“Be careful, princess. I love you.” She said it to a door already closing. A 15-year-old girl, a candy bar and a soda, a dirt path she had walked a hundred times through a neighborhood that had never given her family a single reason to worry about it. 180 yd between her front door and the store. She made it there.
She bought what her mother sent her for. She was seen leaving. She never made it home. What was found the following morning in a field of waist-high weeds directly behind that store within earshot of a McDonald’s on a Sunday afternoon in a quiet Chicago suburb would go without an answer for 30 years. This is the case where the killer escaped the law once, then a law built from the shape of his crime reached back and closed the gap.
Christina Marie Wesselmann was 15 years old, a freshman at Glenbard South High School on the western edge of the Chicago suburbs. She was not the quiet student in the back of a classroom. She was the one her peers chose to lead them, elected president of her freshman class, not appointed, not nominated by a teacher. Her classmates voted for her.
She had already been elected vice president for her sophomore year. She never started it. Her mother, Sandra, would say years later, “Looking back across 30 years at a daughter who filled every room she entered, I had thought when she finished her freshman year, I would have to slow her down. She was doing too much.
Looking back, maybe she wanted to get it all done.” When Kristy left the house that Sunday afternoon, she was wearing a pearl ring, a family heirloom. It was on her hand when she walked out the door. It was not on her hand when her body was found. Unincorporated Glen Ellyn, Illinois, 22 miles west of downtown Chicago.
July 21st, 1985. A Sunday so ordinary it had no reason to remember itself. Brick homes, mature trees, children moving through familiar streets without drawing a second glance from anyone watching. The Valley View subdivision was the kind of place that still existed in 1985. Tightly knit, adults who knew children by name, a community where a teenager walking alone to the store attracted no notice and no concern.
The plan for that afternoon was simple. Old movies, Sandra and Kristy, a quiet Sunday at home. Before they settled in, Sandra sent her daughter to the Jewel grocery store on Butterfield Road, a candy bar and a soda. The store sat less than 2 minutes away. A well-worn dirt path cut through the field behind the parking lot, familiar to every child in Valley View, walked hundreds of times across years of ordinary weekends.
The path had no reputation for danger. It was the kind of route that parents stopped thinking about because it had never given them any reason to. Kristy arrived at the Jewel around 4:00 in the afternoon. She bought what her mother sent her for. She was seen leaving. Sandra reported her daughter missing at 1:50 in the morning on July 22nd.
The hours between 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon and nearly 2 in the morning contained the shape of a mother’s hope becoming something else. That transition is not something a case file records. Sandra Wesselman lived it. She would spend the next 32 years living everything that came after it. Before we go further, if Cold Case Evidence is new to you, this is what we do here every week.
Real cases, real records, the full story of how they broke, who kept pushing, and what finally brought an answer. Subscribe and hit the bell. You don’t want to miss the next one. Now, back to the morning of July 22nd, 1985. Her body was discovered the morning of July 22nd in a field directly behind the Jewel. Weeds 3 to 4 ft high.
The lot partially screened from the parking lot. Enough cover for what had happened there on a Sunday afternoon within earshot of a grocery store and a McDonald’s. She was partially unclothed. She had been sexually assaulted. The autopsy confirmed a minimum of eight stab wounds. A shoelace had been knotted around her neck.
The forensic evidence documented a sustained physical struggle. This had not been brief. In a bag near her body, a half-eaten candy bar, a soda. She had made it out of the store. She was on her way home. Forensic technicians recovered biological evidence. It was collected, cataloged, and preserved. In 1985, CODIS did not yet exist.
The science to run a profile against a national database was not operational. The technicians preserved the evidence anyway because evidence is only useless until the science that can read it catches up. No witnesses reported seeing Christie after she left the store. Nobody had seen anything. Nobody had heard anything. The pearl ring was gone.
The DNA profile went into the file. It matched nothing. DuPage County Sheriff’s detectives launched an immediate canvas. Every street in Valley View, Jewel employees, McDonald’s staff, every resident within the surrounding blocks. Cold case investigators logged thousands of hours running hundreds of leads across Illinois and into neighboring states.
Pawn shop. One name surfaced early. A 34-year-old unemployed laborer from Valley View, whose mother’s backyard sat approximately 100 yards from where Christie’s body had been found. Investigators identified him as a person of interest, questioned him, and did not charge him. He had never met Christie Wesselmann.
The investigation continued. No arrest came. In 1988, the year Christie’s class graduated without her, investigators returned to their primary person of interest and requested biological samples voluntarily. He declined. DuPage County obtained a subpoena. When he continued to refuse, he was held in contempt and taken to jail.
According to his own account and an ACLU lawsuit filed on his behalf, he was stripped of his clothing and held in a cell until he agreed to comply. He provided the samples. They did not match the biological evidence recovered from Christie’s crime scene. Investigators never disclosed to him the basis for designating him their primary suspect.
He was never contacted by law enforcement again. His legal fees reached $50,000. He lost his house. The apparent basis for the suspicion, his mother’s backyard was 100 yards from the crime scene. He had never met the victim. He would say years later, “I’ve had two settings over the last 30 years, angry and depressed.
They never read me my rights, so I guess that means I don’t have any.” The man who had actually walked out of that field paid no legal fees, lost no house, faced no contempt charge. He was 150 miles away, and the system that had once processed him as a violent offender had no mechanism to connect him to a Sunday afternoon in Glen Ellyn.
He was not a man who had stopped In 2000, 15 years after the murder, DuPage County submitted the DNA profile to CODIS, the FBI’s National Combined DNA Index System, now searchable across all 50 states. No match came back. The man who killed Kristy Wesselman had no felony conviction generating a DNA record anywhere in the country.
In 2011, the sheriff’s office made a public appeal about the pearl ring. No one came forward. That same year, Sandra stood before cameras. “On the day of Kristy’s funeral, I silently promised her I would never stop trying to find the person who killed her. I didn’t know that was going to be a lifetime process.
” The Jewel grocery store closed. The building became a banquet hall. The dirt path fell out of use. The neighborhood’s children grew up and moved on. The cold case file continued moving through the unit. New investigators reviewed it. Each advance in DNA technology brought the evidence back to the top of the queue.
CODIS returned the same answer every time. Nothing. In 1999, the year Burkett would later say, “We always figured that time would catch up to whoever committed this offense. It’s not the type of crime committed with no background.” The 2002 law was built in part around the shape of what happened to Kristi Wesselman.
She did not see it pass. But the law was patient, searchable, and waiting. On July 2nd, 2015, the man from that field pleaded guilty to felony aggravated domestic battery in Champaign County and submitted the required biological specimen. His name was Michael R. Jones. 61 days later, a database notification arrived at the DuPage County cold-case unit.
September 10th, 2015. The specimen Jones had submitted under a domestic violence statute had returned a match against the biological profile entered into CODIS from Kristi Wesselman’s crime scene 30 years earlier. CODIS comparisons operate across 13 core genetic markers. The statistical probability of a coincidental match across all tested points sits in the range of one in several trillion.
There is no interpretive window at that margin. The profile was not approximate. It was not a partial alignment. It was the same. Michael R. Jones, 62 years old, Champaign, Illinois. A search warrant was issued Jones’ residence. Investigators arrived Friday, September 18th, 2015. 30 years, one preserved profile, 61 days.
The file had a name. Cold case evidence runs on The state of Illinois had formally classified Michael Jones as a violent offender, supervised his release, placed him under active monitoring. He was not a stranger to the system. He was [clears throat] a documented risk, a classified case, an open file. The machinery designed to manage men like him had processed him, logged him, and returned him to public streets 4 years before his sentence was complete.
He did not become dangerous in that field. He arrived there with a method he had already used on a parole that should have had years left to run. None of it prevented what happened on Butterfield Road. Investigators questioned Jones at his Champaign residence. He denied any connection to Glen Ellyn. He was shown a photograph of Kristy Wesselman.
He looked at the photograph. “As God is my witness, I have never seen her before.” He was arrested 2 days later, Sunday, September 20th, 2015. Held without bond at DuPage County Jail. He showed no expression when he appeared in court. Kristy’s brother, Bill, spoke to reporters outside. “My initial reaction is one of shock and awe.
We’ve been waiting for news like this for 30 years, and it finally came.” Within weeks of the arrest, Kristy’s former Glenbard South classmates, the class of 1988, the class that graduated without her, began raising funds to restore the Christie Wesselman Memorial Scholarship. The original fund, started with Sandra with a single certified check in 1988, had been awarded once.
She stood before the court and said what that arithmetic had produced. Had he served at least the 10 years, we wouldn’t be here today for this. Judith Van Kirk, the woman Jones had assaulted in 1976, the assault for which he was never convicted, addressed the court next. I was Michael Jones’ first victim. He took away our innocence, but he did not take our love away.
Michael Jones got what he deserved. I wish it was a little sooner. Sandra Wesselman, 78 years old, delivered an 11-minute victim impact statement. She glanced at Jones once. She said afterward, “It’s a joyful day and a very sad day. We will always miss Christie. I can go home today and try to be a real person, whatever that is.
” Judge Brian Tellander sentenced Michael Jones to 80 years in state prison. Jones was 64 at sentencing. He will be over 100 years old before he is eligible for parole. The judge did not soften it. Based on his conduct, the defendant has earned each and every day of his sentence. Jones did not speak.
He had not spoken in that courtroom at any point since his arrest. Dana Henry was in the gallery as Jones was sentenced. The man who had been stripped in a holding cell, who had spent $50,000 defending a suspicion he had never earned, who had lost his house, who had described 30 years of his life as two settings, angry and depressed, sat in that courtroom and watched Michael Jones receive 80 years.
He was asked whether it brought him peace. I just want what I lost back. Michael Jones had already done this. Not something similar, not something adjacent. This. He had been convicted of rape, formally classified as a violent offender, placed under active parole supervision. The system had seen exactly who he was, written it down, filed it, and returned him to the public four years early.
Jerry Michaels said it plainly at sentencing. Had he served at least the 10 years, we wouldn’t be here today for this. He didn’t serve 10 years, and a 15-year-old girl buying a candy bar for her mother paid for that shortfall with everything she had left to live. The 2002 law, built from the shape of Christie’s murder, introduced by a prosecutor who had stared at a DNA profile with nothing to match it against, ensured that the next time Jones handed a guilty plea to a DuPage County filing cabinet, science was
already waiting for him. The trap had been set by the case he thought he had escaped. 80 years is the answer a courtroom gave in January 2018. It is not an answer to what Christie Wesselmann was owed in July 1985. Her name is on a scholarship at Glenbard South. It goes to the freshman class president every year, the same role she held, the same role she had just been elected to lead her sophomore year when the path through the field gave her up to someone who had already shown the system exactly what he was.
The file is closed. The path is gone. The jewel is a banquet hall now. Sandra kept her promise. If Cold Case Evidence brought this story to you, subscribe. New cases every week. Leave your thoughts in the comments. Which moment in this case stopped you cold?
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
