Suspected serial killer stayed under the radar
CHICAGO – When a police detective said last week that a man suspected of strangling a suburban Chicago teen in 1976 might have killed as many as a dozen girls and young women, the question that screamed louder than all others was: How did nobody notice?
Today, as Lisle Police Detectives Chris Loudon and detectives in other communities where Bruce Lindahl lived try to retrace his steps, what is emerging is a terrifying murder mystery created by a man Loudon described as a serial killer, a monster hiding in plain sight.
“Bruce stayed under the radar,” he said.
When authorities discovered Lindahl’s body, dead from a knife wound, in a Naperville apartment in 1981, he was known to various police departments as a loser who had been arrested many times but who had no felony convictions. As with many serial killers, he was a loner, he didn’t have a wide circle of friends and he moved often.
He was also a “smooth talker,” Loudon said.
“We talked to women who said he could talk you into doing things,” he said. Many photos of naked women were discovered in Lindahl’s apartment after he died.
He also took pains to hide his actions. Of the females who investigators believe Lindahl abducted and killed, only two bodies have been found.
One was Pamela Maurer, a 16-yearold whose body was found next to a road in Lisle in 1976. Because she was found within hours of her death, DNA evidence remained on her body that investigators used – eventually – to link her death to Lindahl, whose body was exhumed last year. Lindahl tried to make it appear that Maurer had been hit by a car, police said.
The other victim was Debra Colliander, who disappeared days before she was due to testify at trial that she had been kidnapped and raped by Lindahl. By the time her body was found in a shallow grave on a farm two years later, any DNA evidence was long gone, a victim of the elements.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, detectives relied on electric typewriters and telephones, not sophisticated computer systems and cellphones. National databases detailing and connecting unsolved homicides or unidentified remains didn’t exist. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was not created until three years after Lindahl’s death.
Loudon and other investigators have had to scour musty evidence rooms for typed or handwritten reports from that time.
Often, police departments only learned of similar crimes in neighboring communities by accident.
“What I’ve seen in cases from that time is a cop happens to catch a news blurb that someone got arrested and it rings a bell with another case,” said Kendall County Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Caleb Waltmire, who is investigating Colliander’s death.