Daughter of wrongly accused murderer: ‘I thought he would die in prison’

Janey O’Connor spent five years fighting for her stepfather’s release on one of America’s most infamous murder convictions. She won the battle earlier this month. But she told KTTH’s Todd Herman Wednesday that she had a painful realization this week.

“Last night I actually had a bit of an epiphany,” she said. “I went through a period where I wasn’t writing to (my dad). It occurred to me that I had given up. I always rallied when there was time to defend him with the facts, but I had just, and I didn’t want to give up hope, and I didn’t want him to know that I had given up hope, but I thought that he would die in prison.”

Related: Murder charges dropped, man freed after 20 years in prison

Jack McCullough was arrested for one of America’s oldest cold cases: the 1957 murder and abduction of Maria Ridulph, a Chicago schoolgirl. The former police officer and security guard in Washington state had his 2012 conviction vacated on April 15 after the chief prosecutor found that McCulough was 40 miles away when the 7-year-old was abducted. The 76-year-old has said he plans a lawsuit against the state of Illinois.

Dekalb County State’s Attorney called the investigation and trial deeply flawed. O’Connor, who hunted through loads of documents to prove her stepfather’s innocence, said she didn’t become suspicious of officers or the investigation until reading the charging papers. That included information from two Seattle officers who arrested McCullough that she says she knew to be incorrect.

“They’d put in that they could see a young girl lying on the bed; you hear that and it’s like, that’s awful, he’s got a little girl on the bed,” she said. “What you don’t know is the bed is in the living room, I’m two feet from the bed, my son is doing a puzzle right by the bed, she’s reading a book. And they had said they would pursue getting help for the little girl. Well, the parent is standing right in the room, why don’t you just say, ‘hey ma’am is your daughter fine? I’m right here.’

“That was my first thought that we’re not being on the up and up,” she added. “These men are not being honest and they’re police officers. And then you fast forward, I’ve read the FBI documents and I know that what they testified to get the search warrant and the arrest warrant was based on information that is factually false.”

O’Connor says Seattle police illegally confronted her mother and intimidated her after finding marijuana in the elderly woman’s freezer.

“They committed a fraud on the Washington state courts to obtain an unconstitutional search warrant and arrest warrant,” she said. “Everything they used was based on non-factual things.”

O’Connor said this case is disappointing on multiple levels and needs to be a lesson police learn from.

“They knew for a fact that Jack was 40 miles away at the time of the abduction and they hid that information,” she said. “To me, this case is so much more than just about Jack, or wrongful conviction. It’s about this rampant disregard for our laws. And why does just the little guy have to follow them? We pay these people with our taxes. These people are in a position of power and authority. It’s not just my family that they hurt, they tore apart the Ridulph family. The damage done to that family one more time so they could get fame and fortune is disgusting. That’s the part that bothers me so much about this, is how do we hold these people accountable? They are in a position to destroy lives and wreak havoc and they go about their business.”

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