Illinois 1985 Cold Case Solved — A DNA Match Finally Named Him 30 Years Later

July 21st, 1985. Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Glen Ellyn sits 22 miles to west of downtown Chicago in DuPage County. A suburb of mature trees, well-maintained brick homes, and quiet subdivision streets where children walk to the grocery store alone without a second thought from their parents. Kristina Wesselman was 15 years old.

 She had just completed her freshman year at Glenbard South High School where she had been elected president of her freshman class. Not appointed, not nominated by a teacher, voted in by her peers. She was athletic. Her subdivision, Valley View, was tightly knit in the way middle-class suburban communities used to be.

 Adults knew the neighborhood’s children by name and the sight of a teenager walking alone to the store attracted no suspicion from anyone. On the afternoon of Sunday, July 21st, Kristy and her mother, Sandra, had made a quiet plan for the day. Old movies, the two of them, an ordinary Sunday afternoon at home.

 Before they settled in, Sandra sent Kristy to the Jewel grocery store to pick up a candy bar. The store sat at the intersection of Butterfield Road and Illinois Highway 53. From the Wesselman home in Valley View, a well-worn dirt path covered the distance, 150 yards, a trail that the neighborhood’s children used constantly to the Jewel, to the nearby McDonald’s, through ordinary weekends throughout the subdivision’s history.

 Sandra’s last words to her daughter as she walked out the front door were, “Be careful, princess. I love you.” Jewel employees later confirmed that Kristy arrived at the store around 4:00 p.m. She bought candy for herself and for her mother. She was seen leaving the store. She did not come home. Sandra Wesselman reported her daughter missing at 1:50 in the morning on July 22nd.

 Her body was found later that morning in a field directly behind the Jewel. She lay in weeds 3 to 4 feet high near a tree at the edge of the parking lot. She was partially nude. She had been sexually assaulted. The autopsy confirmed a minimum of eight stab wounds. A shoelace was knotted around her neck consistent with an attempted manual ligature strangulation applied alongside the stabbing.

 The forensic evidence documented a struggle. The attack had not been brief or disorganized. The scene recorded the physical evidence of a prolonged assault on a Sunday afternoon in a suburban Chicago lot 150 yards from the front door of her home. From Kristy’s body, forensic technicians recovered semen. It was collected, cataloged, and preserved.

 In 1985, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System did not yet exist. The science required to compare a DNA profile against a national law enforcement database was not operational. What investigators had collected was not yet usable, but the technicians who processed the Wesselman scene understood that evidence is only useless until the science catches up to it. They preserved what they had.

 The candy she bought for her mother was never found. After the autopsy, investigators returned to the field repeatedly. The 150-yard path, familiar to every child in Valley View, yielded no additional forensic material. There were no witnesses who reported seeing Kristy after she left the store. The overgrown lot behind the Jewel, partially screened from the parking lot by the height of the weeds, had provided cover sufficient for an attack in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

 No one had seen anything. No one had heard anything. The semen profile went to the lab. It produced a DNA record. That record matched nothing in existence. DuPage County investigators launched an immediate and intensive investigation. Sheriff’s detectives canvassed every street in Valley View. They interviewed Jewel employees, staff from the nearby McDonald’s, and every resident within the surrounding blocks who could be located.

 Cold Case Unit detectives logged thousands of man hours on the Wesselmann file over the following months, and ran down hundreds of leads across Illinois and into neighboring states. They searched pawn shops and jewelry stores looking for an heirloom pearl ring Christie had been wearing when she left home. It was never found. One name surfaced early and quickly, Dana Henry.

 Henry was 34 years old, an unemployed laborer from Valley View. His mother’s backyard sat approximately 100 yards from the spot where Christie’s body had been discovered. Investigators identified him as a person of interest and questioned him in the days following the murder. He was not charged. He had never met Christie Wesselmann.

 The investigation continued. No charges were filed. No arrest came. Then, in 1988, with early DNA technology newly available, investigators decided to test what they had from the crime scene. They needed comparison samples. They returned to Dana Henry and requested blood and saliva specimens voluntarily. Henry declined.

 DuPage County law enforcement obtained a subpoena. When Henry continued to refuse, he was held in contempt of court and taken to jail. There, according to his own subsequent account, and a lawsuit filed on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, he was stripped of his clothing and held in a cell until he agreed to comply.

 He provided the samples. They did not match the semen recovered from Christie Wesselmann’s body. The ACLU lawsuit against DuPage County for the constitutional violations committed against Henry moved through the courts. Investigators never disclosed to Henry, then or afterward, the specific basis for designating him their primary suspect.

 He was never contacted again by law enforcement about the case. His legal fees reached approximately $50,000. He lost his house. “I’ve had two settings over the last 30 years,” Henry would tell reporters in January 2018. Angry and depressed, in 1989, a separate matter entered the file. A DuPage County judge issued a restraining order against Willis Wilson, a Glendale Heights man who had been calling the Wesselman family and submitting tips to law enforcement since late 1985, claiming to possess information about the killer.

Investigators examined Wilson’s claims on multiple occasions and described them to the Chicago Tribune as ungrounded. In 2000, 15 years after the murder, DuPage County submitted the DNA profile from the crime scene to CODIS, the FBI’s National Combined DNA Index System, now operational and searchable across all 50 states. No match came back.

 The man who had killed Kristy Wesselman had no felony conviction generating a DNA record anywhere in the United States. The case grew cold. In 2011, the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office made a public appeal for any information connected to the pearl ring Kristy had been wearing the day she was murdered. No one came forward.

 At a press conference that year, Sandra Wesselman stood before the cameras. “On the day of Kristy’s funeral,” she said, “I silently promised her I would never stop trying to find the person who killed her. I didn’t know that was going to be a lifetime process.” The man who walked out of that field on July 21st, 1985, settled in Champaign, Illinois, 150 miles south of Glen Ellyn, a distance sufficient to place him in a different county, a different court system, and an entirely different community’s frame of awareness.

 He was not a man who had stopped being violent. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to domestic battery in Champaign County. The charge was a misdemeanor. Under the laws in effect at the time, a misdemeanor conviction did not require submission of a DNA specimen to any state or federal database. His profile remained absent from CODIS.

 The Jewel grocery store on Butterfield Road closed. The building was converted into a banquet hall. The worn dirt path connecting Valleyview to the store fell out of regular use. The neighborhood’s children grew up and moved elsewhere. The DuPage County cold case file on Kristi Wesselman continued to move through the unit.

New investigators reviewed it. Each iteration of DNA technology brought the semen evidence back to the top of the queue. In July 2015, in Champaign County, the man from the field pleaded guilty to a second domestic battery charge. This one was a felony. Illinois law was now very specific about what that required.

 And then, finally, science collected what 30 years of investigation could not. In 2002, the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation with a targeted purpose. Any person convicted of a felony in the state of Illinois was required by law to submit a biological specimen for genetic marker testing. The statute was not designed with unsolved murders in mind.

It was constructed to ensure that violent offenders returning to the community carry a searchable DNA record so that if they reoffended, their next crime would be their last without consequence. The 2002 law was written to protect future victims. Michael Jones pleaded guilty to felony aggravated domestic battery in Champaign County in July 2015 and submitted the required specimen under the terms of that statute.

 On September 10th, 2015, 61 days later, DuPage County’s cold case unit received a database notification. The specimen Jones had submitted under the terms of a domestic violence law had returned a match against the semen profile entered into CODIS from Kristy Wesselman’s crime scene in 1985. CODIS comparisons operate across 13 core genetic loci, a testing standard that produces a statistical probability of a coincidental profile match across all tested markers measured in the range of one in several trillion.

 There is no interpretive window at that margin. The profile was not approximate, not a partial alignment. Jones’s 2015 specimen and the 1985 crime scene profile were the same. A search warrant was issued for Jones’s Champaign address. Investigators arrived at his residence on Friday, September 18th, 2015. If you have followed this channel through any of our investigations, you understand that this moment, when a name first enters a file that has waited decades to receive it, is not an ending.

It is the turn. Subscribe to Crime Files Unlocked so you are here for every case we build to that moment. They questioned Jones. He denied any connection to Glen Ellyn. He was shown a photograph of Kristy Wesselman. He looked at the photograph. “As God is my witness,” he said, “I have never seen her before.

” He was arrested two days later on Sunday, September 20th, 2015. Michael R. Jones was 62 years old at the time of his arrest. His file in the Illinois legal system did not begin with Kristy Wesselman. Prior to July 21st, 1985, Jones had been convicted of the rape and kidnapping of a 27-year-old woman. He had served more than 6 years in a state prison for that offense and had been released on parole.

 The conditions of his parole were current on the afternoon he walked into that field behind the Jewel. The state of Illinois had formally classified him as a violent offender, supervised his release, and placed him under active monitoring. None of it prevented what happened on Butterfield Road. Investigators examining the background returned by CODIS also developed a working theory about Jones’ presence in Glen Ellyn that afternoon.

Champaign is 150 miles from DuPage County. Jones had no documented connection to Valley View, no known associates in the area, no traceable reason to be on that specific path on that specific Sunday. The theory reconstructed by investigators was blunt. Jones had passed through Glen Ellyn, encountered Christy Wesselman on that 150-yard trail, and made a decision.

There was no prior relationship. There was no planning. There was only proximity and a violent history no one in that neighborhood had any reason to know about. When investigators pulled Jones’ full record in September 2015, they found what the 1985 parole file had already contained. Two additional women who had been sexually assaulted by Jones, incidents separate from the Wesselman murder, would later appear in a DuPage County courtroom at his sentencing.

 Their presence confirmed what the database had already established. Christy Wesselman was not the first victim produced by Michael Jones’ documented pattern of violence. The 1985 crime scene profile, the 2015 Champaign County felony submission, it was a confirmed match across every tested marker. On January 18th, 2018, 32 years and nearly 6 months after Christy Wesselman’s body was found in that field, Michael Jones entered a DuPage County courtroom and pleaded guilty to murder and sexual assault.

 Five days later on January 23rd, 2018, Judge Brian Telander sentenced him to 80 years in a state prison. Jones was 64 years old at sentencing. He will be over 100 years old before he is eligible for parole. Sandra Wesselman, 78 years old, stood before the court and delivered an 11-minute victim impact statement. She glanced at Jones once during those 11 minutes.

 It’s a joyful day and a very sad day. We will always miss Christy. I can go home today and try to be a real person. Whatever that is. Judy Van Kirk, one of the women Jones had raped in a separate incident, addressed the court. I was Michael Jones’ first victim. Had he served at least the 10 years, we wouldn’t be here today for this.

 He took away our innocence, but he did not take our love away that we have inside. Um Michael Jones got what he deserved. I wish it was a little bit sooner. Christy’s brother, Bill Wesselman, spoke to reporters outside the courtroom after the 2015 arrest. “My initial reaction is one of shock and awe,” he said.

 “We’ve been waiting for news like this for 30 years, and it finally came.” States Attorney Robert Berlin, who had carried the Wesselman case through the prosecution, described what 30 years of investigation had cost. “For 30 years, the pain and grief and the fear felt by the Wesselman family and the entire community has never gone away.

 Dana Henry was in the gallery as Jones was sentenced. The man who had been stripped in a cell, forced to spend $50,000 defending himself against a suspicion he had never earned, who had described 30 years of his life as moving between two settings, angry and depressed, sat and watched Michael Jones receive 80 years. He was asked if it brought peace.

 “I just want what I lost back.” he said. And here is the part of this case that should not sit quietly. Michael Jones had already done this. Not something like this. This. He had already been convicted of rape and kidnapping. He had already been classified by the state of Illinois as a violent offender. The system had already seen exactly who he was and handed him back to the public.

 The conversation this case demands is not just about cold case DNA or wrongful suspicion. It is about what a system owes the public when it releases a violent offender and calls it managed risk. Michael Jones did not become dangerous in that field. He arrived there already dangerous. The state knew and a 15-year-old girl who had just bought candy for her mother paid for that calculation with everything she had left to live.

 80 years is the answer the courtroom gave in 2018. It is not an answer to the question of what Kristy Wesselman was owed in 1985. If this case stayed with you, subscribe. We’ll be here.