Deathbed revelation: ‘John did it,’ mom says
Jack McCullough’s guiltridden mother admitted on her deathbed that she knew her son was involved in Maria Ridulph’s 1957 disappearance, one of McCullough’s half-sisters testified Tuesday.
“John did it, John did it — and you have to tell someone,” Janet Tessier said, quoting what her mother allegedly told her in 1994.
Two other half-sisters said McCullough — who in 1957 was named John Tessier — never returned home the night the 7-year-old Sycamore girl vanished from their neighborhood. But both claimed that their mother, Eileen Tessier, told police he had.
And Ridulph’s childhood friend offered dramatic testimony, identifying McCullough in a black-andwhite 1950s photo as the man she saw with Ridulph just before the little girl disappeared.
“This photo, right there,” Kathy Sigman Chapman said quietly, tapping McCullough’s picture with her finger.
The four witnesses offered powerful testimony for DeKalb County prosecutors trying to convict McCullough of kidnapping and killing Maria.
Her disappearance on Dec. 3, 1957, triggered massive searches and an FBI investigation.
Ridulph’s body was found five months later in rural Jo Daviess County. McCullough, 72, was charged last year after Illinois State Police launched a new investigation into Maria’s death.
That new probe was triggered by the disturbing claim Janet Tessier said her moth- er made in January 1994 as she was dying of cancer in a DeKalb hospital.
“She was very agitated and emotional and she expressed a great deal of guilt,” Janet Tessier, 56, told Judge James Hallock, who is hearing the trial without a jury.
She said she contacted several police agencies in the years after her mother made the claim, including the Sycamore Police and the FBI.
Illinois State Police began reviewing Maria’s death after Janet Tessier contacted them in 2008, DeKalb County prosecutors said.
Katheran Caulfield, another half-sister of McCullough, said she stayed up until at least 11:30 p.m. on the night Ridulph vanished, but she never saw her brother come home. Caulfield testified that a day or so later, her mother told police that her brother had been in the house the night Ridulph disappeared.
“She said he had been home,” Caulfield said, breaking down briefly in tears.
Another half-sister, Jeanne Tessier, said she dozed inside the family’s locked house until her parents returned from helping search for Maria, but she also testified that she didn’t see McCullough come home. She said she didn’t see him until later the next day.
Earlier this year, McCullough was acquitted of charges he sexually assaulted Jeanne Tessier in 1962. That charge stemmed from allegations she made to police while being questioned about Maria’s disappearance. Judge Robbin Stuckert ruled in that case the evidence against McCullough was too weak to support a conviction.
Earlier Tuesday, Chapman, 63, recounted how she was playing outside with Ridulph when a young man walked up and introduced himself as “Johnny.”
“He asked if we liked dolls and would we like a piggyback ride?” Chapman recalled.
Chapman said she left her friend alone with the man while she ran home to get her mittens.
She came back minutes later, but Ridulph was gone, Chapman said.
“I went to the corner, looking for Maria — she should still be there,” Chapman said, her voice breaking momentarily. “She was not there.”
She didn’t see the man again until 2010, when state police investigators showed her the vintage photo of McCullough, Chapman said.
“It was the picture Johnny,” Chapman said.
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