later—apparently dragged about thirty yards off the trail.
Susan’s brother, John, described her as someone who was quiet in large groups or with people she didn’t know very well.
“If you knew her really well, she could be really funny and very engaging,” he said. “She was a very kindhearted person. I would say that one of the words that describe her best is peacemaker.”
John said that his sister enjoyed writing poetry and that she wanted to pursue a career in radio journalism. He had a lot of tapes of her preparing vocal spots for on-air journalistic reports.
About a month after Schumake’s body was discovered, Timothy Krajcir, who was deemed a sexually dangerous person and recently paroled, became a viable suspect in the homicide. Police investigators interviewed Krajcir but they had no solid evidence to connect him to the crime, and he denied having any involvement with Schumake.
Echols had just joined the force seven days before Schumake was murdered, and he did not become involved in the investigation. Now he had the opportunity to look into the case, which had remained unsolved for over twenty years. Before Woloson, the primary suspect in the case was John Paul Phillips, who was sentenced for the 1981 rape and murder of Joan Wetherall and was a suspect in the murders of at least two other women. While serving a forty-year sentence, Phillips died of a heart attack in 1993. He was posthumously eliminated as a suspect in the murder of Schumake in 2002 after his body was exhumed and a DNA sample taken from the marrow of his thighbone did not match preserved vaginal swabs taken from Schumake.
Echols began to look at the history of previous suspects and spent time attempting to procure DNA samples from them. Two previous suspects in the case voluntarily provided DNA samples, and the results eliminated them from suspicion. When initially contacted, Woloson refused to provide a DNA sample, but through a twist of events his DNA was obtained. With the assistance of the Michigan State Police (MSP) and the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Department (WCSD), DNA samples were obtained from cigarette butts found in a vehicle that Woloson had recently owned. Media sources provided conflicting reports regarding the vehicle in question. One report stated that the butts were recovered from a vehicle that Woloson recently sold. Another reported that Woloson loaned his car to a prostitute, but it was never returned—the car was involved in a crime and traced back to Woloson. The first cigarette butts tested were found to be smoked by a woman. Several months later, a second set of butts were tested and the DNA proved to be a definitive match to Woloson, who was arrested on September 23, 2004. That was the date of Frank Schumake’s birthday—Susan’s father—but he died seven years earlier and never had the gratification of seeing justice for his daughter’s murder. The evidence led to Woloson’s conviction in connection with Schumake’s murder. In his closing argument, Jackson County state’s attorney Michael Wepsiec said that “the DNA in this case doesn’t lie. The defendant is the person in this great whodunit. Daniel Woloson is the person who killed Susan Schumake.”
Woloson received a forty-year sentence, but credit for good behavior and time served may mean that he could be released in less than twenty years. He continues to claim that he is innocent and is currently appealing his conviction.
It was new technology that prompted Echols to look into other unsolved cases like that of Deborah Sheppard, who was also an SIU student. According to Carbondale police chief Jeff Grubbs, Echols didn’t pick Sheppard’s case because of any specific reason. Grubbs said that it was part of Echols’s job to investigate any open cases that remained unsolved, and the one involving Sheppard’s murder was just one of several.
It was DNA evidence from Sheppard’s purple shirt that Echols resubmitted for examination that linked the murder to Timothy Wayne Krajcir. According to an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Echols said that investigators who worked on the Sheppard crime scene twenty-five years earlier were not initially going to collect the shirt because it didn’t appear to be linked to the crime. But when they turned her body over, fluid spilled out from her mouth and got on the shirt, so they decided to take it as evidence. The stained shirt was stored and preserved well enough that Echols was able to submit the evidence to the Illinois State Police Forensic Science Laboratory. A forensic scientist was able to develop a DNA profile from the stain on the shirt, which was found to contain seminal fluid. The profile that the lab technician developed was compared to the DNA profiles in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).
CODIS is a federally funded computer system that stores DNA profiles created by federal, state, and local crime laboratories throughout the United States, and authorities have the ability to search the database of profiles to identify suspects in crimes. In its original form, CODIS consisted of two indexes, the Convicted Offender Index and the Forensic Index. The Convicted Offender Index contains profiles of individuals already convicted of crimes. All fifty states have passed DNA legislation authorizing the collection of DNA profiles from convicted offenders for submission to CODIS. The Forensic Index contains profiles developed from biological material found at crime scenes.
A DNA profile was able to be developed from seminal fluid on the piece of clothing, and on August 9, 2007, a computerized search of CODIS revealed a match to Krajcir, who was already incarcerated at the Big Muddy River Correctional Center.
On August 21, 2007, Lieutenant Echols and Sergeant Michael Osifcin drove to Ina, Illinois, to question Krajcir in regard to the offense. During the interview, Krajcir denied having anything to do with Sheppard’s murder. The next day, Echols and Osifcin pursued their questioning at a second interview. This time, knowing that the DNA evidence against him was irrefutable, Krajcir finally broke down and admitted that he had committed the crime.
Deborah Sheppard was from Olympia Fields. Deborah was the firstborn child in her family and served as a surrogate mother to her two younger siblings. She loved animals and had an interest in pursuing a career in veterinarian medicine, but when she moved to Carbondale to attend SIU, she majored in marketing.
On April 8, 1982, she was a twenty-three-year-old African American senior who looked forward to her upcoming graduation. Sheppard didn’t know who Krajcir was at the time, but he was also a student at SIU, who was recently paroled despite objections from the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office. The state’s attorney feared that if Krajcir was released, he had the potential to commit violent, sexual criminal offenses. His intuition proved correct.
Krajcir confessed that he broke into Sheppard’s apartment and then attacked her as she came out of the shower. He said that he threw her down on the living-room floor and raped her. He said that he wore a blue bandana to cover his face, but Sheppard managed to pull it down. After the rape, he strangled her to death. Krajcir told Echols that he had to kill her because she had seen his face, and he didn’t want her to be able to identify him.
In the late evening hours of April 8, Edward Cralle found the front door to Sheppard’s apartment left slightly ajar. Upon entering, he found her naked body lying on the floor, and the phone cord had been cut. After her body was discovered and an autopsy was performed by Dr. Steven Nernberger, of Anderson Hospital in Maryville, Illinois, the Carbondale Police Department issued a statement that there was no indication of foul play connected with her death. Deborah’s father, Bernie Sheppard, was not convinced. His daughter was happy, young, and healthy. He claimed that the original report filed by officers at the scene ruled the death as “suspicious” and a probable homicide. Bernie Sheppard also claimed that the initial report was changed under the orders of Edward Hogan, the Carbondale police chief. Sheppard said that when he asked for an explanation, he was told that it was decided that mistakes made on the initial report were subsequently corrected. Sheppard believed that it was a conspiratorial attempt to cover up the murder. He said that the police did it deliberately because there were a growing number of unsolved homicides in the area at the time, and they did not want to absorb another one.
Over the last decade, there have been many allegations made against police
