Professional Weirdo Podcast
Where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.
Professional Weirdo Podcast
Episode 19 - A Ride Home
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Listener discretion is advised for this episode. We'll be talking about three murders in Illinois that went unsolved for over 20 years.
Today’s songs are:
- The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
- When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin
- Until Then by Orcas
Sources:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1997/03/13/convicted-killer-indicted-in-womans-78-slaying/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1996/10/19/jury-hears-confession-in-73-death/
https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article251900228.html
Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! Thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.
To find song recommendations for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist
Email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com
Hello! I have a couple of things to tell you about today’s episode. The first part will be covering true stories that contain descriptions of rape and murder. So listener discretion is strongly advised. Given the seriousness of the stories, I’ll be skipping the rating system this time around.
This is Episode 19 - A Ride Home
It was July 7, 1972 in Naperville, Illinois. Julie Ann Hanson was 15 years old. She liked music - sang in the school choir and played in the band. She taught Sunday school at her church. On this night there was a baseball game and to get there she borrowed her brother’s bicycle. Later that night when she didn’t come home, her parents called the police. During a search the next day the bicycle was found along a road. A day after that, in a cornfield farther down the road, Julie’s body was found. She had been stabbed with some type of sharp object 36 times. And it was determined she had been raped.
A year later - Sept. 27, 1973, Roberta Anderson, called Bobbie, lived 13 miles away in Ah-swee-go Osewego, Illinois. She was 15 years old and had been helping work on a homecoming float at a neighbor’s farm, less than half a mile from where she lived. She left for home at 8:30 but she didn’t make it. Her body was later found on an abandoned farm, about a mile away. She had been stabbed 61 times and raped.
Five years later and 26 miles away at the College of DuPage, 18 year old student Margaret Stirn went to her job as a part-time clerk. She was wearing platform shoes. To get back and forth to the college, Margie would often walk 7 miles. But other times she would hitch a ride or pay for a cab. On this day, Sept. 15, 1978, she wasn’t feeling well and told a co-worker she was leaving early. It’s expected that because of the shoes, and feeling ill, she would have hitched a ride. And later, a person would say they saw a young woman fitting Margie’s description accept a ride from someone driving a burgundy van with a gold wing painted on it. Unlike the other girls, she wasn’t found right away, despite efforts to find out what happened to her. Her parents offered a $500 reward, which increased over time to $7000. They worked to get national attention. 7 years after she disappeared, her family was working on mailing thousands of fliers to law enforcement agencies across the nation when they received some news.
It was May 9, 1986. Rock hunters were looking for interesting rocks on an abandoned farm in the area and while moving some stones they discovered skeletal remains. And platform shoes. Dental records confirmed Margie Stirn had finally been found, now 7 years after she disappeared. And this was on the same abandoned farm where Bobbies body had been discovered. So Bobbie had been killed and placed on the farm, and found shortly after. And then 5 years later Margie had been killed on her way home from college and placed 30 feet away from where Bobbie’s body had been, just on the other side of the gravel road. Given the similarities in the two girls deaths and the location where they’d been found, authorities were certain the same person was responsible for at least Bobbie & Margie’s murders. And with Julie’s abduction and murder being similar and also in the area, it was suspected to be related as well. But who did this?
Okay, I apologize for a brief cliffhanger here. I just told you about 3 stories of teenagerwomen in different circumstances that had them maybe needing a ride, or just trying to go home. I’m going to jump in to tell you a story about when I was a teenager. After school I worked in the kitchen of a nursing home. My mom was an admissions coordinator there and usually went home around 4:30. I was coming in after school around 3:30 to sweep and mop the storerooms and then sweep the cooler and freezer. I would take my copy of the printed team schedule at the beginning of each week to post in my room. I worked with 2 other people in the kitchen each night - a dishwasher and a cook. They would take a plastic card for each resident, look at the dietary restrictions, and load the plate before sending it out a window to the dining room. At one point, several meals would be loaded into a closed rolling cart and I would roll them across the building to the Alzheimer’s unit. They had their own dining room because it helped keep them oriented instead of walking across the whole building. After dinner, I would have to wipe the tables and sweep and mop the dining rooms. Some quick details to help set the scene - I had to wear scrubs and a hair net. Pureed hamburger looks like a milkshake (no, I didn’t drink it). Jello is the hardest food to clean up from the floor. The bristles of a broom just breaks it up and smears it around. Mopping just smears it around, only with water. Also, when Medicare plays around with funding old people’s psych meds, you might have a raspy voiced lady sitting in the dining room drinking lemonade and talking to you about the weather one minute, and the next she’s having a loud argument with her dead husband. The dishwasher I worked with the most sang Beatles songs loudly as she loaded the plates and cups, with steam rolling out of the industrial dishwasher. The cook I worked with the most - she was sweet. She lived in the next town over with her husband and two teenage girls. They had one car, and her husband worked at a factory. They would ride in together, sometimes with him dropping her off early before he went to work, sometimes with him waiting for her to get off work. Their commute back and forth from their home to their work took them right by the small gravel driveway that lead 1/8th of a mile through the woods, out into a field, and to my family home. My first winter at this job, when I was 17, the news warned of a bad winter storm coming in the evening. It would start with alternating freezing rain and snow, and it would keep layering that for a while and then go into a deep freeze for several days. Everyone was bracing for it and when I got to work that afternoon after school, my mom explained that she and the cook had decided that if the storm really came in that evening, instead of the kid with one year’s experience driving (that would be me) navigating that ice covered, twisty turning highway for 10 miles, I would get a ride home with the cook and her husband. When I met him, the word that came into my head was “introvert.” He barely spoke, didn’t make eye contact with me, and had his ball cap pulled low over his eyes. His beard was full and wooly. As it turned out, the storm did come in, and I caught a ride home, with me and the cook chatting the whole way. School was canceled for a few days, but those old timers at the nursing home still need to eat, so my dad would drive me into work in the afternoons, and I would ride home with the cook and her husband each night. Finally the thaw happened. School resumed, roads were cleared, and I was back in the driver’s seat. That is, until one afternoon after school, when I found myself needing a ride. I didn’t have to work, so I left school and got into my old beater car to head for home, but it wouldn’t start. A friend gave me a ride to the nursing home, where I was hoping to catch my mom, but had forgotten she’d left that day early for a dentist appointment. The cook was working that night, so my plan had been to hang around for a few hours and catch a ride home. But her husband was already off work and waiting for her. She asked him to drive me down to the school and take a look at my car. It was only about a 7 minute drive, but it was quiet. As you all might guess about me, I don’t normally have trouble with the chit chat. But not on this ride. We were at the high school soon enough and he figured out that there was just corrosion around the battery cables. Pretty quickly I was starting my car, thanked him, and was on my way. All was well. The months went by and I moved away to college. A few months in when I called home to check in with my family, my mom had big news.
Investigators had come to town to get hair and blood samples from the cook’s husband for DNA testing. During the interview he asked the investigators “What if I confess?” He then spent 38 minutes telling them how he had convinced Roberta Anderson, the 15 year old who had spent her last evening helping on the homecoming float, to get into his car. He said they had argued. He had made a pass at her, grabbed her breast. She hit him. The inside locks in his car had been removed. He stabbed her over 60 times with a knife, removed her from his vehicle at the abandoned farm and raped her. He said in his confession that he “ didn’t want her to get cold,” so he covered her body with a blanket before leaving. Two days after the killing, he packed up himself and his wife and left for another state, but not before investigators would take notice of him. There wasn’t enough evidence to charge him, but they kept track of where he was. And waited over 20 year for a break, which looked to be possible when they were able to pull DNA evidence from one of the murders he was suspected of. Regardless of the DNA evidence, his confession to Bobbie’s murder would earn him a 100-year prison sentence.
Because Margie Stirn, the college student leaving early from work, had been found on the same abandoned farm, he was charged with her murder as well. There was also a witness, a fellow prisoner, who said he’d talked about murdering Margie. A guilty plea earned a 20 year first-degree murder sentence for that one.
Major Morris - that’s his name - had lived in freedom for 23 years after his first confirmed murder, that is, until those determined investigators and the new discovery of DNA evidence, led them close to my home town. Major Morris has applied for parole six times. And been denied 6 times. The parole board has determined there is evidence that he would not be safe to return to a life outside bars. That it would be dangerous for him to be free.
It’s strange to think that at 17 I sat in the passenger seat of his car, on the way back to school, where he would fix the issue with my battery cables and I’d be on my way. Arriving home to eat dinner at the family table, to sleep in my own bed, to carry on. I don’t think I made any better decisions - just another teenager needing a ride. Maybe because his wife knew me, or because he had teenage daughters at that point, or because he, in some twisted way, felt reformed, or he was haunted about getting caught. Who can make sense of a mind that would allow such behavior?
At this point you may be asking a question that I asked for years, checking the internet now and then wonderings, what about the DNA? What about Julie Ann Hanson, the first girl who had been murdered going to a baseball game? It’s a rare thing to have DNA evidence from a crime in the 70’s, but in her case, it had been preserved. And when investigators came to collect hair and blood samples, it was actually for her murder. Newspaper articles online would say that much, but I never saw where he’d been charged. It wasn’t until 2021 that I learned, shockingly, the DNA didn’t match Major Morris. The whole reason for questioning him turned out to be what would prove that he was not guilty of Julie Ann’s murder. Finally, in 2021, a match was made to Barry Lee Whelpley, who was 76 and living in Minnesota. And like Major Morris, despite years of freedom, his time was up.
That’s it for today. How are we doing? Everybody okay? And hey now, don’t go expecting more stories about me having close encounters with brutal murderers. That’s the only time. That I know of. And you can bet I understood how to clean corrosion off my battery cables myself after that. If you’d like to support this podcast, rate and subscribe and tell your friends. You can also follow me on Instagram under “professionalweirdopodcast”. And you can email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com
A quick reminder, I have a Professional Weirdo podcast music playlist on Spotify. Think of it as a mixed tape that I’ve made for all of you. Or depending on how old you are, a burned CD I made for you. Or a Spotify playlist I made for you? Which, literally that’s, that’s what it is. For each episode that I’ve done, or that I’m planning to do for this podcast I’ve thrown in 2-3 songs that feel like a good match to the theme. Today’s songs are:
- The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
- When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin
- Until Then by Orcas
I’ll list these, along with the link to the playlist, in the show notes.
Message for the Robots: You don’t have my permission to use any of this content to store, or train, or develop machine learning or AI tools. To do that, you’d need my prior written permission, which, if you asked for that, I would give you an old receipt with a piece of tired bubble gum wrapped up in it. Because creativity is for humans, and the zero one zero zero one zero one one’s are for you. Keep it weird out there, everybody.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1997/03/13/convicted-killer-indicted-in-womans-78-slaying/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1996/10/19/jury-hears-confession-in-73-death/
https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article251900228.html
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