In the movies, we always know when something bad is about to happen. It starts in a place with an idyllic name and peaceful reputation, a place like Downers Grove, Illinois. Usually, the story is set in a place like Downers Grove to provide a contrast for the horrors that will come later. Vibrant, smiling, happy students populate the campus of the local high school, unprepared. Then, a skilled filmmaker injects a bit of musical score, something dark, intended to stir a sense of foreboding in the viewer and build tension. A killer watches, stalks his intended victim, and then the soundtrack goes silent… everything gets quiet… a jump scare is coming, and the viewer knows the killer is about to strike.
A villain in a black robe and mask leaps from the shadows and the terror becomes real.
On January 12th, 1976, the setting at Downers Grove South High School was very much like that, placid and bucolic, but there was no ominous soundtrack to signal the impending crime. Students who resided in places with names like Butternut Court and Crabtree Street, in Chicago satellite communities like Woodridge, Aurora and Lisle, couldn’t know that a murderer was among them.
He wasn’t wearing a robe and a mask.
He was also a recent graduate of Downers Grove… he was one of them, hiding in plain sight.
Pamela Maurer was 16 years old, a Downers Grove student. She spent part of that night playing cards with a friend as a winter storm that would drop 7 inches of snow bore down on the Chicago West Suburbs. At about 8:30 they left for a mutual friend’s house in Woodridge. Pam spent about an hour there, then decided to walk to a McDonalds, less than a mile away, to get a Coke. It was a Monday night, a school night, and when Pam didn’t make it home by 11 pm, her mother called the police.
If you’re a parent, you can relate to the fear Pam Maurer’s mother must have felt. On any other night, a girl would be in her bedroom studying in the dim light of her bedside reading lamp, or talking on the phone with a friend. If she had an early exam the next day, perhaps she would have already been under-the-covers, sound asleep. In northern latitudes like Chicago, the sun sets before 5pm in January. It had already been dark for hours and it was freezing outside, but Pam wasn’t home. A mother wonders… where is my child? Is she cold? Is she scared? Is she safe?
Around 7:30 on the morning of January 13th, her greatest fears were realized. Thomas Pattermann, the Lisle Township Highway Commissioner, spotted a purse lying along College Road. Thinking someone might have been hit by a passing car, Pattermann made a u-turn and returned to the scene. On the other side of the guardrail he found the fully-clothed body of Pam Maurer. She had bruising around her neck that suggested she had been strangled.
Tales of True Crime, episode 016:
The Serial Killer Who Accidentally Killed Himself
Not far from Pam Maurer’s body, police discovered a three-foot length of rubber hose they believed might have been the murder weapon. Investigators described it as half-inch thick tubing of a “special type with limited distribution” and believed it would be the key that helped them find Pam Maurer’s killer.
A wide-ranging investigation by Lisle Police, the Du Page County Sheriff’s Department and Downers Grove, Woodridge, and Napersville police departments followed. The hose did not immediately turn out to be the clue investigators had hoped. Pam had never arrived at the McDonalds, so police investigated two other locations where they thought Pam might have gone to get her soda–a nearby laundromat and food store–without results.
They believed the person responsible for Pam’s murder may have staged the scene, threw her purse on the shoulder of the road to make it look exactly like what Commissioner Pattermann had originally suspected, that Pam had been hit and killed by a car, but the evidence told a different story. Although initial media reports said Pam had not been sexually assaulted, a closer investigation revealed otherwise. The scene was processed, and in accordance with Illinois State Law pertaining to murders, evidence was collected, never to be disposed of until the case was solved. Dozens of people were questioned and some took polygraph tests. Lisle Police Chief M.J. Wurth said there were two juvenile males police wanted to question, but they were advised not to cooperate by their attorneys.
Leads were pursued and threads traced to their ends. Nothing led to Pam Maurer’s killer.
Years passed. 17 years later, in 1993, on the heels of a successful resolution to another Chicago-area cold case using DNA evidence, police took another look at Pam’s murder, without success. Her killer was not identified.
Nobody Will Believe You
March 6, 1979, three years after the murder of Pam Maurer, Annette Lazar reported a man sexually assaulted her at gunpoint in an Aurora home. Lazar had been walking to a friend’s house when a man pulled up and asked her what she was up to. He was a skinny man with a Cheshire cat grin and brilliant blue eyes and he lured her into his car with a promise to sell her some pot. He took her to a home and led her to the basement where he had crafted a cornball pickup lair. Lazar said The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” played on a stereo and the man showed her his pet falcon. Soon, he was making romantic advances, which she rebuffed. That’s when the man became violent.
He grabbed her by the throat and forced her into a bedroom. He put a 9 millimeter handgun to her temple and told her to disrobe. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Lazar said “I told him that I was going to call the police and he told me to go ahead. He said no one would believe me because he lived with a cop.”
Lazar reported her attacker ripped off her pants and she decided to cooperate, to save her own life. She asked the attacker to remove the clip from his weapon while he assaulted her and he complied. In a last ditch attempt to escape her attacker, Annette tried flattery. She told him she liked him, praised his looks, and told him he was really her type. She said if he would let her go, she would be his girlfriend, and to bolster the illusion, she wrote her phone number on a piece of paper. It worked, and her attacker allowed her to leave.
Annette Lazar went to the hospital and endured a rape kit test. She reported her assault to authorities and led them to the home where she was attacked. Her attacker’s name was Bruce Lindahl, and the home where she was raped was owned by Aurora Police Officer Dave Torres. According to a story published in the Chicago Tribune in January, 2020, Lindahl and Torres were close friends.
The police referred the case to the Kane County State’s Attorney on March 26th, 1979. When questioned, Lindahl produced the piece of paper with Annette Lazar’s phone number, in her handwriting, and told investigators she was his girlfriend. The authorities suspected a lover’s squabble, and the State’s Attorney decided not to prosecute.
Years later, Annette Lazar gave an interview to ABC 7 Eyewitness News.
[soundclip: Annette Lazar says]
I had bruises on my neck, and I even had a red mark where he put the gun to my temple, and they didn’t believe me. I just was in shock. I thought they would believe me, ya know. That’s why I went to the police, to prevent this from happening to anyone else.
It appeared Lindahl’s prediction had come true. Nobody believed her.
Did Officer Dave Torres’ ownership of the house where the assault occurred play a factor in the State’s Attorney’s decision not to prosecute? It’s hard to say. Records from the time seem to indicate the opposite. Officer Torres held mostly low-ranking positions in the Aurora Police Department and did not advance as quickly as many of his peers. His association with Bruce Lindahl, a friendship that started when they met at skydiving classes, was regarded with derision by his fellow officers. Years later, Officer Torres would say he believed his friendship with Bruce Lindahl hindered his law enforcement career. In hindsight, it seems Dave Torres was simply a poor judge of character when it came to Bruce Lindahl.
In October, 1979, seven months after Lindahl’s assault on Annette Lazar, Dave Torres decided to begin fresh in a new home and Bruce Lindahl bought his house. He would continue to use the home for his sick desires, and the decision not to prosecute Lindahl for his attack on Annette Lazar would cost people their lives.
Debra Colliander
In June, 1980, Karen Weeks-Kozman, a resident who lived just five doors down from the home Bruce Lindahl had purchased from Officer Torres the previous year, was in her driveway, in the process of gathering her kids into the family van, when a naked woman ran up to her asking for help.
The woman was Debra Colliander and she frantically described being sexually assaulted, threatened with a gun, and photographed, nude, by a man with brilliant blue eyes. Karen Weeks-Kozman immediately knew who she was talking about. It was her neighbor, Bruce. Debbie had escaped, completely nude, when Lindahl fell asleep.
Karen quickly ushered Debbie inside, offered her some clothes, and the police were summoned.
The story she told bore all the hallmarks of a calculated plot by a serial predator.
Debbie Colliander had been locking her bike at Northgate Shopping Center when Bruce Lindahl approached her and asked for assistance in getting his car started. He asked her to get in the car and step on the gas pedal while he tinkered under the hood, but as soon as she got in the car, he pulled a knife and held it to her throat. He started the car and took Colliander to his house.
Officer Dave Torres was on duty when the call went out from dispatch to his former address and he rushed straight to Lindahl’s house.
Toress said, “I made a b-line over there and was the first one through the door. I didn’t even knock.”
He found Bruce Lindahl naked, in bed, asleep. They found a gun, a camera on a tripod, and naked photos of Debbie Colliander.
Officer Torres told the Chicago Tribune, “I said, ‘Hey, Bruce, we have to talk to you.’ He slipped from one bedroom to another and put clothes on. I said you need to go downtown.”
They took Lindahl into custody on charges of deviant sexual contact, aggravated kidnapping, and rape. It was June 23rd, 1980.
With a trial upcoming, you would think Bruce Lindahl would have been on his best behavior, but it is perhaps a sign of his arrogance and sense of personal invincibility that he was not. He was out on bond and Karen Weeks-Kozman kept in touch with daily phone calls to the police, because, as she told the Aurora Beacon-News “He would walk his dog in the rain and just stand on [the] corner, looking at my house. […] Or he’d drive past the house and stop and watch my girls playing in the yard, sort of teasing or threatening me.”
Lindahl was apparently unafraid to run his mouth during the time he was out on bond, either. In late summer of 1980, a friend who lived out of state stayed with Lindahl for about two weeks. Lindahl told the friend about his forthcoming trial and offered him two thousand dollars, a handgun, and drugs if he would make Debbie Colliander disappear. The fr iend did not take Lindahl up on his offer, but it would be months before he informed police.
Before Bruce Lindahl could be brought to trial, Colliander disappeared after leaving her job at Copley Hospital on October 7, 1980. A security guard walked her to her car and watched her drive away and he was the last person to see her alive.
In the months immediately after, Lindahl was under heavy scrutiny from the authorities, but he made no effort to curtail his illegal activities. According to a timeline published in the Chicago Tribune, just two months after Debra Colliander disappeared, Lindahl reportedly attacked another woman outside an Aurora restaurant. It would be months before she identified Lindahl from a photograph.
In January, 1981, Lindahl was charged with assault on a police officer and weapons charges relating to a scuffle with police. He reportedly aimed a shotgun at a Sheriff’s deputy who attempted to serve him a warrant for illegally recording a phone call.
Months had passed and the state of Illinois sought multiple continuances to delay prosecution of Lindahl as they sought a break in the case of Debbie Colliander, but found none, and she remained missing. With no accuser to testify, the sexual assault charges against Lindahl had to be dismissed on March 30th, 1981. It was another year before Colliander’s body was found in a farmer’s field, buried in a shallow grave, April 28th, 1982. Her body was badly decomposed and a cause of death could not be determined, but the authorities said it was foul play and Bruce Lindahl was suspect number one.
Problem. Bruce Lindahl was already dead.
A Killer Accidentally Kills Himself
In the early morning hours of April 5th, 1981, at about 1:45am, a woman who was dating Bruce Lindahl came home to her apartment at 1041 West Ogden Avenue in Naperville, Illinois to find a horror show. Just inside the sliding glass doors of her ground floor apartment, an 18-year-old acquaintance, Charles Huber, lay on the floor, dead, with more than two dozen stab wounds. Her boyfriend, Bruce Lindahl, was also dead, practically lying on top of Huber. There were signs of a struggle. A lamp had been knocked over, and there were copious amounts of blood everywhere.
It had only been five days since charges against Lindahl were dropped for the sexual assault on Debbie Colliander.
Naperville Police Chief Robert Marshall, who was at the time a rookie police officer, took the call.
“When we get dispatched to calls like that, we’re ready for anything,” Marshall said. “The way it was dispatched was an individual had come home to her apartment and saw there were two bodies laying by her sliding glass doors. When I got there, it was clear when I looked at both bodies and checked for vitals on the bodies they were both deceased,” he said.
Initially, the authorities didn’t know what to think of the crime scene. It appeared someone, an intruder perhaps, had killed both men. They thought there might be an offender on the loose. They did not know that the offender was one of the men dead on the floor. It was only after the coroner performed an autopsy that the series of events became clear.
Witnesses reported seeing Lindahl and Huber together at a bowling alley the previous night. It is unclear whether they had just met, or had known each other previously. For reasons that are still fuzzy, Lindahl and Huber got into a dispute and Bruce Lindahl stabbed Charles Huber 28 times with a six-inch kitchen knife. Investigators determined, in the course of the struggle that ensued, Charles Huber fought for his life and Lindahl accidentally stabbed himself in the right leg, severing his femoral artery.
Depending on how serious the injury, a victim of a severed femoral artery can bleed to death in 3 to 4 minutes, and lose consciousness as quickly as 30 seconds to one minute after injury. Charles Huber was not able to save his own life, but his struggle with Bruce Lindahl cost the killer his life, and Lindahl had perhaps as little as one minute to contemplate the end of his existence. Lindahl’s death undoubtedly saved many more people their lives.
In researching this case, my first question was whether Lindahl had hired Charles Huber to do away with Debbie Colliander, and once charges for her sexual assault were dropped, Lindahl sought to kill Huber, the only remaining person who could point the finger in his direction. Just like he had tried to do previously with his friend from out of town, perhaps he had hired Charles Huber to kill Debbie Colliander, and he now had to do away with Huber. Investigators were unable to develop any evidence to that effect, however, and were never able to determine the exact relationship between Bruce Lindahl and Charles Huber. As far as we know, Charles Huber was simply a victim.
With the death of Bruce Lindahl, a killer’s reign of terror came to an end. I would note here that, for a time, some were reluctant to refer to Bruce Lindahl as a serial killer. At the time of his death in 1981, despite his series of depraved sexual assaults, Bruce Lindahl was only known to have killed one person, Charles Huber. In 1982, when a hunter discovered Debbie Colliander’s body, the authorities immediately suspected Lindahl of the murder but couldn’t prove it. Lindahl was already dead, anyway.
It would be another 37 years before the authorities would eventually settle the question, conclusively.
Forensic Genealogy
If this were an episode of a popular TV true crime docudrama, this would be the part where the silver-haired narrator with the incredible voice goes back to the beginning, to remind you of that storyline that seemed like it might be out of place… a dangling thread that draws just enough of your attention to make you think “Hmmm, this is gonna be relevant later in the story.”
Through the 80s and 90s, a coalition of allied investigators and law enforcement agencies continued a dogged investigation into the murder of Pam Maurer, and although progress slowed to a crawl for decades, they never gave up. As I told you back at the beginning, in 1993, with the advent of DNA technology, the police re-examined Pam’s case with a focus on DNA analysis. It would take decades more for the technology to advance to a stage at which it could provide answers for Pam Maurer’s family.
They finally got those answers in 2019, in a press conference by Du Page County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin. The audio is not fantastic, but it’s sufficient to tell the story, so please bear with me for three minutes and I’ll let you hear it from State’s Attorney Berlin himself.
[soundclip: Du Page County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin]
In 2001, biologic evidence collected from Pam’s body was analyzed at the Du Page County Sheriff’s crime laboratory and a DNA profile of her suspected killer was identified. That profile was entered into the Combined DNA Index System, also known as the CODIS system, but no hits were ever generated.
In 2019, additional and advanced DNA testing and analysis was conducted on the forensic evidence by Parabon Nanolabs at the request of the Lisle Police Department and the Du Page County State’s Attorney’s office. First, DNA phenotyping was used, which is the process of predicting physical appearance and ancestry from unidentified DNA evidence. This resulted in the creation of a snapshot prediction for traits such as the suspect’s eye color, hair color, skin color, face shape and a composite which provides an approximation of the appearance of the unknown subject.
Next, genetic genealogy analysis was conducted using a public genetic genealogy database and traditional genealogy research to build a family tree to identify potential new leads in the case. Detectives from the Lisle Police Department then used traditional investigative methods to confirm the genealogical information and they identified a person of interest–Bruce Lindahl–who was deceased.
In the fall of 2019, with the cooperation of the Du Page County Coroner, Richard Jorgenson, and his office, the Lisle Police Department, Sheriff James Mendrick and the Du Page County Sheriff’s Office, and members of the State’s Attorney’s investigations division, a court order was obtained to exhume the body of Bruce Lindahl.
On November 6th, 2019, Bruce Lindahl’s body was exhumed and specimens were collected from his remains in an attempt to obtain possible DNA for comparison to the DNA collected from Pam Maurer’s body in 1976.
Both Du Page County Sheriff’s crime laboratory and DNA Labs International were successful in extracting and profiling DNA from the remains of Bruce Lindahl, which confirmed that the DNA evidence recovered from Pam’s body was consistent with Bruce Lindahl’s DNA profile.
Bruce Lindahl killed Pam Maurer in 1976. The DNA evidence says so. For every offender named, there are always a few, usually friends and family members, who doubt their guilt. For those people, State’s Attorney Berlin revealed the odds that someone else could have been the source of the DNA found on Pam Maurer’s body.
[soundclip: State’s Attorney Robert Berlin describes the odds – :10]
The chance that a person at random would be included as a contributor is 1 in 1.8 quadrillion individuals.
1 point 8 quadrillion to one. For those doing the math at home, that’s 239,000 times the population of the planet.
Bruce Lindahl killed Pam Maurer in 1976, without a shadow of a doubt, and Pam’s case was the first murder solved with forensic genealogy in the state of Illinois.
In addition to the DNA evidence, the State’s Attorney’s Press Conference featured blown up photos of Bruce Lindahl, side-by-side with an artist’s prior renderings of Pam Maurer’s killer that had been based on a DNA Phenotype analysis, and the resemblance was remarkable.
Lisle, Illinois Detective Chris Loudon traveled to Texas, where Pam Maurer’s family moved shortly after her murder, to inform her loved ones. After 44 years, they did not expect to ever get an answer, but were relieved to have some closure.
In the absence of justice, closure is all a victim’s family can ask for.
Pam’s family got it, but there are other families out there, mothers and fathers and siblings of young women who were killed in the 70s and early 80s in the Chicago suburbs, who may get their closure, too.
Because the story does not end with Pam Maurer.
The authorities, and a wider consortium of online armchair sleuths, believe Bruce Lindahl may be responsible for many more crimes–as many as 12 murders and 9 rapes–and further DNA analysis is now underway in a number of other cases. Some of the names that have been mentioned as possible Lindahl victims include Patricia Sue Early, 17, who disappeared on August 1st, 1979 in Napersville. Her remains were found in a field in an advanced state of decomposition more than a year later, cause of death undetermined. Linda Susan Rhein, 19, who disappeared two weeks before Patricia Early. Her body was found along a road by a jogger in southeast Du Page County. She had been stabbed a number of times and police believe her killer may have chased her down and killed her after she escaped his car.
Perhaps most notably, investigators believe Bruce Lindahl was responsible for the disappearance of Debbie McCall who went missing on November 5th, 1979, from that serene place we talked about in the beginning, Downers Grove. She was last seen wearing a beige hooded zip-up jacket, a sweater, blue jeans, light brown suede shoes and a yellow gold necklace. In the murders of Patricia Early and Linda Rhein, it is the similarity in circumstances that seems to indicate Bruce Lindahl is the offender.
In the disappearance of Debbie McCall, it’s more than that.
After Lindahl’s death in 1981, his home, the former home of Aurora Police Officer Dave Torres, went up for sale. Virginia Garza and her husband purchased the home and they found hundreds of photos of women stashed in the walls, under the floorboards, and in the rafters. The Garza’s were unaware of the home’s link to a killer and the violent things that took place there, and unfortunately, unaware of their significance, they threw the pictures out. Police were able, however, to recover some photos from the home, and although I have been unable to find a reputable published description of the photos, rumors abound that some of the women photographed look like willing participants, and others look terrified. The camera and tripod that police found in Lindahl’s bedroom years earlier had been used to photograph many, many women, willing or not.
One of the women whose photograph was found in Lindahl’s home was Debbie McCall. Her body has never been found.
When authorities revealed Bruce Lindahl’s previously unknown past as a murderer of women, they added his name to a list of offenders that grows larger by the day–killers identified after their own deaths thanks to new methods and forensic science. In the last two episodes of Tales of True Crime alone, I told you about similar offenders Frank Wypych and Jeffrey Lynn Hand, both of whom were long dead by the time they were connected to previously unknown victims. If recent events are any indication, we can expect this t o happen even more often in the near future. The prior shortcomings of forensic science will be revealed. Families will get closure. Long dead killers will be exposed and their names and reputations left disgraced. And if we’re lucky, every once in awhile, a DNA Profile and genealogical investigation will serve the purpose of a musical score in a Hollywood movie, by catching our attention in a quiet moment and alerting us that something bad is about to happen… a killer who still lives, who aspires to kill again, will be identified, captured, and brought to justice, before they can hurt anyone else.
Anyone with information on the crimes of Bruce Lindahl is urged to call the Du Page County State’s Attorney’s office at 630-407-8107 or Lisle police at 630-271-4252.
If you enjoy Tales of True Crime, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And lock your doors. I’ll talk to you again in two weeks.
For transcripts, sources, credits, and some occasional cat pictures, follow me on Twitter at True Crime Troy.
[Music]
Undaunted by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4561-undaunted
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[Additional music] Kevin McLeod, Incompetech.com, extended license via FilmMusic.io
[feature photo] Stanislav courtesy Pexels.com
[Sources]
- Chicago Tribune, “Suburb Girl, 16, Strangled” January 14, 1976
- Chicago Tribune, “Hose is Prime Clue in Teen’s Death” January 15, 1976
- Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1981
- Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1982
- Chicago Tribune, “1976 Murder Case is Reopened” December 9, 1993
- Chicago Tribune, “Retired Aurora police officer explains his friendship with the man suspected in 12 murders, 9 rapes: ‘He was a nice guy with a short fuse’” January 2020
- Chicago Tribune, “Years of violence: A timeline of Bruce Lindahl in the west suburbs’” February 2020.
- Victim of suspected suburban killer Bruce Lindahl describes, decades later, her harrowing escape: ‘He said no one would believe me’
- Bruce Lindahl victim Annette Lazar describes surviving attack by suspected serial killer, rapist
- Pamela Maurer cold case: Officials ID killer of teen girl in 1976 Lisle slaying
- How DuPage police solved the 44-year-old murder of Pamela Maurer
- Appleton Post-Crescent, May 2, 1982
- Decatur Herald and Review, April 6, 1981
- Was killer in 1976 slaying of suburban teen a serial killer?
- Police Suspect Serial Killer Strangled Illinois Teen in 1976
