Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Exhuming the Truth

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

A college student is murdered - and two viable suspects surface almost immediately - but it will take 20 years to pin down the killer... Check out our great sponsors! KiwiCo: Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code COLDCASE at kiwico.com  SimpliSafe: Get 40% off your order when you visit SimpliSafe.com/coldcase  Progressive: Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 27 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Hey, Cold Case fans, we have something special for you. We're bringing you double the episodes every week. We know you dedicated fans need your fix in between new episodes. So every Thursday, we are back bringing some of our best episodes from previous seasons. Let us know which classic episodes you'd like to hear again in the comments. And don't worry, we'll see you back here every Tuesday for all new episodes of Cold Case Files 2. Now, on to the episode. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Use your best judgment.

In 1981, Susan Shoemake was a 21-year-old college student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. As a radio and broadcast major, it only made sense that she worked at the local radio station, WIDB. Susan earned a promotion quickly, and on May 18th, she would begin her new position as a sales executive. On May 17th, Susan left her dorm room in Wright Hall to attend a meeting at the station. She headed down a path known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a shortcut that a lot of students used. The trail led through a grassy knoll, passed some railroad tracks, and continued on by the university's physical plant. Susan didn't make it to the end of the shortcut that day.

She didn't make it to the meeting. And she didn't start her new position on May 18th. Because Susan met someone on the trail that day. The person responsible for her murder. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke. And here's the spectacular Bill Curtis with a classic case exhuming the truth On August 17 1981 I'd been a Carbondale police officer for one week. That's the same day that Susan Shumate was murdered

Susan and I had a class in one of the buildings behind me here. In 1981, Paul Eccles is 21 years old. The rape and murder of a local co-ed named Susan Shoemake marks his second week on the job. I actually was in the police training one week. I got hired one week to the day before she was murdered. It was a scary thing. It was the first time ever that I'm aware of that an SIU student was murdered on campus. Her murder shook the campus,

and little did I know that 23 years later I would arrest or kill her. One of her friends called me up there to tell me that they couldn't find Sue. I knew that they felt something wasn't right. John Shoemake is Susan's older brother. On August 18th, he gets a call. His sister is missing from the campus of Southern Illinois University.

She was supposed to meet a friend for a... They were going to have dinner together, and she didn't show up, and that's when they knew something was amiss. As John Shoemake and his parents drive to Carbondale, a campus-wide search for Susan is underway. I kept trying to reassure them and tell them, oh, she's with a friend. Don't worry about

it. I'm sure she's okay. And I don't know at what point I stopped believing that. Well, this is known as Thompson Woods. There's footpaths and trails that have been through here for years, some of them lighted, some of them not. and it was common for students to cut through when traveling across campus. Hank Benecke is a student police officer for the university, one of a half dozen who scout the area. Obviously, you can see that it's a lot of undergrowth, so that is what we were asked to do, to start just walking the footpaths and searching through the woods as best we could. Just before midnight, searchers discover Susan's body, just off a campus shortcut called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The cause of death was strangulation. Now, there was no ligature marks, so you're probably talking manual strangulation. Frank Cooper is a crime scene tech with the Illinois State Police. He's called out to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the body of Susan Schumach. After we turned her over, then she had obvious injuries to her face. She had a cut lip, bruises on her face, so she had been hit hard and hit several times. The guy that did this was an animal.

That's all you could say about him. I'm Lola. And I'm Megan. And we're the hosts of Trust Me, cults, extreme belief, and manipulation. We both have childhood cult experiences, and we're here to debunk the myths about people who join them

and show that anyone can be manipulated. Our past interviews include survivors and former members of the Manson family, NXIVM, MS-13, Teal Swan, Heaven's Gate, Children of God, and the Branch Davidians. Join us every week as we help you spot the red flags. Get new episodes of Trust Me every Wednesday on Podcast One or wherever you get your podcasts. At autopsy, the ME determines Susan was raped and semen is collected.

Her body is released for burial, and Susan's family feels the cold hand of murder touch their very soul. I'll never forget that night. It was just awful. Just realizing that she had been murdered, it was just impossible. And I was just crying, and what else could I do? Once Ms. Shoemake was found and the circumstances surrounding her death were known, the community was obviously alarmed, and the police wanted to solve it as quickly as possible. So the police used all their resources to try and solve this. One name surfaces as an immediate suspect.

A man named John Paul Phillips has already served time for kidnapping and is considered a suspect in two local deaths. Even better, police could actually place him on campus at the time of the disappearance. It was determined that John Paul Philips was working right here at the women's, what we called the women's gym back then. They were doing some repair work on it and it turned out that he was working here, very near proximity of where the body was found,

down the way a little distance. So that right there put him in the neighborhood and was just one more indicator that maybe he was the right person. Phillips is questioned. His interview only heightens an already significant sense of suspicion. There were some things that were learned during the interview

that made him look still even more viable as a suspect, some odd scratches on him and some, you know, wishy-washy alibi and so on and so forth, and so the detectives gave him a good hard look. Phillips, however, is not the only name on police radar, as new evidence places a second suspect even closer to the crime scene. This is the evidence room of the Sutherland University Police Department.

This is where Daniel Willison's tote bag was stored after it was recovered. Days after Susan Shumake was murdered just blocks from the crime scene, a bag was found containing prescription drugs, but not the kind issued at your local drug store. The prescription was filled at the Menard Correctional Institution in Chester, Illinois, and that caused a red flag to come up. The name on the prescription bottle is Daniel Wollison, a paroled con who was working less than a mile from the murder site.

Wollison moves to the top of the suspect list for Detective McGee. This is the King's Inn. Looks like it's pretty well abandoned now. Detective Hopkins and I came here to contact Daniel Wollison, and we wanted to talk to him, really, about the murder he'd been committed on the campus. He was smoking heavy.

He wouldn't make eye contact when we talked to him. He just seemed to be nervous. In fact, you could see he was visibly shaken. Wollison claims he is innocent. Detectives leave but return to the King's Inn the next day. Wollison, however, is gone. In a wastebasket, Detective McGee finds the remnants of a letter. I don't understand why it's always me.

I know I can't handle prison again, so I know everyone is better off this way. My only regret is hurting my family. If my brother wants anything that I've got, that's who I want to have it. He signs the note, sorry, Dan. McGee believes Willison to be his killer. Two months later, the detective finds his suspect

sitting in the Joliet penitentiary, picked up on a parole violation. Well, Detective Hopkins and I went to Joliet, and we interrogated him. All he would say is, I didn't do it. We were sure that when we went there we could turn him around and get a confession out of him. And when we couldn't, we were very disappointed. Without a confession, the trail on Willison runs cold.

Meanwhile, the case grows more complex as two more young women are attacked near the SIU campus. In November, 30-year-old Joan Weatherall is raped and bludgeoned to death. Then in December, a female student is abducted and raped. She escapes and fingers a familiar suspect as her attacker. We'd had three murders of Jan Kowetz, and we could put him near the scene of every one of them. So when this one came along, we tried the same scenario. Was John Paul near here? Yes.

He was working 200 yards away every day. So, in my opinion, he was a good suspect. John Paul Phillips is convicted in the November and December attacks. And while there is no physical evidence to link Phillips directly to Susan Shoemake's murder, Susan's family marks him down as Susan's killer. We were firmly convinced that John Paul Phillips

was the man who killed Susan, so we thought this has to be the guy. 20 years later, however, a cop named Eccles finds suspicion and guilt are two very different things. Many smart people thought John Paul Phillips did it, so that became the first step in this. Let's either identify or let's eliminate John Paul Phillips. Susan Shoemake was raped and murdered at Southern Illinois University while on her way to work.

The investigators had their eye on two suspects, a man named Daniel Woolison, an ex-convict, and a man named John Paul Phillips, who had served time previously for kidnapping. Woolison worked less than a mile from where Susan was murdered, and the police found evidence that appeared to connect him to the crime scene. However, while he was incarcerated for a parole violation, two additional women were raped and attacked. Phillips was a suspect in those cases and found guilty, leading the investigators to believe he was also the person who had raped and attacked Susan.

I'm slowing down here because right here in front of us, you'll see another pedestrian overpass. This is known as the Susan Shoemake Memorial Overpass. In the summer of 1981, Paul Eccles was a rookie cop when 21-year-old Susan Shoemake was raped and murdered. This room here contains all our major case evidence. This box on this shelf here is the evidence collected in the Susan Shumate murder from 1981.

Twenty years later, the case remains officially unsolved. Unofficially, many believe the murder was the work of local serial killer John Paul Phillips. Initially, my peers, or those that were my supervisors in those years, certainly felt that John Paul Phillips was responsible for Shoemake just because of the fact that he was a killer. He was proven to be a killer, and he'd worked within 300 or 400 yards of the crime scene.

By 2001, DNA testing is solving cases and can hopefully confirm the suspicions of original investigators regarding Susan Shumake's murder. Everybody knew that he was capable and that he was in the area, and some of them had the opinion if John Paul Phillips was anywhere in the area and somebody was murdered, a female specifically, then he probably did it. Forensic testing isolates a male DNA profile from the Shoemake evidence. Phillips, however, died in prison eight years earlier.

To get his DNA, detectives must make a trip to the graveyard. Well, the immediate thought was, the only way we're going to be able to do this is actually exhume him. In October of 2001, the remains of a serial killer are exhumed. The DNA results are not what most expect it. They compared it to the unknown male profile in the Susan Shumate case and found that the two did not match. So we essentially eliminated John Paul Phillips. With Phillips cleared, Echols returns to the case file. I went into the case and I tried to find

three primary suspects. Start with three, work with three, and then move on to another three. And my intent was to go until we eliminated those suspects. Included on the suspect list, an ex-con named Daniel Willison. When you read the case file, Daniel Willison does stick out. Willison first surfaced as a suspect in 1981, after his bag was found near the murder scene. Now he's living in Detroit. Eccles reaches out to the Washtenaw County Sheriff for a little help.

This is the auto salvage yard where I was told Mr. Wollison worked at and this is where I had my first contact with him. Mike Downey is a detective with the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department. On August 29th, he pays Willison a visit. Originally, when I came up the driveway there, he was curious as to why I wanted to talk to him. And then once I explained to him why I was here, and I was here on behalf of the Carbondale Police Department, that's when he got nervous, and his hands started to shake. He wouldn't keep eye contact with me anymore and he wasn't interested in what I had to

say anymore. Downey asks Wolison for a sample of his DNA. Wolison refuses. Detective Downey, however, has a plan. The plan was to set up surveillance on Mr. Wollison in order to obtain a cigarette butt to compare it with Carbondale's sample. We're going to do it surreptitiously. Hopefully we would follow him.

Wollison would be driving. We knew he smoked cigarettes. Maybe he would throw a cigarette butt out the window and we'd retrieve the cigarette butt and then take it to the forensic lab for analysis. Lieutenant Richard Hayward runs the surveillance operation. For the first few days we conducted surveillance of the salvage yard that he worked at hoping to get him to leave and follow him and hopefully obtain a DNA sample. However that was unsuccessful. A couple weeks later Hayward learns that

Willison had recently sold his car. Investigators tracked the vehicle to its new owner in Detroit. And during my interview with him, I asked him if there were any cigarette butts in the car. He stated yes, and I asked him if he smoked, or were the cigarette butts in the car when he bought it. He said they were in the car when he bought them. Hayward suspects the butts might belong to Willison

and sends them to the Michigan State Police Crime Lab for DNA testing. And it was on September 9th of 2004, I get a phone call in the morning. He says, look, I have the results of those four cigarette butts. I pull out the Susan Shumate DNA report that has the unknown DNA profile. It has all the genetic codes there,

and I compare it back and forth, and voila, there it is. I have the same DNA profile. The Illinois Crime Lab confirms the match, and Paul Eccles heads to Michigan to pick up Wollison and charge him with the murder of Susan Shumach. I could see the stress in his eyes. I mean, he was giving me the signs that you would typically see in a person that was guilty.

He knew he was had. He knew that that day had finally arrived, the day that he had dreaded for so many years and hoped that would never arrive. He knew that that was the day. I go back to a description of him in the pre-sentence report. Michael Wepsig prosecutes Daniel Wollison for murder. A friend or neighbor called him a Jekyll and Hyde type of individual. And we saw very much the Dr. Jekyll part of his personality throughout the proceedings.

He was very polite, answered the judge, yes sir, no sir. As his attorney said, a model client. And there is a deep, dark side to his heart. Yeah, I could see him as a murderer. In March of 2006, Wollison is found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to 40 years. Under Illinois law, at the time the crime was committed, he could be out in as little as 18.

It's a fact that doesn't sit well with prosecutors or Susan Shoemake's family. Susan Shoemake was just barely 21 years of age when she died. It's been almost 25 years since her murder. Daniel Willison will spend less time in prison than Susan was alive and less time than she has been dead, and that's really unfair. That's really unfair. You have to ask yourself, what is a woman's life worth?

If the guy gets 40 years, that means he's out in 20. I think it would be a good question for a lot of women. Is that what your life is worth? That's what their life is worth in the state of Illinois. Daniel Wilson is now 60 years old and continuing to serve time in an Illinois prison. He'll be eligible for parole on November 17th, 2024. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve Delamater. Our associate producer is Julie Magruder. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. Thank you. and at Brooke the Podcaster on Instagram. I'm also active in the Facebook group, Podcasts for Justice. Check out more cold case files at AETV.com or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog

at AETV.com slash real crime.