Two boys weeding a vegetable garden in Skokie, near the Old Orchard Shopping Center and the Edens Expressway, found Susan Clarke at the end of August 1977. They told a gardener working a nearby plot, and he called the police. She was lying on her back, partly undressed, with her hands tied above her head, and someone had pulled plants over her to hide her.
She was sixteen and a student at St. Scholastica Academy in Chicago, the daughter of Richard and Connie Clarke of Rogers Park; her surname is often printed as Clark. She had left a babysitting job to walk home and never arrived. Her boyfriend was waiting for her, and she missed a second babysitting appointment after that. Her father went out searching with five members of the Illinois Search and Rescue Squad.
She had been raped and shot in the head, and her body had been cut open from the neck to the abdomen.
The date is not settled. The 1999 charge placed the abduction on August 25, 1977; other accounts have her disappearing from Lincolnwood on August 28 and found two days later, and her grave gives August 29 as the day she died. She had been born on February 3, 1961.
Ralph Raymond Andrews was questioned early and denied it. Twenty-two years passed before anyone charged him, and what did it in the end was not forensic science.
He was born in Evanston in 1945. From 1961 he was charged again and again, with offenses from transporting stolen goods to assaults on women, and he was either acquitted or given light sentences for most of them. He married in the late 1960s or early 1970s, had three children, and worked a string of menial jobs.
In April 1972 he was charged with aggravated battery for strangling a woman he had dated in Evanston. He was allowed to plead guilty to simple battery and served six months. That year he was on a work-release program, driving a bus.
In 1973 he picked up two teenage girls hitchhiking in Evanston and drove them toward a forest preserve, meaning to assault them and threatening them with a knife. They fought him. All three were hurt, the car went off the road into a ditch near the Edens Parkway, and the girls got out and ran. He told the police they had tried to rob him and that he had acted in self-defense. Both girls testified, and the jury acquitted him; two of the jurors later said the deciding factor was that the girls admitted they had been smoking marijuana that night. His wife divorced him soon afterward and was given sole custody of their children.
One of those two girls was Betty Lee Hanson, who was fifteen, and who is named in later reporting by her married name, Betty Hermes. The date was Christmas Day.
In April 1976 he was working as a mechanic at a gas station in Wyoming, Michigan, when an eighteen-year-old woman and a companion went to use the restrooms. He is alleged to have forced them into the bathroom with a screwdriver and raped them both. He was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct and acquitted that November. The jury had been swayed by a twenty-dollar bill found in one woman's shirt pocket and took it as payment offered for car repairs; he had tucked it there himself when he let them go.
In August 1978 he took a woman on a canoeing date in the Cook County Forest Preserve, knocked her out and tied her up. He was convicted of unlawful restraint and served three years. Paroled in February 1980, he moved to Michigan, and that August he knocked a twenty-year-old neighbor off her bicycle on a rural road, dragged her into his car and tried to press a rag soaked in chemicals over her face. She fought, another neighbor came to see what the noise was, and Andrews drove her home and told her father it had been an accident. When the father asked why his daughter smelled of fumes, Andrews punched him. The local prosecutor declined to bring a case, reasoning that she had been frightened but not really harmed.
On November 21, 1982 he went deer hunting in a swamp near Ravenna, Michigan, with Floyd Glen Foster, fifty-one, and Foster's son Jerry Lee, twenty-two. By the account accepted at the time, Andrews fell into a creek, Foster grabbed the barrel of his rifle to help him out, and it went off into Foster's chest. Foster died at a hospital in Muskegon. No charge followed; the death was put down to negligence, and none of the three had been wearing hunter orange. Jerry Foster always believed it was deliberate.
By the summer of 1991 Andrews was living in Chicago and working as a caretaker and gardener at Pottawattomie Gardens in Rogers Park. People who knew him said he carried a stun gun and talked about wanting blood when he was angry. Hours before Virginia Griffin died, he was fired from an Ace Hardware store after a dispute over the length of his lunch hour in which he threatened to kill someone and waved the stun gun around.
Around midnight on August 12, 1991, police in Rogers Park took a report of a woman screaming. There was confusion over whether it was coming from the street or from inside the gardens, and the officers did not get out of the car in time to find her.
In the morning Virginia Griffin was found inside Pottawattomie Gardens. She was forty-four, though some reports give forty-three, a homeless woman who spent time in the area. She had been stabbed thirty-two times, shocked with a stun gun and disemboweled, and she had been sexually assaulted with an aluminum pipe. Her blouse was wrapped around her neck. Like Susan Clarke fourteen years earlier, she was left in a vegetable garden.
Andrews and another man had been seen drinking with her and several others that night, and on August 15 both were charged. The case against the other man was dropped. In Andrews's apartment police found two knives, a stun gun, bloodstained clothing and hairs that were not his, and on August 24 prosecutors announced that blood from the items matched the scene.
The State sought death. A jury convicted him on every count on July 15, 1993. At the sentencing hearing Betty Hermes testified, and so did Jerry Foster, who said Andrews had pointed the rifle at his father twice before it went off. Andrews's former girlfriend Mary Ebeling said he had come home after Foster's death and seemed unconcerned. Skokie police Sergeant Brent Fowler testified that under hypnosis Andrews had implicated himself in the deaths of Amy Alden and Susan Clarke, evidence that could never have supported a conviction. On August 18, 1994 Judge Thomas Durkin sentenced him to life and called him an evil man who had poisoned the lives of everyone around him.
In prison he started talking. Roughly six months before he was charged he began telling another inmate about murders he had committed, and the inmate went to the authorities. The Cook County State's Attorney's office, the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Illinois State Police and the Skokie police arranged for the conversations to be recorded. Accounts differ on whether the recorder was placed in his cell or worn by a second inmate.
On the tape he described picking Susan Clarke up as she walked home, tying her up, raping her, shooting her in the head, stabbing her and dragging her out of his car. He gave details that only the killer would have known.
He was charged in 1999, at fifty-four, with her rape, kidnapping and murder. Richard Clarke, then sixty-four, had spent the two decades since writing poetry about his only daughter, and he said the renewed attention was like opening the wounds of his heart all over again.
Andrews pleaded not guilty. Judge Edward M. Fiala Jr. allowed prosecutors to put the Griffin murder and the 1973 attack before the jury, over the objection of his public defender, Shelton Green. Days later the Clarke family told prosecutors that Andrews had written to them, apologizing for what they were going through and denying that he had committed any of the crimes. Fiala rebuked him and ordered all such correspondence turned over to the court.
In March 2003, facing a possible death sentence, he unexpectedly pleaded guilty. The next month Judge Marjorie Laws gave him a second life term.
The tape also reopened everything else. A 1994 Chicago Tribune report had already named him a suspect in at least five murders, disappearances and suspicious deaths. Amy Alden was fifteen and had last been seen hitchhiking; highway workers mowing near a Skokie cemetery found her on September 22, 1972, two weeks after she was reported missing, with a leather belt around her neck. No cause of death was ever fixed. Andrews drove a bus on a route she used and was late for work the day she vanished, and an acquaintance of hers said he had once threatened to strangle her with her own belt if he caught her smoking marijuana again.
Robin Feuerriegel was a seventeen-year-old office worker who had moved to Evanston from Newark, Ohio. She was reported missing on August 26, 1972, after leaving her boyfriend's home in Skokie, and on November 18 two boys found her decomposed body behind the Naval Air Station Glenview, identified at first by a class ring with her initials and then by her dental records.
Laura Anne Williams was sixteen, a Chicago girl last seen leaving her grandparents' home to visit friends. A telephone repairman spotted her body on May 2, 1977 near Old Willow Road, close to where Feuerriegel had been found. She had been stabbed to death and had fought back. Police at the time were looking for two young white men whose car she had been seen getting into.
Arvella Louise Thomas was fourteen. She was found in a Skokie alley on April 12, 1978, stabbed once in the back and twice in the chest, with pantyhose around her neck; the day before, she had been trying to get car fare from a stranger. Police later took a bloodstained knife from Andrews's car. He said the blood came from a fish or a deer. It was human, and close to her blood type. He was not charged.
Investigators in Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin asked to examine him against twenty to forty unsolved murders in their states. None of it was ever charged. He died of a heart attack at Stateville Correctional Center on January 31, 2006, aged sixty-one.
His name came up once more in 2017, when lawyers for Michael R. Jones, charged with the 1985 murder of fifteen-year-old Kristy Wesselman in Glen Ellyn, petitioned to introduce evidence tying Andrews to that killing instead. The theory was ruled out, and Jones pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eighty years.