SYCAMORE – Jack McCullough will be appointed a lawyer in his quest to prove his innocence, but will remain in incarcerated while he does, a judge ruled Tuesday.

McCullough, 76, will next go before DeKalb County Judge William Brady on April 15, at which point a timeline will be set for the conclusion of McCullough’s petition for post-conviction relief. Brady cannot make any rulings, however, until McCullough, who is serving a life sentence at the Pontiac Correctional Center, has had a chance to talk to a lawyer.

Members of both the McCullough and Ridulph families watched as McCullough made his first courtroom appearance since DeKalb County State's Attorney Richard Schmack announced he believes McCullough is innocent of the 1957 murder of Maria Ridulph.

McCullough will be appointed an attorney by the end of the week to help him through the rest of his post-conviction proceedings, Brady said. McCullough has been steadfast in maintaining his innocence since his 2011 arrest, a claim he reiterated at Tuesday’s hearing.

Schmack last week responded to McCullough’s petition for post-conviction relief by outlining his belief McCullough was wrongfully convicted in 2012.

Maria was 7 years old when she was abducted while playing near the intersection of Archie Place and Center Cross Street in Sycamore. McCullough fell under intense suspicion only in 2008 after his half sister Jan Tessier came forward to tell investigators that her mother had implicated McCullough in the crime in a deathbed confession.

After months of poring over evidence related to Maria’s disappearance, including information barred from being introduced during trial, Schmack said Friday that newly obtained AT&T phone records placed McCullough in Rockford at the time Maria was reported to have gone missing.

Schmack also alleged his predecessor, Clay Campbell, bypassed his ethical obligations and knowingly allowed false testimony that placed Maria’s abduction earlier in the day. Prosecutorial misconduct on behalf of Campbell and his team is something McCullough’s stepdaughter, Janey O’Connor, said she has suspected all along.

“They needed memories and emotions of children 55-plus years later, talking about when they had dinner to change that timeline,” O’Connor said. “But to change that timeline of the abduction, you have to discount 20-plus people: neighbors, family.”

Police found Maria’s body April 26, 1958, in Jo Daviess County, nearly five months after she went missing.

Worried the man sentenced to life in prison for killing his 7-year-old sister could walk free, Charles Ridulph filed a request Monday for a special prosecutor to handle the remainder of McCullough’s post-conviction relief petition proceedings. However, Brady ruled it was too soon for Ridulph to file anything.

“There is a time and a place for everything,” Brady said in court. “This would be the place, but the time is not now.”

But appointing a special prosecutor would undermine the professionalism of the entire state’s attorney’s office, Schmack said.

“It’s appropriate to have a special prosecutor when the state’s attorney or the attorney general is personally interested in the outcome of a case in a financial way, or because he or she is the defendant or victim, or some member of the family or the state’s attorneys office is a victim, defendant or witness,” Schmack said. “Those are the appropriate times when a special state’s attorney is appointed, not because other people who are connected with the case disagree with the determination of the state’s attorney.”

Charles Ridulph said he understood the judge’s decision, but has plans to hire a lawyer to represent his family, a victim’s right he said they only recently discovered.

“Your honor, what alarms me the most about Mr. Schmack’s failure to inform us of this absolute right to counsel, is the question of why he would not have done so,” Charles Ridulph said in a statement he intended to read in court, but was not permitted. “To have abandoned Maria is one issue, but the to bind our hand and to further silence us is disturbing to say the least!”

McCullough was one of more than 100 people who were briefly suspects after Maria’s disappearance. But the case went cold for decades until Jan Tessier told Illinois State Police about a deathbed confession from their mother in 1994 that named McCullough as the murderer.

Another of McCullough’s half sisters, Mary Hunt, was also called to testify about that event, by McCullough’s defense at the 2012 trial.

“He’s a sociopath and he thinks he’s the smartest man in the room,” Hunt said. “He has done this his entire life. He destroys whatever’s in his path. It doesn’t surprise me that he thought the judge today would say, ‘You’ve been a good boy and everybody was wrong.’ “

Even amid the commotion of the case’s potential re-opening, Ridulph said he has never feared the memory of his sister would be forgotten.

“I do not worry about that, because this community has been so supportive,” he said. “I received calls and emails this morning offering prayers. Maria is not being forgotten. I have no fears of that.”