by C.

Cortez

Disappearance

Maria Ridulph was a seven year old child who was kidnapped from a street corner close
to her Sycamore home in 1957.
Sycamore, an Illinois farming community, was home to 7,000 people in the 1950s. In
late 1957 someone began scattering photos of nude women all over town. The local
police department suspected it was the same person who also scribbled obscenities on
the stop and road signs.

Maria’s friend Kathy Sigman lived right down the street and on December 3, 1957 the
two girls decided to meet after dinner to play “Duck the cars.” They met at their favorite
spot, the intersection of Archie Corner and Center Cross Street, home to one of the
vandalized stop signs.
In a trial that took place 55 years after the abduction, Kathy recalled the following
events, many of which had never before been shared with police or the public. While
playing, the girls were approached by a young blond man with a gaunt face and an
uncomfortably high-pitched voice. The man, who introduced himself as 24-year old
Johnny to Maria and Kathy, offered the girls a piggyback ride. When Maria ran home to
fetch her doll, Johnny tried to get Kathy to go on a walk around the block with him. She
refused, even though he repeatedly told her how pretty the second grader was and how
much he liked her.  
Once Maria returned, Kathy left to fetch the mittens she had forgotten at home.
Returning to the intersection she found that both Maria and Johnny were gone.
The Search

The Ridulph family waited three hours to call the police because the last time the child
had gone missing, she was later found playing near the cemetery gates. When Maria
had still not returned late at night, the entire neighborhood joined the police search
party. Hardware store owner Ralph Tessier had reopened his establishment and
handed out free flashlights to searchers. But only Maria’s doll was found, tossed aside
in the mud near a field.
Ralph’s wife Eileen provided coffee and sandwiches to the search party at the store,
and their children had locked themselves in at home. That is, all their children save for
eighteen year old John, Eileen’s son from her first marriage.

The Ridulph family used the media to plead with the kidnapper. Maria’s mother Frances
also intimated that Maria was a “nervous girl,” who might just throw a temper tantrum if
scared. Years later, it was suspected that “Johnny” may have originally abducted Maria
in order to sexually abuse her, but that a possible temper tantrum of hers could have
angered the kidnapper enough to kill her.

Although Kathy had denied that Johnny had sexually assaulted her, her parents echoed
the police’s sentiments that the Sigman’s family doctor should examine her for signs of
rape. Kathy was placed under 24-hour police guard. Whenever she left the house she
found herself surrounded by reporters from all over the nation. Police presented to her
hundreds of mugshots of petty, violent and other criminals but “Johnny” was not among
them.

Social Climate

Sycamore residents began locking their doors during both night and day. Children were
either seen out in groups or with adult supervision, the police received thousands of
calls about “homosexual deviants, fairies and queers.” Women and children ran from
any male just looking their way. Sycamore skidded into hysteria. To ease their feeling of
helplessness, the town cut down the large elm tree at the intersection. Children steered
clear of the intersection altogether.

According to Kathy, most Sycamore parents wouldn’t let their children play with her after
Maria’s disappearance. The atmosphere in the community was rife with magical
thinking, as parents worried Kathy would attract bad luck to their families. Worse still,
over a decade later, mothers of prospect husbands dissuaded their sons to marry
“someone as notorious as Kathy.” Kathy struggled with survivor’s guilt, but also
agonized over the question whether she had been too ugly to abduct. This recurring
obsessive thought was fueled by the townspeople avoiding her “like the plague.”

Kathy first moved to Texas with her new husband Mike in 1969, when she was 19, then
on to Florida. They returned to Illinois around 2010 to care for their aging families but
settled in a nearby community.

Discovery

Almost half a year after her disappearance, on April 26, 1958, Maria’s badly
decomposed body was discovered by Woodbine mushroom hunter Frank Sitar. It had
been crammed underneath some shrubbery by a tree. Woodbine was a small
community 120 miles (193 km) away from Sycamore, close to the Iowa border.
Newspaper articles from 1958 state that Maria was clad in a shirt and brown socks, the
rest of her clothes were never found. Frank Sitar, though, told the coroner that he had
only realized he wasn’t looking at a dead dog or deer only after he had spotted a jacket
near the body.

Suspect

A week after Maria’s disappearance, someone had called the tip line to suggest police
interview a young man named “Treschner” who went by the nickname Johnny. No one
named Treschner lived in Sycamore, but a John Tessier did.

So, where had John been the night of Maria’s kidnapping? Record shows that he went
to Rockford, Illinois for a physical examination by the local military recruiting station. He
placed a collect call home around 7 o’ clock on the same night. If Maria was abducted
around that time, his alibi pans out. Maria’s mother suggested her daughter may have
left home around as early as 17:50, meaning the abduction would have taken place
around an hour earlier too. In that case John would have had ample time to drive back
to Sycamore after his physical examination, abduct Maria, drive back to Illinois to make
the call – giving himself an alibi – and dump her body someplace afterwards.
But John didn’t take his car, or so he states, although a neighbor recalled seeing John’s
car in the neighborhood around the time of Maria’s disappearance. Tessier defenders
suggest that John’s car would have been parked “in the neighborhood” because he took
the train to Rockford. Others suggested that one of John’s friends may have borrowed
the car to drive around Sycamore. This was refuted by a neighbor who stated that John
never let anyone else drive his car.
John remained firm about having taking the train to Rockford. When he failed his first
physical, he took a train to Chicago, returning to Rockford to check into a YMCA for the
night. He underwent a second physical examination the next morning which he also
failed. After John became a suspect, recruiters noted that he had “seemed nervous.”
One of the recruiters recalled that John had had a fresh cut on his lip the morning of
December 4, 1957. He’d remarked that it was a good thing he hadn’t been in Sycamore
last night because of the Ridulph disappearance. That was not too alarming a
statement, but John went on to say that he would never be considered a suspect
anyway because his girlfriend’s father worked for the Sycamore Sheriff’s Office.
The recruiters contacted the FBI with this information and John was scheduled for a lie
detector test. He was asked whether he’d ever had sexual contact with children, to
which he replied that he’d been “involved in some sex play” with a child a few years
earlier but “had outgrown it.”
When the FBI contacted John’s mother to ask where he had been the night of
December 3, she told them he’d been in Rockford, although she had told Sycamore
police that he had been at home with his siblings. But neither this contradiction nor the
fact John had admitted to sexual contact with a child raised any alarm bells for the FBI.
He had passed the polygraph and so they crossed John off their list of suspects. And
the case went cold. John on the other hand left Sycamore one day after his interview
with the FBI and didn’t return until 55 years later. He joined the military, then the Lacey
and Milton, Washington police forces, married and got divorced – twice.

Career

Among his colleagues, John was known as a pathological womanizer, and an overall
sketchy character. He had a habit of sleeping with women he had previously arrested,
offering them a “safe place” to stay. John was a hobby photographer whose nude
models were barely legal. Decades later, some investigators drew a parallel between
John’s hobby and the nude photographs that had been strewn all over Sycamore in
1957.

John was ultimately let go from the police force because he had entered a “relationship”
with 15-year old Tacoma runaway Michelle Weinman. According to her, John would
shower her and her teenage friend with gifts, but only if they were “good.” At first that
meant dressing and applying makeup in a way he liked. Then he insisted on giving her
massages, and soon the massages became sexual in nature. Weeks went by and the
situation escalated to oral rape. The police whom Weinman reported the assault to,
disbelieved and dismissed her.

In 1982 John got married again but his third wife Denise Trexler filed for divorce
because he was abusive and controlling. She particularly disliked that John would
allegedly tell her how to dress and apply makeup. Their relationship had mostly been
platonic, Trexler said. John seemed far more interested in his 12-year old daughter
Christine from a previous marriage. According to Trexler, he made sexually suggestive
comments to her, and she once happened upon his secret stash of nude photos of the
child.
Most alarming, perhaps, is the fact that Christine – whose middle name “Marie” roused
investigators’ suspicions – disappeared in 2005 at age 34. Her body was discovered in
the drainage ditch of a San Antonio, Texas golf course in 2013. John and his wife
Susan state they were both at home in Washington during both the woman’s
disappearance as well as the discovery of her body.

Deathbed Confession

In 1993, John’s half-sister Janet contacted law enforcement to inform them of her
mother’s disturbing deathbed confession. She’d allegedly cried out, “Janet! Those two
little girls, and the one that disappeared, John did it. John did it, and you have to tell
someone.”

Investigation

It took fifteen more years until Illinois State Police would take a renewed interest in the
case. In the course of the ensuing investigation, Detectives Brion Hanley and Larry Kot
contacted the Tessier siblings. None of what they recalled about John was positive. It
was Jeanne Tessier’s words that struck a nerve with the Detectives though. According
to Jeanne, John had not only molested her as a child, but had made her stand watch so
he could molest the other little girls in the neighborhood. She further stated that when
she was 14, John visited Sycamore with his military friends while on leave. He lured her
into an empty bungalow where he and his two military friends raped her.
Hanley and Kot tracked down Tessier’s then girlfriend Jan Edwards, daughter of a
Sycamore police officer. She provided the piece of circumstantial evidence that would
lead to the arrest of “Johnny” as she called him. Because police had no high school
yearbook photo of John from 1957, they asked Jan to provide one. She mailed it to the
Detectives in its original frame. When they took the photo out, a one-way train ticket fell
out of the back of the frame. It was dated December 2, 1957 and unused. John had
decidedly not taken the train to Rockford that day as he had claimed.

When Detectives Kot and Hanley presented Kathy Sigler with a photo lineup consisting
of six photos, she picked out John’s 1957 picture. Illinois police contacted their
colleagues in Seattle, where John Tessier lived under the name Jack McCullough. He
had changed his name to McCullough – his mother’s maiden name – shortly after his
siblings had informed him he was not to come to her funeral. Detectives Cloyd Steiger
and Mike Ciesynski, whom readers of this blog may know from their ties to the Ted
Bundy case, were working the Cold Case squad in Seattle at the time. Together with
Hanley and Kot they worked hard to establish a reliable timeline, they pored over
records, interviewed anyone of interest in relation to the Ridulph case.

On June 29, 2011 Detective Ciesynski brought John in for questioning. He remained
casual, if not jovial, but as the hours went by, his mood allegedly shifted back and forth
quite dramatically. In 1957, John had admitted to having “fooled around” with a child.
And now he confirmed that this girl had been his sister Jeanne, who had previously
accused him of rape. When asked about Maria, John’s eyes allegedly glazed over, his
voice grew soft and he praised her “stunning beauty” and “loveliness.” Eventually,
Ciesynski had enough, “You do realize that you are under arrest?” he said. John
demanded a lawyer.
On July 27, 2011, the day John returned to Sycamore a prisoner, Maria’s grave was
exhumed. No DNA was found but medical examiners could finally determine that Maria
had been stabbed to death. John seemed unbothered by the proceedings around him.
He allegedly remarked, “All I need to do to beat this case is convince one juror, like
Casey Anthony did.” A large crowd had gathered in front of Sycamore Jail, mostly
consisting of reporters. John happily cried out, “They’re all here for me!”
Both Detectives and prosecutors agree that John is a stark raving narcissist, as well as
a sociopath. John’s wife of thirty years and his friends are of the opinion that he has
trouble reading social cues.

Prosecution

Because the Jeanne Tessier rape case against John was stronger than the Maria
Ridulph murder case, it was tried first, in 2012. Prosecutors hoped it would impact the
second trial. Jeanne and Michelle Weinman testified but the rape case was dismissed.
The judge felt there were too many inconsistencies in Jeanne’s story. She had called
John’s fourth wife to warn her that her underage daughter wasn’t safe around her new
husband. When pressed as to why, she said that the way he had looked at her when
she was a child had made her “uncomfortable.” There was no mention of rape. Jeanne
further claimed that John and his military friends had dragged her down a hallway, yet
the bungalow the rape allegedly took place in had no hallway.

The murder trial was presided over by a different judge. It was a mess of strange rulings
about hearsay, contradictory decisions and based solely on circumstantial evidence.
Witnesses recalled events and conversations in such detail that they gave the
impression the crime had occurred days ago rather than 55 years prior. John’s eyes
“glazing over” whenever he spoke about Maria was mentioned repeatedly. The
prosecution did ask all the right questions however: How did John get that cut on his lip
the morning after Maria’s disappearance? Why had he not taken the train, lied about it,
and was now claiming he had hitchhiked? Why were there so many incidents of
underage girls accusing him of inappropriate behavior? The defense argued that
memory fades, that because John was considered a strange duck he was now made a
target to bring Sycamore closure, and that the photograph in Hanley and Kot’s lineup
was notably different in nature than the other photos, suggesting that this could have
swayed Kathy Sigman to pick this photo over the five others. The defense’s strongest
arguments were that in 1958, Kathy had picked up a different man out of a lineup, one
who had a rock solid alibi for that night. And Mary, who had been present during her
mother’s alleged deathbed confession, testified that Eileen had simply whispered, “He
did it,” resulting in Jeanne connecting dots that weren’t there.
In 2012, Judge Stuckert sentenced John to life in prison for the murder of Maria
Ridulph.

Prison

Because he used to be a police officer and was convicted child rapist and killer, John
was kept in protective custody while in prison. He was still stabbed in the face by
another inmate. His wife Sue and step-daughter Janey stood by John. Janey insists that
John never acted inappropriate with her at any time in her life. She implied that John’s
hero complex was misconstrued as him preying upon underage girls. She herself, she
stated, was a wild child when her mother married John. And her stepfather was patient,
kind and never mistreated her or her own daughter whom she often left in his care. In
fact, he had helped her turn her life around.

Overturned Conviction

On April 12, 2017, John’s conviction was overturned on the recommendation of new
DeKalb County prosecutor Richard Schmack. Judge Brady remarked that John should
have never been sentenced in the first place. Plenty of circumstantial evidence that
pointed to John’s innocence, including old FBI and Sycamore police files, had been
disallowed in court. They were considered hearsay by Judge Stuckert, who had yet
allowed hearsay the prosecution had presented.

Compensation

In July 2020, Washington State paid John $300,000 to settle a law suit filed against both
the Seattle Police Department, as well as Detectives Mike Cyesinksi, Cloyd Steiger and
Irene Lau in particular. Lau was the first person to state that John’s eyes kept glazing
over whenever he spoke about Maria. Interrogation tapes of her conversation with John
show that this was a lie. A lie that was later perpetuated by others despite lack of
evidence.

Opinion

I recently watched John Berlinger’s 2021 documentary, “Crime Scene: The Vanishing At
The Cecil Hotel.” In it, Berlinger heavily focuses on YouTube conspiracies that surfaced
in the process of the investigation of Elisa Lam’s death. Many of those heavily invested
in True Crime honed in on one “suspect” in particular. The police had never even
considered him a suspect, and were criticized for it. Pablo Vergara, who is related to
Hollywood actress Sofia Vergara and whose stage name was Morbid, is a young Latin
American-born musician turned producer who stayed at the infamous hotel at the same
time Elisa did. In his YouTube videos he sang about murder, mayhem, and – literally –
all things morbid. Some of his videos were filmed in his living room whose walls were
adorned with posters of serial killers and allegedly “Satanic imagery.” Vergara’s
particular brand of Metal, which he calls “Black Metal,” has been around for over 30
years. Because the lyrics of one of his songs referenced the death of a Chinese girl, the
internet had determined he was guilty of Lam’s murder. He receives hate mail and
death threats to this day and struggles with depression and anxiety. What does this
have to do with the Ridulph case? It’s the same principle. Ordinary citizens who call
themselves “citizen sleuths” take single puzzle pieces of information and squeeze them
together until they somehow fit, if only in their minds.
In the case of Ridulph, Sycamore residents remembered John Tessier (Jack
McCullough) as an odd duck who wore strange clothes and had poor social skills. This
made him suspicious. Not only was John suspicious to them though. Kathy Sigman was
too. She was not suspected of having murdered her friend Maria, yet she was treated
as an outcast despite her indisputable innocence. That John would leave a town whose
residents already mostly disliked him, and now knew he had been questioned by the
FBI, comes as no surprise. If Kathy had become notorious, then we need a new word
for notorious when it comes to John.
John’s habit of using his job on the police force to find sexual partners is bothersome.
That several women and girls accused him of the same type of crime is too. John’s ex-
wife Ms. Trexler yet failed to take the nude photo of his 12-year old daughter to the
police – if it ever existed. She failed to inform the girl’s mother of her discovery. She
failed John’s daughter by not asking her about the photo in question or at least getting
child protective services involved. It’s entirely possible that John is a rapist as Jeanne
and Michelle state. John’s daughter Christine’s death leaves a bitter aftertaste. Yet
scraping the surface, I found that Christine was a deadbeat mother with a drug habit
and a history of bad relationships. The last person to see her was her then boyfriend.
Although she had not seen her father in many years, they regularly spoke with each
other over the phone. Christine had even made plans to visit John in Seattle sometime
later that year. The point is that even if twenty more women had surfaced to accuse him
of sexual misconduct, and even if more of his children or ex-wives had turned up dead,
the rule of law demands evidence. That seems unfair and cruel for victims until we look
at the estimated nationwide 10,000 wrongful convictions each year. And if even the
judicial, legislative and executive powers that be make such dramatic mistakes, then
how reliable could the proposals and “theories” of citizen-, web-, and YouTube sleuths
really be? Everyone wants to be a Paul Holes or Billy Jensen these days, failing to
acknowledge that Holes is an ex-investigator and Jensen is an award-winning
investigative journalist. Both men have the means, know-how and authority to crack a
case. They also decidedly do not call for or tolerate the harassment of those they
investigate.
Do I, random blogger on the world wide web, with the information available to me,
consider John Tessier a good suspect in the Ridulph murder case? Maybe. But in the
end it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the prosecution provided circumstantial
evidence only, did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed this – or,
really, any other – crime he was accused of.
Another problem is that this case was overshadowed by magical thinking. Sycamore
parents believed that little Kathy Sigman was a magnet for bad luck and even cut down
the “bad elm tree” (and this was decades before Freddy Krueger made elm trees or Elm
Streets suspicious) which had watched on in silence as Maria was abducted. Even half
a century later Sycamore believed it a heavenly omen that it started snowing right after
John had been convicted. Why? Because it hardly ever snowed in Sycamore, so it had
to be a sign of approval from Maria up above.

Sources
Footsteps In The Snow by Charles Lachman, Seattle Times, Tacoma Tribune, CNN,
Archive.Org, CBS News, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Irish Times, AP News,
ABC 7 Chicago, Komo News, Peoria Public Radio, Reuters, Case Aquaint, FBI Files,
Illinois State Archives, Jack McCullough WordPress, Missing.Org

Credit

Edited by Erin Banks, with Sabrina Holmes