Exhumation yields few clues about 1948 murders

By Vinde Wells

vwells@oglecountynews.com

The exhumation of a Rockford man murdered in 1948 has yielded little new information about Ogle County’s oldest cold case.

However, the man’s nephew, Stephan Skridla, 62, Rockford, said May 29 that he is hopeful the findings may lead to solving the decades-old double homicide of his uncle Stanley Skridla, then 28, and his date, Mary Jane Reed, then 17, on a lover’s lane just outside of Oregon.

“I’m very hopeful,” Skidla said at an afternoon press conference in Oregon. “I think Ogle County investigators are going to work with us. Let’s put almost 70 years to rest. My uncle was shot in the groin and burned with acid. That’s a statement. Someone definitely wanted him dead and [wanted to say] don’t mess with us.”

“We’re certainly closer than we’ve ever been before,” said Michael Arians, the now retired owner of an Oregon restaurant, and former Oregon mayor, who has tried to help solve the murder for several years.

Arians obtained a court order from Winnebago County Judge Eugene G. Doherty last November to have Skridla’s remains exhumed from Calvary Cemetery, just west of Rockford, in his ongoing personal quest to solve the two murders.

During the press conference, held at The Roadhouse, Arians said Skridla’s coffin did not contain Reed’s skull as he suggested it might last November.

During an autopsy conducted right after the exhumation on May 28, Arians said forensic anthropologists determined that the coffin contained all of and only Skridla’s remains.

“The body was the same throughout,” he said.

Two 32-caliber slugs and the possible remnants of a third were also retrieved from the casket, Arians said.

Winnebago County Coroner Sue Fiduccia said only skeletal remains were left of Skridla’s body.

“We had only skeletal remains because he had been down so long. There was no tissue,” she said. “The forensic anthropologists determined that they were the remains of one male individual between the ages of 28 and 31.”

She said two slugs were found in the casket.

Fiduccia said that because of the Skridla family’s concern that his body was burned with acid, scrapings were taken from the skull. She said the scrapings will be analyzed to determine the presence of acid or an accelerant, such as gasoline. She did not know when those results would be available.

Stanley Skridla, a U.S. Navy veteran, was reburied after the autopsy. His nephew said he is glad they did took those steps.

“I was pleased they could find 99.9 percent of his remains,” Stephan Skridla said. “I’m pleased that we could bury him with military honors and with a priest. He didn’t get that before.”

The case began on June 24, 1948 when Reed failed to return home after a date.

She and Skridla, her companion on the night she disappeared, were subsequently found shot to death.

Skridla’s body was discovered the next morning on County Farm Road south of Oregon. He had been shot five times, according to police reports at the time.

Reed’s badly decomposed body was found four days later in a ditch along Devil’s Backbone Road west of Oregon. She had been shot once in the head.

The double murder has never been solved, although a new investigation of the case by the Ogle County Sheriff’s Department in 2005 pointed to possible culprits.

That investigation concluded that the murders were probably committed by two brothers in a robbery gone bad.

Witnesses at the time said Skridla had a large amount of cash that night.

Reed’s body was exhumed in August of 2005 after Ogle County Judge Stephen Pemberton granted a petition filed by Arians and Reed’s brother, Warren, Rock Falls.

The body was exhumed from its grave in Daysville Cemetery, southeast of Oregon, for a post mortem examination and forensic testing.

The body was interred later the same day, except for the skull, several vertebrae, and a femur, which were held for several months for further testing.

Pemberton later ordered those remains returned to Warren Reed, Mary Jane’s closest surviving relative, to be reburied.

Arians, citing previous examinations by a forensic anthropologist, claims the skull and at least one of the vertebrae are not Mary Jane’s.

He said May 29 that he has also uncovered new evidence in case, including the two guns he believes were used to kill Reed and Skridla.

He hopes the slugs recovered from Skridla’s coffin can be matched to the guns, which he said have been passed down to new owners over the generations from the killers.

While Arians declined to reveal who the current gun owners are but said he gave that information to Ogle County Sheriff Brian VanVickle and Ogle County State’s Attorney Eric Morrow when he met with them recently.

VanVickle said Friday that known forensics indicate the guns are not the weapons used in the killings.

“Nonetheless, we are going to look into it to exclude them,” he said.

VanVickle said he believes all the people involved in the murders are dead, but will continue the ongoing investigation.

“We’ll do our due diligence and send the information collected yesterday [May 28] off to the state crime lab and continue to investigate,” he said. “There’s enough doubt about [the original investigation] that it warrants us taking a look at it.”