Jack McCullough Unused Train Ticket and Mother’s Deathbed Confession Led To Arrest

Jack McCullough Unused Train Ticket and Mother’s Deathbed Confession Led To Arrest, The detectives were near the back of the plane on a morning United Airlines flight to Chicago. The suspected killer they were extraditing sat next to them in handcuffs.

“Remember Casey Anthony?” he asked, referring to the murder suspect acquitted that same month. “I just need one juror.”

Jack McCullough, the man being taken to Chicago, spoke with an eerie, condescending tone, police recalled. And he stuck to his story, never admitting that he killed 7-year-old Maria Ridulph in 1957.

Maria’s murder was the nation’s oldest cold case to result in a conviction – one that terrorized the Illinois town of Sycamore and drew the attention of then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. President Dwight Eisenhower also asked for updates on the case that garnered nationwide attention.

On Monday, McCullough was sentenced to life in prison for Maria’s murder. But if not for the work of Seattle homicide detectives, he likely would have walked free.

‘We caught him in so many lies’

McCullough, 73, was among the dozens of suspects in Maria’s death back in 1957. But McCullough claimed he was out of town that day, and his alibi was backed by his mother.

In 2010, Illinois State Police looking into the case contacted McCullough’s former girlfriend to see if she had photographs of them together in 1957. When she pulled one out of a frame, the woman found McCullough’s unused train ticket from the day of the crime.

He initially claimed he’d been on that train.

As police built a case against McCullough, Seattle homicide detective Mike Ciesynski learned he worked as a security guard at the Four Freedoms retirement home in North Seattle. Ciesynski first contacted him on a ruse that police were investigating an assault that happened at a Seattle hotel where McCullough used to work security.

But really, police wanted to keep tabs on him.

It was a Wednesday night in June 2011 when Ciesynski and his partner, Cloyd Steiger, went to the retirement home and McCullough sensed something was up. The detectives drew their guns. He was under arrest.

McCullough was eventually placed in a seventh-floor interview room at Seattle Police headquarters, and investigators thought Ciesynski, an Illinois native, had the best chance of making him open up.

“”I’m not saying a word to you,”” Ciesynski recalled McCullough saying. “Then I couldn’t shut him up.”

McCullough had worked as a cop in the Western Washington towns of Lacey and Milton and talked at one point about officers they knew in common. McCullough didn’t volunteer the fact that he left the Milton police force after a teen girl accused him of sexual assault and he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

The more McCullough talked, the more he fidgeted. At one point in the interview room, when McCullough realized his lies weren’t working, he literally backed himself into a corner, police said.

“He didn’t confess,” Ciesynski said of multiple interviews, “but we caught him in so many lies.”

On the July 27 extradition flight to Chicago, McCullough insisted that detectives pay attention to the travel times, believing that could prove he didn’t kill Maria. Seeming excited about the attention he was getting, detectives said McCullough looked for camera crews and said the media would have a field day when they figured out the proper timeline.

“It’s a big deal when CBS wants to talk to you,” police recall McCullough saying. “I’ve been in contact with Greg Fisher from ’48 Hours.’ He’ll probably be there when we get to Sycamore.”

Only one juror

Maria and her 8-year-old friend had been playing in a neighbor’s front yard when a young man named Johnny approached and asked to give them a piggyback ride. The friend went inside to get mittens and when she returned, Maria was gone.

Her decomposed body was found in a forest nearly five months later.

The small town of Sycamore, which McCullough described like the fictional Mayberry, went into panic. Police searched homes without warrants, armed officers went looking for the killer and McCullough’s fearful mother backed her son’s account.

But on her deathbed in 1994, McCullough’s mother told his half-sister: “He did it,” according to news reports.

McCullough claimed that the day of the murder, he was traveling to Chicago for a military exam. And he did eventually go into the military, serving in the Air Force and then the Army.

McCullough told Seattle detectives he recalled Maria looking like a “beautiful little Barbie doll,” but claimed he hadn’t seen her since she was 5 years old.

Ciesynski asked if maybe he had given Maria piggy-back rides the day she disappeared, but left before someone else came and kidnapped her. The detective suggested maybe he was covering for someone else.

Police said McCullough seemed to ponder the idea, then denied it.

Maria’s 8-year-old friend, now 63, told investigators she never forgot Johnny’s face. When she was given a lineup of pictures that included McCullough as an 18-year-old, she picked him as the teen offering the piggyback ride.

That was another lie police say they caught him in: McCullough initially denied anyone called him Johnny, but they knew that wasn’t true. McCullough went by John Tessier as a teenager and changed his name in 1994.

But whenever McCullough sensed detectives were getting too close, he’d smile and sometimes hold up one finger.

“Remember,” police recall him saying, “reasonable doubt: I only need one juror.”

Stories at the Steak ‘n Shake

McCullough changed his story about the train and later claimed that after that military physical he met an unidentified man for a ride to Rockford, a town about 40 miles away from where Maria was killed. McCullough claimed to have called his dad from Rockford, and when he couldn’t get a ride back he hitchhiked to Sycamore.

But it was snowing that day, Detective Steiger pointed out. Did he really hitchhike?

McCullough claimed he was acclimated to the cold and dressed appropriately.

After the extradition flight, McCullough showed police his former house and said he moved garbage cans to get in an upper front window after hitchhiking home. That house was up the street from where Maria was abducted. McCullough didn’t explain why he didn’t just use the front door.

He also pointed out Maria’s house and the former car lot where he once bought a new auto with money from his paper route. But McCullough didn’t make any indication that he recognized the abduction spot.

Because McCullough hadn’t eaten the day of the flight, police took him to a Steak ‘n Shake restaurant about 40 minutes from O’Hare International Airport. Ciesynski sat across from McCullough, and the killer talked constantly about Maria’s case.

“They found another pair of girl’s pants with the body,” he said. “That means the guy was a serial killer.”

As McCullough ate his double cheeseburger, fries and large milk, Detective Steiger grabbed a placemat and started taking notes in the booth behind him.

“I would have dumped the body at (Kishwaukee) Creek,” Steiger noted McCullough saying. “I used to go out there shooting.

“You have to look at the timeline. When the prosecutor hears the timeline … he doesn’t want to lose a case like this.”

The turning point

McCullough also had been charged with the 1962 rape of an Illinois teenager, but was found not guilty in April after opting for a bench trial. Hoping for the same in Maria’s murder case, McCullough asked for bench trial there, too, meaning he’d have to convince a judge instead of a jury.

A turning point came in September when an inmate who had been incarcerated with him testified that he’d overheard McCullough tell another inmate he choked Maria to death with a wire.

A second man who was incarcerated with McCullough also testified that he’d heard him admit to suffocating the girl.

Prosecutors argued that McCullough was sexually attracted to Maria and, after killing her, dragged her body through a house window – the one he showed to detectives trying to explain his alibi. Investigators think McCullough later loaded Maria’s body into a car and dumped her in the woods more than 100 miles away.

Though no forensic evidence linked him to the crime, McCullough couldn’t explain his way out of his mother’s deathbed statement, Maria’s friend who picked him from a photo lineup, the confusing alibi or the unused train ticket.

“I did not, did not, kill Maria Ridulph,” McCullough told the court in his last appeal for leniency, according to the AP. “It was a crime I did not, would not, could not have done.”

The judge didn’t believe him.

When it was announced McCullough would spend the rest of his life in prison, his stepsister told reporters he was “as evil as prosecutors painted — and some.” Maria’s family spoke of their relief, and the childhood friend who escaped told reporters a weight had been lifted.

Seattle police say that moment came because of phenomenal work by prosecutors, Chicago police and the Illinois State Police.

But “had it not been for the assistance of the Seattle Police Department,” Illinois State Police Director Hiram Grau wrote to Chief John Diaz, “it is unlikely that charges against Mr. McCullough would have been approved.”