Unsolved murder sparks tales of haunted roadhouse

For years there had been reports of eerie noises and weird happenings at the old restaurant just outside Oregon, Ill., a small town about 100 miles west of Chicago. A young woman would stroll through the building and disappear. The jukebox would spontaneously burst into the song “After Sunrise,” and dishes would fall and shatter for no reason.

Employees found the place so creepy that some refused to work late shifts.

The building went up sometime in the 1800s and in decades that followed, it would house a succession of speakeasies and bars, providing a perfect stomping ground for unsettled spirits of all kinds.

When a new owner took over the place in the 1990s, he proposed a different theory. The weird events, he believed, were not many ghosts, but just one — the restless spirit of a murdered girl.

Her name was Mary Jane Reed, and the restaurant, once known as the Stenhouse, was one of the last places the 17year-old switchboard operator from Oregon was seen alive. That night, June 24, 1948, she went on a date with a Stanley Skridla, 28, a handsome Navy veteran from

Rockville who was working as a telephone lineman.

The next day, police found Skridla’s bullet-ridden corpse sprawled in a ditch along an isolated farm road, known as a popular lovers lane. His car was parked a short distance away.

Sheriff Joseph Mass said the killing had the earmarks of a crime of passion, a love triangle. The sheriff ’s theory was that one of Reed’s many boyfriends surprised the couple and pumped five bullets into his rival.

“Girl Companion Hunted in Lovers’ Lane Slaying,” was the Daily News headline a day after Skridla’s body was found. At that point, no one knew where Reed was. A lipstick-stained cigarette butt found in the abandoned car was the only hint that the girl had been there. One early theory was that the jealous lover kidnapped her and was holding her captive.

Reed’s mother told police that her daughter worked a 6 to 10 p.m. shift but failed to call home when she was done. This was unusual for her. Even more troubling, her daughter was to be the maid of honor at her brother’s wedding on Sunday. It was not like her to miss such an important event. The wedding was postponed.

Hundreds of searchers fanned out over several counties looking for her. On June 29, the hunt ended. They found Reed’s near-naked body in the tall weeds along a road a couple of miles from the town. She had been shot in the chest. Ballistics tests showed that the same .32-caliber pistol was used to kill both victims.

Investigators started rounding up Reed’s boyfriends, including one former mental patient and another who allegedly threatened to kill her. Detectives also questioned a few of the “numerous girlfriends squired by Skridla in his romantic roamings about the countryside,” noted the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Robbery was soon ruled out, because the dead man’s wallet, containing cash and his paycheck, had not been taken. Reed was still wearing her mother’s ring.

Within a few days, authorities were talking about having hit a “blank wall” in the investigation. In November, a roofer from Wisconsin confessed to the killing, but that lead fizzled. The story of the lovers lane murders made an appearance in year-end newspaper roundups of memorable events of 1948 then, slowly, it was forgotten and remained so for about half a century.

Then, in the late 1990s, the case rose from the grave. Mike Arians, a former insurancefraud investigator, dinner-theater impresario, and the mayor of Oregon at the time, bought the building that once housed the bar where the couple made their last stop.

Arians fixed the place up and renamed his new restaurant the Road House. He soon started sensing strange vibes in his new eatery and learned about the murder. Solving the case became an obsession that would eventually cost him about $100,000.

He contacted Ted Gregory, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune reporter with a penchant for quirky stories. Starting in 2003, Gregory produced several features about the cold case. In 2017, he published a book, “Mary Jane’s Ghost: The Legacy of a Murder in Small Town America.” It chronicled the saga of the long-forgotten crime and latter-day attempts, including séances, psychic readings, and digging up the victims’ remains, to breathe life back into it.

Examination of the exhumed remains yielded nothing but more questions. A forensic anthropologist, for example, said that the skull in Reed’s coffin did not match the body. But after all the years, there was no way to figure out exactly where it came from.

Then there was the question of what happened to Reed’s skull.

Arians believes the killer was a local police officer, Gregory wrote, and kept her head as a trophy. He offered a reward for anyone who could produce it. There were no takers. Skridla’s exhumation and autopsy in 2015 also yielded no meaningful leads. After that, the case cooled off again.

Still, Arians has found a way to keep the memory of the illfated couple alive. He started a foundation in Reed’s name, and his Road House, part bar and restaurant, part museum, part tourist destination for ghost hunters, features images of the slain teenag er as part of the décor.