On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1985, a 15-year-old girl walked out of her house to go to a store less than 10 minutes away. She never came back. Her mother called her friends. She walked to the store herself. Then she called the police. And for the next 30 years, that was where the story stopped. A girl left, but never returned.

And no one could explain what happened in those [music] 10 minutes between her front door and the store. Police searched. Investigators [music] collected evidence. Suspects were questioned, followed, and cleared. The case went cold. Years passed. Decades passed. The detectives who originally worked the case retired.

 New ones picked [music] it up. And still, nothing. Until one [music] day in 2015, a man sitting in a jail cell on an unrelated charge picked up a cup and wrote [music] four words on it. I’m sorry for 1985. His DNA had already told investigators exactly what those [music] four words meant. But the full story, who this man was, what he’d done before that Sunday afternoon, what he’d done after it, and how a law built from this very case finally tracked him down 30 years later.

This is the story of Kristy Wesselman. And once you hear all of it, you’ll understand why this case still makes people angry today. Glen Ellyn, Illinois, sits about 25 miles west of Chicago. In 1985, it was the kind of town where kids rode bikes until dark, front doors stayed unlocked, and neighbors knew each other by name.

The Wesselman family lived right there in Valley View. Sandy and Bob Wesselman had four children, two older brothers, a sister, and the youngest, Christie. She was born on April 19th, 1970. And by the summer of 1985, she was 15 years old. Fresh off her freshman year at Glenbard South High School. And already the kind of person who made an impression on everyone around her.

She played volleyball. She played softball. She was the girl who stayed after practice when a teammate was struggling. By the end of freshman year, her classmates had voted her class president. She was 14 years old when they did that. Her mother, Sandy, would later say she’d spent that summer expecting to have to slow Christie down.

She was already doing too much, already reaching for more of everything. Looking back, Sandy said years later, maybe she wanted to get it all done. On July 21st, 1985, Sandy and Christie were home together on a Sunday afternoon. No big plans. Old movies. The day felt completely ordinary. At some point, Sandy mentioned she was craving something sweet.

Without hesitation, Christie said she’d go. She pulled on her shoes. And before she walked out the door, Sandy looked at her and said the last words she’d ever say to her daughter. Be careful, princess. I love you. The Jewel-Osco was less than 10 minutes away on foot. Christie knew exactly how to get there. Most kids in the neighborhood took the shortcut through a vacant lot.

A narrow dirt path cutting through tall grass that years of foot traffic had worn down to bare earth. She’d probably walked it a hundred times. She would have turned onto it without thinking. Around 4:00 in the afternoon, she walked through the front door of the Jewel. The clerk at the counter recognized her immediately.

He lived in the same neighborhood. He’d actually babysat her years earlier when she was little. He watched her pick out a candy bar and a soda. She seemed happy, relaxed. She paid. She walked back out into the afternoon. She turned toward home. A family was having a barbecue in their backyard just a few dozen yards from the edge of that field.

A gas station employee was working a shift about 60 yards away. The neighborhood was not empty. It was a Sunday afternoon in July and people were outside. Not one of them would remember seeing or hearing anything unusual. Sandy waited. 5 minutes. 10. She told herself Christie had run into someone. That the afternoon had drifted the way it sometimes does.

But the feeling that something was wrong arrived before she had any real proof of it. She called Christie’s friends. None of them had seen her. She walked to the store herself, watching every street along the way. Nothing. The family spent the rest of the evening searching. Every hour that passed made the fear harder to push down.

At 1:50 in the morning, Sandy called the police. The following morning, a was retracing the route Christie most likely would have taken home. He followed the dirt path into the vacant lot. And then something in the tall grass, just a few yards off the trail, caught his eye. He pushed through the overgrowth. He found Christie’s body lying in a pile of leaves.

Beside her was a half-eaten candy bar and a soda bottle. She had made it out of the store. She had not made it home. Christie Wesselman had been stabbed eight times. A shoelace had been tied around her neck. She had been sexually assaulted. Investigators collected biological evidence from the scene. This evidence, in the right hands, with the right technology, could identify exactly who had done this.

The problem was the year. It was 1985. The science needed to use that evidence didn’t exist yet. So, investigators carefully preserved it and set it aside, hoping that one day they’d have a way to use it. One more thing was missing. The pearl ring Christie had been wearing when she left the house was gone. Her killer must have taken it.

Police processed the crime scene with everything they had. No footprints, no weapon, nothing left behind. Detectives interviewed everyone who’d been near the field that afternoon. The family at the barbecue had heard nothing. The gas station worker had seen nothing. Witnesses placed Christie at the store around 4:00 p.m.

Not one of them could say where she went after she walked out. Investigators built lists of men in the area with violent histories. They followed tips. They questioned neighbors, people who used the path, people connected to the Wesselman family. Every direction they looked, they hit a wall. For 3 years, the case moved in circles.

Then, in 1988, DNA analysis had developed enough to actually be useful in a criminal investigation. Detectives went back to every person they’d ever looked at and asked for voluntary samples. Most people said yes. The samples were tested against the evidence collected from Christie. None of them matched. But one man had said no.

His name was Dana Henry. He was 34 years old. He’d been on the department’s radar since the beginning of the investigation. And the reason was simple. His mother’s backyard sat about 100 yards from where Christie’s body was found. That proximity had kept his name in the file for 3 years. When detectives came asking for his DNA, Henry refused.

He hired a lawyer. Police went to court to force the issue. Henry showed up at the hearing, said he was innocent, and was held in contempt of court for refusing. And then police did something Henry has never forgotten. “They took my clothes,” he said years later. “Put me in a jail cell. Never told me why I was a suspect.

Never read me my rights. So I guess I never had any.” He stayed in that cell until he agreed to give a sample. No match. Dana Henry had nothing to do with Christie Wesselman’s death. He was cleared and released. But he was not free, not really. Henry claims he spent approximately $50,000 on legal fees fighting an accusation that was never true.

He says he had to mortgage his house to cover the cost. He lost it. Friends walked away. Family members kept their distance. He moved to another county and tried to start over. The cloud that had gathered over him never lifted. Not even after the DNA cleared him. Some people still believed he was guilty because once an accusation attaches to a person in a small community, facts don’t always remove it.

“I’ve had two settings over the last 30 years,” he said in 2018. “Angry and depressed. Nobody from the police department ever apologized. And the case still had no answers.” Then, in late 1985, a man the court would later only identify as Willis began contacting the Wesselman family directly. He claimed to know who was responsible.

He sent tips. He made calls. Each one was checked by investigators. Each one led nowhere. This went on for nearly 4 years. 4 years of false hope and dead ends for a family already living inside the worst thing that had ever happened to them. By 1989, Sandy Wesselman had had enough. The family filed a complaint.

A judge issued an order barring Willis from ever contacting them again. When police looked into Willis himself, they found no connection to the crime. Another name, another dead end. In 2000, investigators made their best move yet. They submitted the killer’s DNA profile to the Combined DNA Index System, the national forensic database maintained by the FBI.

If that profile ever matched someone arrested anywhere in the country, investigators would get a notification. It was a waiting game. But at least now they were playing it at the national level. They waited. No match came back. Sandy Wesselman had moved to Colorado by then, but she hadn’t moved on. She’d made a quiet promise to herself at Christie’s graveside the day they buried her.

She would not let this disappear. In 2011, 26 years after her daughter’s death, she gave an interview and said, “It’s a matter of time before someone has the courage to come forward.” She was right about the timing. She was wrong about how it would happen. Because what finally broke this case open wasn’t courage.

It was a law. A law that existed because of Christie and a mistake made by the man who killed her. In 2002, a law quietly changed everything in Illinois. It was pushed through by a man named Joe Birkett, who at the time was the DuPage County State’s Attorney. The law said this, “Anyone convicted of a felony in the state of Illinois had to submit a DNA sample to the state police.

” That sample would go into a database and be checked against unsolved cases. Birkett hadn’t built that law out of nowhere. He’d watched the Wesselmann case sit cold for 17 years. He believed that the kind of man who does what was done to Christie doesn’t do it once and stop. He believed that if the net were wide enough, the right name would eventually swim into it.

The law passed. Life moved on. Then, on July 2nd, 2015, in a courtroom in Champaign County, a man pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated domestic battery. His wife had reported him to police. Because it was a felony, the law required him to submit a DNA sample to the state police. He swabbed. He walked out of the courtroom.

And then the sample moved through the system. The DuPage County Crime Laboratory ran it against the profile collected from Christy Wesselmann’s body 30 years earlier. The profile that had been sitting in the national database since 2000. The profile that had returned no matches in 15 years. On September 10th, 2015, the cold case unit of the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office received a notification.

They had a match. The name that came back had never appeared, not once, in 30 years of investigation. His name was Michael R. Jones. He was 62 years old, living in Champaign, Illinois, about 150 miles south of Glen Ellyn. He had no known connection to the Wesselmann family. His name had never come up in a tip, a witness statement, a suspect list, or any record connected to this case.

As far as 30 years of investigation could determine, Michael Jones simply did not exist in Christy Wesselmann’s world. And here’s the part that makes this story something different from a simple cold case. Michael Jones had done this before. In 1976, he sexually assaulted a woman in the Chicago area. He was never charged.

That woman, Judith Van Kirk, carried what happened to her for more than 40 years in silence. She wouldn’t speak publicly until the day Jones stood in a courtroom in 2018. And when she finally spoke, she said, “I was Michael Jones’ first victim. Michael Jones was a very violent man.” In 1977, Jones followed a woman riding her bicycle on the northwest side of Chicago.

He rammed his car into her. He bound her wrists. He covered her face with a wool cap. He dragged her to his parents’ home and sexually assaulted her at gunpoint. Her name was Gerry Michael. Jones was convicted and sentenced to between 10 and 20 years in prison. He served less than seven. He was released on parole in 1983.

Two years before Kristy Wesselman walked out her front door. And Gerry Michael was not notified. Nobody asked her what she thought about letting him out early. She found out years later. And when she finally got to speak in a courtroom in 2018, she said the thing the whole story leads to. Had he served at least the 10 years, we wouldn’t be here today for this.

Investigators believe Jones was traveling between Champaign and the Chicago area on July 21st, 1985. And that Glen Ellyn fell along his route. He wasn’t a neighbor. He wasn’t someone who knew Kristy or her family. He was a man passing through a town on a Sunday afternoon. A man who had already attacked multiple women.

A man who had been processed by the justice system and let back out 2 years earlier. After the murder, Jones went home to Champaign. He got married. He drove across the state. He lived for 30 years as just a man in a city. While detectives chased dead ends, and a family buried their daughter and waited for answers that never came.

Until a domestic battery charge in 2015 put his DNA into a database. And the database remembered what he had tried to forget. When investigators sat down across from him after his arrest and showed him a photograph of Kristy Wesselman, Jones looked at the photo and said, “As God is my witness, I’ve never seen her before.

” But sitting in his jail cell, when he thought no one was watching, he had already picked up a Styrofoam cup and written four words, “I’m sorry for 1985.” Prosecutors planned to put that cup in front of a jury. Michael Jones was formally charged on September 18th, 2015 with two counts of murder and one count of aggravated criminal sexual assault.

Two DuPage County detectives didn’t call Sandy Wesselman in Colorado to break the news. They got on a plane and flew to her. They went to her door and told her in person that after 30 years, they had finally found the man who killed her daughter. During the lead-up to trial, Jones’ defense team tried something unexpected.

They attempted to pin the murder on a deceased convicted serial killer named Ralph Raymond Andrews, who had died in an Illinois prison in 2006. The defense pointed out that Andrews had reportedly listed a victim named Chris among his victims before his death. It was an attempt to create doubt. The court rejected it.

The DNA connecting Jones to the crime was not a matter of interpretation. On January 18th, 2018, Michael Jones, now 64 years old, pleaded guilty to one count of murder. He said nothing. The plea deal didn’t require him to explain what happened on that path. Didn’t require him to answer for anything else his history suggests he may have done.

He accepted the deal, kept his silence, and let the process move forward without saying a single word to the family sitting behind him in in courtroom. Five days later, on January 23rd, 2018, DuPage County Judge George Bakalis sentenced him to 80 years in prison. Parole eligibility, no earlier than 2095. The judge looked at Jones and said, “At the age of 64, this is essentially a life sentence.

Based on his conduct, the defendant has earned each and every day of his sentence.” Michael Jones did not speak. Sandy Wesselman stood before that court and described her daughter, “Vibrant, spirited, gifted, amazing.” She talked about who Christy had been in her 15 years, and she talked about everything Christy never got to become.

And she called her daughter’s life an unfinished book. “It’s a joyful day and a very sad day,” Sandy said afterward. “We will always miss Christy.” Her son, Bill, had been waiting 30 years to be in a room where someone was held accountable. When Jones was first arrested in 2015, Bill stood at a press conference and said, “My initial reaction is shock and awe.

We’ve been waiting for news like this for 30 years, and it finally came.” Gary Michael stood outside the courthouse on sentencing day. 35 years after Jones had attacked her at gunpoint, 35 years after she had not been warned about his early release, she said, “I’m glad to see he’s going in and will never, ever see the light of day as we know it again.

And then she said the line that stays with you. Had he served at least the 10 years, we wouldn’t be here today for this.” Judith Van Kirk stood there, too. Jones’s first known victim, the woman no one had ever convicted him for. She said, “He took away our innocence, but he did not take our love away that we have inside.

” Joe Birkett, the man who built the 2002 DNA law from the failure of this very case, said, “We always figured the time would catch up to whoever committed this offense. We’ll never know why he was here. But one thing we know for sure, it was him.” And Dana Henry was in that courtroom, the man who had been stripped of his clothes, locked in a cell without being told why, cleared by DNA, and left to carry the cost of an accusation that was never true.

He had come hoping that watching the real killer face a sentence would give him something that had been owed to him since 1988. It did not. “I’ve had two settings over the last 30 years,” he said the day after sentencing, angry and depressed. No apology had come. No one from the department had ever stood in front of him and said they were wrong.

He watched justice land on Michael Jones and left without any version of it landing on him. There is a law in Illinois that exists because Christie Wessellman was murdered, and no one could prove it for 30 years. Joe Birkett built that law from that case, and that law is the reason Michael Jones’s DNA was ever in a system that could match it to a crime scene from 1985.

Christie’s death is built into the foundation of the thing that caught her killer. She was the reason, and most people will never know that. The pearl ring was never found. 30 years of checking pawn shops, following leads, and reopening the file never turned it up. Her killer took it from her finger that afternoon, and no one knows where it is today.

But on January 23rd, 2018, in a courthouse in Wheaton, Illinois, the name Christy Wesselman was spoken in front of the man who killed her. The right name was attached to what happened on that path. And the man who took her ring, and her life, and her mother’s Sunday afternoon, is going to die in a prison cell.

Sandy Wesselman called Christy’s life an unfinished book. But somebody finally wrote the ending. And it took 30 years, a state law, a felony charge, and four words on a Styrofoam cup to get there. Now, a question before you go. Michael Jones was on parole, released years early from a sentence for a violent attack on a woman, when he killed Christy Wesselman.