There is a commemorative plaque tucked away within the chancel of Riverside Presbyterian Church. It’s a little hard to find, but once you do, it lists the names of the three women to which it was dedicated: Mildred Lindquist, Frances Murphy and Lillian Oetting, all congregation members.
In Andy Hale’s mind, the three Riverside women, who were brutally murdered on March 16, 1960 at downstate Starved Rock State Park, were present with him Saturday afternoon.
Hale is a Chicago attorney who has spent the last decade on a relentless search for justice in the case against Chester Weger, who was convicted of the murders and paroled in 2019 – but never exonerated. Saturday’s talk about the investigation, the criminal trial and possible new evidence, in the very sanctuary where the three women worshipped, was transcendent for him.
“I could feel those women in this church,” Hale said post-talk. “I feel these women now, knowing that this plaque was over my shoulder. It was surreal.”
Nearby, someone said that, for better or worse, the case is part of the church’s history.
“That’s why I feel like something is going to come of this,” Hale responded.
The crime
It’s a sordid case with many twists and turns, and Hale makes a convincing argument for why Weger, who died last year, wasn’t the murderer. In other words, Hale believes he was never meant to be a suspect … but instead a scapegoat.
It’s less than 100 miles from Riverside to Starved Rock State Park, and the women set out in Murphy’s station wagon for a four-day visit on Monday, March 14, 1960, arriving at Starved Rock Lodge, where Weger was a 21-year-old dishwasher. They checked into the lodge, had lunch, and set off on a hike in the park’s St. Louis Canyon.
Then they vanished.
Two days later, all three were found dead in a shallow cave in St. Louis Canyon.
“The injuries were devastating,” Hale told Saturday’s 100 attendees, noting Murphy’s fractured skull. “You couldn’t recognize who they were, they were beaten so badly.”
The case became a national story, including coverage in the once-ubiquitous Life magazine.
All three were Riversiders, married mothers, church members and people with hopes and dreams.
Frances Murphy grew roses and was a member of the Riverside school board. She left behind four children. Oetting left three children, while Lindquist had two.
Lynda Nadkarni is the community programs director at Riverside Presbyterian Church, 116 Barrypoint Road, and helped organize Hale’s visit – the first time he had made a presentation about the case in Riverside.
Nadkarni grew up in the church and said over the years the women had been almost ghostly.
“I’ve always felt their presence here,” she said. “It’s impossible to sit in the choir and sing and not feel those women.”
The investigation
Weger, who stood 5-foot-7 and weighed 180 pounds, compared with the victims’ 5-foot-6 height, was interviewed by the Illinois State Police March 18 and interrogated again two days later. He passed three polygraph tests by the end of the month, then passed three more that April.
Meanwhile, it came to light that a roughly 25-year-old man was seen speaking to the women with possibly three more men in a car. A potential lead, of course, but Hale said the big break in the case was on March 21, when Illinois Bell phone operator Lois Zelensek connected a call between a party from La Salle County, where Starved Rock State Park is located, and Aurora.
She heard part of the conversation, which made her blood run cold.
“They sure have a big writeup in the paper,” the La Salle County party said. Zelensek later said the Aurora voice sounded like an uneducated person.
The Aurora caller: “The kid has bloodstained overalls in the trunk of the car. He’s afraid he’ll get caught.”
The La Salle County response: “Tell him to get rid of them. Burn them.”
Zelensek’s daughter, Marsha Minott, sat in the front row Saturday.
“My mother was scared for my family,” Minott said. “She was a telephone operator and they overheard a lot of different things, and my father worked for the Aurora Fire Department and he kept telling my mom, ‘Do not say anything. We don’t need our family exposed to this.’”
Investigators, said Hale, traced the call to two brothers with organized crime connections and, significantly, to the husband of one of the victims. But the state’s attorney cleared them with, in Hale’s surmise, a handpicked polygrapher.
Instead, the state turned its attention to Weger, who was driven to Chicago in late September by La Salle County Sheriff’s Deputy William Dummett for another polygraph test, which Dummett claimed Weger failed and went on to say that if Weger didn’t confess, he would face the electric chair.
The endgame arrived in November. Weger, who had been relentlessly tailed by law enforcement for months, was interrogated for eight hours, Nov. 16, before confessing early the next morning.
His story was that on his work break at the lodge, he was walking in St. Louis Canyon, decided to rob the women and let them go. But one attacked him, likely Frances Murphy, who apparently dislodged a hair from her attacker, so he defended himself and killed them all before returning to work.
Hale doesn’t buy it.
“The confession was a joke,” he said. “Nobody could believe it. In 1960, it was checkmate. In 1960, we didn’t know false confessions were real.”
That led to Weger’s incarceration for 59 years, three months and six days. All the while, he maintained his innocence while he acquired the nickname the Starved Rock Killer.
New evidence
Hale got involved a decade ago and was clear on his objective.
“My job as Chester’s lawyer, I have to show he didn’t do it,” he said. “I have to prove who did it.”
So he went to work looking for new evidence and plausible alternative suspects. With modern advances in DNA evidence, it was determined that a hair found at the scene likely dislodged by Murphy was a male profile … but not Weger. A new process called genetic genealogy connected the hair to three brothers. Coincidentally, the latter died of a heart attack the same day the women’s bodies were found.
The weapon was likely a tire iron or the end of a hammer, according to a forensic pathologist.
Hale said there is new evidence implicating a small-time La Salle County hood, who allegedly admitted he helped plan the murders and stored the bloody clothes in his car, matching what Zelensek overheard on the phone call. That man’s sister later allegedly implicated him.
Here’s another twist: Hale contacted a woman whose grandfather was in the Chicago mob and allegedly organized the murders.
But why remains a mystery.
In recent years, Hale has worked tirelessly to exonerate Weger, before and after his parole and death. Didn’t happen. A court in Will County, where the case was moved due to a conflict of interest in La Salle County, refused to vacate the conviction, possibly because it would have cost tens of millions of dollars in relief to Weger and his family.
Local help requested
What to make of all this? Hale said the case isn’t over, but there are a few heroes, including Frances Murphy, who apparently fought her attacker and dislodged the hair evidence that led to the modern conclusions, along with Lois Zelensek.
“I contend this was a colossal coverup in 1960, and it’s a colossal coverup today,” he said. “I’m urging everyone in here, if you know something, reach out. Justice does not have an expiration date.”
Hale got to know Weger over the years and called him a “very humble person [with] a dry sense of humor.
“I thought he was kind of a gentle person, the Chester Weger I knew after the last 10 years,” Hale said. “He really became a friend to me. Our go-to after court in Ottawa was Cracker Barrel.”
Nadkarni said she believes the mob was involved in the murders.
“There were four victims,” she said. “The three women and Chester Weger.”
If you know anything related to the Starved Rock murders, however seemingly inconsequential, email Andy Hale andy@ahalelaw.com or visit https://www.andyhalepodcast.com/contact