SYCAMORE, Ill. _ Former Sycamore resident Jack McCullough was granted a certificate of innocence Wednesday in connection with the 1957 slaying of a local girl, but the ruling may not have settled questions about perhaps the most enduring crime story in DeKalb County history.
Judge William Brady ruled that McCullough had presented enough evidence at a hearing to earn the certificate. McCullough, 77, had been tried and convicted of the crime, but the conviction later was vacated and the charges were dropped. The case remains unsolved.
McCullough testified last week that the certificate would help prove he's not the "monster" who abducted 7-year-old Maria Ridulph off a snowy Sycamore street corner on the night of Dec. 3, 1957, and later killed her.
"We hope this will put a painful chapter behind for Jack," Aisha Davis, an attorney for the Exoneration Project, said after the ruling.
The certificate will entitle McCullough to claim a monetary award granted to people deemed wrongfully imprisoned. But it didn't change the mind of Maria's sister, Pat Quinn, who was in the audience to hear the judge's ruling.
"Do I feel Jack McCullough killed my sister? Yes, I do," Quinn said afterward.
McCullough was not present for the ruling, having returned to his Seattle-area home after testifying last week.
He was a retiree working as a security guard when police arrested him in 2011 and charged him with killing Maria more than a half-century before. He was convicted at a 2012 bench trial, and an appeals court affirmed the guilty finding.
In 2016, he was serving a life sentence when then-State's Attorney Richard Schmack said he thought McCullough had been wrongly convicted. That sparked a series of court actions that led to McCullough's conviction being vacated and Schmack dropping the charges in April 2016.
In his ruling, the judge cautioned that he was not retrying the case but only deciding whether McCullough had met the requirements to be issued the innocence certificate.
Brady recounted some of the evidence put forward in last week's hearing: an expert who cast doubt on the credibility of an eyewitness identification of McCullough made a half-century after the crime and old investigative reports that placed McCullough in Rockford, about 40 miles away from Sycamore, when the girl disappeared.
Reports are generally inadmissible as trial evidence, and the documents compiled by investigators in 1957 had not been allowed at McCullough's trial.
Maria and a friend had been playing on a neighborhood street corner when a man walked up and identified himself as Johnny. Maria's friend left Maria and Johnny for a few minutes, and when she returned both were gone. The girl's disappearance was national news and drew the attention of the FBI. Maria's body was found in April 1958 in Jo Daviess County, but no one was ever charged.
After receiving new information in 2008, the Illinois State Police reopened the investigation, and Maria's childhood friend identified an old photo of McCullough as being "Johnny." In 1957, the 18-year-old McCullough lived with family in Sycamore and was known as John Tessier.
At last week's hearing, McCullough said that on the day Maria went missing he had been in Chicago attempting to enlist in the Air Force. He said he had taken a train to Rockford, interacted with three Air Force recruiters there and then placed a collect phone call to have his father drive to Rockford to pick him up.
Police in 1957 had corroborated McCullough's account, his attorneys said.
After the hearing, Rick Amato, who was elected state's attorney in November, said his office's legal position was constrained by the actions of Schmack, his predecessor. He declined to comment on whether he thought McCullough was innocent or guilty of Sycamore's most infamous crime.
"It's an open investigation," Amato said. "We'll take a step back and see where things proceed."
