Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 30 - Smoking Out A Killer - Full Episode | Forensic Files

up next three college students are murdered it looks as if one person had killed
them all he picked on young women picked on pretty women police immediately have
a suspect in law enforcement terms it's almost like winning the lottery but not everyone was convinced he was the one if
he's gonna brag about three why not four he mentioned all the other cases but never mentioned susan chummy for 20
years questions remained until decades old evidence reveals the terrible truth it's a horrifying thing to think that
there's more than one monster in your community at one time [Music] it was a week before the fall semester
began in 1981 susan schumache moved back to the campus of southern illinois university at
carbondale she was anxious to start her senior year she had just gotten a job at the radio
station and she was going to be doing some of the uh the broadcast work she makes section 3
description narration and dialogue on august 17th susan left the radio station just before 6 pm
she planned to meet her girlfriend for dinner but she never arrived the friend who she was supposed to have
supper with called her roommate mary mary did not know where she was at later into the
night approaching midnight they've started calling all their friends they went to places where they thought she
might have gone the next day with still no word from susan the police were notified
that night officers noticed some trampled vegetation near a dirt footpath students
used to walk from one side of the campus to the other as he walked into the the weeds a little
deeper with the flashlight and the weeds were quite high it was very difficult to
see then once he saw susan's body this was something that really undid us this was it was obviously a horrible
thing and i immediately started crying it was a very uh terrible moment for me it appeared that susan had been beaten
strangled and sexually assaulted police assumed the crime occurred just after susan left
the radio station between 6 and 6 30 p.m which meant she was abducted and attacked
in broad daylight this was in the middle of the day that this happened and i think that really
that was one of the more scary things to people is that it was so random police asked anyone who might have seen
anything suspicious to come forward they also interviewed all of susan's friends including her past romantic
relationships there had been a few people who had attempted to date her that she had
denied so they of course became a part of a growing suspect pool police also had to consider whether the
perpetrator was a stranger because of the location of the murder and its accessibility to a number of
dormitories they were looking at dormitory lists and who lived who lived in the area she was such a blameless
victim the thing that we're all afraid of is some monster coming out of nowhere and snagging someone we love or snagging
ourselves and that's what happened to susan then police learned of a remarkable coincidence
on the day susan was murdered a subcontractor working on the new campus gymnasium had employed a man who'd been
a suspect in two murders both victims were students at the university he was within three or four hundred
yards you gotta remember he's working on a campus where there are eight or nine thousand pretty girls walking around
every day the investigators of that day figured that if if a woman was raped and
murdered he's the one that did it [Music] within days of susan schumache's murder
john paul phillips topped the list of suspects he was known about town as kind of a
hellion i met him early in his life he was a had a terrible temper i met him when he
was 15 or 16 years old in a fight he tried to beat some kid to death with a baseball bat
phillips had been a suspect in the rape and murder of two other southern illinois university students five years
earlier twenty-one-year-old teresa clarke was found raped and murdered in her apartment off campus
at the time john paul phillips lived in an apartment about a hundred feet away we worked that case to death we didn't
have any fingerprints dna was way in the future we had no witnesses we didn't have much of anything to go on
but we felt pretty comfortable he might be her person one year later 24 year old kathleen
mcsherry was also found raped and stabbed in her apartment again john paul phillips lived in the
neighborhood again no dna no fingerprints well where's john paul now well it turned out he lived just a few
blocks north there had been insufficient evidence to arrest john paul phillips for either
murder but in susan schumache's murder police finally got a break at susan's autopsy the medical examiner
found two foreign hairs on her body presumably from her killer homes the body here one was a pubic hair
that was recovered from susan's body phillips willingly provided hair samples for comparison
based on microscopic examination philips hair was not similar so he was eliminated as a suspect
despite the hair analysis susan's family was convinced that john paul phillips was susan's killer and
they didn't take phillips into custody at the time they didn't arrest him or charge him which i
didn't understand at the time because i thought that they had enough reason to later phillips committed several
assaults that landed him in jail he went out to the devil's kitchen like spotted a young lady and her boyfriend
at one of the campgrounds approached him with a gun he went over to carterville and kidnapped a girl too
but police finally got a break in susan shoemake's case first they found susan's yellow backpack
in the piles fork creek behind the dormitories her wallet was missing friends said she
usually carried about ten dollars and the campus worker found a small red bag with some toiletry items not far
from where susan shoemake was murdered inside police found some identification he finds a pharmaceutical bottle that
has the name daniel willison but it was prescribed at the bernard correctional center they did some
checking on him and found that he was on parole and so he became a person of interest
twenty-one-year-old daniel willison had recently been released from prison for a
burglary conviction he was a handyman working on campus at the time of the murder
daniel was working at the quad apartments which is probably about a quarter mile away from the crime scene
when questioned by police willison said he had an alibi for the night of susan shumake's murder that he
was with a friend and the officers took him to the various locations trying to find this person
with whom he spent the night were unsuccessful willison cooperated with police and
provided hair samples but the next day when police went to speak with him again he was gone
in his room they found a torn note some of the pieces were in the toilet the rest were
in a trash can it ran almost like a suicide note i don't know why it's always me
i know i can't handle prison again i know everyone is better off this way police continued to search for willison
until they examined his hair sample willison's hair was not consistent with the hair found
on susan's body so he was eliminated as a suspect the case threatened to go cold
until john paul phillips now in prison for rape and kidnapping allegedly bragged about his murders to his prison
cellmate thomas maccabee one day in the cell he relates all these crimes that he
committed to thomas moccaby and provides detailed information about these murders
detail that only the killer would have known phillips provided details about the
murders of college students kathleen mcsherry and teresa clark but also confessed to killing a third woman a
waitress joan weatherall but he never mentioned susan if he's going to brag about three
why not four he never mentioned miss shoemake but the conventional wisdom back then was that he was responsible
police believe that john paul phillips killed susan shumake too but if they were wrong
a murderer was still at large [Music] in november of 1986 john paul phillips went on trial for the
murder of joan wetherall one of the three murders phillips allegedly confessed to during a
conversation with his prison cellmate in fact when we were done the judge said i'm not only satisfied he did this one
but i think he put on a good enough case i could convict him for the other two judge said that open court
on the day he was sentenced phillips addressed the court he said well i didn't kill her but i hope she felt
every bit of it and the judge immediately sentenced him to death and he went off to prison on
death row but before the sentence was carried out he died in prison of a heart attack at
the age of 40. although phillips bragged to his prison cellmate about killing three women
he never mentioned susan shumake but her family still believed he was responsible
we thought that phillips was the murderer and he went to jail and he died in jail so my family consequently
thought well this is done it's over he's dead others weren't so sure for one thing
susan's murder was different from the others most of his murders were under darkness and that wasn't the
situation with susan chummy minor maybe but just enough that it didn't quite seem right
lieutenant paul eckles was susan's classmate in college and had kept the picture from her case file on his desk
you could just look at that picture you could see that this was a happy moment a father standing with his
daughter very proud and knowing the story that i knew by that time that she had been murdered
that it was something that always held my attention by the year 2000 almost two decades
after susan's murder a new dna process called pcr made it possible to test a small biological sample where in the
past much larger samples were needed essentially that process is just xeroxing dna so we're just copying the
specific portions of dna that we're interested in analyzing so analysts tested the small biological
sample taken from susan schumache's autopsy and were able to identify the dna profile of the killer
yeah we're in the game now there's a good chance now we'll be able to figure out who killed her
john paul phillips dna sample was not on file so investigators took the extraordinary step of requesting that
the state exhumed his body they wanted to eliminate him as a suspect and they needed to get his dna in order
to do that a dna sample was obtained from phillips bone marrow it did not match the dna
from the crime scene i called and spoke with susan's mother it was a very emotional phone call
she cried as we talked it's obvious that you never forget the death of a child like that
and she was very disappointed but you know i tried to assure her that we would continue to go forward and try to
identify the suspect i was angry at the time when this happened because and probably on a
subconscious level because i felt we had closure it was done with and there was more bad news the dna did not match
anyone in the statewide database of known criminal offenders so we knew it had to be somebody who's never
participated or contributed to the codis database if the killer wasn't phillips or anyone
who committed a felony before the dna database was created then who was it where do we go from here
and the obvious answer is let's dig back into the case and let's see who else was
a suspect in those days who else can we get a dna standard from let's just keep going until we run out
of suspects the first person on their list was daniel willison he was originally a suspect he was
working a quarter mile away on the day of the murder then he ran off when police tried to question him
police found him in michigan where he worked at an auto salvage yard by this time he was divorced with one
child and did not want to talk with police wilson told them that he had provided
hair samples and fingerprints back in 1981 he was not interested in cooperating with their investigation
investigators wanted a dna sample woolison refused to provide one and the courts refused to order one
citing the lack of probable cause willison's hair was on file from the original investigation but the samples
didn't contain root material so they couldn't be used to generate a full genetic profile
so investigators decided to try an unconventional method to get woolison's dna it had taken a long time
almost 20 years and lieutenant paul eckles was convinced he was closing in on susan shumake's killer
but only dna could prove it and the suspect daniel willison wasn't willing to provide it
so michigan state police decided they'd take his dna in a perfectly legal manner
they decided to run surveillance on him the whole purpose was to try to get something that might have daniel willis
dna so we could either identify him or eliminate him it wasn't easy since willison worked in an auto parts
salvage yard only other employees could get close to him without a rousing suspicion
then police learned he had recently sold his car and they knew he smoked cigarettes
so they traced the car to its new owner they asked him about the cigarette butts
and the ash tree says i don't smoke and all my friends throw their cigarette butts out the window so these were like
when i bought the car there were more than a dozen cigarette butts police hoped at least one was from
daniel willison they gave the evidence to dna analyst jennifer andrew when i gathered from speaking with the
investigator in charge there was a homicide about 20 years ago of a college student and you know me being recently
out of college it was a little bit personal for me one by one andrew cut open the cigarette filters
often a good source of dna because that's where all the saliva and skin cells would be deposited
samples were treated with a solvent that separates the dna a profile was generated from an unknown
male people think the job is so cool it's actually very very stressful and it's moments like this that really make it
worthwhile the profile was sent to illinois for comparison with the 20 year old genetic
material left at susan schumache's murder and it matched daniel willison well i'm ecstatic of course i mean this
is uh in in law enforcement terms it's almost like winning the lottery naturally
lieutenant echols would need another dna test to confirm the dna results from the
cigarette until then echoes wanted to prevent williston from fleeing so he tried a ruse
he confronted willison with some made-up evidence it was important for me to extract some type of information from
him that would give me enough to get an arrest warrant i give him the story about the witness which is not true
i tell him that there was a person that he worked with at the quad apartments who had stepped
forward and had seen daniel wilson walking down a path behind the right one carrying a yellow backpack during the
evening that she was murdered and i took it just a little bit further and told him but i had a fingerprint that was
identified to him from that backpack and then immediately without me saying a thing he said you know i only took ten
dollars from that backpack so i knew he was telling me the truth he was pretty much a sunk puppy there
so willison was arrested and he was forced to provide an additional dna sample that test
left no doubt he was the source of the dna found on susan shumake i knew enough about dna evidence to know
that the odds of there being a mismatch is you know it turned out in this case it
was going to be 300 million to one was the most conservative estimate prosecutors cannot fathom a reason for
susan schumache's murder they believe willison saw her walking alone along the dirt path
and he decided to attack her it was late in the day no one heard or saw anything
he left behind his dna then took her yellow backpack stole ten dollars from her purse dumped
it in the creek then dropped his bag with a pharmacy prescription in it not far away
it's that randomness that's so frightening she wasn't stalked she wasn't selected
she would just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time despite the evidence against him
willison pleaded not guilty in march of 2006 25 years after susan's murder daniel willison was convicted of first
degree murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison the university has now built a
well-lighted pedestrian overpass so students no longer have to walk through the overgrown dirt path where susan was
abducted and murdered it was named in susan's honor my wife had made the comment she said
you know i wonder how much it costs to have one of these overpasses built and i said i'll tell
you what it costs cost one human life that's why we do what we do you know to bring justice to these
families so the families deserve a lot of credit as well they're the people who push us along the way i went back to the
site again after the trial and i'd been beaten there by quite a few people there were flowers and balloons
obviously a lot of people had felt that they needed to go to that site it was it was
it was overwhelming you

A college senior was found raped and murdered near an unpaved footpath used by students to walk from one side of campus to the other.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

The episode details Susan Schumake's murder, the investigation, and the eventual identification of her killer, Daniel Willison, through DNA evidence.

Key points

The Murder of Susan Schumache. Three college students are murdered, leading to a complex investigation.
A New DNA Breakthrough. Decades later, DNA technology finally identifies the killer.
Daniel Willison's Conviction. After 25 years, Daniel Willison is convicted of Susan's murder.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It's a horrifying thing to think that there's more than one monster in your community.

0:38WatchJan 28, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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