‘Like they forgot her’: Sleepy Hollow teen’s death was reclassified a homicide, but family still awaits justice

For 16 years, Martha Schneider and her husband went along with authorities who told them not to talk publicly about the 2009 death of their 19-year-old daughter.

But that no longer sits well with the Sleepy Hollow mother, whose daughter Anna Mary Schneider’s remains were exhumed and reexamined in 2020.

Anna’s family had long questioned the official finding that their daughter — a competitive swimmer — drowned in their backyard pool.

A breakthrough seemed to come in 2022. Then-Kane County Coroner Rob Russell — based on the findings of the exhumation and a multi-pronged investigation that involved the Kane County Cold Case Team and a national group — revised the cause and manner of Anna’s death from drowning and undetermined to chloroform and homicide, official records show.

Martha Schneider, 73, recalled Russell coming to her home in 2022 to tell her he changed the death certificate. He said that was good news in getting answers to her daughter’s mysterious death.

Yet three years later, she said, still nothing has come of it.

“It’s like they forgot about her,” Schneider said.

A revised manner of death

Martha Schneider said her daughter was a healthy, talented and popular 2008 Dundee-Crown High School graduate. She’d spent most of her life in the water and was a trophy-winning swimmer. She competed in the Junior Olympics, was captain of the girls varsity swim team and was a scuba diver, her family said.

Anna also was a basketball player, artist and “gifted vocalist” who traveled to Europe in middle school with the Elgin Children’s Chorus and sang in cathedrals.

After high school, she was selected for a Shedd Aquarium program that sent her to the Bahamas to research sharks.

She lived a lot of life in her 19 years, her family said.

But that all ended early July 4, 2009, when Schneider was home from college on summer break after completing her first year at the University of Hawaii, where she was studying music and marine biology.

Anna had been hanging out by her family’s in-ground swimming pool with a friend from Algonquin, according to Anna’s family and Sleepy Hollow police reports.

According to one report, the friend told police she and Anna had been drinking “a little” wine, though in another she said it was rum and Coke. The friend said she went into the house for five minutes, came back outside and “saw Anna floating in the water facedown,” according to friends and police reports.

When police asked the friend what happened to Anna she responded, “Your guess is as good as mine. You know as much as I do,” the report states.

In a recent interview, Martha Schneider recalled being startled awake at 4:43 a.m. by the back door slamming shut and Anna’s friend “hysterical,” screaming for help and banging on the walls. She was yelling that Anna is by the pool and won’t wake up, Martha Schneider said.

Martha and her husband, Lawrence “Larry” Schneider, ran outside. They told police they found her “half in and half out of the water on the stairs, on her stomach, with her face turned to the right, arms up,” according to the police report. Her father pulled her out of the pool, turned her on her back and began CPR, to no avail.

Anna was taken by ambulance to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elgin, where she was pronounced dead. The Algonquin woman was taken to the Sleepy Hollow Police Department for questioning, according to police reports. Police said they tried to interview her that night but “due to her being very upset, she was not making any sense.” Her parents took her home, and she later returned with them and an attorney, police reports show.

The 2009 autopsy report stated Anna had bruises on her chin, the left side of her nose, on her chest and in other places. “There was an odor of alcohol in the stomach content,” according to the report.

The autopsy report makes no mention of water in Anna Schneider’s lungs but it says there “was water in the sinus cavity which would appear she died by drowning.” There were no drugs in her system.

‘Our beautiful mermaid’

In the days that followed Anna’s funeral, the house was filled with tears, silence, confusion and questions, Martha Schneider said.

“There was no TV, no music, no noise. It was just total silence and we just walked around like zombies,” she said. “I would just shake in bed, Larry was just quiet. I would read the Bible.”

The family believes police “dropped the ball” and “wanted the case to go away.” Attempts to locate police who investigated Anna’s death in 2009 were unsuccessful.

The Schneider family said they never believed Anna, who Martha called “our beautiful mermaid,” had drowned.

Over the years, the Schneiders tried their own investigation. They hired a poison expert and a private investigator, but nothing came of it because, Martha Schneider said, police would not cooperate and made them fearful and were “mad about” the family’s efforts.

The Schneiders said they wanted to alert the media that they would offer a reward for information about their daughter’s death. The family said police discouraged that, saying it would hurt the investigation.

In 2015, the Schneiders contacted Russell and said they wanted the coroner’s new cold case team to investigate their daughter’s death. He obliged, which led to the exhumation, a second autopsy and the change in the death certificate.

After the cause and manner of death were changed, the case was handed over to the Kane County Major Crimes Task Force. The task force presented its findings to the Kane County state’s attorney’s office, according to Russell.

But nothing has become of it since, the family says.

Nicholas Jenz, public information officer for Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser, confirmed the task force presented findings.

“After reviewing all of the evidence and findings, our office did not file any charges,” Jenz said in an email. Prosecutors “determined that the evidence was insufficient to bring charges and obtain and sustain a conviction.”

Sleepy Hollow Police Chief Sam Parma said “nothing actionable came to light and to date nothing has changed.”

Martha Schneider, who has not changed her daughter’s bedroom since she died, said she decided it was time to share her story publicly.

She said she “got tired of not hearing anything” from law enforcement. She believes her daughter’s case was passed on from one agency to another and nobody wanted to deal with it.

“If you know something, say something,” she said.