“Johnny’s” conviction would stick.
For the eyewitness whose long memory and compelling testimony solved a 1957 murder — the oldest cold case to go to trial in America — it felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted. For a few moments at least, Kathy Sigman Chapman could set aside her grief over losing her brother and rejoice in seeing justice done for a long-lost childhood friend.
Kathy was 8 when FBI agents escorted her to the funeral of Maria Ridulph. Kathy was the only person who saw the stranger who snatched 7-year-old Maria, her best friend, from the street where they lived. He had weird teeth, a flip in his hair and introduced himself as “Johnny.”
Kathy would carry the burden of what she saw for the rest of her life.
She visited Maria’s grave after her she finally identified the killer more than half a century later, and again after her testimony in court helped convict him and send him to prison. She, too, had been looking for “Johnny” for all those years.
In its ruling last week, an Illinois appeals court took special note of both her adult testimony and childhood descriptions of Johnny in upholding the murder conviction of Jack Daniel McCullough.
The court said it was not bothered by the small discrepancies in the descriptions Kathy gave under prodding by adults. She saw him as older, and that could mean 18, or 25, or 30 to “her 8-year-old self,” the court said. She, more than anyone, knew the face of Maria’s killer.
‘An excellent reason to remember’
“Chapman not only had the ability to observe defendant on December 3, 1957, she had an excellent reason to remember him for all the years afterward,” the court said. “She was a witness to an event that horrified the community and caused her to be the object of law enforcement and news media attention. For a time, the police even accompanied her to Sunday school, making their presence in her life onerous.”
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“The reports were authored by FBI agents who had no personal knowledge of the substance of the underlying assertions,” the court found. Courts generally consider hearsay statements unreliable because they can be twisted and misinterpreted in the retelling.
McCullough and his parents had a powerful motive to deceive in 1957, and his motive continues to this day, the court found.
The DeKalb County States Attorneys office in Sycamore thanked the appeals court on its web site for “moving the Maria Ridulph case one step further towards final resolution.”
The prosecutor’s office said the court’s “lengthy and well-reasoned” ruling showed it “gave thoughtful and sober consideration to the entire record.”
Kathy Chapman provided a key part of that record, even though she is a retiring person and the thought of testifying in front of Maria’s killer had terrified her. But she looked him in the eye, pointed a finger and let him know she wasn’t that frightened 8-year-old anymorefl.
“Jack is where he should have been since the day he murdered Maria,” the Chapmans said. “You should never to able to outlive justice when you take someone’s life.
“There is justice for Maria.”
And finally, for Kathy, a measure of peace.
For “Taken: The Coldest Case Ever Solved,” CNN’s Ann O’Neill and video producer Brandon Ancil interviewed investigators, witnesses, prosecutors and family members — and the convicted killer himself. They also obtained a video copy of his eight-hour interrogation by police. The series chronicles the case and includes an interactive examining the evidence.
