Police didn’t say exactly what led them to a vacant Joliet-area home last week seeking clues to the final resting place of Michael Mansfield, but a writer intimately familiar with the Rolling Meadows teen’s 1975 disappearance and presumed murder tells us the search was long overdue.
Bonnie Thompson, who has written three books about the man authorities believe killed Mansfield and at least two others, says she urged law enforcement to search the property as far back as 2006.
“It’s a serial killer’s paradise,” said Thompson, author of three books under the heading “Buried Truth Trilogy” about the crimes of Russell Smrekar, a convicted murderer who made a deathbed confession to Mansfield’s slaying in 2011.
Thompson was convinced of Smrekar’s guilt long before his confession, and believed the property northwest of Joliet may be the key to solving the mystery of Mansfield’s disappearance. The home, Thompson says, sits near marshland and a wooded area and matches the description of the place Smrekar told authorities he killed Mansfield, Thompson says. It belonged to relatives of Smrekar in the mid 1970s, and he even may have lived there for a time, she adds.
Although last week’s police search didn’t locate Mansfield’s remains, Thompson believes clues to his whereabouts — or more — may be on that land.
“Michael Mansfield could be anywhere in that area,” she said from her home in Idaho.
Mansfield , then a 19-year-old student at Lincoln College downstate, vanished New Year’s Eve 1975 after leaving his Rolling Meadows home for a friend’s place in Arlington Heights.
Authorities believe Mansfield was murdered because he was scheduled to testify against Smrekar, a college acquaintance, in a theft case.
Thompson’s interest in Smrekar and his crimes is a family affair. Her father, former Logan County State’s Attorney Roger W. Thompson, prosecuted Smrekar for killing a man and his pregnant wife in 1976. At the time, Bonnie was a clerk in the Logan County courthouse. And as a longtime resident of Lincoln, Thompson also was familiar with many of the people linked to Smrekar’s crimes.
She says she wrote about the case because she doesn’t believe the full truth of Smrekar’s crimes had been made public.
“I want people to know what’s taken place over the past 41 years,” Thompson told us. “I want them to know the facts. (These cases) just haven’t had the attention they deserve.”
The case of disgraced Fox Lake police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz will be aired out again for a national audience Monday when it’s the focus of the CNBC series “American Greed.”
In an episode entitled “Badge of Dishonor,” the program will recount how Gliniewicz engineered his suicide in September 2015 to make it appear he was killed in the line of duty, sparking a massive manhunt in northern Lake County. It’ll also show how investigators eventually concluded that Gliniewicz killed himself in hopes of avoiding disclosure that he had been stealing from a police explorers program.
Among the locals who took part in the filming were Lake County Sheriff’s Sgt. Chris Covelli and former county coroner Thomas Rudd, who was among the first to cast doubts on the murder scenario.
The show airs at 9 p.m. Monday on CNBC. For a preview, visit www.cnbc.com/american-greed.
Aurora Police Chief Kristen Ziman vented some frustrations this week on her blog, kristenziman.com, about someone who tried to besmirch her town.
Under the headline “Pants on Fire,” Ziman took on a man who posted a negative review of the city on the website of the Paramount Theater. In it, the man claimed he was mugged walking from a parking lot to a Jan. 28 show and that after the show several black men begged money from him. “Clean up your (excrement) Aurora,” he wrote.
After seeing the review, Ziman had officers look for a report of a robbery near the theater that day, but there was none. Surveillance video of the area didn’t show any, either. Detectives tracked the reviewer down via social media. He wasn’t home, but his wife, who attended the show with him, said she didn’t know anything about a mugging.
Ziman labeled the guy a “fabricator, a fabulist, a fibber, a prevaricator.”
“We take crime very serious and we prefer devoting our resources to the thugs out there committing crimes without having to waste time on storytellers who grandstand to amass attention,” she wrote.
It really should not take a warning from police to get your tipsy self to ride with a designated driver or take an Uber home from the Super Bowl party on Sunday.
But if it helps, here goes:
Illinois State Police; Naperville, Crystal Lake and Lake in the Hills police; Lake County Sheriff and other agencies will have extra patrols out this weekend, searching for what they call the “fatal 4” violations: driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, speeding, distracted driving, and not wearing your seat belt.
The extra effort is funded with federal transportation safety money.
Illinois State Police last year handed out 200 alcohol-related tickets, almost twice that of 2015.
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