Illinois 1991 Cold Case Solved — 9 Witnesses Stayed Silent For 33 Years

Nine people knew. Not one of them said anything for 33 years. Nine people who lived in the same small city, who shopped at the same grocery stores, who attended the same 4th of July celebrations, who shook hands with the same politicians at the same county fairs, and every single one of them went home every single night for three decades carrying the same knowledge that a man was dead, that they knew who had done it, and that they had decided, for reasons that a jury would eventually be asked to consider, to say nothing at all.

That is not a story about a crime that went unsolved. That is a story about what silence costs and who ends up paying for it. And it would take 33 years, a single deathbed conversation, and an investigator who refused to believe a file had no more to offer, to finally bring it to an end. But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to the summer of 1991.

Because to understand what was lost, you first have to understand who Marcus Dellwood was. Galesburg, Illinois, in the summer of 1991, was a city in the middle of a slow exhale. The Knox County seat sat in the flat agricultural heart of the state, population just under 34,000, built around the old Maytag plant, and the Burlington Northern railyard that had kept the city’s working families employed for three generations.

 It was the kind of place where people knew their alderman by first name, and where the 4th of July parade drew most of the city out to Main Street in lawn chairs and folding tables. There were diners with the same menu they’d had since 1974, and barber shops where the conversation moved from the Cubs to the harvest and back again without anyone feeling the need to resolve either.

 The VHS tapes were still renting strong that summer. The Gulf War had just ended. The Berlin Wall had been down for less than 2 years. And there was still a residual sense in towns like Galesburg that the world was reorganizing itself into something more hopeful. Marcus Dellwood was 26 years old. He worked the early shift at the railyard.

Started at 5:00 in the morning. Three days a week and spent the other mornings doing maintenance work for a property management company on the south side of town. He was compact and quick moving. The kind of man who arrived at things early and left only after the work was done. His mother, Yvette, lived 12 minutes away on Fremont Street.

He had Sunday dinner with her every week without exception. And he helped her with her yard in the spring and fall. And he called her on the phone on Tuesday and Thursday evenings the way she’d asked him to when he first moved out. He had a daughter named Briana who was 4 years old. And who in a photograph her mother kept on the refrigerator is wearing a yellow dress and squinting into the sun in a way that makes her look exactly like Marcus. He had a plan.

He’d been saving to take a course in diesel mechanics at Sandburg College. He wanted to move from the railyard into the maintenance side. Work his way up. He talked about it with his supervisor who had encouraged him. He had the On the evening of Saturday, July 20th, 1991 Marcus Dellwood drove to a cookout on the east side of Galesburg.

It was the kind of gathering that happened most summer weekends in that neighborhood. 20 or 30 people, someone’s backyard, music from a stereo in the window, kids running between the legs of adults. He arrived at around 7:00 in the evening. By 9:30, he was dead. He was found in an alleyway two blocks from the house.

He had been shot once. He was 26 years old. He had Sunday dinner with his mother every week. The call came into the Galesburg Police Department at 9:44 p.m. The caller was a woman who gave her name and address and then hung up before the dispatcher finished writing them down. She was never definitively identified.

The first officers on scene arrived at 9:51 p.m. Marcus was found face down in the alley between Oak Street and a row of garages that backed onto a chain-link fence. His car keys were still in his right hand. His wallet was in his back pocket, untouched. This was not a robbery. Detective Ronald Spears reached the scene at 10:22 p.m.

He would later describe what he found there as one of the clearest crime scenes he had attended in 12 years on the force. Clear in the sense that there was an obvious story being told by the physical evidence, even if the story refused to name its main character. There were shell casings. One, 9 mm, approximately 3 m from the body.

There were partial boot impressions in the soft gravel along the north side of the alley. There was a single red plastic cup, overturned, with what appeared to be a beer spill across the gravel that hadn’t yet fully dried. And there was a scuff pattern along the base of the chain-link fence that suggested someone had moved quickly along it, running or close to it, heading east.

Detectives canvassed the surrounding blocks that night and into the early hours. Of the 31 people who had attended the cookout, 22 spoke to investigators. All 22 said the same essential thing, they hadn’t seen anything, they hadn’t heard anything, and they didn’t know of any conflict involving Marcus. Nine people who had attended the cookout did not speak to investigators.

Nine people who detectives subsequently attempted to contact in the following weeks either declined to be interviewed, gave single-sentence responses to written requests, or relocated without leaving forwarding addresses. Detective Ronald Spears was a deliberate, methodical man who had grown up in Galesburg and who took the death of a 26-year-old rail worker from the East Side of his own city as something personally offensive.

 He told his partner in those first weeks that this was the kind of case that could go cold very fast if they let the community outpace them. And the community, as he put it, was already moving. Within 72 hours, there were two names circulating in the neighborhood. Not to the police, between residents in kitchens and on porches, in the way that information travels in small cities when people decide to manage it themselves.

The name that came back most consistently was Terrence Growl. He was 29 years old. He had attended the cookout. He had, by several accounts, been in a dispute with Marcus earlier in the evening over something that was described variously as a debt, a disrespect, and a woman. And the different descriptions perhaps said more about who was telling the story than about what actually happened.

Grohl was brought in for an interview on July 24th. He was cooperative, articulate, and calm. He said he and Marcus had exchanged words earlier in the evening, but that it had been resolved. He said he had left the cookout before 9:00, gone home, and was watching television when Marcus was shot. He provided no alibi witness.

The shell casing was sent to the Illinois State Police Crime Lab. It was a 9 mm round, common enough to be functionally untraceable to a specific weapon without a corresponding firearm to match it against. No weapon was ever recovered. By November 1991, the Galesburg PD had conducted 47 interviews, followed 11 investigative leads, and submitted four items of physical evidence for laboratory analysis.

None of it produced a chargeable case. In December, with Detective Spears reassigned to two other active homicides, the Delwood case was transferred to the cold case shelf. Yvette Delwood kept her son’s Sunday dinner chair at the table. She told people who asked that it wasn’t morbid. It was a promise she was keeping to herself.

She lit a candle there every week, and she served a plate, and she sat down across from it and ate her dinner, and talked to the room the way you talk to someone who isn’t answering. In 1995, she attended a community meeting at the Galesburg Police Department to ask publicly whether the case was being actively reviewed.

The captain at the time told her there was nothing new to report. She wrote him a letter the following week with three specific questions. He did not reply. Breanna was 9 years old by the time Marcus had been gone for 5 years. She had started to understand what was missing in ways that a 4-year-old couldn’t. She kept the photograph of herself in the yellow dress.

She told her mother once, when she was about 12, that she didn’t understand how people could know something and not say it. Her mother didn’t have an answer. By 2001, 10 years after the murder, Yvette had attended two vigils, written to the state’s attorney’s office, spoken at a community forum on unsolved homicides, and maintained a handwritten list of every detective assigned to the case over the years.

Seven names by that point. Each one a small diminishment of hope when the new one arrived and the old one moved on. The railyard where Marcus had worked was unionized. In 2003, the local chapter held a small memorial on the anniversary of his death. One of his old supervisors read a short statement. About 30 people attended.

It was noted in the register mail in a five-paragraph article on page seven. By 2010, the chain-link fence behind which someone had fled on the night of July 20th, 1991, had been replaced twice. The house where the cookout had taken place had changed owners and been repainted. The alley itself had been repaved.

The physical world of that night had been quietly erased the way physical worlds are, by the ordinary processes of time. Yvette Dellwood still lit a candle every Sunday. Every case on this channel comes from weeks of combing through records, court documents, and the kind of detail that most people never know existed.

If what we do matters to you, take a moment to like and subscribe, and leave a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. It helps more than you might think. Now, back to Galesburg. Because something was about to change. In the spring of 2024, a man named Curtis Beal checked himself into Off Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria with a diagnosis he had known was coming for several months.

He was 61 years old. He had lived in Peoria since the mid-1990s. He worked, or had worked until recently, in warehouse logistics. He had a daughter and two grandchildren. He had also, since the summer of 1991, been carrying something that had grown heavier with every year he carried it. The specific weight of a thing you know, and have chosen, every single day, not to say.

In late April 2024, he asked his daughter to step out of the hospital room. Then, he asked the chaplain who had been visiting him to stay. And then, over the course of approximately 90 minutes, Curtis Beal told the chaplain what he had seen in an alleyway in Galesburg, Illinois, 33 years ago. The chaplain contacted the Knox County State’s Attorney’s Office on May 2nd, 2024.

Detective Sergeant Lisa Huang of the Illinois State Police was assigned the Dellwood case review the following week. She was 38 years old, had worked cold cases for 6 years, and had never opened a file that was older than this one. She drove to Peoria on May 9th and sat at the foot of Curtis Beal’s hospital bed and listened for 4 hours.

Curtis Beal told her he had been standing at the corner of the alley on the night of July 20th, 1991. He had seen the argument in the last moments before the shooting. He had seen the shooter. He named him. And he told Detective Huang that he had not been alone. That there had been eight other people within sight or earshot of what happened that night.

And that all of them had made an agreement, spoken or unspoken, never to say so. He said he was telling her now because he didn’t want to take it with him. Detective Huang drove back to Galesburg that night and pulled the original case file. She requested access to Knox County court records and the Illinois State Police database.

Then she began making phone calls. The name Curtis Beal gave Detective Huang was Terrance Groll. He was 62 years old in 2024. He had never left the Galesburg area. He had spent time in the Stateville Correctional Center in the late 1990s on an unrelated firearms charge and had been released in 2001. He lived in a duplex on Henderson Street.

He drove a newer model pickup truck. He had three adult children. By all external appearances, he was an ordinary man living an ordinary life. Detective Huang spent 3 weeks building a picture before she moved. She tracked down six of the other eight witnesses Curtis Beal had named. Two had died, one in 2007, one in 2018.

Four were located in Illinois, one in Missouri, one in Georgia. Of the six she reached, four agreed to speak with her. The fifth declined through a lawyer. The sixth called her back after two days of not responding and spoke for two hours. Each account matched the others in its essential facts. There had been an argument.

There had been a gun. There had been a single shot. There had been a decision made in the immediate aftermath, not formally, not in any organized way, but arrived at collectively, the way that decisions are sometimes made in communities where the cost of speaking is calculated against risks that outsiders rarely fully understand, to say nothing.

Three of the four witnesses who cooperated said they had thought about coming forward at different points over the years. One said she had driven to the Galesburg Police Station in 1994 and sat in the parking lot for 20 minutes before driving home. She had never been back. On June 14th, 2024, Detective Hwang executed an arrest warrant at Terrance Growl’s Henderson Street duplex at 6:45 in the morning.

He was in the kitchen when they knocked. He opened the door in a t-shirt and work boots. He looked at Detective Hwang for a long moment. Then he said quietly that he’d been wondering when this was going to happen. He offered no resistance. He was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police vehicle and driven to the Knox County Jail.

His neighbors saw it happen. By the afternoon, Galesburg knew. The reaction in the city was not simple. For some people, particularly those who had known Marcus Dellwood or known Yvette, or attended those vigils in the years after the murder, the arrest produced something close to physical relief. A woman who had grown up on the East Side and had known Marcus since childhood said she cried in her car for 40 minutes when she heard.

Not from joy, she said, from the release of something she hadn’t known she was still holding. But the arrest also surfaced something more complicated. Because Galesburg is not a large city and some of the people who felt relief at the arrest were also people who had known for years that witnesses existed, who had heard the name Terrance Grohl discussed in certain rooms over three decades, who had not said anything either.

The question of why nine people stayed silent for 33 years does not have a single answer. Court testimony from the four cooperating witnesses identified fear as a primary factor. Fear of retaliation. Fear of a justice system that had not always treated East Side Galesburg with uniform care.

 Fear of what comes after you name someone in a town small enough that the person you named knows exactly where you live. One witness testified that she had not trusted the police to protect her. Another said he had believed in 1991 that the case would be solved without him, that surely someone else would come forward, that surely the evidence would be enough.

 He said he had continued to believe that for longer than he was comfortable admitting. What none of them had fully reckoned with, perhaps, was that they were not nine individual people making nine individual calculations. They were nine people making the same calculation. And the sum of that calculation was 33 years of a Sunday dinner chair with no one sitting in it.

 Terrence Groll was tried in Knox County Circuit Court in February 2025. The trial lasted 11 days. The cooperating witnesses testified. Curtis Beal, who had died in September 2024, 4 months after giving his statement, was represented by his recorded deposition admitted into evidence under Illinois law. Terrence Groll was convicted of first-degree murder on February 21st, 2025.

 He was sentenced in April 2025 to 45 years in prison. He would be 107 years old before he completed the sentence. He said nothing when the sentence was read. He was led from the courtroom without looking at the gallery. Yvette Delwood was in the gallery. She was 74 years old. She had her son’s enrollment form from Sandburg College in her handbag.

She had carried it to every court appearance. She did not say anything when the verdict was read. She sat very still. Marcus Delwood was 26 years old. He got up before sunrise three mornings a week and worked on the rail lines that ran through the middle of a city that didn’t always notice the people who kept it moving.

He called his mother on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had a daughter in a yellow dress who squinted into the sun. He had an enrollment form on his kitchen counter and a plan for what came next. What came next was taken from him in an alleyway on a summer night by a man who was able to walk back through the dark into the rest of his life because nine other people made the same quiet decision to let him.

33 years is a very long time to keep a secret. It is long enough to watch a daughter grow up without her father. Long enough to watch a mother light the same candle every Sunday for three decades. Long enough for a dying man to finally decide that the weight of what he knew was heavier than whatever he had been afraid of.

What does it mean for a community when silence becomes its own form of harm? Not the silence of one person, but nine people over 33 years. And what does it tell us about the systems that exist to protect witnesses that so many of them felt those systems couldn’t protect them? Is a conviction 33 years late still justice? Or is it something else? Something we don’t quite have a word for yet.

I genuinely like to know what you think. Leave your thoughts below. Justice found Marcus Dellwood after 33 years. It found him because one man, at the end of his life, decided that truth was something he owed. Not to the system, not to the police, but to the young man with the enrollment form on his kitchen counter.

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