Victim’s son has no sympathy for ‘monster’

Wayne Wallar dreaded Oct. 11, 2012.

On that day, the man convicted of his father’s 1982 murder was due for parole. Wallar said he worried that the pain Michael Whitney inflicted on him and his four sisters would be inflicted on someone else.

But that appears unlikely with new charges filed against Whitney on Tuesday in the 1976 murder of Wheaton native Darlene Stack.

Authorities charged Tuesday that Whitney, who lived in the same boardinghouse as Stack, sexually assaulted the 28-year-old in her upstairs room and then stabbed her 33 times in the chest.

Whitney had been serving a 60-year sentence for the murder of 76-year-old Cecil Wallar after breaking into the Carol Stream home of Wallar and his wife, Elizabeth.

Wayne Wallar said seeing Whitney, now 58, in a courtroom rekindled old feelings.

“He’s a monster, an animal,” Wallar said. “How could you do something like that?”

However, he praised the police work that, if it leads to a conviction, likely would mean a life behind bars for Whitney.

“It was a big sigh of relief,” Wallar said after the announcement by DuPage County prosecutors and Wheaton police. “I was not looking forward to when he was getting out of jail.”

Several members of Stack’s family, as well as her then-fiance’s family, were on hand for the announcement. “I want to thank them for bringing what we hope is the end of this, and it makes it very easy now to put some closure,” Stack family spokesman Mark Douglass said in a brief statement.

Wallar said as soon as he heard about the new charges, he started reliving the trial and the night of the murder.

He said once Whitney broke into the home, he saw Wallar’s mother, Elizabeth.

“He told my mom, ‘I am not gonna hurt you because you look too much like my grandmother,’” Wallar said.

Whitney did, however, fatally stab Cecil Wallar in the chest.

Two years after the murder, Wallar’s mother died — but not without testifying against Whitney.

Wallar said seeing the “cocky” and “arrogant” Whitney in the courtroom took him back more than two decades.

“It renewed a lot of old feelings; the agony we went through at his trial,” he said. “The fact that he was so coldblooded.”