Sycamore, Illinois

Maria was the pretty one, slight and graceful at 7 with big brown eyes that shined with warmth and intelligence. Everyone said the second-grader was special and Kathy, who was a year older, felt honored to be her friend.

They lived a few doors away from each other on a side street called Archie Place. It was their whole world in 1957, a time when children played hide-and-seek outside instead of watching television. People didn't lock their doors in this Midwestern farm town because everyone knew everybody else.

Sycamore and its 7,000 souls felt safe on the morning of December 3, 1957, but the feeling wouldn't last.

That first Tuesday in December started like any other for Maria Ridulph and Kathy Sigman, with a short walk across the street to West Elementary School. It was cold, with a promise of snow in the air. After school, they went to Maria's house to cut out paper snowflakes.

A few blocks away, a man in an overcoat spotted two other girls walking along State Street by the public library and tried to strike up a conversation. It was 4:15 p.m. The girls felt uneasy, so they ducked into a restaurant. When they emerged, the man was gone — but he'd left something disturbing behind. Scattered on the sidewalk were half a dozen photographs of nude women.

That wasn't Sycamore's only peculiar hint of the dirty and forbidden. Since Halloween, someone had been scrawling obscenities in chalk on a tree and stop sign at the intersection of Center Cross Street and Archie Place. Maria and Kathy made plans to play there after dinner. It was a favorite spot they hadn't been to since summer.

At 5 p.m. sharp, Kathy went home. Maria's family gathered around the table for her favorite supper: rabbit, carrots, potatoes and milk. She finished off two rabbit legs, but barely touched her vegetables. She pleaded to go back outside as the first flurries of the season started to swirl in the night sky.

Excited, she called Kathy on the phone: I can go outside tonight, can you?

Kathy lived in a white cottage at the end of a long driveway, and her family was the first on the block to own a clothes dryer. Her freshly laundered jeans still felt warm as she met Maria at mid-block and they raced in the dark to the massive elm tree on the corner. They were playing "duck the cars" — scurrying back and forth between the tree and a street pole, trying to avoid the headlights from oncoming cars — when a good-looking young man approached. He wore his blond hair swept back in a ducktail. Kathy remembers his narrow face, big teeth and high, thin voice. She'd never seen him before.

Hello, little girls, he said. Are you having fun?

He asked whether they wanted piggyback rides and gave his name as "Johnny." He told Kathy and Maria that he was 24 and wasn't married.

Do you like dollies?

The girls nodded.

By the time these events were recalled in a Sycamore courtroom 55 years later, memories had faded and many details noted in police and FBI reports were lost to time.

But nobody could forget the piggyback ride. That was how Johnny won Maria over.

-snip-

Read more:http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/08/u...case/?hpt=hp_c2

Thanks for posting.

"In the Ridulph case, three inmates locked up with the suspect told different stories about how he described killing Maria: by dropping her on her head, or by suffocating or strangling her while trying to silence her cries.

Yet a forensic pathologist testified Maria was stabbed."

There is no way he should have been convicted of so serious a crime on evidence so flimsy and flawed.

I read every word.

Heartbreaking.

My grandmother graduated High School in 1957. Its amazing how clear some memories are of things like a trip to a hot dog stand to someone who was around then. But its almost impossible to even locate someone who was involved in various news making events/historical. Heck you go back far enough and you can see conflicting reports of how old an older person was when they died !

"The Chicago G-man found it "most peculiar" that such a rigorous investigation had not turned up a suspect. The locals were passing on tips about "all of their homosexuals, queers and fairies, etc." when the FBI was looking for "sex deviants of a different kind," the supervisor wrote in the pejorative and politically incorrect language of 1957",

whoa, generational shock right there. That was a waste of time for those folks. Most of the time these child rapist murderers are the regular guy across the street wearing a ballcap