Park Predators - The Housewives

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

In 1960, three housewives from Chicago never make it out of Starved Rock State Park alive and police in Illinois quickly realize a piece of nature itself is the murder weapon. The investigation zeros in on a predator who was hiding in plain sight.Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://parkpredators.com/the-housewives/ Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and today's case is one that I think is a true testament to understanding just how massive an undertaking it is to investigate a triple murder, and how tricky a case is when the actual murder weapon is a piece of nature. Our story takes place in Starved Rock State Park in Illinois. This park is home to 13 miles of trails that loop along the Illinois River. It gets its unique name from a Native American legend that dates back to the 1760s. The legend details the history of a bitter battle for power between two indigenous tribes that resulted in one tribe taking refuge on a massive rock inside of the park. The story goes that while that group was cornered by their enemies for several days without access to food or water, they all starved to death. And thus, Starved Rock State Park got its name. The

park is praised as one of Illinois' most beautiful destinations. Its biggest attractions are 18 canyons that feature vertical rock walls, sandstone bluffs, and access to waterfalls. These sites are just as enchanting during the winter months as they are in the summer, because everything, including the waterfalls, freezes over and the canyons turn into spectacular ice caves. In March of 1960, a violent killer wielding a frozen log as a weapon cornered three middle-aged women in one of those ice caves and left a bloody trail of clues that led police straight to him. But as recently as 2019, many people are questioning if the case elicited a false confession and a ruthless predator got away with a horrific crime.

This is Park Predators. On Monday, March 14, 1960, George Otting dialed the telephone number for his wife Lillian's room inside of Starved Rock Lodge in Oglesby, Illinois. It had only been a few hours since 50-year-old Lillian left their home in Riverside, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and had made the hour-and-a-half drive or so to the park. The mother of two was on a four-day vacation with two of her friends, 47-year-old Frances Murphy and 50-year-old Mildred Lindquist. George was eager to hear how the women's road trip had gone

and if they were settling in well for their stay. This was Lillian and the women's first trip together after what was said to be a hard and trying winter. A few months before, George had suffered a heart attack, and every day since, Lillian had been caring for him at home, on top of balancing all of her other social activities in Riverside. She was due for a fun getaway with her girlfriends. According to Life magazine, all three women were very close. They all had their hands full serving on education boards together and participating in garden and reading clubs. When George dialed his wife's room, the phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. According to the Chicago Tribune, the women's plan was to spend Monday, March 14th, their first day of vacation, walking the trails in Starved Rock State Park.

At the time, George was a high-ranking supervisor for Illinois Bell Telephone Company, and he liked to make sure that he and Lillian stayed in touch when they were apart, especially since he'd just had a heart attack. According to the Daily Illini, Francis' husband, R.W. Murphy, was a lawyer and vice president for a worldwide automotive parts supplier in Chicago called the Borg-Warner Corporation. Mildred's husband was the vice president for a large bank in the city. According to the Chicago Tribune, there was no question that the women had the necessary funds and supplies for their four-day getaway. After Lillian didn't pick up the phone in her room, George figured that the women had probably just stayed longer in the park than they'd planned to, and he tried calling again in the morning. George had no way of knowing neither he nor the other women's husbands would ever see their wives alive again. The next morning, Tuesday, March 15th, George called the

phone number for his wife's room at the lodge and just like the day before, no one picked up. When he phoned the front desk, lodge staff told him they hadn't seen Lillian or the other two women, but would send someone up to Lillian's room to leave a note for her to call him. According to the Chicago Tribune, a bellboy for the lodge went up to the room with a card to hang on the doorknob. It's unclear from reports what exactly the message on the paper hanger said, but it was something to the effect of, you have a message downstairs and George has been calling. The fact that George couldn't get a hold of Lillian concerned him.

So he decided to call the other husbands and bring them in the loop to see if they'd spoken with their wives. The men revealed to George that they hadn't heard from their wives either since the trio left Chicago. At that point, the men decided each of them would call the lodge back the following morning. Their concerns for their wives only grew stronger throughout Tuesday night when they turned into local weather reports in Chicago. The forecast predicted a blinding snowstorm was going to descend

on Starved Rock State Park Tuesday night. On Wednesday morning, March 16th, after the snowstorm hit, Francis's husband called the lodge to check on the women, but once again, none of the staff reported having seen them coming or going from their rooms. The hotel workers finally got into the women's quarters and found that none of their beds appeared to have been slept in. The sheets and linens were all freshly made, none of the towels had been used, and none of their luggage had been unpacked. All of those things were signs that the three women had never stayed their first night in their rooms. After that, staff went outside into the lodge's parking lot and found Frances' station wagon.

That vehicle was what the women had ridden in from Chicago. According to Steve Stout's reporting, the car was covered in snow, almost like it hadn't been moved in days. At that point, the women's husbands agreed. After two days of not hearing from their wives, it was time to alert the local police. After two days of not hearing from their wives, it was time to alert the local police. According to the Daily Illini, midday on Wednesday, the LaSalle County Sheriff's Office and the Illinois State Police organized a few search parties to start walking in Starved Rock State Park. One group, which was made up of young men from a nearby youth camp, set out on the trails and rocky terrain to try and find the women. But by that point, the weather conditions had deteriorated over the past two days,

so the searchers were having to plod over very narrow trails with sheets of ice and slippery rocks hidden underneath. Shortly after launching the search, the group of young men from the youth camp found all three women. They were dead. Their bodies tucked a little ways into a cave in an area of the park known as St. Louis Canyon, about a half a mile away from Starved Rock Lodge. According to the Daily Illany, the scene was gruesome. The victims had their skulls bashed in with some sort of large object, and there were trails of blood found on the ground and in the snow around their bodies. Each of the victims were lying sprawled out face up on the floor of the cave. Mildred and Lillian's hands and feet were bound with twine, and Frances appeared

to have been bound the same way, except the twine around her ankles was undone, indicating at some point she might have had the chance to run away. Nearby, searchers found their purses, a broken camera, and a pair of binoculars with traces of blood on them. Immediately, the Illinois State Police were called in and responded to the crime scene. Chief William Morris told reporters that he believed it would have been very difficult for one person to overtake all three women, who'd clearly put up a fight. He said based on his initial observation of the crime scene, it was possible whoever had killed the women might have

been part of a gang. The state attorney for the region, a man named Harlan Warren, agreed and told news reporters that he was convinced, based on the brutal nature of the murders, that more than one person had attacked the women. But he wasn't completely married to that idea. He did say that if it was one person, it was likely a man who was strong enough to overpower three victims at once. who was strong enough to overpower three victims at once. And just a note here, Mildred, Lillian, and Frances were not frail women by any means. They were middle-aged, average height, maybe even on the taller side, and would have been capable of fighting off an attacker if they needed to. Immediately after the victims' bodies were found,

Chief William Morris called investigators from the Illinois Bureau of Investigations. He needed their help searching the cave for clues and trying to figure out if any of the victims had been sexually assaulted. Elements at the crime scene and the position of the women's bodies strongly indicated sexual assaults had occurred. According to Life Magazine's reporting, Mildred and Lillian had their pants and underwear removed. Their clothing had been torn in several places, and the killer had placed their winter coats between their legs. One of the victims also had a tuft of short hair clutched in her hand. Officers removed all three bodies and transported them to the nearby town of Ottawa for autopsies. As I was researching the case, though, it appears the medical examiner never ruled on whether any of the victims were sexually assaulted. That detail isn't mentioned anywhere in reporting,

only that it was suspected of happening. The best I can guess, and so does author Steve Stout, who wrote a book on this case called The Starved Rock Murders, is that technology at the time wasn't advanced enough or police just didn't investigate the evidence enough to prove sexual assault one way or the other. One thing that was clear, though, was that the killer had used something large, like a club of some sort, to inflict the head injuries. Investigators fanned out around the cave and began looking for a potential murder weapon. Finding further clues, though, was challenging. Between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, eight inches of snow had fallen in the park, and a lot of the area near the cave had been covered up. One method investigators used to scour the area were brooms, like actual straw brooms you'd store in your house. Police officers combed through the snow drifts, sweeping

back and forth, trying to uncover any additional items they believed could be related to the crime. In addition to that, astonishingly, investigators also used flamethrowers to melt snow at the crime scene. This absolutely blew my mind when I heard it announced in an archive news report featured in a documentary about this case. Using flamethrowers to melt the snow around a brutal triple murder scene seems like the worst possible thing you could do to protect evidence, but that's exactly what police did in this case in 1960. In the documentary by Hunter Cox, archive news footage literally shows police

holding open flamethrowers over the crime scene to melt the snow drifts and dig up anything underneath. I feel like this is exactly what crime scene tech classes nowadays would tell you not to do. But again, this is 1960, and no one back then was really thinking about crime scene preservation or DNA or anything like that. In one news report, the anchor says that after burning up one section of snow, investigators found a small piece of aluminum foil, section of snow, investigators found a small piece of aluminum foil, which they concluded was the wrapping to a roll of film. The film itself, though, was no longer intact, likely meaning it had been burned away. This is where I want to scream, because it was documented

that a camera was found at the crime scene, so that roll of film that was burned up could have been a huge clue. Anyway, after a few hours of blowtorching snow away, deputies located a three-foot tree limb buried beneath fresh snow. The tree limb was frozen solid and had dried blood caked on one end. They also found a long icicle from the cave that appeared to have blood on the tip of it. Investigators at the time considered both of these items as potential murder weapons. But another challenge to the state police was the fact that blood evidence in the cave seemed to indicate that the location was not the spot where the women were initially attacked. According to the Chicago

Tribune's reporting, there was some blood found in the cave and on the walls, but not a lot. Not the amount of blood you'd expect to see if the cave was the site where the women had been bludgeoned to death. The lack of significant amounts of blood in the cave told the state police that the killer may have murdered the women in a clearing somewhere else in the woods, left them there, and possibly returned and dragged their bodies into the cave to prevent someone else from finding them. Feeling the pressure mounting to find a suspect, police investigators backtracked the women's last known movements and they established a few helpful facts. Records from the lodge and

eyewitness interviews with staff confirmed that right before lunchtime on Monday, March 14th, the three victims had checked into the lodge and eaten lunch together. Then, shortly after 1 o'clock, they were seen dressed appropriately for a hike and leaving the lodge. That was the last known sighting of them before being found two days later. The horrific and sensational nature of the crime sent people in the immediate area into a panic. There was palpable fear that a killer was on the loose in the park. Because of this, state police's search for a suspect was ramped up even more to not only find the perpetrator,

but help calm people's hysteria. LaSalle County deputies set up roadblocks in and around the lodge and all streets leading to Starved Rock State Park. They stopped everyone and asked them to be on the lookout for people, most likely a man, who may have had a scratched face or injuries consistent with having been in a tussle or fight. As you can imagine, authorities focused heavily on the Starved Rock Lodge. On the Thursday and Friday after the murders, detectives rounded up everyone who worked there

and park rangers from the area and asked them to take polygraphs. According to news reports, everyone did and they all passed. But one worker told the police a strange and interesting story. This witness said that after the women vanished, a 21-year-old man named Chester Otto Weger, who was a dishwasher for the lodge, had shown up to work with scratches on his face that appeared to be fresh. This information obviously got the police's attention, so they went to interview Chester. This information obviously got the police's attention, so they went to interview Chester. According to news reports, Chester told the police that he had accidentally cut himself shaving,

and that's why he had a noticeable gash on his chin. He told the police that during the time frame they suspected the murders happened, he was in the basement of the lodge, stoking a coal furnace and writing letters. Authorities had no reason to believe at that point that Chester was lying. They didn't love his answers, but they had no proof he was involved, only suspicion. According to Life magazine, something that fueled their suspicion was a large dark stain they noticed on Chester's leather jacket. They thought to themselves, it looked a whole lot like blood. So they asked Chester for the jacket

and he gave it to them. Investigators sent it off for testing to a state lab and a few days later, the lab determined the blood was not human. It had come from an animal. In light of that, detectives at the time completely stopped looking at Chester as a suspect and moved on with their investigation.

State police decided to cool it with the interviews and polygraphs and instead turned to the physical evidence they'd collected from the crime scene. One item that investigators knew was going to be important was the film inside Lillian's camera that was left severely dented and partially buried in the snow. The strap on the device was completely broken, which made authorities believe it had been ripped away from her and the strap snapped in the process. According to Steve Stout's reporting, Lillian's camera was an Argus C3, which at the time was known to take good quality pictures. Every time you took a photo on that particular device, you had to manually wind a knob at the top of the camera

to advance the film roll to the next available frame. Oftentimes, if you didn't twist the knob all the way, frames of film would overlap on one another. This would result in what authorities eventually referred to as a triple exposure. When officers processed the film from Lillian's camera, they saw that the women had taken several pictures throughout their hike. Most of the images showed them bundled up posing in front of overlooks and huge rocks or waterfalls. Authorities realized that the last picture on the roll was a triple exposure, meaning Lillian didn't twist the knob on the top of the camera all the way before snapping the photo.

The last picture showed Francis and Mildred standing in front of a frozen waterfall. In the background were lots of trees and snow piled around them. That image was overlaid onto another frame of film, so it kind of looked ghostly and unnatural. Investigators knew that the location where the women were standing was just steps away from the cave where their bodies were found. So, most likely, Lillian had snapped the picture right before their assailant, or assailants, had struck. What both the state police and the LaSalle County Sheriff's Office thought was interesting about the triple exposure was they believed you could see the outline of a man's face

in a shadow between the rock face of St. Louis Canyon and a tree trunk behind where Mildred was standing. Detectives spent hours and even days analyzing the photo, trying to figure out if in fact the women had inadvertently taken a picture of their own killer who was lying in wait.

Some investigators were convinced you could see this stranger hiding in the shadows. Others just thought the ghostly image was an accidental result of the triple exposure. According to Steve Stout's

reporting, in the end, authorities ruled out the theory that the women had photographed their killer, but that didn't stop publications at the time from running full steam ahead with that angle of the story. Life magazine published a several-page article that detailed how it was possible the women had captured a haunting glimpse of their killer just moments before being brutally murdered. Two other clues that seemed like they had strong potential for police to follow were a case for a set of keys found on the trail leading to the cave and a reported sighting of a gray station wagon seen in the area where the women entered the park shortly before

they were suspected of being killed. But with little other information to go on about those two things, the leads fizzled out. March dragged on and the families of the victims grew increasingly upset that police had no suspects in the case. According to archived news footage in Hunter Cox's documentary, a man named Virgil Peterson, who worked for the Chicago Crime Commission and was close friends with all three victims' families, criticized the LaSalle County Sheriff's Office for not organizing a search sooner for the women. He told reporters it was outrageous that two days had passed with no sign of the women before any effort

was made to find them. He said that when multiple attempts by the victim's husbands on Monday and Tuesday to get a hold of them went unanswered, that should have been a red flag to everyone that something horrible had happened. He also criticized the fact that there was no protection or police presence in the park to help prevent a crime like this from happening. With tensions growing and the desperate need for more information, the companies that employed the three women's husbands banded together and offered a $30,000 reward for information in the case. Local authorities and the state attorney Harlan Warren asked the state of Illinois for more money to fund the investigation, but that request was denied. By that point, law enforcement had been working the case for more than two weeks and detectives had followed up on 2,100 leads and interviewed 254 people and still had nothing to show for it.

So with funds drying up, the case continued to grow colder as spring of 1960 turned into summer. A few months after the murders, in July, a really interesting thing happened that you almost never see in homicide investigations. The state attorney, Harlan Warren, decided he was going to launch his own personal investigation into the case, which is definitely controversial, even by today's standards. State attorneys are essentially like district attorneys. Typically, they're not the detectives or investigators who try and solve crimes. They are the legal officers in charge of assessing what police bring to the court and figuring out if a case can

go to trial. They file charges against a suspect on behalf of the state and see to it that a case is prosecuted. They're not supposed to play the role of detective themselves, but in this case, Harlan did exactly that, and he ruffled a few feathers in the process, especially with the Illinois State Police. According to Steve Stout's reporting, not long after launching his personal investigation, which was Harlan pretty much saying he didn't think the state police were doing a good enough job, someone threw a rock through his window at his home. So it was clear that not only were law enforcement investigators not making any progress finding a killer, they were now in an escalating battle of egos with the state attorney, who was criticizing their lack of progress.

Harlan called for all of the evidence in the case to be returned to his office in Ottawa, the LaSalle County seat, and for weeks, he and two detectives reviewed all of the pictures and items from the investigation. Among all of the evidence taken from the crime scene, there was one item that the investigators felt most likely did not belong to the women and would not have been something that they would have brought into the park. The twine. The twine that was found on their hands and feet in the snow had no reason to be at the crime scene unless it was something the killer had brought with them to restrain the victims. So Harland asked the question anyone would be asking, which was, where did the twine come from? In September of 1960, he and the two deputies who were helping him refocused their investigation on the Starved Rock Lodge.

When they spoke with the lodge's manager, he told them there was a ball of twine stored in the kitchen's pantry. The cooks would sometimes use it to tie up large chunks of meat before putting them in the freezer. When investigators got a hold of the twine and compared it to the string found on the women's bodies, they confirmed it was a match. That's also when they realized there was one Lodge employee they'd previously spoken with who would have had access to the twine whenever he wanted. And that person was Chester Weger. Investigators zeroed in on Chester and again brought him in for questioning. They learned that not long after the murders, Chester had quit his job at the lodge and began working as a house painter for a family member. This time, police asked him to take not one, not two, but four polygraph tests.

According to news reports at the time, Chester failed all of them. Three days later, on September 26th, the police had Chester take four more lie detector tests, this time with a new administrator who was from an outside firm that specialized in conducting polygraphs. And when the expert with that company reviewed Chester's test results,

he concluded that Chester was the killer everyone had been looking for. Now, police just had to prove it. Despite police in Illinois making Chester Weger take eight polygraph tests, which they said he failed, they didn't have any other evidence to keep him in custody. Polygraphs aren't something you can use in court or as probable cause to arrest someone, so the investigators had no other choice but to let Chester walk. entire month of October 1960, police kept Chester under 24-hour surveillance, watching his every move as he went to and from work and lived with his wife Joanne and their two small children. Officers followed him everywhere. They felt on many occasions that the former Marine was toying with them, leading them into the woods on unplanned hunting trips and making officers chase him through bars as he ran in circles between alleyways and buildings. While they surveilled him, they also began researching other violent crimes in the area that he could be potentially linked to.

Authorities discovered that roughly six months prior to the murders in Starved Rock State Park, two high school seniors on a date in nearby Matheson State Park had been robbed at gunpoint while getting into their car. In that case, the boy and girl reported to authorities that they were tied up by a man who was wielding a rifle in the woods

and had been hiding in the shadows of a trailhead parking lot. The assailant robbed the young man and sexually assaulted the young woman. Steve Stout reported that when the victims first went to LaSalle County Sheriff's Office to report their attack in the fall of 1959, deputies didn't believe them and dismissed their story as made up. Well, fast forward to the fall of 1960 and authorities revisited those two victims and showed them a stack of pictures of various men that included a photo of Chester Weger. Reportedly, the female victim screamed at the sight of Chester's picture and identified him as the man who had sexually assaulted her and robbed her boyfriend.

and robbed her boyfriend. Right after that, on November 16, 1960, police used the woman's positive idea of Chester as a means to arrest him for the sexual assault and robbery. That arrest was the authorities' way of at least getting Chester into custody while they continued to investigate how he might be connected to Lillian, Frances, and Mildred's murders.

According to the Starved Rock Murders documentary, the night police brought Chester in for questioning about the 1959 sexual assault and robbery, he ended up confessing to the triple murder of the housewives in Starved Rock State Park. But his confession only came after hours of intense questioning by police, who reportedly at one point suggested that Chester's wife would cheat on him when he went to prison for the rape and robbery. While questioning him into the wee hours of the morning,

police allowed Chester's parents, wife, two kids, two court reporters, a medical doctor, and several other non-law enforcement people to come into the interrogation room. According to the documentary, after being pressed for hours about where he'd been on March 14th and what he'd done, Chester began sobbing uncontrollably and sighed and uttered, quote, All right, I did it, end quote. The next day, Chester volunteered to take the state police to St. Louis Canyon and walk them through how he committed the crime. Eager to show the public that they had a prime suspect in the case,

the state police alerted roughly 20 newspaper and radio reporters that Chester was going to be doing a reenactment of the murders and the publications were welcome to join. So with a crowd of journalists and police following him, Chester sobbed and whispered while he walked everyone through how he committed the murders. He said that on the day Lillian, Francis, and Mildred were in the park, he'd been on a mission to rob someone. When he saw the trio of women near St. Louis Canyon,

he attempted to snatch one of their purses. When he grabbed what he thought was a purse strap on Francis Murphy's shoulder, it broke and he realized it was the strap to the camera. At that point, the women were frightened and Chester was afraid that he would get caught, so he begged the women to go further into the canyon and give him time to escape. He said the women were shaken up and agreed. The trio quickly walked away from him in the direction of the cave, deeper into the canyon. After that, Chester said he decided to continue stalking the women

because he was determined to rob them. He said near the end of the canyon, he jumped out of the woods and threatened them with a large tree limb and herded them into the cavern. He said he then tied them up with some twine he'd stolen from the kitchen at the lodge. He said he originally planned to leave them in the cave, but as he was leaving, Frances broke free of her bindings and ran after him holding a pair of binoculars. He said she attempted to strike him on the back of the head, but they broke. During the tussle, Chester said he picked up the tree limb he'd used to corral the women and struck Frances on the back of her neck. He then dragged her body back to the mouth of the

cave, where Mildred and Lillian were. But when he got there, he found that they too had been able to stand upright despite their bindings. He said they came after him and began trying to claw at his face. He said at that point he realized the situation was out of his control and he couldn't leave any of them alive. He said that all three victims begged for their lives as he beat them to death with the frozen tree limb. He said after the attack, he checked all their pulses to ensure that they were dead. After killing the women, Chester said he dragged their bodies further into the cave to conceal them from a red and white airplane he'd seen flying above the park.

Police later followed up on that detail and confirmed that a pilot flying a red and white airplane out of nearby Ottawa Airport had been cruising over St. Louis Canyon on the afternoon of March 14th. During his reenactment, Chester told reporters and police that he partially undressed Mildred and Lillian to make the scene appear as if a sexual predator had committed the crime. He said he washed his hands with a scoop of snow and hightailed it back to Starved Rock Lodge to be on time for his dishwashing shift at 5 o'clock. The Chicago Tribune pointed out in an article published after Chester's confession that none of the three victims' expensive jewelry, rings, or purses had been taken after they were murdered. When police asked Chester to explain why he hadn't robbed the women of those items,

if robbery was his sole motive, he didn't directly answer the question. He only replied saying, quote, It all started with robbery, but I don't know what I needed the money for, end quote. On November 18th, a grand jury in LaSalle County indicted Chester for three counts of first-degree murder and eight other felonies related to the 1959 sexual assault and robbery. By the time Chester went to trial in February 1961, his public defender claimed that his confession and his reenactment in the park was all coerced. The first case he went to trial for was the murder of Lillian Otting. Chester's lawyer maintained that his client was innocent and that police had bungled the

investigation from the start. He claimed the state was prejudiced against Chester throughout much of 1960 and prosecutors had no credible physical evidence tying him to the crime. According to news reports, the prosecution successfully won a motion to allow Chester's confession as evidence, despite the defense trying multiple times to get it thrown out. According to an article in the Daily Illini, Chester's lawyers scored a huge victory at trial. They were able to successfully argue that the jurors not be allowed to see all of the

crime scene photos, most notably images of the three women's bodies and their gruesome injuries. During the trial, the judge only allowed prosecutors to show the jury one photo of the victims in the cave. The defense claimed that the photos in their totality were, quote, inflammatory and would prejudice the jury against the defendant, end quote. It was hard for Chester and his lawyer to combat the state's case, though, in terms of forensic evidence. The two deputies who'd helped former state attorney Harlan Warren build the case against Chester have been able to prove something very important about the twine used to bind the victims.

With the help of a manufacturer, LaSalle County deputies were able to prove that the twine from the Starved Rock Lodge's kitchen was an exact match to the twine used to bind the victims. The material used to make the twine was reportedly a type of string that was rarely made and had a distinct 20-strand weave pattern. There was no denying the twine from the kitchen was used on the victims' bodies. On top of that strong forensic evidence, prosecutors also had damning evidence about Chester's leather jacket. They admitted that the state lab back in the spring of 1960 had made an error in identifying the blood stain on the jacket as only belonging to an animal. Before trial, investigators had sent the jacket to the FBI's lab in Washington,

and the results that came back concluded the stain on the jacket could be human blood. But the FBI's experts couldn't rule out animal blood for sure due to the tanning process used to make the leather. The FBI agent who testified at trial said it appeared someone had tried very hard to wash the stain to remove whatever blood had soaked into it. According to the Chicago Tribune, Chester's attorney put his client on the stand to defend himself against the charges. For three hours, the state attorney grilled Chester, but he maintained his innocence and claimed that the deputies from LaSalle County threatened him into confessing to something he didn't do. After five long weeks of trial, both sides rested their cases,

and jurors deliberated for nearly 10 hours. According to the Daily Illini, on Friday, March 3rd, 1961, the jury found Chester guilty of Lillian Otding's murder and sentenced him to life in prison. According to Illinois law at the time, Chester was eligible for parole after serving 20 years of that sentence. Chester and his attorney appealed the conviction and asked for a new trial, but that request was ultimately denied. Meanwhile, the state announced it intended to try Chester for Francis and Mildred's murders as well. While they pulled those cases together, a year passed,

and in February 1963, LaSalle County was forced to drop all charges against Chester for the 1959 rape and robbery in Matheson State Park. Reason being, the speedy trial clock to prosecute him for those crimes had run out. In April of that year, a new state attorney in LaSalle County dropped the remaining murder indictments against Chester for Francis and Mildred's murders. He told the Chicago Tribune that he made the decision because there was reluctance from the Illinois State Legislature to impose the death penalty. Basically, if Chester had been convicted of Francis and Mildred's murders, he would have received the same life sentence that he had for Lillian's murder.

Those sentences would be served concurrently, meaning he would still have been able to apply for parole after serving only 20 years. Because the state attorney couldn't guarantee a jury would put Chester to death, he just bailed entirely on taking the remaining murder cases to trial. He told news reporters that despite this, he vowed to make sure that Chester would never be released on parole. That same year, Chester penned a 48-page memoir in prison and gave it to the Chicago Tribune. In it, he claimed he was framed for the Starved Rock

murders and went into detail about how authorities coerced him every step of the way. When reporters asked Chester about some of his previous convictions for rape and theft prior to 1960, he claimed in those incidents, police had gotten him to falsely confess as well. For decades, every time Chester applied for parole, the state of Illinois denied his request. The next update in the case wouldn't come until 43 years after his conviction in 2004. According to Karen Mellon's reporting, in 2004, Chester Weger's post-conviction attorneys attempted to have new DNA testing done on items of evidence in the case. Their hope was that advancements in DNA technology would prove

that the blood on Chester's jacket and the hairs found clutched in one of the victim's hands would not tie him to the murders. Unfortunately for Chester, in the 43 years that had passed, LaSalle County had allowed school groups, civic clubs, and journalists to handle and examine key pieces of evidence in the case while it was in storage. A lot of items had been intermingled with one another and completely tainted. Chester's friends and family, who had always believed he was innocent, were disappointed when the judge ruled against having DNA testing done due to contaminated evidence. Descendants of Lillian, Mildred, and Francis, though, were relieved to know that they wouldn't have to relive any more legal proceedings related to the case. In 2007, 2016, and 2018, Chester again applied for parole and was denied. According to the Chicago Tribune, in each of his filings for clemency, Chester maintained

his innocence. When asked if he would be willing to admit to having remorse for the crime he was convicted of in exchange for his freedom, Chester said, quote, I'll stay in prison the rest of my life to prove my innocence before I'll make any deal with any of you crooked people, end quote. According to the Tribune, in November 2019, 58 years after his conviction, the state of Illinois granted Chester's 24th request for parole. In February of 2020, at the age of 80, Chester was released from prison, complaining of arthritis. To this day, Chester claims he did not murder the three housewives from Chicago and St. Louis Canyon. He believes another perpetrator got away with the perfect crime. Most people don't believe his claim.

But some people from LaSalle County who spoke to Hunter Cox for his documentary stated that they believed Chester had an accomplice. Some people even suggested that the son of the man who owned Starved Rock Lodge helped commit the murders. According to these people, the lodge owner's son was close friends with Chester, and right after the murders, he was sent away to Europe. According to the documentary, the lodge owner's son was questioned several times in the months after the murders, but eventually cleared of all suspicion.

Something that stuck out to me after researching everything about this story was a detail that Steve Stout mentioned in his book, The Starved Rock Murders. Steve has done extensive research on this case and strongly believes that Chester is guilty. this case and strongly believes that Chester is guilty. While combing through records and witness transcripts, Steve discovered that during the first few days of the murder investigation, the authorities held daily press briefings in the Great Hall of the Starved Rock Lodge. Dozens of newspaper, television, and radio reporters would attend those gatherings, along with a lot of police officers involved in the case. Steve realized that one of the people documented as serving coffee and food to the reporters and police during those meetings was Chester Weger. It's a remarkable detail,

one that just goes to show you, whether you're walking in the woods or sitting in the comfort of a lodge, a predator can be right under your nose, pouring you a warm drink, all the while getting away with murder. Park Predators is an AudioChuck original podcast. Research and writing by Delia D'Ambra, with writing assistance from executive producer Ashley Flowers. Sound design by David Flowers. You can find all of the source material for this episode on our website parkpredators.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?