Inmate charged with murder just before he was to be released
On the day he was scheduled to leave prison after serving a five-year sentence for burglary, a suburban man found out he was charged in the stabbing death of a woman 12 years ago.
"We got him just before he was going to get out," Bedford Park police Detective A. Smuskiewicz said of 40-year-old Steven Podkulski, who was arrested Wednesday. "I don't think he knew we were coming."
State corrections department spokesman Tom Shaer said the prison system helped in the investigation and that officials had no intention of releasing him from Stateville Correctional Center on Tuesday.
Podkulski appeared Thursday in a Cook County court, where he was formally charged with first-degree murder and a judge set his bail at $3 million, according to the Cook County state's attorney's office.
Podkulski was identified as a "person of interest" in the August 2002 death of 27-year-old Jennifer Boyd, who was found stabbed to death inside a locker of a Bedford Park storage facility where she worked as a manager. There was not enough evidence to link him or anyone else to the crime, so after more than a year, the initial investigation stalled.
Smuskiewicz, who was not in the Bedford Park department in 2002, said he was asked to renew the investigation about two years ago. After re-interviewing people from the initial probe and finding new witnesses, detectives identified Podkulski as the main suspect. According to court documents, a witness told authorities she overheard Podkulski telling someone else he had stabbed Boyd.
According to the court records, One of the things the witness overheard was that Podkulski wiped the bloody knife off on Boyd's clothing - information that was consistent with evidence that wasn't released to the public that "Boyd had two apparent bloody swipe marks" on her pants.
Podkulski has a lengthy criminal record with convictions in the 1990s and 2000s for burglary and other theft-related charges. It was not immediately clear whether Podkulski was represented by an attorney at Thursday's hearing.