Bruce Lindahl// Serial Killer?

In the 1970s women were going missing and being murdered in Dupage County Illinois. One of those victims was a 16-year-old schoolgirl, named Pamela Maurer. It would take over four decades for law enforcement to crack the case in 2019. When they did, they would be left to follow the trail of a suspected serial killer. 

Transcript

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Hello, everyone. And welcome to Crime Valley. I'm your host, Amber. And today I will be presenting a case from the US state of Illinois. This case is an old one that has been back in the media spotlight since January this year, and I'm really excited to be sharing it with you. If there was ever a true example of instant karma, then it occurred on the night of April 4th, 1981 on Ogden Avenue in Naperville, Illinois. The events that unfolded that evening were horrific, senseless and shocking. But the scene that played out in that ground floor apartment would bring an end to a quiet evil that had been winding its way through suburban Chicago for half a decade. The realisation of the significance of that night would not be made apparent for nearly four decades. Years of hindsight, would bring closure, shock, many questions and a strange sense of relief for what could have bean if a teenage boy hadn't fought for his life so many years ago. But first we need to go back five years prior to that night and talk about a cold winter's evening in 1976. On Monday, the 12th of January 1976 at around 11:45 p.m. Police received a call for help. A high School Junior, by the name of Pamela Maurer, had not returned home. Earlier that evening, 16 year old Pamela had been at home playing cards with a friend. After a while, the two teenagers decided to walk the one and 1/2 miles to another friend's home. At some point, after having arrived at the friend's house, Pamela decided that she wanted to go to the local McDonald's for a Coke. Pamela left on foot at around 9:45 p.m. She was alone. I'm not certain if Pamela planned to walk back to her friend's home after buying the soft drink or if she had intended to walk back to her family home. But regardless, when Pam had not returned, as expected, her mother, Betty, called the police. The night passed by with no word from Pamela. At around 7 25 AM on the 13th of January, Thomas Patter man, who was the township road commissioner, was driving to work along College Road in Lisle. Thomas spotted a purse on the shoulder of the road and worried that there may have been a hit and run. He got out of his vehicle to inspect the area. As he approached the guard rail, he saw the body of a young girl lying prone on the ground. That young girl turned out to be Pamela Maurer. The scene certainly looked like a hit and run. Pam's body was lying alongside a guard rail, and she was fully clothed. There was something else, though. A three foot long, one and 1/2 inch thick piece of rubber automotive hose lay on the ground next to the body. When an autopsy was performed, it showed that Pamela Maurer had been strangled by an unknown instrument. There was bruising evident around her neck, and police believed that the rubber hose was the likely murder weapon. They also felt that Pam had been murdered elsewhere. It was confirmed that she had been killed a 10:30 p.m. The night before. That meant that the teenager was killed within an hour of leaving her friend's house, not just murdered but sexually assaulted too. Although media reports at the time consistently reported that Pam had not been sexually assaulted, this was inaccurate No doubt the inaccuracy was perpetuated by the fact that Pamela was found fully clothed and also perhaps because of the sensitivities surrounding the age of the victim. Biological evidence was taken from Pam's body, which showed great initiative from law enforcement, considering that it was 1976. A description of the rubber hose was made public, and it was described as being a special type with limited distribution. Police were actively seeking its owner and strongly believed that the murder weapon would lead them to Pamela's killer. At the time, it was said that authorities were intensely questioning in Pam's friends and schoolmates. Pamela was described by an old school friend as very happy but shy and not the type of person who would willingly get into a car with a stranger. By January 17th police were circulating a composite drawing and description of a man they were seeking for questioning. On the night of Pamela Maurer's murder, a man in a vehicle had tried to pick up a woman who had rejected his offer of a ride. The man asked her to model for him, and the woman had noticed a white bundle in the front seat of his car. This occurred at around 11:45 p.m. The same time that Betty Mara was reporting her daughter missing. The man was described as being around five foot nine and 25 years old. The police also had two 17 year olds that they wanted to question. The teen's refused to answer questions, and they retained lawyers. The 27 year old male was also a person of interest, and there was talk that all three men would be subpoenaed and brought before a grand jury in February that year. Police had traced Pamela's whereabouts on the night of January the 11th thinking that she may have stopped somewhere closer than McDonald's to buy her soft drink. Police were quickly able to ascertain that she hadn't.  Due in part to the large number of young women murdered and missing in and around DuPage County during the seventies. Multiple DuPage County police departments decided to create fiat.  Fiat is an acronym for Felony Investigation Assistance Team, and its purpose was to help solve major crimes. The creation of fiat meant that a department could put a call out for assistance and detectives from agencies involved in the agreement would come together and form a cohesive investigative unit. A formal agreement was signed off on by all of the police chiefs, along with the DuPage County sheriff .  Fiat in its very infancy, was a way of bringing detectives from multiple Police Department's together to investigate crimes such as murder, sexual assault, robbery and burglary. Until that point, police departments in the county had relied on the good grace of other departments to assist them in major crime investigations. Fiat has since expanded and formed a tactical response team, traffic crash investigators and a canine unit . Years went by with no break in Pamela's case. Then in 1993 a ray of Hope. In mid 93 Pamela's investigation was re opened because police received new information about her death. This information reportedly came from multiple sources. Another source of optimism was that new technology had enabled law enforcement to solve the 1973 murder and sexual assault of Roberta Jean Anderson in DuPage County. It is a convoluted storey, but the basics are that in 1992 a man by the name of Major Morris was living in Missouri with his family. Morris was a former resident of Oswego County and had been on police radar for years. Law enforcement in DuPage County were looking at the cold case murder off a 15 year old girl named Julian Hanson, who in 1972 had been stabbed and sexually assaulted. Investigators from Illinois had gone to see Major Morris in Missouri to request blood and hair samples to match against DNA that they had taken from Julie's murder scene. Instead, the detectives got a confession not for Julie's death but for the murder and sexual assault of Roberta Jean Anderson. Major Morris pled guilty and received a 100 to 200 years sentence, and a few years later he was convicted of another stabbing and sexual assault murder, that of Margaret Stern in 1978. To this day, Julian Hanson's murder remains unsolved. In 2001 DNA was extracted from biological evidence taken from Pamela Maurer's body. This profile was entered into Codis. There were no matches. On the 13th of January 2020 exactly 44 years after Pamela's body had been found behind that Guard rail on College road, DuPage officials held a press conference and announced that they had found Pamela's killer. Using genetic genealogy, the police were able to link the murder of Pamela to Bruce Lindahl. DNA had been taken from Pam's body, and from that sample using DNA  phenotyping the investigators were able to build a physical profile of what her murderer may have looked like. This included eye colour, facial features, skin colour and hair colour. The investigators were then able to search the genealogy databases and start building a family tree. By late 2019 law enforcement felt that they had their man. The only problem was that the man in question had died nearly 40 years prior. But on November the 6th 2019 Bruce Lindell's body was exhumed and a DNA sample was obtained from his remains. Investigators had a match. In fact, the odds of the biological DNA profile taken from Pamela Mara's body belonging to somebody other than Bruce Lindahl was one in 1.8 quadrillion. And if this wasn't proof enough, the sketch that have been generated as a result of the  phenotyping was an incredible likeness to a high school yearbook picture of Bruce Lindahl. It was the first case in Illinois, where genetic genealogy had been used in a criminal investigation. The big questions that people now wanted answered were, who was Bruce Lindahl? How many other women had he harmed, and how had he managed to fly under the radar for so long? Not a lot is known about Bruce Lindahl, at least not publicly. It has been said that the police in the area viewed Lindahl as a loser. He apparently had many run ins with law enforcement but maintained no felony convictions. Bruce Lindahl had moved around quite a bit in his twenties. He stuck to the same area but moved in and out of suburbs. Such as Downers Grove, Lisle,  Aurora and Woodridge These were all areas where women were being abducted and murdered. Lindahl had taught small engine repair for a time at Mid Valley Vocational Centre in Kaneville, but it seemed that his employers took exception to newspaper reports of Lindahl's criminal activity. Shortly before his death, he took a leave of absence and resigned  a month later. Bruce was described by some as a smooth talker who could be very persuasive. One man who probably new Bruce Lindahl better than most was a police officer by the name of Dave Torres. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Dave Torres gave an account of his friendship with Lindahl. David and Bruce had been what you would describe as good friends, at one point. Dave was five or six years older than Bruce, and they had met through a local skydiving club. The two would regularly go out for meals, play racquetball, attend late night parties and go on double dates. Dave Torres said that Lindahl "was a nice guy with a short fuse, and if you watched him go off, you knew, Boom, he's going." Torres went on to say that he had told Lindahl "Hey, you can mess with anyone you want, but the last person you'll mess with is Me, you leave me alone."  It is not surprising, then to learn that Dave Torrez noticed a negative impact from his decision to be friends with Bruce Lindahl. Police colleagues were wary and allegedly they didn't keep their discust hidden. Dave felt that because of his association with Bruce, he was unable to advance in his career. It is not known what major crimes Bruce Lindahl committed between the night he sexually assaulted and murdered Pam Maurer in January 1976 and March 1979 when his name would once again be linked to an attack on a woman. But it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that in those three plus years there would have been more victims. In an Undated incident, which was recorded by police, Bruce Lindahl was pulled over by a policeman in a traffic stop. When the police officer looked inside Lindahl's vehicle, he saw an unconscious woman bleeding from a deep gash to the head. When the officer questioned him, Lindahl stated that he was taking the injured woman to a hospital. The problem with that was that Lindahl was actually driving away from the hospital.  No doubt realising how suspicious the situation. Was, the policeman ordered an ambulance for the injured lady. Once at the hospital, it was found that she had been sexually assaulted. When questioned by police, the victim had no recollection of events bar the fact that Lindahl had given her a drink of something she remember taking a sip and nothing after that. No charges were ever laid. Years later, police believed that the woman in that car that night had had an extremely lucky escape. The general consensus was that the woman was most certainly heading to her death that night, and at the time of the traffic stop, she was being driven to a remote area to be murdered and disposed off. Annette  Lazar can't listen to the Moody blues without being pulled back to the spring of 1979.  One  day in particular, would forever haunt her, and that day was March the 6th 1979.  Twenty year old Annette Lazar was walking to a friend's house. At some point, a car with a male driver stopped, and the man spoke to Annette. He didn't seem threatening, and, in fact, he appeared very normal. When the man offered to sell Annette some marijuana Annette felt comfortable enough to follow him home. Once they had arrived at the man's house, he took her downstairs to the basement, where he showed her his pet falcon. When people experience a traumatic event even years later, a visual, a smell, a taste, a sound, they can all transport you back to that traumatic time. For Annette Lazar, it's a sound.  Nights in white satin by the moody blues was playing when the man's demeanour started change. He started making sexual advances towards Annette and was rebuffed. But things took a turn for the worse, and the man grabbed Annette around the throat and produced a nine millimetre gun, which he held to her temple. Annette was forced into a bedroom, where the man proceeded to tear off her clothes, and with a gun pressed to her head she asked asked him to remove the clip, and he did. After the sexual assault was over Annette's Focus became leaving that house alive. She started to compliment the man, telling him how handsome he was, and that he was exactly her type. Annette even offered to be his girlfriend and wrote her name and number on a piece of paper as a way to prove her sincerity, anything to get away from her attacker. The man fell for Annette's false flattery and allowed her to leave.  Annette went straight to the hospital to have a rape kit performed and then went to file a report with the police. When police confronted Annette's attacker they found that it was 27 year old Bruce Lindahl. He denied attacking in Annette and told police that he and the Annette were in some type of intimate relationship. He played off  her story as a lover's tiff. Lyndall even produced proof that he and Annette actually knew one another. It was the hand written note that Annette had written her name and number on, the piece of paper that had helped to buy her freedom from a predator. Lindahl was never charged. Aurora police recently released a statement that said that their records showed an Officer had taken a report of rape from Annette Lazar on March the 6th 1979. They said that the case was investigated and then given to the Kane County State's attorney on March 26 1979. Records indicated that the prosecutor reviewed the report and investigation and decided that under the circumstances he would not issue any complaints at this time. The case was an cleared due to a lack of prosecution.  Annette Lazar would keep the secret of her attack from family and friends for many years to come. Sadly, she felt that there was shame attached to her naivety in trust in a stranger all of those years ago, This was exacerbated by the fact that she felt like law enforcement had not believed her Story. On the 23rd of June 1979 less than four months after the attack on Annette Lazar, Bruce Lindahl struck again. It was a Saturday in the summertime and Northgate shopping Centre in Aurora was no doubt a busy place. 25 year old Debra Colliander had just arrived at the shopping centre and was performing the task of locking up her push bike when she was approached by Bruce Lindahl.  He explained that he was having car trouble and asked her for assistance. Debra must have felt uncomfortable at the request because at first she declined. But Lindahl could be quite persuasive, and that is how Debra ended up sitting in the front seat of his car. He was going to play around with whatever needed fixing under the hood, and Debra's job was to push the accelerator whenever he needed her to. However, one Debra was situated in the car, Bruce produced a knife and forced her to come back to his house with him. Debra was then taken inside Bruce Lindell's home, where she was sexually assaulted. The horror did not stop there. Bruce produced a camera and took pictures of a naked Debra. At some point, Lindahl fell asleep. Debra, who must have been fearing for her life, managed to escape the house and run naked, down the street. Five doors down from Lindahl's home, a neighbour and her daughters were outside, getting ready to get in their car. Debra ran to them for help, and they took her inside their home. The police were called, and while they waited, the lady gave some clothes to Debra and wrote down everything that Debra had told her about the attack. One of the things that had stood out to Debra, where Lindahl's eyes. They were a noticeable feature and a brilliant blue. She mentioned this to the lady and her daughters, and straight away they knew that it was Bruce Lindahl who had attacked Debra. When police officer Dave Torres heard on the police scanner that a girl had been attacked at his old residence, he drove straight to his former home. Torres said that he was the first one there, and that he entered the home without knocking and told Bruce said he needed to head to the police station. At the time, Lindahl was naked, apparently moving from one bedroom to the next, putting clothes on. When police looked around Lindahl's home, they found a handgun and a tripod with the camera still attached. Police also recovered the nude photos of Debra. Lindahl was arrested but was soon released on bail. I wanted to mention that the house that Bruce Lindell was living in at the time was sold to him by his friend Dave Torres in about 1979. The next chronological piece of information that I found on Lindahl was in the Chicago Tribune dated the 10th of September 1979. There was an ad in the personal section place by an attorney by the name of John A. Myers Jr. It said Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Bruce Lindahl, formally of Downers Grove and Lisle, please notify John A. Myer's Jr attorney, followed by a contact phone number. It is unknown why the lawyer was trying to track Lindahl down. On October the 7th 1980  Debra Colliander disappeared. It was two weeks before she was meant to be testifying against Lindahl at trial.  Debra was last seen by a security guard who escorted her to a car after her shift at Copley Hospital in Aurora. The state sought continuances for the trial, but they couldn't delay the proceedings indefinitely.  Due, in part to the Speedy Trial Act, which at the time stated That defendants should be tried within 70 days of being indicted. The case was ultimately dismissed on March 30th 1981. On December 22nd 1980 a 30 year old woman went to the police telling them that she'd been attacked by a man outside a restaurant,  after she had refused his advances.  The woman was able to identify Lindahl as her attacker, from a photograph. Then, on January 28th 1981. Lindahl was charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, resisting arrest and not having a firearm owner's identification card. It was alleged that Kane County sheriff's deputies were attempting to serve Bruce Lindahl with an arrest warrant for illegally recording a telephone conversation, when he pointed a shotgun at them.  On the fifth of April 1981 just before two AM, police were called out to an apartment on Ogden Avenue in Naperville. The girl that lived in the apartment had arrived home to a horrific scene. Two men lay dead in her living room, directly in front of a glass sliding door. The men were positioned virtually one on top of the other. There were obvious signs of a struggle, and there was blood everywhere. A six inch kitchen knife lay next to the bodies, and at first the police didn't know what to make of the scene. It appeared that two men had been viciously murdered by an unknown assailant. The first question law enforcement needed to answer was, who were these two men and what were they doing in this poor woman's apartment? Well, the first man turned out to be 18 year old Charles Huber, a senior at Waubonsie High and a resident of Naperville, and the second man? Well, that turned out to be 29 year old Bruce Lindahl from Aurora. Bruce Lindahl was the boyfriend of the woman who had discovered the dead men in her apartment. Autopsies were performed, and the results were shocking. Charles Huber had been brutally stabbed 28 times, Bruce Lindahl's body had a single stab wound to his leg. Police were now able to understand the perplexing crime scene. Bruce Lindahl, in some kind of fit of rage, had stabbed Charles Huber. Charles had fought back, and in doing so caused Lindahl to inadvertently stab himself in the thigh, where he severed his own femoral artery. Nobody was ever able to come up with a motive for the murder of Charles Huber. What is known is that Charles and Bruce was seen at the Gala Lanes Bowling Alley in Naperville earlier that evening. Why the two men went back to Bruce Lindahl's girlfriend's apartment is also unclear. Newspaper reports at the time suggested that there was no link between Lindahl and the disappearance of Debra  Colliander. That idea would be put into question when a friend of Lindahl's  came forward with a tip. The man was from out of state and had stayed with Lindahl,  sometime between Lindahl's attack on Debra Colliander  in June 79 her disappearance in October 1980.  The friend told police that Lindahl had asked him to make Debra Colliander disappear, and in exchange he would be paid in cash, drugs and alcohol. Bruce Lindahl explained that with Debra out of the picture, there would no longer be a case against him. Lindahl's friend declined the offer. Debra Colliander's body was found by a farmer on the 28th of April 1982 in Oswego Township. Oswego  is about a 12 minute drive from Aurora and the place that Debra was last seen. Debra had been buried in a shallow grave, and an autopsy was unable to find the cause of death. Her death was ruled a homicide. After his death, the new owners of Bruce Lindahl's home were unaware of the criminal goings on of the former resident. The couple said that they found nude pictures of women underneath floorboards and within wall cavities. Not realising the significance of the pictures, the new owners threw them out. Presumably in the investigations surrounding Charles Huber's murder. Law enforcement had also recovered photos, many of them nude of multiple women in the home of Bruce Lindahl. Some of the pictures found were of a high school girl who had disappeared without a trace in 1979.  Debra McCall was a 16 year old girl who was a student at Downers Grove High School, the same school the Pamela Maurer had attended. On the fifth of November 1979 Debra was seen leaving Downers Grove High School, and after that she was never seen or heard from again. Debra's body has never been found. Earlier in the episode, I mentioned a girl named Julian Hanson, who was brutally murdered and sexually assaulted in 1972. Bruce Lindahl has been ruled out as a suspect in that crime. It is highly probable that Bruce Lindahl victimised many more girls and women then is currently known by law enforcement. Some police investigators believe that Bruce Lindahl may be responsible for up to 12 murders and nine sexual assaults. Anyone with information about Bruce Lindahl or any possible victims, is asked to contact the DuPage County state's Attorney's Office tip line at 630 407 8107 or the Lisle Police department at 6302714252 I hope that you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, I would be so grateful if you could leave a review on whatever streaming platform you are listening on. Thank you for coming to Crime Valley. Have a wonderful day and I will be back this time next week with a brand new episode.