County Sheriff's Office thought the triple exposure showed the faint outline of a man's face in a shadow between the rock face of St. Louis Canyon and a tree trunk behind where Mildred was standing. Investigators knew that the location where the women had posed Was only a few steps away from the cave where their bodies were eventually found. So the prevailing theory was most likely Lillian had snapped the picture right before the victim's assailant or assailants had struck. Detectives spent hours and even days analyzing the photo, Trying to figure out if, in fact the women had inadvertently taken a picture of their own killer who was lurking in the shadows near them. Some investigators were convinced the image clearly showed a man was present, While others just thought the ghostly image was a byproduct of the accidental triple exposure, According to Steve Stout's reporting. In the end, authorities ruled out the theory that the women had photographed their killer. But that didn't stop publications at the time from running full steam ahead with that angle of the story. Life magazine published a several page article that detailed how it was possible the women had captured a haunting glimpse of their killer just moments before being brutally murdered. Two other clues police followed up on included a case for a set of keys found on the trail leading to the cave. And a reported sighting of a gray station wagon seen in the area where the women entered the park shortly before they were suspected of being killed. But with little other information to go on about those two things, the leads fizzled out. March dragged on and the families of the victims grew frustrated that police had no suspects in the case, according to archive news footage in Hunter Cox's documentary on this case, a man named Virgil Peterson, who worked for the Chicago Crime Commission and was close friends with all three victims families, criticized the La Salle County Sheriff's Office for not organizing a search sooner for the women. He told reporters it was outrageous that two days had passed with no sign of the trio before any effort was made to find them. He said that when multiple attempts by the victims husbands on Monday and Tuesday to get in touch with their wives went unanswered, that should have been a red flag to everyone that something horrible had happened. He also criticized the fact that there was no protection or police presence in the park to help deter a crime like this from happening. The criticism, though harsh, was understandable because law enforcement had worked the case for several weeks and interviewed more than 250 people. But still, they were no closer to catching a killer or killers. With tensions growing to see some kind of progress, the companies that employed the three women's husbands banded together and offered up a $30,000 re for information, which back in 1960 was a substantial chunk of change considering inflation. By the end of March, State Attorney Harland Warren, State Police Chief William Morris, and the La Salle County Sheriff's Office asked Illinois legislators for more money to fund the investigation, but that request was denied. According to Hunter Cox's documentary on the case, the total man hours put into solving the murders up until that point was totaling close to 22,000 hours. The mounting cost to pay for those efforts was nearing $65,000, which, again, keeping in mind the era this happened in, was a significant amount of money. So with funds drying up, the case slowly turned cold. A few months later, in July, an interesting thing happened, though, that you almost never see in homicide investigations. The state attorney decided he was going to launch his own personal investigation into the case, which is unusual even by today's standards. State attorneys are essentially like district attorneys. Typically, they're not the detectives or investigators who try to solve crimes. They're the legal officers in charge of assessing what police have to investigate. And then it's their job to figure out if a case has enough legs to go to trial. State attorneys file charges against a suspect on behalf of the state and move forward with prosecution. They're not supposed to play the role of detective themselves. But in this case, Harland Warren did exactly that, and he ruffled a few feathers in the process, particularly with the Illinois State Police. According to Steve Stout's, reporting. Not long after launching his personal investigation, which was Harlan's pretty clear way of saying he didn't think the state police were doing a good enough job, someone threw a rock through a window at his home. So it was clear that not only were law enforcement investigators not making any. Any progress finding a suspect, they were now in an escalating battle of egos with the state attorney, who was criticizing their lack of progress. As part of Harlan's effort, he called for all the evidence in the case to be returned to his office in Ottawa, which was the La Salle county seat. And for several weeks, he and two deputies reviewed all the pictures and evidence from the investigation. Out of all the items they reviewed, which included the broken camera, the frozen tree limb, the broken binoculars, and all the bloody clothing taken from the crime scene, there was one thing the group identified as uniquely important. The twine, which had been used to bind the victim's hands and feet. That was not an item authorities suspected the women already had brought with them when they entered the park. It was something the killer had seemingly packed themself to restrain the victims. So naturally, Harland asked the big question anyone would, which was, where did the twine come from? In September of 1960, he and the two deputies who were helping him refocused their investigation to try and answer that question. They set their sights once again on the employees of the Starved Rock Lodge. They spoke with the building's manager, and he told them there was a ball of twine that stayed stored in the kitchen's pantry because the cooks would sometimes use it to tie up large chunks of meat before putting them in the freezer. When investigators got ahold of that twine and compared it to the string that had been found on the women's bodies, they confirmed it was a match. That's also when they realized there was one lodge employee whom they'd previously spoken with who would have had access to that twine. Chester Weger. After that, investigators revisited Chester as a potential person of interest and again brought him in for questioning. After his first interview, they'd learned he'd quit his job at the lodge not long after the murders and begun working as a house painter for a family member. During his second sit down with police, investigators asked him to take a polygraph. And according to news coverage from that time, Chester reportedly failed all of them.