Joan Weatherall was waiting tables at Stan Hoye's, the lounge in the Holiday Inn in Carbondale, Illinois, on the evening of November 10, 1981, when John Paul Phillips first noticed her. Later that night he saw her leave another lounge on Illinois Avenue. On November 11 her nude body was found floating face down in the water of an abandoned strip-mine pit west of Elkville.
Phillips was twenty-eight, a Carbondale native who had been paroled from prison that April and come home. He was already known to the police. He had been identified as a suspect in two killings of university students years earlier, and had not been charged.
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 had been tied behind her back and her face covered with a shirt, and she had been stabbed repeatedly in the back and chest and her throat cut. The Carbondale police chief said at the time that the two killings were very alike, and investigators afterward called them sister cases, or mirror images. Hundreds of interviews produced no arrest.
In May 1984 Phillips shared a cell at the Menard Correctional Center with Thomas Mocaby. According to Mocaby, he described killing Weatherall in detail, down to her appearance, and talked about Clark and McSharry as well. A Jackson County grand jury indicted him on April 8, 1986 on five counts over the Weatherall murder. He was tried for her death alone. His lawyers argued that Mocaby's testimony was the only thing connecting him to the crime and that Mocaby could not be believed. The jury convicted him of murder and aggravated kidnapping. He waived a jury for sentencing, and the judge found no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude death. The prosecution put the two student murders before the court at that stage, though he was never tried for either.
On March 29, 1989 the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence, holding that the evidence was sufficient and that the aggravated kidnapping stood on its own facts. Phillips never confessed publicly and denied killing anyone. He died of a heart attack on death row at Menard on November 2, 1993, at forty.
What happened afterward 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 applied a technique called miniSTR, 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, on the same day, closed the Clark case against him 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 fifteen years.
He was also suspected of the 1974 murder of fourteen-year-old Paulette McDonough, of the August 1981 murder of Susan Schumake, a twenty-one-year-old university senior killed on the campus a few hundred yards from where he was working, and of the 1982 murder of Deborah Sheppard. None was ever charged.
The victim's surname is spelled Weatherall in the Illinois Supreme Court's opinion and Wetherall in much of the press.