On a warm Sunday afternoon in July 1985, fifteen-year-old Kristy Wesselman laced up her shoes, told her mother she would be back soon, and stepped out the front door of her home in the Valley View neighborhood outside Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She was heading to the Jewel grocery store, less than a quarter mile away, to buy a soda and a candy bar. She and her mother had plans for the evening: old movies, a quiet Sunday at home. The walk took five minutes.

It was a route she had traveled dozens of times. As she left, her mother called out four words that would stay with her for the rest of her life: Be careful, my princess. I love you. Kristy never came home.

Her body was found the next morning a few feet from the path she had taken. She had been attacked from behind, sexually assaulted, and stabbed eight times. She had no defensive wounds on her hands or arms, no sign she ever saw her attacker coming, no chance to resist. Whoever did this knew what they were doing, or had done something like it before.

At the store, surveillance footage captured Kristy standing in line, buying a soda and a candy bar she planned to share with her mother. It was the last image of her alive. She left through the back of the store and headed toward the path, only 150 yards from home. She never made it.

By midnight, Sandy Wesselman was worried. Her daughter had been gone for hours. She contacted the authorities. Investigators began searching in the dark.

Around 11:15 the next morning, Detective Kevin Buckholtz, thirty-two years old and the lead investigator, followed a report from a store employee who had seen Kristy leave through the field behind the market. He noticed a section of grass pressed down at an angle from the main path. He followed it. He found her under two trees on a bed of leaves.

He had no portable radio, so he ran back to the store to use a pay phone. Decades later, retired in Florida, he said the memory had never faded. It never fades. The investigation into Kristy Wesselman’s murder became one of the most extensive in DuPage County history.

It was also, for thirty years, one of its most unsuccessful. At the crime scene, investigators had a body, a path, a field, and biological evidence. A sexual assault examination during the autopsy yielded a semen sample. The DNA evidence was there from day one.

But in 1985, forensic science could not yet do what that evidence would eventually do. What investigators lacked was a direction. Detective Buckholtz spent the next five months working the case almost exclusively, checking alibis, canvassing the neighborhood, searching the field for additional physical evidence. He later described the central challenge plainly: there was no one to focus on, no clear suspect, no obvious motive beyond the crime itself.

The attack bore the hallmarks of a stranger and a predator. The path Kristy took was public knowledge. Anyone in the neighborhood or a visitor to the area would have known it. The attack happened in broad daylight.

A family was in a backyard just feet away. No one heard anything unusual. Whoever did this was controlled and efficient, and walked back into an ordinary Sunday afternoon without anyone noticing. In the days and weeks that followed, tips came in from around the region.

A gang member from Chicago confessed, but his story collapsed under questioning and he was ruled out. One by one, suspects were brought in, questioned, and released. The field was searched repeatedly. Evidence logs accumulated.

The suspect list remained empty. Kristy’s funeral was held at St. James the Apostle Church in Glen Ellyn. More than 700 people attended.

The church could barely hold them. The pastor, Father Edwin Joyce, spoke to a community that did not yet know how to process this kind of grief, the sorrow of a child killed while running an afternoon errand in the middle of a suburb. He offered these words: We grieve today because we realize how precious this girl’s life was. How precious is life?

Seven hundred people came to the funeral of a fifteen-year-old who had been in high school for one year. That number tells you everything about Kristy Wesselman’s place in the community that loved her. In the years that followed, the investigation continued, but without a clear suspect, it became a test of patience. The DuPage County Sheriff’s Office never formally closed the file.

The case remained open, remained active. But by the late 1980s, the trail had gone cold. Then came 1989, four years after the crime. Evidence was reexamined using newly developed forensic techniques.

A partial genetic profile was assembled from the biological material found at the scene. It was not complete enough for a decisive database search, but it was something. A thread, and investigators held onto it. In the years that followed, as DNA technology advanced at a pace no one had predicted in 1985, the DuPage County crime lab returned to the Wesselman evidence again and again, each time trying to extract a more complete and definitive profile.

Then in the late 1990s, a breakthrough occurred, not in the Wesselman case specifically, but in forensic science generally. The FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, became national. For the first time, investigators could upload a DNA profile from an unsolved crime scene and automatically compare it to a national database of people convicted of violent crimes. In 2000, fifteen years after Kristy Wesselman was killed, the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office uploaded her killer’s genetic profile to CODIS.

They waited for a match. None came. At that time, the database contained profiles of individuals already convicted of violent crimes. Michael Jones, the man who would later be identified as Kristy’s killer, was not yet legally required to provide his DNA.

He was entirely outside the system designed to catch men like him. He would remain outside it for another fifteen years. But while the criminal investigation stalled, it was taking a different kind of toll on the human level. Among the suspects brought in for questioning in the Wesselman case was a man named Dana Henry.

He was thirty-four at the time. He had never met Kristy Wesselman, never spoken to her, had no connection to her at all, except for one geographic fact investigators could not ignore: the backyard of his mother’s home was about 100 yards from where Kristy’s body was found. That proximity was enough. Henry was brought in for questioning.

What happened next, according to his personal account, crossed a line he never forgot. He said investigators stripped him, put him in a jail cell, and held him there until he agreed to provide blood and saliva samples for DNA testing. He was never read his rights. He was never told specifically why he was a suspect.

He was never charged with anything. His DNA did not match the crime scene evidence, but the damage was done. Henry described the experience in a single sentence that stuck with observers ever since: They never read me my rights, so I guess I didn’t have any. He spent around $50,000 on legal consultations over the following years, money that ultimately cost him his home.

He moved to LaSalle County. The informal cloud of suspicion, never officially acknowledged and never officially withdrawn, followed him into every relationship he tried to build with friends, family, and partners for thirty years. Dana Henry attended Michael Jones’s sentencing hearing in January 2018, hoping it would bring a sense of closure. He said it did not.

The system that failed to catch Kristy’s real killer had consumed an innocent man alongside her. By 2000, Kristy Wesselman had been dead for fifteen years. She would have been thirty. Her class at Glenbard South High School graduated in 1988, the year her mother established a one-time scholarship in her name, a $500 award given to a member of that class, so that at least one person would carry something of her memory in the year Kristy should have finished high school.

The recipient was Robert Derr. He became a cardiologist and vascular specialist practicing in Chicago. He never forgot where that money came from. Meanwhile, the investigation settled into the long, grinding work of a case that refused to close but also refused to yield.

DuPage County Sheriff’s Office officials eventually formalized the work by creating a dedicated cold case unit. Two investigators, Tiffany Wai and David Molchan, were assigned to work full-time on the county’s most significant unsolved homicides. They identified 49 cases in unincorporated DuPage they believed could still be solved. The oldest dated to 1945.

But the Wesselman case consumed most of their attention. In the late 1990s, forensic scientists at the county lab achieved what had eluded them for more than a decade, using DNA extraction and analysis techniques that did not exist in 1985, or even in 1989 when the evidence was first reexamined. They built a more complete and definitive genetic profile of Kristy’s killer. County forensic scientist Douglas Soll put it this way: Seven years ago, no one would have talked about the kind of DNA they are talking about now.

The new profile was complete enough to search nationally and, eventually, internationally. In 2000, that profile was uploaded to CODIS. The database returned no hit. The man responsible for Kristy’s murder had committed a violent sexual crime before.

In fact, he had served time for one. But he had been released years before laws existed requiring convicted offenders to provide DNA samples in their current form. The system could not find a man who was never required to register with it. This was not a failure of investigation.

It was not a failure of science. It was a failure of policy, and it would take fifteen more years to fix. After the CODIS upload produced no match in 2000, the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office did not accept the result as final. The then-state’s attorney, Joe Birkett, who later became a state appellate judge, pushed for new legislation in Illinois.

The argument was straightforward: if the law required convicted felons to provide their DNA to a state database, the database would grow, and cold cases connected to criminals who had fallen through historical gaps would finally be solved. The law passed in Illinois in August 2002. It required anyone convicted of a felony in the state to provide blood, saliva, and tissue samples for genetic marker testing. Joe Birkett, reflecting on the case years later, said: We always thought time would reveal who committed this crime, and that it was not the kind committed by someone with no prior record.

He was right about the prior record part. He was more right than he knew at the time. Because the man who killed Kristy Wesselman had not committed one violent crime. He had committed several.

His name was Michael Jones. In 1977, eight years before he killed Kristy Wesselman, Jones was living in the Chicago area. On August 4 of that year, he saw a twenty-seven-year-old woman riding her bicycle in Chicago. He followed her in his car, struck her bike directly, knocking her to the ground, forced her into the vehicle, bound her wrists, and pulled a knit cap over her head so she could not see.

He drove her to his parents’ home in Schiller Park, a northwest Chicago suburb, took her to the basement, and raped her repeatedly. He was convicted. He was sentenced to ten to twenty years. He served seven.

He was released on parole in 1983. Two years later, in 1985, while still under supervision for the kidnapping and rape of a twenty-seven-year-old woman, he killed Kristy Wesselman. Jerri Michel, the 1977 assault victim, attended Jones’s sentencing hearing in 2018. She said something that put a precise finger on the systemic failure that allowed it to happen: If he had served at least the ten years, we would not be here today for this.

Consider that for a moment. A man sentenced to a minimum of ten years for violent rape and kidnapping served seven. He was released in 1983 on parole. Eighteen months later, still under supervision, he killed a fifteen-year-old girl on her way back from a grocery store in an Illinois suburb.

The system meant to protect Kristy Wesselman failed in a very specific, traceable way, years before she walked out that front door. After Kristy’s murder, Jones returned to Champaign, Illinois, 150 miles south of Glen Ellyn. He built a life there. He married in 1984.

His wife left him about ten years later, pointing, according to investigators, to his abnormal interest in underage girls. He was arrested again in 1999 for assaulting a relative of his new girlfriend. The charges were resolved. He moved on with his life.

Investigators would later learn that Jones had a pattern of taking long motorcycle trips north toward Chicago, trips that took him through or near Glen Ellyn regularly. It is believed, though not officially confirmed in his plea agreement, that he spotted Kristy Wesselman opportunistically on one of those trips, that she was not a planned target but a chance encounter, and that he followed her and waited for the path to be clear. Meanwhile, investigators kept working. The DNA profile waited in the CODIS database.

The case file expanded. The cold case unit, restructured and reassigned over the years, kept pushing the investigation forward. Detective Sergeant Robert Harris took effective command of the dormant case and became its most visible face, attending press conferences, coordinating neighborhood canvasses, and in 2011 making the decision that defined the next stage of the investigation. He revealed the ring.

This was the secret investigators had kept for twenty-six years. When Kristy’s body was found on the morning of July 22, 1985, a small gold ring was missing from her left hand. It was a family heirloom of yellow gold, size four and a half, with a broken pearl in a delicate setting. Her mother knew the ring well.

Investigators who examined the crime scene knew it had been on Kristy’s hand in the store surveillance footage, but it was gone by the time her body was found in the field. The killer had taken the ring. Investigators kept that information completely secret for twenty-six years. The purpose was operational.

Keeping the detail quiet helped them eliminate false confessions. Anyone claiming responsibility for Kristy’s murder could be evaluated in part by their knowledge of the ring. It was the one piece of information only the killer and investigators would know. In July 2011, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of Kristy’s death, Harris made the decision to release it publicly.

The reasoning was that the operational benefit of secrecy had been exhausted, and the potential benefit of public awareness, someone recognizing the ring or knowing who had it, outweighed the risk. Harris also stated what he believed about the man who took it. The killer, in his view, was likely using the ring as a way to relive the details of the crime. That is the language of criminal psychology, used to describe a specific type of offender: one who keeps trophies, returns to the memory of what he did, and has felt not remorse over the decades but something closer to possession.

Sandy Wesselman stood beside Harris at that press conference and addressed whoever might be listening, carrying thirty years of compressed grief and anger in a single sentence. She said: There is a man out there who thinks he has gotten away with murder. Please help us destroy his dream. He took everything Kristy had.

Investigators canvassed 120 homes in the Valley View residential area where residents had lived since 1985. They asked people to reach back across three decades and remember whether anyone they knew had acted strangely in the summer of 1985, become withdrawn or unusually interested in the case, or visited Kristy’s grave at a suspicious frequency. More than 25 new tips had come in during the previous year. The most recent had arrived just two weeks before the press conference.

None of them led to Michael Jones. He was not a neighborhood resident. He had never lived in Glen Ellyn. He was not part of anyone’s suspect network.

He was 150 miles away, living quietly in Champaign. The only thing connecting him to that path, that field, that Sunday afternoon, was three nanoliters of biological material that had sat in a sealed evidence kit for more than a quarter century. Then, on July 2, 2015, Michael Jones made a mistake. He pleaded guilty to an aggravated domestic assault charge in Champaign County, Illinois.

It was a felony under the 2002 Illinois law, the law Joe Birkett had pushed through the legislature, the law inspired in part by the Wesselman case itself. Jones was now required to provide a DNA sample to Illinois State Police. He submitted the sample on September 10, 2015. Thirty years, one month, and twenty days after Kristy Wesselman was murdered, the DuPage County crime lab received notification.

CODIS had found a match. The DNA profile obtained from the sexual assault evidence kit administered during Kristy Wesselman’s autopsy matched the DNA profile of a man named Michael R. Jones of Champaign, Illinois. State’s Attorney Robert Berlin later described the statistical weight of that match in terms that removed all ambiguity: the profile would be expected to appear in one out of 1.

5 quadrillion Caucasians. One in 1. 5 quadrillion. Investigators Tiffany Wai and David Molchan, the cold case detectives who had been carrying this file, moved immediately.

A search warrant was obtained for Jones’s home in Champaign on September 18. Detectives executed the warrant, collected a fresh cheek swab directly from Jones, and sent it to the crime lab for independent confirmation. The swab confirmed the match. Jones was arrested the same day, transported back to DuPage County, and charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of aggravated criminal sexual assault.

Then investigators showed him a photograph of Kristina Wesselman. He looked at the image of the fifteen-year-old girl he had killed in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon in 1985 and said: God as my witness, I have never seen her before in my life. Michael Jones remained free for thirty years. He ate meals.

He rode his motorcycle. He married and divorced, entered new relationships, committed more acts of violence against women in his orbit. He lived, by all external measures, a complete adult life. And somewhere, in a drawer or a box or a private place never identified, there may still be a small gold ring with a broken pearl.

The ring was never found. Its location was never disclosed, not by Jones, not by anyone else. He pleaded guilty without providing a full account of what happened on that path. The plea agreement, by its nature, did not require him to explain anything beyond what the state could prove.

The ring, that trophy, or talisman, that object representing Kristy’s final moments, remains missing. It is an open wound in a case otherwise closed. Jones was held without bail from the moment of his arrest in September 2015. He remained in the DuPage County Jail for more than two years as the case moved through the courts.

He pleaded not guilty at his October 2015 arraignment, wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackles, his face expressionless as prosecutors laid out the timeline of what he had done over thirty years. In January 2018, with his jury trial scheduled for the twenty-third, Jones changed course. He pleaded guilty to a single specified charge of murder, alleging he stabbed Kristina Wesselman to death during the commission of a forcible sexual assault. Judge George Bakalis accepted the plea.

Before sentencing, Jones was held in a cell at the DuPage County Jail. At some point during that period, he picked up a Styrofoam cup and wrote four words on it: I am sorry for 1985. Prosecutors had planned to introduce that cup as evidence if the case went to trial. The guilt embedded in those five words, written secretly in a cell when Jones presumably thought no one was watching, stood in stark contrast to the statement he had made to investigators when shown Kristy’s photo.

The man who had said with apparent confidence he had never seen her before was apparently sitting in his cell writing apologies to a girl he insisted he had never met. On January 23, 2018, Michael Jones was sentenced to eighty years in prison in the courtroom of Judge George Bakalis in Wheaton, Illinois. Before sentencing, the judge addressed Jones directly: You are the embodiment of evil. Bakalis called him a real Jekyll and Hyde character.

Under 1985 sentencing guidelines, and because Jones was sentenced under the laws in effect at the time of the crime, he was eligible for one day of good conduct credit for every day served. But given his age and the length of the sentence, the math was straightforward. His earliest possible release date would not come until 2095. Michael Jones will die in prison.

Sandy Wesselman, who had moved to Colorado in the years after the murder, was informed of Jones’s arrest in a manner that reflected the care investigators had shown this family throughout. Detective Tiffany Wai did not call by phone. She traveled to Colorado and told Sandy in person. State’s Attorney Berlin later said of that decision that it required more than a phone call, and that Wai’s willingness to make that trip reflected the depth of commitment investigators brought to the case.

At the press conference following sentencing, Sandy Wesselman spoke to reporters. She said five words that contained everything: It is a happy day and a very sad day. We will always miss Kristy. Her son Bill, who had stood beside his mother at every press conference and court appearance, said at the time of the initial arrest that his reaction was shock and disbelief.

He said he had been waiting thirty years for news like this, and that he always suspected a DNA match would ultimately solve the case. He was right. Kristy’s friend and neighbor Bridget King, who worked to revive the Kristy Wesselman Memorial Scholarship in her honor, a $1,000 annual award given to a Glenbard South student serving as freshman class president, just as Kristy had done, spoke with a measured grief balancing loss and gratitude. She said: Nothing can repay Kristy’s lost life or the years we had to endure without her.

It was so painful to learn what a violent, psychopathic sadist Jones is and the torture he inflicted on others. But after Tuesday, he is no longer our concern. Now we move forward again to celebrate the vital and impactful life Kristy Wesselman lived and the positivity she left in everyone who knew her. Jerri Michel, the woman Jones had raped and kidnapped in 1977, the crime for which he served seven years of a potential twenty, also attended the sentencing.

She had lived with the consequences of that early release for decades. She stood in that courtroom and said what many in the room were thinking: if he had served his minimum sentence in full, if the system had held him for the ten years it promised, Kristy Wesselman would not have been on that path on that Sunday afternoon in 1985. They would not have been in that courtroom in 2018. There would have been nothing to be sorry for.

The two investigators who solved the case, Tiffany Wai and David Molchan, were later honored by the Chicago Crime Commission with its Distinguished Service in Law Enforcement award, presented at the organization’s Stars of Excellence dinner in November 2018. Wai, who had been with the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office for nineteen years by the time of the award, spoke about what the case meant to her personally. She said the case had drained her. She had developed a close relationship with Kristy’s family over the years, especially with Sandy and Kristy’s sister.

She had spoken with them recently in the week of the awards ceremony. She said something that stayed with everyone who heard it: For me, it never felt like a cold case. For them, it felt like it happened yesterday. It drained me.

They needed some justice. It meant everything to me to be able to give them that justice. The day after Michael Jones was sentenced to eighty years, Dana Henry broke his silence. He had attended the sentencing hoping to close something inside him that had been open since 1985.

It did not happen. He had never met Kristy Wesselman. His only connection to her death was geography. The backyard of his mother’s home was 100 yards from where her body was found.

That proximity made him a prime suspect. Investigators stripped him, put him in a cell, and held him there until he agreed to provide DNA samples. He was never read his rights. He was never charged.

His DNA did not match the samples. Yet the damage was already done. Over the following thirty years, Henry spent about $50,000 on legal consultations, money that ultimately cost him his home. He moved to LaSalle County.

The cloud of suspicion, never formally created and never formally withdrawn, followed him into every relationship he tried to build. He described his emotional state in a single sentence that needed no elaboration: he said he had lived in only two states over the past thirty years, anger and depression. He attended Jones’s sentencing hoping to feel something different. He walked out of that courtroom in January 2018 with nothing officially acknowledging what he had endured because of the investigation.

The DNA match solved the murder. That matters. Thirty years of relentless investigative work finally brought justice for Kristy and her family. But that match did not erase what the investigation had done to an innocent man.

It scientifically confirmed his innocence, but that confirmation had existed since the first time they compared his DNA to the crime scene evidence decades earlier. Confirmation and accountability are not the same thing. Michael Jones will die in prison. Kristy’s family received justice.

Dana Henry received a verdict that proved what he had always known about himself, and nothing more.