CHICAGO – A Seattle man was charged Friday in the long-unsolved slaying of a 7-year-old girl who was abducted in 1957 near her home in Illinois, prosecutors said.
DeKalb County State’s Attorney Clay Campbell said that Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, was charged with murdering Maria Ridulph, who was abducted while playing with a friend near her home in Sycamore, about 50 miles west of Chicago.
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The search for Maria involved more than 1,000 law enforcement officers and numerous other community members, and it caught the attention of President Eisenhower and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who requested daily updates, Campbell said in a written statement.
Maria disappeared Dec. 3, 1957, and the search lasted five months, until two people foraging for mushrooms in the northwest corner of the state found her remains on April 26, 1958.
It was unclear whether McCullough had an attorney. Campbell’s office said no additional information about the investigation would be released until next week, and the Illinois State Police referred all comments to Campbell.
Sycamore Police Chief Don Thomas said McCullough was picked up for questioning Wednesday night.
“This crime has haunted Sycamore for half a century. We hope that the family of Maria Ridulph and this community can find some solace and closure with this arrest,” Campbell said.
He said McCullough is in the King County, Washington state, jail awaiting extradition.
Officials said McCullough, who was 18 and named John Tessier at the time of Maria’s disappearance, was an initial suspect but had an alibi. The case went cold after he joined the military and changed his name to McCullough.
“He matched the description of the suspect, he wore the same clothing, he had the same first name, ‘Johnny,’ and he lived about a block away” from the Ridulph family, said Thomas.
Thomas said the Illinois State Police received new information a couple of years ago that led them to McCullough, and that they have been working with local detectives.
“We were able recently to totally disallow (McCullough’s) alibi with fresh information and new interviews,” Thomas said.
Thomas said he spoke to Maria’s family Thursday to prepare them for the news. “We’re hoping that his arrest and eventual conviction will bring some measure of closure for the family,” Thomas said.
A message left for Maria’s brother, Charles Ridulph, was not immediately returned Friday. But in 2007, he told The (DeKalb) Daily Chronicle that even in the first days after his sister’s abduction, he didn’t think his family held out hope she would be found alive.
He said Maria’s disappearance left a lot of anger in the town, but his family tried to go on.
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