The murderer of 8-year-old Bridget Cannady and her grandmother left only the slimmest of clues.
The front door, usually locked, was open.
There were the 6 inches of water in the bathtub where the two were found.
The bodies were facing each other.
Bridget’s 2-year-old brother was left unharmed.
Those few shreds of evidence are much of what Cicero police have had to work with since the slaying of the girl and her grandmother, Marylin Williams, on Aug. 28.
As of Wednesday, no arrests had been made.
Even though Cicero police declined to discuss the details of their investigation, other law enforcement officials say there are few shortcuts in cases like these. Unlike many of the other 52 children under the age of 15 to be killed this year in the Chicago area, there are no bullet wounds, abusive parents or shouted gang slogans to point the way toward a killer.
Instead, detectives must resort to basic, painstaking and methodical police work, the slow accretion of physical evidence-perhaps a hair, smudges of saliva on a cigarette, a particle found in a carpet-that may provide the crucial clue.
In Bridget’s case, that work began the moment the bodies were discovered in the second-floor bathroom by Lucy Rhynes, Bridget’s mother. Bridget was 44th child younger than 15 slain in the Chicago area this year.
The case confounded police from the start. One immediate problem confronted them: By the time the murders were discovered, hot, humid conditions had already begun to accelerate the bodies’ decomposition.
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Minutes after the bodies were found in the second-floor apartment, the Cicero police summoned the sheriff’s police.
“A great deal depends on the (first) responding officer to preserve the scene and not let anyone touch the scene,” said Arthur Jackson, first deputy chief of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department, who has handled hundreds of murder cases in more than 30 years. “Our investigators come out, the evidence technicians, they collect and preserve the evidence and take it to the crime lab.”
Three sheriff’s officers examined the apartment and the bodies for hours.
Bridget was strangled, probably with a ribbon found around her neck, according to Dr. Mitra Kalelkar of the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Her grandmother died of asphyxiation, but doctors could not determine exactly what happened, Kalelkar said. Both had been sexually assaulted, according to the autopsy report.
Although Jackson is not involved with the Cicero case, he said that the procedures followed in such probes are standard.
First, photos are taken of the crime scene. Then officers seek physical evidence.
Technicians take hair and blood samples from the victims, and also their fingerprints. Later, those could be compared against samples gathered at the scene. Prints and other evidence that do not match the victims could provide clues that lead police to a suspect.
“In the case of a bathtub, you would look for latent fingerprints,” Jackson said. “If there was a carpet on the floor, they would have a microvac suck in any hair or particles that may have been left by an offender.”
“They’re looking at the (victims’) hands (to) see whether or not there was some defensive wounds or the possibility that the victims scratched the offender,” Jackson said.
DNA matching tests can be done on a variety of evidence recovered from a crime scene, Jackson said. Bits of skin found under a victim’s fingernails, traces of semen, or errant strands of hair can be critical in such investigations.
Investigators question family members, work associates, neighbors, and anyone else who had a link to the victims. They also contact other law enforcement agencies, sifting through lists of known offenders, and crimes with similar circumstances.
“It’s so much like looking at a Rorschach and trying to pull stuff out,” said Robert Lorinskas, 53, an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. “You’ve got to keep massaging that information.”
Of course, police canvass the neighborhood for witnesses.
In this case, neighbors say they heard nothing unusual between 8 p.m. Aug. 28-when neighbors last saw Bridget and her grandmother in the yard-and about 11:45 the next morning, when the bodies were discovered.
“Up to this point, everyone is claiming they know nothing, they heard nothing, they saw nothing,” said Cicero Police Supt. Emil Schullo.
The only potential witness police have located is Bridget’s 2-year-old brother, who was found sleeping on a couch in the apartment. The boy hasn’t been able to provide any information about what he might have seen that weekend, but his mother said he sometimes screams out Bridget’s name in the night.
A downstairs tenant in Williams’ building said he heard the boy calling out, “Grandma, grandma, grandma,” about 8 a.m. Aug. 29, according to the tenant. But the tenant said that was not unusual.
A psychologist is working with the boy, who will be 3 in November.
“I don’t believe they’re having much success,” said Rhynes, 26, who works as a waitress in a Westmont restaurant. “I’m trying to stay strong for my son. He’s very angry. You don’t know what’s going on in a 2-year-old mind.”
The lack of evidence and witnesses has stymied police.
“It’s difficult, bordering on the impossible, if it’s a perfect stranger who entered onto the scene and did this,” said Bob Reinertsen, 51, former FBI agent and an associate professor in the Law Enforcement Administration Department at Western Illinois University. “It’s relatively easy if it’s someone familiar with the people involved.”
Even though the evidence is scant, police probably have made some assumptions.
“The fact that the door was unlocked and there was no forced entry would point to the fact that the offender may have known the victims,” Jackson said.
Reinertsen agreed. “If it was just somebody wandering in off the street or whatever, it would be a first-floor wander-in,” he said. “It would be very uncharacteristic for someone to wander up a flight of stairs and gain access to a second-floor apartment.”
Reinertsen, who is not involved in the investigation, speculated that the 2-year-old brother was put out of the way while the murders were committed, “by, obviously, someone he knew. If he were on the scene, there would either be more noise coming from him, or he would have been harmed. The fact that he was unharmed indicates that he was not right on the scene when this was occurring.”
The way the bodies were found makes Reinertsen believe this was “some sort of a ritualistic acting out of violent, sexual fantasy.”
“There have been cases where you’ve had serial killers who for some reason have washed their victims,” Lorinskas said. “Washing the bodies and stuff like that is so common amongst these killers.”
Another possibility, Jackson speculated, was simpler: the bodies in the bathtub might indicate the killer was trying to eliminate evidence.
As part of the investigation, officers usually examine details of the victims’ lives.
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Friends described Williams, 49, as a self-reliant, rugged woman with a sparkling sense of humor. She made her living selling leather jackets at the Casa Blanca Flea Market in Cicero.
Williams was remembered by many of her friends at the flea market, where the owner, Ron Keller, has offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Acquaintances there said she was very trusting and friendly.
Bridget was by all accounts a polite, friendly girl who loved to sing in church. She was active in Brownies for a few months. Her troop leader placed a uniform in her coffin, along with six badges Bridget had earned.
Bridget, her mother, and brother had lived with Williams occasionally. Lucy Rhynes said she and the children lived “on and off” at Williams’ apartment with Kevin Rhynes, her boyfriend at the time. Rhynes was not Bridget’s father, according to the death certificate, which lists her father as “unknown.”
On July 24, Kevin and Lucy were married. They moved with the children to a house in Broadview, a few miles away.
One of Lucy Rhynes’ last impressions of Bridget was her reaction to the news that she was going to spend an August day at Williams’ apartment.
Said Rhynes: “My daughter was excited. She said, `Go ahead and go to work, Mommy.’ I thought that was the safest place she could be.”