PRETTY MARIA RIDUPLH ACCUSED, DENIES MURDER

PRETTY MARIA

PRETTY Maria Ridulph's accused killer is 'absolutely' going to deny murdering the seven-year-old girl back in 1957 his lawyer has revealed..
Former cop, Jack Daniel McCollough, now 71, was a neighbor of the youngster in Sycamore, IL allagedly kidnapped and killed the youngster, after offering a piggy back ride.
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COPS EXHUME BODY OF MARIA RIDULPH; SLAIN IN 1957

DETECTIVES in Illinois exhumed the body of Maria Ridulph--the 7-year-old girl murdered in 1957. Cops are hoping that modern science will help the case they're building against the man they believe raped and murdered her. Jack Daniel McCullough, now 71, was arrested last week in the grisly slaying that garnered national headlines at the time. He is a former police officer in the Seattle area and has denied any involvement.
State's Attorney Clay Campbell said: "Suffice to say science has advanced greatly, thankfully, since that time and we're hoping that advancement in science can assist us in our investigation of this case."
Maria disappeared while playing with a pal near her home, 60 miles west of Chicago. Her body was discovered five months later after spring thaw
and more than 100 miles away

McCullough immediately came under suspicion but said he was at an air force recruiting station 20 miles and had taken the train. The unused ticket was recently discovered by a former girlfriend.
MORE ON MARIA RIDULPH

JACK DANIEL McCULLOUGH DENIES 1957 SEX SLAYING

THE FORMER cop busted in the sensational 1957 sex slaying of little Maria Ridulph denies murdering the child. Creepy Jack Daniel 'Creepy Jack' McCullough, 71, told the Associated Press in a jailhouse chat: “I have an iron-clad alibi. I did not commit a murder.” Hmmm. Geez Jack, pretty much everyone else thinks you're a killer who changed his name and vanished from Illinois in the spring of 1958. During the interview, McCullough stuck to the alibi he gave cops half a century ago: he couldn't commit the murder because he was in
Chicago--50 miles away--enlisting in the US Air Force.

But McCullough lived near the girl and matched the description of the suspect given by Maria's 8-year-old friend, Cathy Sigman, who last saw her on Dec. 3, 1957, at about 6 p.m. Sigman said she left Maria with a young man and ran home to get some mittens; when she returned 15 minutes later, the two were gone. She has not wavered from her story and even recognized the aged McCullough as the killer.
McCullough has a long history of molesting young girls and even his own family has claimed he abused them when they were young, making them perform sick acts on each other.

MORE IN THE CHICAGO SUN TIMES

JACK DANIEL McCULLOUGH'S HISTORY OF SEX TERROR

HE'S A monster. That's the word around the campfire on Jack Daniel McCullough, the 71-year-old Seattle man charged with the 1957 sex slaying of Maria Ridulph. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, McCullough has a long, long troubling history of molestation, sexual perversion, violence and terror.
* One of his sisters told cops McCullough--originally from Sycamore, Illinois-- sexually abused her on numerous occassons and used her as a lookout when he was “doing that to other neighborhood girls as well ...while he did so.”
* While a cop in Washington state, sexually assaulted a 13-14-year-old runaway in the early 1980s.

*  McCullough "at times took his two-year-old brother and two of his sisters into the attic of their home and made them strip and touch each other sexually."

* The man his niece calls "kindly and loving" had a very troubled marriage. She told cops he was emotionally abusive and made sexually suggestive comments to his daughter from a previous marriage, who was 11 at the time. The ex-wife also said she found nude photos of the daughter taped to the bottom of a desk drawer.

The murder of Maria Ridulph was a case that made headlines around the world in 1957 and '58. She had been playing with a pal when she disappeared with a man named "Johnny." Her body was found months after her disappearance.

JACK DANIEL MCCULLOUGH BUSTED FOR 1957 MURDER

PRETTY MARIA RIDULPH

COPS have made an astonishing arrest in a murder case which is more than 50-years old. 
Back in December 1957 Maria Ridulph was playing with a friend outside her Sycamore, IL home when a young man walked up and introduce himself as "Johnny". 
She accepted piggyback rides from the mysterious stranger and her friend left her, playing with him. 
It was the last time the girl dubbed "Pretty Maria" by newspapers at the time, would be seen alive.      
For the next five months, almost the entire 7000-strong community, searched alongside FBI agents for the girl but in in April 1958 their worst fears were realised when Maria’s decomposed remains turned up beneath an oak tree near Galena. Now more than half-a-century later
Jack Daniel McCullough, now 71 has been arrested on murder charges.
Maria’s brother, Charles Ridulph, 65, was stunned by the news, telling The Chicago Sun Times he had assumed whoever killed her was long dead.
“We’re in shock, to tell you the truth,” said the old timer, who was just 11, when his sister disappeared.

“The shock that it [was] someone that we know from the neighborhood is just an added shock,” said Ridulph, who still lives in Sycamore.

McCullough, also known as John Tessier, was living in Seattle at the time of his arrest and will now be extradited to Illinois to face the charges.

DeKalb County investigators said he had been a suspect at the time of Maria’s disappearance, but that “the case ran cold after McCullough joined the military and changed his name.”

At the time he claimed he’d been on a train from Rockford to Chicago on the day Maria was abducted, court documents state.
But last year one of his ex-girlfriends came across an unused and unstamped train ticket for the Rockford-to-Chicago trip, ripping apart his alibi and prompting authorities to reopen the case. 

Mary Katherine Chapman was the little girl playing with Maria Ridulph the day she was kidnapped. Chapman chose to speak through her husband Friday, saying she’s delighted someone has finally been charged with her childhood friend’s murder.