Solved cold cases in Illinois
2 documented cases.
Julie Ann Hanson
Julie Ann Hanson, a 15-year-old girl, left home on a bicycle on July 7, 1972, in Naperville, Illinois; she was sexually assaulted and stabbed, and her body was found the next day in a field. The case went cold for nearly 50 years until forensic genetic genealogy identified Barry Lee Whelpley, a former Naperville resident living in Minnesota, who was arrested in 2021 and died in jail awaiting trial in 2024.
Kathy Halle
Kathy Halle, a 19-year-old woman from North Aurora, Illinois, in Kane County, vanished on March 29, 1979, after leaving her apartment to pick up her sister at the Northgate Shopping Center in Aurora. Her car was found in her apartment complex parking lot with blood behind the driver's seat, and about three weeks later her body was recovered from the Fox River. The case went unsolved for more than four decades. Bruce Lindahl, a Chicago-area man already suspected in roughly a dozen killings of young women in the late 1970s and early 1980s, had died in April 1981 after accidentally severing his own femoral artery while fatally stabbing an 18-year-old man in Naperville. Lindahl's DNA profile was on file from his 2019 exhumation in a separate case, and he was a known suspect because evidence showed he frequented the shopping center where Halle was headed. The break came not from genealogy but from re-testing the original physical evidence: North Aurora Detective Ryan Peat learned of the M-Vac wet-vacuum DNA collection system at a 2022 conference, a grant from the nonprofit Seasons of Justice funded the roughly 10,000 dollar test, and in June 2023 Halle's preserved clothing was sent to DNA Labs International in Florida. In August 2024 the lab reported that DNA recovered from her clothing was approximately 9.4 trillion times more likely to have originated from Bruce Lindahl than from an unrelated person. On October 23, 2024, Kane County authorities announced that the 45-year-old case was solved and that, had Lindahl lived, charges would have been authorized.