John Paul Phillips was born in 1953 and was a Carbondale native.
Theresa Clark, twenty-two, a graduate student at Southern Illinois University, was killed at home on January 27, 1975. Eighteen months later, on July 12, 1976, Kathleen McSharry, twenty-four, was killed in her apartment on Allyn Street; she had transferred to the university from Western Illinois a month before. Her hands were tied behind her back, her face was covered with a shirt, she had been stabbed repeatedly in the back and chest and her throat had been cut. The Carbondale police chief said at the time that the two killings were very alike, and investigators afterwards called them sister cases, or mirror images of one another. Hundreds of interviews produced no arrest.
Phillips was identified as a suspect during those investigations and was not charged. He was in prison on other matters, and was paroled in April 1981 and came back to Carbondale.
In August 1981 Susan Schumake, a twenty-one-year-old university senior, was murdered on the campus a few hundred yards from where he was working. He was a suspect and was never charged. On November 11, 1981 Joan Wetherall, a Carbondale waitress, was abducted from Illinois Avenue and her body was found the next morning.
He was caught in 1983 because he told his cellmate, Thomas Mocaby, that he had killed Clark, McSharry and Wetherall. He was tried for the Wetherall murder only, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1986. He was never tried for the other two, though the prosecution put them before the court at the sentencing stage. He never confessed publicly and denied killing anyone.
He died of a heart attack on death row at Menard Correctional Center on November 2, 1993, at forty.
What happened afterwards is why the case is known. Slides from McSharry's 1976 autopsy had been kept. An attempt to get a profile from them in 2001 failed, and his body was exhumed that year so that his own DNA could be recorded. In 2007 the Illinois State Police crime laboratory turned a technique called miniSTR on the case, which can work with samples about a hundred times smaller than conventional testing and with material too degraded to have been usable before. In September 2008 the laboratory matched skin taken from under Kathleen McSharry's fingernails at her autopsy to Phillips. It was the first use of the technique in Illinois.
Carbondale police announced the McSharry result and closed the Clark case against him on the same day, on the strength of the similarities between the two killings and what he had told his cellmate. Neither closure is a conviction, and he had been dead for fifteen years when they were announced.
He was also suspected of the 1974 murder of fourteen-year-old Paulette McDonough, of the murder of Susan Schumake, and of the 1982 murder of Deborah Sheppard. None was charged.
Two corrections to this entry as it previously stood. It said he was convicted of two of the killings after DNA linked the cases; he was convicted of one, and the DNA came fifteen years after he died. It also placed Joan Wetherall's death in the mid-1970s and the Clark and McSharry killings in 1981, which reverses them: Clark died in 1975, McSharry in 1976 and Wetherall in 1981.