Illinois 1985 Cold Case Solved — A DNA Match Finally Named Him 30 Years Later
Be careful, princess. I love you. She said it to a door already closing. Unincorporated Glenn Ellen, Illinois, 22 mi west of downtown Chicago, July 21st, 1985. A Sunday afternoon so ordinary it had no reason to remember itself. brick homes, mature trees, children moving through familiar streets without a second thought from anyone watching.
Christina Wessleman was 15 years old. She left her front door carrying a small errand and 180 yards of well-worn dirt path between her and the Jewel Grocery Store at Butterfield Road and Illinois Highway 53. Her mother watched her go. Employees at the store confirmed she arrived around 4:00 that afternoon.
She bought what she came for. She was seen leaving. She did not make it home. What was found the following morning in a field of three-foot weeds directly behind that store would remain without an answer for 30 years. Crime Watch Central, where cold cases don’t stay cold. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from.
Hit like and subscribe so you’re here when the next file opens. This one starts with a 15-year-old, a dirt path, and a name that took three decades and one overlooked law to surface. Christina Marie Wessleman, 15 years old, a freshman at Glenbard South High School on the western edge of the Chicago suburbs. Not a quiet student in the back of a classroom.
The kind of presence that other 14-year-olds voted to lead them. Elected president of her freshman class, not nominated by a teacher, not appointed by administration, her peers chose her. She had already been elected vice president for her sophomore year. She had not yet started it. Her mother, Sandra Wessleman, would say 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 Christy left the house that Sunday afternoon, she was wearing an heirloom pearl ring. It was on her hand when she walked out the door. It was not on her hand when her body was found. Valley View was the kind of subdivision that still existed in 1985.
Tightlyknit, adults who knew children by name. A teenager walking alone to the store drew no notice, no suspicion, no second thought. Nobody in that neighborhood had any reason to know what was already in her direction. The plan was simple. Old movies. Sandra and Christy. the two of them, a quiet Sunday at home. Before they settled in, Sandra sent her daughter to the jewel for a candy bar and a soda.
The store sat less than 2 minutes away, a well-worn dirt path through the field behind the parking lot, familiar to every child in Valley View, walked hundreds of times through ordinary weekends across the subdivision’s entire history. The path had no reputation for danger. It was the kind of route that parents stopped thinking about because it had never given them a reason to think about it.
That was the nature of Valley View in July 1985. Safety was the assumption. Alarm was what happened somewhere else. Christy arrived at the jewel around 4 in the afternoon. She bought what her mother sent her for. She was seen leaving the store. 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 contain the shape of a mother’s hope gradually becoming something else. That transition is not a fact the file records, but Sandra Wessleman lived it. She would spend the next 32 years living everything that came after it. Her body was found the morning of July 22nd. A field directly behind the jewel.
Weeds 3 to 4 feet high. The lot partially screened from the parking lot. Cover sufficient for what had happened there on a Sunday afternoon within earshot of a grocery store at a McDonald’s. She was partially nude. She had been sexually assaulted. Autopsy results confirmed a minimum of eight stab wounds.
A shoelace was knotted around her neck, consistent with attempted manual ligature strangulation applied alongside the stabbing. The forensic evidence documented a prolonged physical struggle. This had not been brief. In a bag near her body, a halfeaten candy bar, a soda, she had made it out of the store. She was on her way home.
Forensic technicians recovered semen. It was collected, cataloged, and preserved. In 1985, KOTUS did not yet exist. The science to run a profile against a national database was not operational. The technicians preserved it anyway because evidence is only useless until the science catches up to it. No witnesses reported seeing Christy after she left the store.
No one had seen anything. No one 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 surrounding blocks. Cold case unit detectives logged thousands of man-hour running hundreds of leads across Illinois and into neighboring states.
They searched pawn shops and jewelry stores for the pearl ring Christy had been wearing. It was never found. Investigators built a geographic profile of the crime. The field sat between the store and the subdivision, accessible from Butterfield Road, from the parking lot, and from the path itself. Anyone who knew the area could have used it.
Anyone passing through could have found it. The radius of possible suspects was not narrow. One name surfaced early. Dana Henry, 34 years old, an unemployed laborer from Valley View. His mother’s backyard sat approximately 100 yards from where Christiey’s body had been found. Investigators identified him as a person of interest, questioned him, and did not charge him.
He had never met Christy Wessleman. The investigation continued. No charges were filed. No arrest came. In 1989, a separate matter entered the file. A DuPage County judge issued a restraining order against Willis Wilson, a Glendale Heights man who had been calling the Wessleman family since late 1985, claiming information about the killer.
Investigators reviewed his claims repeatedly and described them to the Chicago Tribune as ungrounded. The file stayed open. The profile stayed in the lab. It matched nothing. In 1988, with early DNA technology available, investigators returned to their primary person of interest and requested blood and saliva specimens voluntarily. Henry declined.
DuPage County obtained a subpoena. When Henry continued to refuse, he was held in contempt and taken to jail. According to Henry’s own account and a lawsuit filed on his behalf by the ACLU of Illinois, 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 semen recovered from Christiey’s body. The ACLU lawsuit moved through the courts. Investigators never disclosed to Henry 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. Years later, Henry would tell reporters, “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.” >> He says he spent about $50,000 on lawyers and ended up losing his house. He now lives in Lasal County and says the cloud of suspicion has cost him relationships with friends and even family.
The man who had actually walked out of that field paid no legal fees, lost no house, faced no contempt charge. He was 150 mi away, and the system that had once processed him as a violent offender had no mechanism to connect him to a Sunday afternoon in Glenn Ellen. He was not a man who had stopped being violent. In 2000, 15 years after the murder, DuPage County submitted the DNA profile to Kotus, the FBI’s national combined DNA index system, now searchable across all 50 states. No match came back.
The man who killed Christy Wessleman had no felony conviction generating a DNA record anywhere in the country. In 1988, the year Christiey’s class graduated without her, Sandra had donated a certified check to Glenbard South, a one-time scholarship, $500, awarded to a single graduate and then allowed to lapse. The fund went quiet.
30 years passed. The school moved forward in the way institutions do when they have no choice. The case had no ending to give them, so it gave them nothing. 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 Christiey’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 closed. The building became a banquet hall. The dirt path fell out of use. The neighborhood’s children grew up and moved elsewhere.
The cold case file continued to move through the unit. New investigators reviewed it. Each iteration of DNA technology brought the seaman evidence back to the top of the queue. Cotus returned the same answer. Nothing. In 1999, the man who walked out of that field pleaded guilty to domestic battery in Champagne County. A misdemeanor.
Under the laws then in effect, a misdemeanor conviction did not require DNA submission to any state or federal database. His profile remained absent from Cotus. That year, Dana Henry had been living without his house for over a decade. The ACLU lawsuit was long resolved. The $50,000 was gone. The man responsible for none of that was in Champagne entering a plea in a courtroom that had no file connecting him to a 15-year-old girl or a field behind a grocery store 150 mi north.
The misdemeanor classification was not an accident of law. It was the precise legal boundary that determined who did and did not submit a DNA specimen. One category carried a searchable genetic record. The other did not. Jones had landed on the wrong side of that line for the right reasons. A felony conviction would have put him in Cotus 15 years earlier.
In July 2015, he pleaded guilty to a second domestic battery charge in Champagne County. This one was a felony. 16 years separated his first conviction in Champagne from his second. The law had not stood still. In 2002, the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation requiring any person convicted of a felony in the state to submit a biological specimen for genetic marker testing.
On its surface, protecting future victims. Beneath it, a specific origin. The law was introduced by then DuPage County State Attorney Joe Berquette. Berquette had lived with the Wessleman file. He had watched a preserved DNA profile sit in a database with nothing to match against it. He understood the gap.
Violent offenders returning to the public carrying no searchable genetic record, invisible to science, free to reaffend. Briquette 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 Christy Wessleman.
She did not see it live. But the law was patient, searchable, and waiting. When the man from that field handed over a felony conviction in Champagne County 13 years later, Michael Jones pleaded guilty to felony aggravated domestic battery on July 2nd, 2015 and submitted the required specimen. 61 days later, a database notification arrived at the DuPage County Cold Case Unit.
September 10th, 2015. The specimen Jones submitted under a domestic violence statute had returned a match against the seaman profile entered into COTUS from Christy Wessleman’s crime scene 30 years earlier. COTUS comparisons operate across 13 core genetic lossi. The statistical probability of a coincidental match across all tested markers sits in the range of 1 in several trillion.
There is no interpretive window at that margin. The profile was not approximate, not a partial alignment. It was the same. His name, Michael R. Jones, 62 years old, Champagne, Illinois. A search warrant was issued for Jones’s residence on Southmore Drive. Investigators arrived Friday, September 18th, 2015. 30 years, one preserved profile, 61 days, and the file has a name.
Crime Watch Central runs on real records, nothing invented. If this is landing, hit like and subscribe. We keep digging as long as you keep watching. Now, Jones hasn’t spoken yet. Investigators questioned Jones at his Champagne residence. He denied any connection to Glenn Ellen. He was shown a photograph of Christy Wessleman.
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. Christiey’s brother, Bill Wessleman, spoke to reporters. 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, Christiey’s former Glenbard South classmates, the class of 1988, began raising funds to restore the Christy Wessleman Memorial Scholarship. The original award started with Sandre with a single check in 1988, had been given once and allowed to lapse.
Now it would become annual, awarded every year to Glenbard South’s freshman president scholarship, the same role Christy had held. Michael R. Jones record in the Illinois legal system did not begin with Christy Wessleman. It preceded her by nearly a decade. In 1976, Jones sexually assaulted a woman. He was never convicted.
That woman, Judith Van Kirk, would later stand in a DuPage County courtroom. I was Michael Jones’s first victim. In 1977, Jones followed a woman on a bicycle on the northwest side of Chicago. He rammed his vehicle into her bike. He bound her wrists. He covered her head with a wool cap. He dragged her into his car and drove her to his parents’ home in Schiller Park where he sexually assaulted her.
Her name was Jerry Michael. Jones was convicted, sentenced to between 10 and 20 years. He served six and was released on parole. The conditions of that parole were current on the afternoon of July 21st, 1985 when Jones walked into a field behind a Jewel grocery store in Glenn Ellen. The state of Illinois had formally classified Michael Jones as a violent offender, supervised his release, and placed him under active monitoring.
He was not a stranger to the system. He was a documented case, a classified risk, an open file. The machinery designed to manage men like him had processed him, logged him, and returned him to public streets. He did not become dangerous in that field. He arrived there with a method he had already used on a parole that should have years left on it.
None of it prevented what happened on Butterfield Road. January 18th, 2018, Michael Jones entered a DuPage County courtroom and plead guilty to murder and sexual assault. 32 years and nearly 6 months since Christy Wessleman’s body was found in that field. January 23rd, 2018. Sentencing Judge Brian Telander presiding.
Jerry Michaels spoke first, the woman Jones had run off a bicycle in 1977, whose wrists he had bound, who had watched him walk out of prison four years early. 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. >> Had he served at least the 10 years, we wouldn’t be here today for this.
Judith Vancerk, Jones’s 1976 victim, the assault for which he was never convicted, addressed the court next. I was Michael Jones’s first victim. He took away our innocence, but he did not take our love away that we have inside. Michael Jones got what he deserved. I wish it was a little sooner. >> Michael Jones got what he deserved.
I wish it was a little bit sooner. Sandra Wessleman, 78 years old, delivered at 11minute victim impact statement. She glanced at Jones once. She said afterwards, “It’s a joyful day and a very sad day. We will always miss Christy. I can go home today and try to be a real person, whatever that is.” States Attorney Robert Berlin addressed reporters after the sentencing.
He had carried the Wessleman case through prosecution. For 30 years, the pain and grief and the fear felt by the Wessleman family and the entire community has never gone away. >> Judge Brian Telander sentenced Michael Jones to 80 years in state prison. Michael was 64 at sentencing. He will be over 100 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 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.
The families of Joan other victims filled the rose around him. He was asked if it brought peace. I just want what I lost back. And here is the part of this case that should not sit quietly. Michael Jones had already done this, not something like it. This he had been convicted of rape, formally classified as a violent offender.
He was under active parole monitoring the afternoon he walked into that field. The system had seen exactly who he was, written it down, filed it, and handed him back to the public 4 years early. Jerry Michael said it plainly. Jones didn’t serve his 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 Christy’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 his name to a guilty plea, science was already waiting. The trap was set by the case he thought he had escaped. 80 years is the answer a courtroom gave in 2018.
It is not an answer to what Christy Wessleman was owed in 1985. Her name is on a scholarship at Glenbard South. It goes to the freshman class president every year. The file is closed. The path is gone. Sandra kept her promise. If this case stayed with you, tell us in the comments. Tell us which moment stopped you cold.
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