As they had so often done during the past week, Will County Sheriff’s Officers Scott Swearengen and Michael Guilfoyle parked their squad cars and walked off into the dark early Tuesday, hoping that maybe, this time, they would happen upon the missing boy.
Nothing distinguished this patch of rural woods from the countless others that the two had combed in their lonely, seemingly hopeless attempts to accomplish at night what hundreds of searchers had failed to do in broad daylight: Find Christopher Meyer, the missing 10-year-old from Aroma Park, Ill.
But Monday night, a psychic had advised Guilfoyle to search this particular area more closely. So there they were, the beams of their flashlights dancing over yet another isolated piece of southern Will County.
That’s when they saw it: a piece of plywood lying across the ground.
As they got closer, they smelled what Swearengen later would describe as “a wretched odor.”
Within minutes, the search was over.
Tuesday night, following a six-hour autopsy at Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, the body was tentatively identified as that of Christopher Meyer, said Will County Coroner Patrick O’Neil. He said the identification was made by a forensic dentist.
“The cause of death was multiple stab wounds and slashing injuries,” O’Neil said. He said it had not been determined how long the body was in the shallow grave.
The discovery, by the pair of officers motivated as much by parental anguish as by duty, confirmed the worst fears of a community united in its hope that somehow, somewhere, the boy was still alive.
Now, the case of a missing child appears to have turned into a murder investigation.
Christopher was last seen the evening of Aug. 7 near the Kankakee River after he had been fishing with two friends at the Aroma Park boat launch southeast of Kankakee. The body was found about 18 miles upstream, and about 2 miles east of where searchers on Saturday found a pair of boys underwear.
Convicted child murderer Timothy Buss, 27, was charged Friday with aggravated kidnapping in connection with Christopher’s disappearance and is being held without bond in the Kankakee County Jail.
Preliminary results of DNA tests comparing blood found in the trunk of Buss’ car with blood samples from Christopher’s parents won’t be known before Wednesday, officials said.
The boy, from Walla Walla, Wash., had been spending the summer with his mother, Mika Moulton, who lives in Aroma Park. His parents are divorced.
The latest development prompted James Meyer, Christopher’s 41-year-old father, to make an angry plea for officials to give stronger punishment to convicted child murderers.
“We need to work together as a country to stop this kind of stuff from happening,” Meyer said, starting to shout as he stood outside the Kankakee County Courthouse. “It’s the same predator story. They go to prison, they’re let out and they do it again.”
Buss was convicted for the 1981 murder of 5-year-old Tara Sue Huffman of Bradley. He served 12 years of a 25-year sentence before being paroled in 1993, officials said.
Buss, who is expected to be arraigned Aug. 24, is not talking to police, said Kankakee County Sheriff Bernie Thompson. Buss has done nothing to assist the hundreds of volunteers and law enforcement officers who have been trying for a week to find Christopher.
Swearengen, 27, and Guilfoyle, 29, weren’t part of an organized search effort at the time they found the body. The two officers, who had been assigned to the Will County Jail for more than five years before becoming patrol officers in January, used spare time between calls to search for Christopher.
They did this on their own initiative, without being asked by supervisors.
“We’re both fathers, and knowing what the parents were going through just drove us up the wall,” said Guilfoyle, who has a 2-year-old son. Swearengen has a 6-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter.
“We both felt that we were supposed to find him. We weren’t going to stop until we did,” Swearengen said.
Guilfoyle’s shift runs from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.; Swearengen’s runs from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Both work the southern part of Will County as part of their daily beat. During the four hours that their shifts overlapped, the two would scour the countryside whenever they could.
On Monday night, a police dispatcher suggested that Guilfoyle talk with a psychic who in the past had helped local authorities with such tasks as locating a person who had drowned. Guilfoyle drove to the Custer Park Fire Department, where an official there phoned Greta Alexander, a psychic from Delavan in Tazewell County.
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“We were basically going to take anything we could to find the boy,” Guilfoyle said during a news conference Tuesday. “I wasn’t going to discount anything.”
Alexander told Guilfoyle that she felt what the boy was feeling.
“I told him what I felt and what I saw, and that I wanted to go east until . . . like a park or a parking area,” Alexander said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “I felt that I wanted to park the car where I couldn’t drive any further, like I had to stop where the road just quit. . . . I wanted to walk west 42 feet, and that’s where I would be, and I would have my hand up, and there would be a board on me.”
Having no better lead, Guilfoyle and Swearengen returned to the boat landing where searchers earlier had found a pair of boys underpants and a fishing pole.
“We started at the boat launch and headed to where our county line ends,” Guilfoyle said. About an hour later, east of the launch site, the two arrived at the site where they eventually found the body.
Alexander said she is convinced that the search would have taken much longer without her guidance, but Swearengen and Guilfoyle aren’t so sure. They said they might well have searched in the same area even without the psychic’s help.
“You can call it luck. You can call it fate, good police work, whatever you want. We’re just thankful we found him,” Swearengen said. “I’d credit it more to perseverance.”
Alexander conceded that the two officers deserve all the credit for finding the body. Said Alexander: “All I was was just an instrument to lead them in the right direction.”
This is not the first time a psychic helped out in a police investigation. Investigators found the remains of Lorraine Borowski, a woman missing since 1982, after a psychic advised them to look in a cemetery near Westmont. Another psychic, after viewing photographs in connection with female victims of a serial killer found in forest preserves in the mid-1960s, was able to come up with the killer’s last name, Cook County sheriff’s police said.
Yet Guilfoyle and Swearengen tried to focus much of the praise on the hundreds of people who had joined in the search during the past week.
“Those people deserve the credit as much as we do,” Swearengen said.
“I’m not a psychic. I can’t say if we’d have found the boy or not,” Guilfoyle said. “I’d like to think we would have.”