By Genevieve Bookwalter
Tribune News Service

Three decades after 15-year-old Kristina Wesselman was assaulted and killed while walking a well-worn path home from a grocery store near Glen Ellyn, DuPage County sheriff’s officials say they have arrested the man they believe committed the crime.

Michael R. Jones, 62, of Champaign, was charged Sunday morning with two counts of murder and one count of aggravated criminal sexual assault, said sheriff’s spokeswoman Dawn Domrose. He was being held in DuPage County Jail and will appear in bond court Monday.

The arrest caps a 30-year search during which one man was slapped with a restraining order for aggressively sharing tips with the family and DuPage County law enforcement was sued by the ACLU for allegedly coercing a suspect into giving blood and saliva samples for DNA testing.

“Over the last 30 years the sheriff’s cold case unit has worked hundreds of leads that have sent them across the nation, and thousands of man hours have been spent to catch the killer in this horrendous crime,” said Sheriff John Zaruba in a statement Sunday.

Jones was arrested after an unidentified tip about the case came in to law enforcement Sept. 10, Domrose said. Investigators searched Jones’ Champaign address Friday and he was arrested Sunday, according to the DuPage sheriff’s office.

Champaign County court records show Jones pleaded guilty in 1999 to domestic battery/bodily harm. He pleaded guilty again to a domestic battery charge in July. But the DuPage County sheriff’s office released few details on Jones’ most recent arrest Sunday.

Wesselman was killed July 21, 1985. She was last seen walking home in unincorporated Glen Ellyn along a well-traveled path from a Jewel — now a banquet hall — near Butterfield Road and Illinois Highway 53, officials said.

Wesselman was described as a popular, athletic Glenbard South High School student who was president of her freshman class and well-liked in Valley View, her tightly-knit, middle-class subdivision. The 150-yard path she walked that day was a trail neighborhood kids regularly traversed to the nearby supermarket or McDonald’s, residents said at the time, according to Tribune reports.

Jewel workers remembered Wesselman stopping in to buy candy for herself and her mom. She was last seen in the store about 4 p.m., and her mother, Sandy Wesselman, reported her missing about 1:50 a.m. the next day, articles in the Tribune said.

The teen’s body was found later the next day among 3- to 4-foot-tall weeds near a tree in a field behind Jewel. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death, police told the Tribune.

Dana Henry, 34, an unemployed laborer who lived near the field, became a high profile suspect in the case. He was questioned but not charged shortly after Wesselman’s 1985 death. But in 1988, investigators sought to use DNA evidence — a new technology at the time — to help determine if Henry committed the crime.

When Henry refused to give blood and saliva samples, he was subpoenaed and later thrown in jail for contempt of court, where he said he was stripped and held naked until he gave the samples, according to Tribune reports.

The ACLU sued DuPage County law enforcement for violating Henry’s constitutional rights. Investigators never disclosed why Henry was singled out. He said he was never contacted again by police about the case.

“You’re talking about a time in which, really, the idea of DNA and DNA testing as part of criminal investigation, you were at the very forefront of that,” Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the ACLU of Illinois, said Sunday.

Another twist in the case came in 1989, when a judge issued a restraining order against Willis Wilson, of Glendale Heights, who had aggressively pursued the family with what he said were clues about who killed Wesselman. Since late 1985 Willis had called Wesselman’s family and in 1987 wrote a lengthy letter detailing information he said he had about Wesselman’s killer.

Investigators repeatedly investigated Willis’ claims, they told the Tribune, and called the information “ungrounded.”

In 2011, law enforcement sought to bring the case back into the public eye by asking for information about an heirloom pearl ring that Wesselman had been wearing when she was attacked. After her death, police said at the time, they scoured pawn shops and jewelry stores looking for it, to no avail.

On Sunday, Wesselman’s mother did not return calls for comment. But in 2011, she spoke at a news conference pleading for information about her daughter’s killer.

“On the day of Kristy’s funeral I silently promised her I would never stop trying to find the person who killed her,” her mother said. “I didn’t know that was going to be lifetime process.”