Train ticket helps crack 1957 killing

SYCAMORE, Ill. -- Charles "Chuck" Ridulph always assumed the person who stole his little sister from the neighborhood corner where she played and dumped her body in a wooded stretch some 100 miles away was a trucker or passing stranger -- surely not anyone from the hometown he remembers as one big, friendly playground.

And after more than a half- century, he assumed the culprit also had died or was in prison for some other crime.

So Ridulph said he was stunned Saturday by the news that a onetime neighbor had been charged in the kidnapping and killing that captured the attention of the president and FBI chief.

Prosecutors in Sycamore, a city of 15,000, charged a former police officer Friday in the 1957 abduction of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph after an ex-girlfriend discovered an unused train ticket that blew a hole in his alibi.

Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, has been held in Seattle on $3 million bail.

"I just can't believe that after all these years they'd be able to find this guy," Ridulph said.

A 65-year-old minister, Ridulph worries about a drawn-out legal process that will dredge up bad memories but also perhaps answer some nagging, stomach-churning questions about what happened to the little girl who loved to play dress up.

"It's in my every thought, even in my dreams," he said of his sister's death.

Maria disappeared Dec. 3, 1957, while doing what kids in Sycamore did then -- playing. Kathy Chapman recalled that she and Maria were under a corner streetlight when a young man she knew as "Johnny" offered them a piggyback ride. Chapman said she ran home and never saw her best friend again.

The search for Maria grew to involve more than 1,000 law enforcement officers and numerous other community members, ultimately catching the eye of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who requested daily updates.

Christmas came and went, with a pogo stick wrapped as a gift for Maria remaining unopened, her brother remembered. Then in April 1958, two people foraging for mushrooms found her remains.

Police suspected McCullough, who lived less than two blocks from the Ridulphs and fit the description of the man said to have approached the girls, Sycamore Police Chief Donald Thomas said Friday.

But McCullough, who was 18 and named John Tessier back then, seemed to have an alibi, claiming he took the train from Rockford to Chicago the day of the abduction. The case went cold after he joined the military and changed his name to McCullough.

His story fell apart last year after investigators reinterviewed a woman who dated him in 1957 and asked her to search through some personal items, the Seattle Times reported. She found an unused train ticket from Rockford to Chicago dated the day the girl went missing.

"Once his alibi crumbled, we found about a dozen other facts that helped us build our case," Thomas said.