The ripple effects of Barbara Glueckert’s disappearance remain unabated by time
Editors’s Note: This article originally published Aug. 17, 2006.
Why am I writing this?
The teenage girl from Mount Prospect has most likely been murdered and secretly buried for 30 years.
Her suspected killer died two years ago.
The original investigators on the case have retired, expired or been rehired for other jobs.
Here we have a probable, yet unproven crime that, even if it could be solved, can’t convict its perpetrator. During three decades of on-again, off-again investigations, the clues can be charitably described as arctic cold.
Each time the case makes the media, it reopens old wounds and inflicts new pain on family members and friends.
So, why am I writing this?
Because every story demands an ending. Every mystery wants a solution.
For 30 years, the search for Barbara Glueckert has been a mystery without a solution.
This is her story. It has no ending.
Not yet.
“I’ll be home by 11:30.”
That was the last sentence Barbara Glueckert ever said to her parents.
Barbara, 14, lived at 610 Russell St. in Mount Prospect. On Aug. 21, 1976, she and a friend went to a rock concert held on a farm in rural Huntley.
Her friend returned home. Barbara did not.
Police had few clues, except reports that a 21-year-old man gave her a ride to the concert in a Buick Electra. Barbara’s disappearance launched an intense search on a scale unprecedented in the Northwest suburbs at that time.
Police interviewed hundreds of people, 50 scuba divers from nine suburban fire departments combed lakes and rock quarries for her body and 65 members of a Green Beret unit stationed in Arlington Heights searched on land for signs of a grave.
Mount Prospect police enlisted helicopters, thermograph machines (capable of detecting heat from buried bodies), grand juries, bloodhounds and even clairvoyants.
They couldn’t find Barbara.
The disappearance triggered a media circus with television crews and reporters climbing over each other to interview anyone connected to the case.
I know. I was one of them.
At 23, I covered the crime beat for the not-yet-daily Herald. Five days after the disappearance, Mount Prospect Police Chief Ralph Doney asked me to his office to give me information on the missing teen, making me the first reporter to cover the Glueckert case.
During the following months, I became a shadow attached to the detectives. I got to know them well: Patrick Hallihan. Jack Gniot. Bob Gibson. Bob Barone. Ray Rhode. Dick Pascoe.
These men put in grueling hours, hunting down the flimsiest of leads. It took a toll on them all, physically and emotionally.
Every night, the detectives would lock the door to their office and pore over the day’s clues in sessions that stretched into morning. I would wedge myself in the doorjamb and fall asleep with my head resting on the door. That way, if they tried to leave, I’d be awakened and I’d ask questions.
In December 1976, police got a break when they secured a rambling, 35-page letter written by Thomas Urlacher, a 24-year-old Algonquin resident and the prime suspect in Barbara’s disappearance. Urlacher already had a record of assaulting young women, most of whom never pressed charges.
“I put that girl in the ground,” Urlacher wrote in the letter, which suggested that he had sexually assaulted and killed Barbara. “Now I am going to go to jail for murder,” Urlacher added.
Later that month, Gniot flew to San Francisco to retrieve Urlacher after Mount Prospect police had issued a warrant for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Prosecutors surprised everyone on March 16, 1977, when they dropped the charge and freed Urlacher. They planned to issue a murder warrant once police recovered Barbara’s body.
That warrant never came.
For 27 years, Urlacher avoided any legal repercussions connected with the disappearance. Then, in April 2004, drug dealers gunned down Urlacher in Pueblo, Colo.
Some might call this justice and consider the case closed.
But what about Barbara? What about her family? They remained in limbo.
As the years passed, the original investigators began to fall out. Hallihan retired. Barone took a chief’s job in Florida. Gniot suffered a heart attack and retired. Rhode joined the Arlington Heights Police Department. Gibson died of cancer. Pascoe committed suicide with his own handgun.
I traded real violence and death on the crime beat for fake violence and death as the Daily Herald film critic in 1978. Still, as each Aug. 21 anniversary came and went, I thought about Barbara and her family.
I kept up with the case, periodically asking for updates from the detectives. A few years ago, I interviewed the late Bob Gibson, hoping that a never-realized documentary might flush out new leads.
To this day, I am afflicted with a gnawing sense of a job unfinished, an injustice still yearning to be righted.
Outside of the original detectives, I thought I was the only one who felt this way.
I was wrong.
One week after Mike Nelson became a detective for the Mount Prospect Police Department in January 2005, he sat down with watch commander Bob Rzepecki to talk about his caseload. The Barbara Glueckert disappearance came up. A lot.
Rzepecki told Nelson: “The file is in here. If you want to take a crack at it, it’s yours.”
Nelson took the case. He didn’t care how cold it was. He immersed himself in the history and minutia of the investigation and visited the Huntley farm site where people last saw Barbara. He checked out old wells in South Elgin and looked anywhere he felt a desperate rapist might be able to quickly stash a body.
He used bloodhounds, archaeologists and excavators to hunt for a body wherever evidence suggested one might be.
“It’s just like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Nelson said, “except we don’t even know where the haystack is. Find me a haystack. I’m there.”
As I spoke to Nelson in his office, a sense of deja vu seized me. It was as if I were talking to the original detectives. Nelson evoked the same unrelenting dedication, eternal optimism and bulldog stubbornness. Where did this come from?
O. Henry himself could have written this part of the story.
It turns out that Nelson spent part of his childhood growing up on the 400 block of Russell Street - two blocks from the Glueckert home. He attended St. Raymond’s with Barbara. He saw her on Aug. 19, two days before she disappeared.
“When you’re familiar with the people in the case, the victim, her friends and all the other people involved, it makes a big difference,” Nelson said.
Nelson is now 44, a father of a son and a 17-year veteran of the Mount Prospect police. He works on many cases, but he’s compelled to keep searching for Barbara.
How compelled? Ask his wife, Kathryn.
“Last summer, for the entire summer, we ate, slept and breathed the whole Barbara Glueckert case,” she said. “I know in police work, you’re not supposed to become personally involved. But how could you not, given what happened?”
Her husband admits he thinks about the case constantly.
“I can’t let it go,” Nelson said. “Not even for a while. Pat warned me about that.”
And if anyone should know, Pat would.
“Every time August comes around, it’s hard not to remember,” Pat Hallihan said.
Sgt. Patrick Hallihan headed up the detective division - and the search for Barbara Glueckert - until he retired from the MPPD in 1990. He’s now 71.
“Was there something I didn’t do I should have? Something I did I shouldn’t have? I ask myself that all the time,” Hallihan said. “Was there anything I could have done that would have made a difference? I really can’t think of anything. I really can’t.”
Hallihan took the Glueckert disappearance personally. His laid-back personality changed. He became focused. Serious. Driven. Nearly morose.
“It takes a toll on you, especially your family,” Hallihan said.
In 1976, Hallihan’s daughter had just turned 14. The same age as Barbara.
“Having a daughter the same age, I can honestly say that it drove me a little harder,” Hallihan said.
A little harder?
“OK. A lot harder. You don’t like to see anything like that. I never wanted to be on any case like that again.”
Barbara’s parents, Robert and Gail, now live in a retirement community. Her father is 80 and fighting colon cancer. Her mother is 69 and fighting ovarian cancer. I opted not to contact them for this story.
For three decades, Robert Glueckert has served as the family spokesman on all matters involving his missing daughter. Now, that responsibility has fallen to Barbara’s brother, Bob, a real estate agent and a man of sincere spirit.
“We have been overwhelmed by the number of people who expressed their concern and shared our pain when reports come out about Barbara’s disappearance,” he said. “It’s like they’re reminded of it, and they want to help.”
There are positive things that have happened as a result of publicizing his sister’s case, Bob said.
“Other victims of this man have had the courage to come forward and talk. One woman called up and told Mike about her encounter with this man (Urlacher). There are many hurting people out there who’ve kept their encounters with this man secret, kept horrible experiences deep inside of them for years. For the first time, they can release all that.”
Nelson is preparing another search of the locations he believes are the likeliest places Urlacher could have left Barbara, given the timeframe, testimony and some guesses into the presumed killer’s personality.
But why does a police department fund an investigation where there can be no conviction?
“The case isn’t truly finished until we find Barbara,” Nelson said. “You’d expect nothing less from a public servant. The parents deserve some closure. And, when you come right down to it, it’s the right thing to do.”
Hallihan echoed these sentiments, strongly.
“For the peace of mind of her parents, you gotta keep looking and you gotta find her, just so they can give their daughter a Christian burial.”
What do the Glueckerts want?
“Resolution for all those people - police and friends and family - who’ve carried a lifetime of baggage associated with this case,” Bob Glueckert said. “As a family, we’d like to see resolution on this - while my parents are still here.”
And what do I, the former crime reporter, want?
The same thing as Nelson, Hallihan and the Glueckerts.
Because every story demands an ending. Every mystery wants a solution.
A suffering family needs peace.
And a girl named Barbara deserves a final resting place.
Glueckert at a glance
Aug. 21, 1976: Barbara Glueckert, 14, and a friend go to a rock concert on a farm site in Huntley. Barbara never returns home.
Aug. 22, 1976: A mystery man calling himself Tom Edwards telephones the Glueckert house and says hell come by and explain the situation. He doesnt.
Dec. 20, 1976: Prime suspect Thomas Urlacher writes a letter in which he confesses I put that girl in the ground.
Dec. 29, 1976: Urlacher arrives at Mount Prospect police station after being extradited from San Francisco, where police arrest him on a Mount Prospect warrant for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
March 16, 1977: A judge frees Urlacher after prosecutors drop contributing charges and prepare to file murder charges once a body has been recovered. That doesnt happen.
April 2004: Drug dealers shoot Urlacher to death when they decide to rob him of $12,000 hes carrying to buy narcotics.
April 21, 2005: Authorities dispel hopes that bones found buried in Elgin belong to Glueckert. Officials determine they come from a small animal.
If you know any information regarding the Barbara Glueckert investigation, contact Detective Mike Nelson at (847) 870-5649.