On a warm Sunday in July 1985, 15-year-old Christy Wesselman dropped her school bag on the kitchen chair, kissed her mom, and said she was running to the corner store. It was the sort of errand kids in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, made a dozen times a summer—soda for the walk home, a chocolate bar to split later. The store was just a few minutes away. Her mom expected to hear the screen door again almost as soon as it had closed.
When the minutes stretched into an hour, Christy’s mother did what parents did before cell phones: she paced, called friends, walked the route herself, scanning the sidewalks and lawns. Evening fell, the neighborhood exhaled into that blue, quiet hour when porch lights blink on and backyard grills hiss low. By 1:50 a.m., panic had overtaken hope. She called police.
Glen Ellyn, a leafy suburb about 25 miles west of Chicago, prided itself on feeling safe. Christy’s family—her mom, two older brothers, and a sister—had built their routine around that feeling. Christy thrived in it. She was a class vice president, a summer-school student, the kid who stayed too long in the yard because the conversation—about volleyball, a softball game, an inside joke—was still good.
In places like Glen Ellyn, safety is a story the town tells itself. And on July 21, 1985, the story broke.
The Footpath Through Tall Grass
Detectives began with what they always begin with: the last known movements. The store clerk—who knew Christy and had even babysat her when she was younger—remembered her visit around 4:00 p.m. She bought chocolate. She was happy, in no hurry. Several customers confirmed seeing her. No one could say where she went next.
All night, officers canvassed. Dawn brought a fresh shift and, with it, a new idea from one of the detectives who was also the parent of local kids: the shortcut.
Between Christy’s neighborhood and the small strip of stores was a vacant lot, a field of tall summer grass matted by a narrow, well-worn trail. Adults drove around the block. Teenagers and children—out for fries at the McDonald’s or a bottle of soda—cut through. If Christy had wanted to be quick, the detective reasoned, she’d have taken the path.
He followed the route, parting the waist-high grass. A few yards off the trail, he saw a shape. He pressed through the green. It was Christy.
The scene was turned over to the medical examiner. Technicians combed the field for clues—footprints, discarded items, anything that might tell the story the grass would not. There was nothing obvious to lead them. Later, the medical examiner’s office recorded that Christy had suffered multiple stab wounds and a sexual assault. Biological evidence was collected and preserved, but in 1985 DNA analysis was not yet a practical tool for local police. The sample would be carefully labeled and shelved, a vial of truth waiting for science to catch up.
Back at home, Christy’s mother told detectives about a detail only a mother would hold onto: a delicate pearl ring her daughter wore that day. It wasn’t on Christy’s finger. It wasn’t in the grass. Officers quietly spread the word to pawnbrokers and secondhand dealers. If a ring turned up, they wanted to know.
Silence, Then Theories
The field where Christy was found lay on the edge of ordinary life—close enough to hear a backyard barbecue, steps from a gas station. Detectives canvassed: Did anyone see a struggle? Hear a cry? Smell smoke, notice the grass twitch? No. Barbecue guests heard nothing unusual. A station attendant worked his shift and saw nothing out of place. The path had hosted other walkers around the time Christy would have passed through, but no one noticed her detour into the grass. The invisibility seemed impossible and yet, given the height of the weeds and the hot hush of a summer afternoon, it also seemed eerily plausible.
Investigators began to string together possibilities. Maybe she knew her attacker and trusted him long enough to step off the trail. Maybe he followed her from the store. Maybe he crossed her path by chance and saw an opportunity the tall grass made too easy.
They looked first at proximity: men who knew Christy or lived near the footpath; men with histories of violence in the wider county. They interviewed, cleared, interviewed again. Leads dissolved. Tips curdled into rumor. With no physical matches to test and no witness to anchor the timeline, the case stalled.
A New Tool, an Old Case
In 1988, DNA technology moved from the pages of forensic journals to the workbenches of police labs. Investigators returned to Christy’s file and pulled the preserved biological evidence. If they could collect DNA samples from the original pool of potential suspects, they could at least close the circle.
Dozens of men agreed to provide samples. One did not.
Dana Henry, 34, lived near the field. He had been on the radar from the beginning and had denied any involvement. When detectives asked for his DNA, he refused. Police sought a court order. A judge held him in contempt; he spent days in custody and, under pressure, agreed to a swab.
The result: no match. Henry was released.
The legal ordeal didn’t end at the lab door. Henry said the experience broke his life in ways that couldn’t be reversed. He mortgaged his home and, later, lost it. Long-time friends kept their distance. He sued; the suit went nowhere. Even with DNA excluding him, suspicion clung. “Cleared” on paper is not the same as “believed” in the neighborhood. Years later, Henry would tell a reporter that no one from law enforcement had ever apologized.
The case receded again. In 1989, a judge issued a restraining order against a man who had inundated Christy’s family with his own theories about the killer. Police looked at him, too. No link. In 2000, the DNA profile from Christy’s case was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s national database. It found no match. Detectives rotated off the detail. Binders settled into the long, patient dust that gathers on cold cases.
The Knock That Comes Decades Later
On an ordinary day in 2015, an extraordinary notification pinged across a screen at the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s office: CODIS had found a match.
The DNA recovered in 1985 aligned, perfectly, with a profile recently uploaded after a domestic-violence arrest in downstate Illinois. The name attached to the profile was Michael Jones, 62, of Champaign.
He was unknown to the original investigation. Not a suspect, not a witness, not even a rumor.
Detectives moved fast. They verified the match with a fresh sample obtained while Jones was in custody. They began to reconstruct a life that had managed to stay just outside the edges of their original search.
A Pattern in the Past
Public records and interviews painted a stark picture. In the mid-1970s, Michael Jones had assaulted a woman. A year later he attacked another—sexually assaulted her and left her in a hospital parking lot. He turned himself in. In court, he expressed remorse and spoke of mental health troubles; an independent evaluation concluded he knew what he was doing. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years.
He served six.
Released in 1983—two years before Christy’s death—Jones went back to civilian life. According to records, his victim was not notified of his early release, a detail that would haunt her in later interviews. Through the 1990s, as investigators would eventually learn, Jones married, divorced, and drew a restraining order after what was described in legal filings as an “unhealthy interest” in a young relative of his then-wife. He was arrested again in 1999 for assaulting a family member of a girlfriend.
He liked long solo motorcycle trips. He had relatives in Chicago. The map moved in ways that could have brought him through Glen Ellyn in 1985 without leaving a footprint—no paycheck from a local job, no utility account, no rented room to flag a detective’s attention.
Now, 30 years later, science had found the footprint. The match opened a door that had been locked for decades. Investigators notified Christy’s mother. She’d been through enough false dawns to keep her reaction measured—another knock, another question. When they came to her home and said the words face-to-face—We found him—she allowed herself to believe.
The Law That Helped
There was one more twist of timing and policy. Illinois enacted a law in 2002 requiring DNA samples from certain arrestees. One of the leading advocates for the measure was the DuPage County State’s Attorney—the same office responsible for overseeing Christy’s case—who frequently cited unsolved assaults and homicides as urgent reasons for expanding the state’s DNA database.
When Jones was arrested in 2015 on an unrelated domestic-violence charge, the law required that he provide a DNA sample. It went into CODIS. It lit up Christy’s file.
An Arrest, and Questions That Linger
Michael Jones was charged with Christy Wesselman’s murder in September 2015. He denied involvement. Prosecutors assembled the case they had—DNA and the story it told alongside the geography of Jones’s travel, the timeline of his past offenses, and the absence of any other match after decades of searching.
Trial would take time. Pretrial motions and continuances stretched the calendar. In 2018, the case was set to proceed before a jury when Jones accepted a plea. He would admit guilt in exchange for a sentence that, while long, was shorter than a natural life term. The judge sentenced him to 80 years with the possibility of parole far beyond any reasonable life expectancy.
Because of the plea, there would be no sworn testimony about Christy’s last minutes. Jones was not required to explain his presence in the field or what drew him to Glen Ellyn that day. The DNA had spoken. For the court, it was enough.
For Christy’s family, it was something like an answer—and the beginning of a new, sobering set of questions. Her mother thanked the investigators who refused to let the file go dark, and then she said what any parent might say when confronted with the arithmetic of release and consequence: if the man who attacked women in the 1970s had served the full 10-year minimum of his sentence, he would not have been on the street in 1985. Would Christy still be alive?
There are no mathematical replies to counterfactuals. There is only the weight of what we know now and the policies we adjust because of it.
The Man Who Carried Suspicion
When the sentence was read, one other person sat in the gallery, quiet and intent: Dana Henry.
Thirty years earlier, he’d refused to provide DNA and then agreed after days in custody. The lab had cleared him. Life had not. He said afterward that watching the man who killed Christy face justice didn’t erase what suspicion had done to his reputation, his finances, his sense of home. He had never been charged, but in small communities the gravity of a crime can pull anything nearby into its orbit. He still hadn’t received an apology. He didn’t expect one.
His presence at the hearing made the story larger than a straight line from crime to conviction. It reminded everyone how investigations touch not only the accused and the bereaved but also the many people who end up in the radius of the search.
What the Footpath Still Knows
Cases like Christy Wesselman’s carry two parallel narratives. One belongs to institutions: the methodical collection of evidence, the slow power of science, the dogged returns to an old file until it gives up what it knows. The other belongs to human beings: a mom waiting for a screen door to creak; brothers who become advocates because doing nothing is unbearable; a town that learns how to hold sorrow and vigilance at the same time.
They are both true. They’re also incomplete without each other.
Christy’s shortcut still exists, though development has smoothed the rough edges of the field. The grass isn’t as high; the path is more formal. If you walk it on a summer afternoon, you’ll hear the ordinary music that filled it in 1985—car doors, kids arguing amiably about fries, a lawn sprinkler ticking. You can stand at the place where detectives stepped off the trail and feel the old riddle pressing at the air: how did so much happen so close to so many and yet remain unseen?
The answer is practical and humbling. Violence often hides in plain sight, muffled by timing and distance, masked by the camouflage of everyday sound. That’s why the work of solving it relies on patience, on lab routines that seem boring until the day they are not, on laws that expand our ability to connect a forgotten vial to a fresh arrest.
It also relies on memory. For thirty years, Christy’s case stayed alive because people refused to let it be anything else: a mother keeping watch; detectives checking back when DNA got better; a prosecutor using one unsolved file to push for a statute that would someday unlock it.
When the match finally came, it did so with the quiet click of a database. No fanfare, no cinematic swell. Just a notification landing where a person would see it and say, after years of no, now.
The End of One Story, the Work of Another
After the plea, Christy’s mom spoke about gratitude—for the teams who worked the case, for the law that helped, for the simple fact of an answer. She also spoke about loss that doesn’t get smaller, only less lonely to carry. Her daughter had been gone for more than three decades. Justice, when it arrived, couldn’t restore what mattered most. It could only acknowledge it.
There is a sober kind of hope in that acknowledgment. It looks like lab techs labeling a sample carefully in 1985 because they believe someone in the future will need it. It looks like a CODIS analyst building a system robust enough to find a needle in a thirty-year haystack. It looks like a community remembering that “safe” is not a state we inherit; it’s a practice we maintain—lighting the path for kids who still cut through fields, keeping watch without paranoia, insisting that accountability is a long game worth playing.
And there is this: somewhere, perhaps in a drawer of keepsakes, there is still a space for a pearl ring that did not come home. We do not always get back what was taken. But sometimes we get to say clearly, and in court, who took it. Sometimes that’s the only answer the living can claim.
Christy’s walk began as a small kindness to her mom: a soda, a chocolate bar. Remember her that way if you can—mid-summer, mid-errand, the kind of day that makes futures. Then remember what it took to get here: the science, the persistence, the law, and the insistence that even after decades, a story like this deserves an ending with a name.
