March 29--The brother of a Sycamore girl murdered in 1957 wants a special prosecutor to investigate the case after the DeKalb County state's attorney said the conviction of the man found guilty of the crime four years ago should be reversed.
Charles Ridulph, whose sister, Maria, 7, was kidnapped and murdered, filed an emergency motion Monday asking for the appointment of a special prosecutor to intervene in the case of Jack McCullough, who was convicted in 2012 of murdering the girl.
Ridulph disputes the findings of DeKalb County State's Attorney Richard Schmack, who announced Friday that he thinks McCullough was wrongly convicted. Schmack said that based on his review of original reports from the case, McCullough could not have been in Sycamore at the time Maria disappeared on Dec. 3, 1957.
The girl's body was found months later in a wooded area of northwest Illinois.
"My sister Maria was snatched away, raped and murdered, abandoned in the woods," Ridulph said. "And now Richard Schmack has abandoned her yet again, and he has done so for the wrong reasons."
Schmack said Monday that he had seen Ridulph's motion, and it did not change his conclusion.
"I stand by everything I had written in my report to the court," Schmack said.
Ridulph, in his motion, said he was begging the judge to appoint a special prosecutor to "review the claims of Richard Schmack and the defendant and to handle the matter in an unbiased manner so that we may all know justice is being served."
Schmack, though, said a special prosecutor is usually called in when the elected prosecutor has a conflict of interest, not when someone disagrees with his decisions.
The case is up for hearing Tuesday afternoon in DeKalb County court.
McCullough, 76, who lived in the same neighborhood as the Ridulphs in 1957, was not charged until 2011, after Illinois State Police investigators reopened the case. That year, a childhood friend who was with Maria in the minutes before she disappeared identified a mid-1950s photo of McCullough as being the same man who approached the two girls as they played on a neighborhood street corner in the early evening.
The timing of Maria's disappearance became a key point in the case because old phone records show McCullough had placed a collect call from Rockford just before 7 p.m. At his trial, prosecutors argued that McCullough kidnapped Maria earlier than contemporary reports made by investigators in 1957.
But Schmack said those original reports have not been contradicted, and that based on that timeline, it would have been impossible for McCullough to have kidnapped Maria and made it to Rockford in time to place the collect call.
McCullough, who was a Seattle-area resident at the time of his arrest, is serving a life sentence at the prison in Pontiac.
Clifford Ward is a freelance reporter.
