Judge schedules Nov. 10 hearing for pretrial motion in Naperville murder case

Both parties in a 1972 Naperville murder case are scheduled to have their first pretrial hearing next month on whether a judge should quash a search warrant and suppress the evidence obtained through it.

On Thursday, two attorneys for Barry Whelpley, 76, of Mounds View, Minnesota, and a prosecutor met in court after both sides filed several motions regarding the tactics of police officers who investigated Whelpley.

Whelpley was charged with the fatal stabbing of 15-year-old Julie Ann Hanson on July 7, 1972, in Naperville.

Prosecutor Chris Koch informed Judge Dave Carlson that both parties plan to first address one of the motions filed by Whelpley’s attorney Terry Ekl to have the search warrant of his client’s residence quashed and the evidence suppressed.

“We are contesting the search of the house,” Ekl said.

Carlson scheduled a hearing on that motion for Nov. 10.

In Ekl’s motion, he said officers from Naperville and Ramsey County, Minnesota, searched Whelpley’s Mounds View residence June 2 and seized numerous items, including computers, phones and other electronics.

Ekl argued that while the complaints for search warrants were “extremely lengthy, very little information was contained in the complaints related to the defendant.”

“The complaints for the search warrants for defendant’s residence do not set forth any reasonable cause to believe that evidence of Julie Hanson’s murder in 1972 would be located in defendant’s Minnesota residence 49 years later,” Ekl said.

Ekl said the search warrant should be quashed and all evidence obtained should be suppressed, along with any forensic analysis of that evidence.

Prosecutor James Long responded in a court filing that the search warrants were supported by probable cause and sought items that may constitute evidence of the crime, such as journals, notebooks, ledgers, computers, digital media, yearbooks from Naperville, news articles, items regarding Hanson, dental picks and “knives, broken or otherwise.”

“Because genealogy helped connect the defendant to the crime and because the court can conclude the most personal items a person can have and keep despite the passage of time or moving from one location to another … the search of the defendant’s home now for those items was properly supported by probable cause,” Long said.

Ekl countered Oct. 8 that the prosecution merely “responds that the search warrant complaint was sufficient by relying upon generalized conclusions, opinions and speculations that is not based upon any actual facts.”

“Additionally, the state fails to identify any legal authority to support its position that there was a sufficient nexus between the murder of Julie Hanson 49 years ago, evidence of the murder and the defendant’s residence,” Ekl’s response said.