Murder in Starved Rock

Between the Vermilion and Illinois rivers, 100 miles southwest of Chicago, is the glacier-born wilderness of caves, forests and canyons called Starved Rock State Park. There, according to Indian legend, a band of Illinois was besieged by an enemy tribe. Driven to the highest cliffs, they fought bravely until the last starved Illinois perished. There too, last week, along the snow-carpeted trails that weave into the panorama of canyons and frozen waterfalls, wandered three vacationing women. And there they died at the hands of a killer or killers who raped two of them and savagely bludgeoned the faces of all three until they were unrecognizable.

The women were middle-aged friends who had driven to the rustic Starved Rock Lodge on the same day they disappeared. They were respected matrons in the upper-middle-class Chicago suburb of Riverside. Frances ("Frankie") Murphy, 47, wife of a vice president and general counsel of the Borg-Warner Corp., had four children, and, like her two friends, was a dedicated community leader and an active member of Riverside's Presbyterian Church. Mildred Lindquist, 50, wife of a vice president of Chicago's Harris Trust & Savings Bank, had two children. Lillian Getting, 50, wife of an Illinois Bell Telephone Co. official, had three children.

A Beautiful Afternoon. The three-day vacation trip was a special outing, particularly for Lillian Getting, who had spent long days and nights nursing her heart-patient husband through a tough recuperation period. With her husband well on the mend, she got into Frankie Murphy's Ford station wagon and set out with her friends for Starved Rock. They were prepared for a tranquil time: Mildred Lindquist brought her copy of A Field Guide to the Birds; Lillian Getting took a novel, The Lincoln Lords; they had their knitting, a pair of binoculars and a 35-mm. camera.

After they checked in at the lodge and had lunch, the three friends went out for a hike. Janitor Emil Boehn was carrying wood into the lodge as they left. "It's a beautiful afternoon for a hike," said one of the women. "Yes, ma'am," replied Boehn. The women walked to a slippery, narrow canyon trail, wound their way past ravines with 20-ft. drops, came to the dead end of a canyon whose walls rise 80 ft. on three sides, framing a frozen waterfall. They were about a mile from the lodge.

A Bloodied Log. Lillian Oetting had promised to telephone her husband that night. When she failed to call, George Oetting tried to reach her. Nobody at the lodge seemed to question the fact that the women's beds had not been occupied. "Sometimes," says a waitress, "women get together in another room and play bridge and talk all night." Next day Oetting again tried vainly to call his wife. Then he called the police.

It was another day before a search party found the bodies, lying side by side in a cave in the canyon. Twine had been tied on the wrists of two of the women. The binoculars were broken, the camera dented. A four-inch snowfall had obliterated any trace of tracks. Nearby was a bloodied, yardlong log, about four inches thick.

While investigators began checking up on known sex offenders in the Starved Rock area, others brought heavy tanks of liquid petroleum gas into the canyon and slowly began burning away the top layer of snow. A piece of tin foil--perhaps from the fresh roll of film in the camera--turned up; the melting snow ran off to reveal blood stains. A policeman with a broom lightly swept snow from the spot in an attempt to unearth footprints. He found none. Police squads began checking reports about an auto that had been seen at the head of the trail. The film in the camera revealed only smiling photos of Frankie Murphy and Mildred Lindquist, taken by Lillian Oetting (see cut).

At week's end police admitted that they were still far from solving the grisly crime. "It's got to be somebody from Chicago followed them down here, " said a Starved Rock employee. "We don't have no people like that around here." But the police were not sure about that either.

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