Retired detective to discuss 1950s murders with 2002 conviction
Back more than 50 years ago, Palatine resident James Jack was a young detective with the Chicago Police Department, barely a year into his new job, when a man came into the station whose face still haunts him today.
His name was Malcolm Peterson. He came in search of his 13-year-old son, Robert. The teen had gone to the movies with his friend, John Schuessler, and John's younger brother, Anton.
"(Peterson) was wearing a fedora, and he kept fidgeting with that hat," Jack says. "He was really worried."
It would be an agonizing two days before their brutally murdered bodies were found in Robinson Woods just east of O'Hare International Airport, and more than 40 years before the Peterson-Schuessler murder case was solved.
Jack was the first detective to talk to one of their fathers, and he remains one of the few investigators still living who worked the case. He continued to work it intermittently until he retired from the police department in 1968, but he never forgot the horror of seeing their bodies.
"I had to walk away," Jack said in an interview last week. "I was trying to hold back tears."
He will recount some of those details when he appears at 7 p.m. Tuesday, at a general meeting of the Palatine Women's Club, at the Presbyterian Church of Palatine, 800 E. Palatine Road. The meeting is open to the public, and free of charge.
Jack, now 78, will draw from his book that he wrote on the case, published in 2006, called "Three Boys Missing: The Tragedy That Exposed the Pedophilia Underworld."
It takes readers through that first meeting with the distraught father, through the investigation, and the trials, both in 1995 and 2002, that eventually convicted Kenneth Hanson -- who worked for Silas Jayne at Idle Hour Stables -- of the triple murder.
Hanson died last year in the Pontiac Correctional Facility in Pontiac.
Marilyn Jamal of Palatine, an officer with the Palatine Women's Club, was a child at the time of the murders, and she vividly remembers how her world changed after news of it came out.
"It changed the way people used to live in their houses," Jamal says. "I grew up in what is now Rosemont, and after the news of their deaths, we all started locking our doors."
Jack says the crime remained unsolved because other children Hanson abused refused to come forward. Their reasons ranged from embarrassment and guilt, to fear of what would happen to them from their own families.
"We couldn't identify a killer," Jack says. "But I knew, deep in my heart that someone knew something, and I knew they would eventually come forward."
The tragedy exposed an underground world of pedophilia that was protected by organized crime, and may have resulted in Hanson alone molesting up to 2,000 boys over four decades, he said.
It never came to the attention of law enforcement, Jack says, because Hanson was not a "known sex offender."
Last year, Jack completed a national tour that took him from coast to coast talking about the book and the case. He continues to talk about it, he says, not so much to promote himself, but to educate parents and keep children safe from sexual predators.
"In those days, we didn't have a name for pedophilia," Jack says.
He adds that even today, parents and children are not much better equipped to understand and prevent this problem than they were back in the 1950s.
"This very fact," Jack says, "should shock us into action."
If you go
What: Author and former detective James Jack talks about his book, "Three Boys Missing" with members of the Palatine Women's Club. The public is invited.
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Presbyterian Church of Palatine, 800 E. Palatine Road
Cost: Free
More on the club: www.palatine-womens-club.org