Cold Cases That Were Solved: The Triple Murders Of John & Anton Schuessler and Robert Peterson.

John Schuessler was born on November 30th, 1941. He had blue eyes and brown hair. He weighed 100 pounds and stood 5 feet 3 inches tall.  He acquired serious injuries in an auto accident. His mother had noticed a personality change after the accident and he seemed dominated by other boys of his age.

John's brother Anton was born on November 13th, 1943. He had brown eyes and brown hair. He weighed 90 pounds and stood 5 feet and 1 inch tall. Anton would always tag along with John. 

John and Anton's parents were Eleanor Holz Schuessler Kujawa and Anton Schuessler Sr.  Anton Sr. grew up in Germany and was the operator of a tailor shop.

John and Anton both liked bowling. Their father would take them often.

Robert Peterson was born on February 11th, 1942 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois to Dorothy  and Malcolm Peterson. He had blue eyes and brown hair. He weighed 110 pounds and stood 5 feet 3 inches tall. Robert liked sports. His father  was a carpenter and Little League coach. In the fall his father was taking him bowling twice a week. Robert was bright, assertive and seven years older than any of the other three Peterson children.

In early 1955, Robert played hooky three times. When his parents questioned him, they told police, he said he was in the garage and basement and other places. They asked him if he was with anyone and Robert seemed afraid.

That was probably a normal kid thing that Robert did. He was probably afraid that he would get whomever he was with in trouble. However, it is possible something not right was happening.

On October 10th, 1955, a personality and aptitude test was given in Robert’s and John’s room at Farnsworth school. One of the questions was “Do you know anybody who is trying to do you harm or hurt you?” Robert and John were the only ones in the class of 30 who wrote “Yes“.

I wonder if they really looked into why they answered yes. Was it a bully or someone more dangerous they were afraid of?

On Friday, October 14th, John had gone to the Faetz & Nielsen alleys with the Robert and his father. 

The next day all John, Anton, Robert, James Schemitsch and Richard Padal bowled at the Natoma Lanes.
It was Sunday, October 16th, it had rained heavily earlier that morning and light showers were expected on and off for the rest of the day.

It was 1 p.m. and 14 year old Robert had dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes with his family. After dinner his father went out to clean the garage. 

13 year old John and 11 year Anton had returned from 11 a.m. mass at St. Tarcissus church and sat down to a chicken noodle soup lunch at 1:30 p.m.

John and Anton loved chicken soup. They were at the table when the phone rang around 2 p.m. John answered the phone and discovered it was Robert. They talked about going to a movie and Mrs. Schuessler heard the names of two northwest side theaters. 

Sunday was movie day for the Schuessler boys. They usually went with two 10 year old neighbors, James Schemitsch and Richard Padal, bur hey had gone Sunday driving with their families.

John and Anton put on their blue Cubs jackets. Anton’s jacket had lost the “U”. Anton got on his bike and John on Robert’s, which had been left at their home the day before, and they went to Robert's house.

At the Peterson home, John and Anton found that Mrs. Peterson had called the Loop theater where the Disney nature film, The African Lion, was playing. She found out the show was 1 hour 45 minutes long and the price would be 50 cents. Robert had $1.50 and the Schuesslers $2.50 left from bowling the day before.

It was now 3:30 p.m. and about 53 degrees outside. Robert’s put on his black White Sox jacket. Mrs. Peterson leaned out the front door of her home at 5510 Farragut and watched the three boys walk eagerly down the street toward a Milwaukee av. bus stop. Robert was in the middle of John and Anton. 

Numerous sightings of the boys were reported around town, but there was only one where they were positively identified. It was about 7:30 p.m. and the rain had been falling lightly since about 5 p.m. Robert, John, and Anton arrived at the Monte Cristo alley, 11 blocks east of the Kenneth intersection in Montrose. They stayed there for about half an hour, but did not bowl. 17 year old Ernest Niewiadomski and his sisters 20 year old Leona and 10 year old Delphine were bowling. They knew the Schuesslers boys so Ernest stopped to talk to them.

It was Anton's first adventure to the Loop without an adult. He told Ernest of going there, seeing “The African Lion“, and travelling there by bus and rapid transit. Ernest had asked them if they were going to bowl.“Not unless you pay for it“, one of the boys replied without further explanation.

The bowling alley was crowded. Two witnesses recalled a gang of tough-appearing young men, led by a black-haired man with long sideburns, seated behind the Niewiadomski children. A few minutes later Leona noticed Robert and Anton go to the bathroom, where they were for about five minutes. When they emerged, Robert called, “Let’s go, John“, in a purposeful way and all left. They seemed somewhat tense and eager to Leona and did not appear to be going home. Leona believes they were on something they considered an adventure. It was about 8 p.m. and the three boys wandered out into the dark.

Again there were sightings of the boys, but non could be positively confirmed. 

It was about 8:30 p.m., John and Anton's parents became restless and worried about their boys, Around 10:30 p.m. they decided to call the Petersons. Mr. Schuessler asked Mr. Peterson to pick him up, as he had no car and the two went to the police station. They arrived at the station shortly before midnight and found a sympathetic listener in Sgt. George Murphy. The sergeant began calling Loop theaters and alerted the downtown police and sent message on the missing boys to all the stations.

The fathers drove to the Loop and checked theater exits. They left about 2 a.m. and returned to the station where Murphy made more checks and asked police districts to check various routes which might be taken by the boys. Also, Murphy, without telling the fathers, alerted the sex bureau to the case.

Mr. Peterson took Mr. Schuessler home at 3:30 a.m. 

The next day, Mr. Peterson was at home with his family and Mr. Schuessler went to his tailor shop. At night Mrs. Niewiadomskis mother sent Leona over to tell the Schuesslers they had seen the boys in the Monte Cristo. The fathers began searching the bowling alleys in the area. 

It was now Tuesday morning, it was a cloudy and the noon temperature was about 52 degrees. 50 year old liquor salesman, Victor Livingston, decided to eat his lunch outdoors in Robinson reserve woods, a forest preserve along the Des Plaines river and due west of the city area where the boys disappeared. 

He turned his car south from Lawrence av. into a blacktop parking lot 100 feet east of the river. He took out a sandwich and glanced at the foot-high grass. There had been a 30 minute shower the night before.

Directly ahead of him he saw something which he thought was the lower part of an unclothed tailor’s dummy. Feet toward him, it was lying in a shallow ditch.

He got out and saw it was a body. This made him ill, so he returned to his car, and drove away rapidly. He reported his discovery at a nearby tavern. A few minutes later men were looking down into the ditch.

Sadly, the body was Robert’s. He was lying stomach down, head jammed against the east side of the ditch. John’s body was sprawled on his side to the north, one leg under Robert. Anton was on his back on the south, hands folded restfully across the lower part of the chest, and with the legs under Robert’s body. All boys' bodies were naked, smeared with dirt and had their eyes and mouths taped shut. It was obvious that there had been no attempt to conceal the bodies.

An unpaved drive leads from the north side of Lawrence near the lot entrance. The more exposed lot was selected to avoid leaving tracks.

After a brief examination at the scene and the identification of the boys, their bodies were removed. The postmortem was conducted at 4 p.m. in the County morgue. The findings have been reevaluated so often and so much conjecture has been added that they are confusing.

The cause of death was suffocation. Robert had been garroted with a long, flexible object, as the strangulation bruise extended around his neck. There was an unexplained horizontal fingernail mark on his throat. Bruises and a vertical fingernail mark on Anton’s neck disclosed hands had strangled him. A peculiar mark on John’s neck suggested a judo blow. There was no evidence of sexual molestation, but that has not been ruled out by police.

Examiners could not find any marks indicating the boys’ wrists or ankles had been tied. It was decided that rigor mortis had come and gone, indicating the time of death 16 hours or more before.

The wounds and bruises on the bodies also have become the subject of controversy. One argument is over whether one of the boys had a broken nose and another a broken jaw. The coroner’s pathologist at that time said there were no such fractures.

Fourteen small wounds were found on the left side of Robert’s head. There seemed to be four parallel patterns, one of four gouges, which might indicate a four pronged instrument had been swung at him four times, with not all the prongs striking each time.

Single heavy blows, apparently with fists, had caused large bruises near the right eye of John and the left eye of Anton, and behind the left ears of both. Anton’s right side had another bruise.

Three of the knuckles on one of Anton’s hands and one on the other were torn, as if he swung at a person and struck some intervening object.

Black smears on the soles of their feet indicated they had been walking in their bare feet. Dirt and blood smears suggested they were naked before they were murdered.

One medical expert has suggested that the blows, the tape applied in near suffocating manner, and the later strangling indicate an irrational overdoing of murder typical of maniacal fury, the brutal passion of a man subject to sadistic rages but normal at other times.
The time of death has been debated. The examiners found several ounces of partly digested food in the stomachs of the Schuesslers but nothing in Peterson’s.

This tends to place the time of the Schuessler’s death at shortly after they disappeared Sunday night. Robert probably was killed sometime later.

Anton’s folded hands were interpreted by some as an expression of remorse by the killer. However, it has been pointed out that some other person, who came on the bodies and lifted an arm to seen if they were dead, might have placed both arms in the position of rest.

The bruises on the faces and heads of the Schuessler boys suggest that a powerful man, much taller than they were, struck each first on the face. Then he grabbed and turned each boy, striking again in the back of the head to propel his victim thru a door. The Peterson boy’s head wounds suggest a weaker, frantic flailing of a weapon by a shorter assailant. 

Robert’s father was weeping as he left the morgue after he had identified his body. He cried, “O Robert, what have they done to you?” John and Anton were viewed by their father, who had to be helped to a car, saying, “If you have any kids, you know how I feel.” 

Services were held for John and Anton Jr. in St. Tarcissus church,  and for Robert in the Jefferson Park Lutheran church.

Less than a month later the Mr. Schuessler died of a heart attack while going through electric shock treatment for depression at the Forest sanitarium and rest home in Des Plaines. His wife Eleanor said, “Everything there was to live for is gone“.

During their investigation, police obtained reports of three cars parked outside the parking lot in the forest preserve and possibly five inside between 7:15 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. the day the bodies were found. One of the cars that were parked inside the lot was a light colored station wagon with wood trim. and two men were standing behind it.

47 year old Edward Rolfes said that he and his deaf-mute brother, Herman, had slept in their truck in a connected lot 300 feet from where the bodies were found. He said that they had been there all of the night before the discovery. He said that he drove back about 10:30 a.m. with his daughter to show where he had slept. Neither saw the bodies. But they saw three young men in a weathered blue Ford enter as they drove out. Edward's story was supported by lie detector tests. 

Fingernail scrapings of Robert's were analysed. Scientists found and identified several tiny fragments of an unusual nonmagnetic stainless steel.

There was a flake of material from Robert’s right foot that weighed only a millionth of an ounce. The speck was found to be a substance similar to casein glue and containing bits of lime, dolomite, sand, and other materials.

Police then surveyed metal working places. They visited 2,000 shops in a large area of the northwest side and the adjoining county area.

A series of parallel marks on John’s back could have come from the trunk mat of a 1942 to 1951 Packard. Police compiled a check list of 12,000 owners of such cars.

More than 44,000 people with some kind of information about the murders were interviewed. More than 3,500 suspects were questioned.

On December 28, 1956, two young sisters, Barbara, 15, and Patricia 13, went to the Brighton Theater on Archer Avenue to see an Elvis Presley movie, Love me Tender. On January 22nd, 1957, their naked bodies were found behind a guard rail on a country road in an unincorporated west of Chicago. Their bodies like those of the Schuessler-Peterson boys had apparently been thrown out of a car. However, the girls had not died of asphyxiation, instead their deaths were thought to have been caused by secondary shock due to exposure. The investigation into their deaths led to nowhere as well.

In 1989, ATF agents were investigating the February 17th, 1977, disappearance of Brach's candy heiress Helen Brach. This led to two Chicago stable owners, Silas Jayne and Richard Bailey, that were involved in serious criminal activity.

The ATF were told by informants that horse trainer, Kenneth Hansen (one of Jayne's employees) had boasted of committing John's, Anton's and Robert's murders and had threatened others that they would "end up like the Peterson boy." A second informant had told the FBI of Hansen's confession in the 1970's, but no action was taken.

Hansen was convicted in 1995.

Hansen was 22 years old at the time of the boys' murders. Supposedly he had met the boys while they were hitchhiking after having last been seen at the Monte Cristo Bowling Alley, which about eight miles from the Loop theater. Hansen lured them into the Idle Hour stables, claiming that he wanted to show them horses. When Robert discovered Hansen sexually abusing the Schuessler brothers, Hansen attacked all three and killed them.

Jayne discovered what Hansen had done and was enraged but he realized that the murders on his property had the potential to ruin him. He helped put the bodies in a station wagon, and disposed of them. 

Neighbors had reported to the police that they had heard screams from the stables on the day the boys disappeared, but it was not followed up on. 

After winning a second trial from an appeals court, Hansen was convicted again in 2002. He was sentenced to 200 to 300 years in prison. He died at Pontiac Correctional Center on September 12th, 2007, still proclaiming his innocence. 

According to a detective who worked on the case, Kenneth Hansen had preyed on hundreds of boys before his 1995 arrest and conviction for the murders.