Naperville police chief recalls finding killer's body atop stabbing victim's
Finding a dead man lying on top of another dead man in a Naperville apartment in 1981 was strange enough for then-patrol officer Robert Marshall.
But all these years later it became even stranger as Marshall, now Naperville's police chief, and others learned of its connection to a decades-old cold-case murder.
Bruce Lindahl was the dead man found atop 18-year-old Charles Huber, whom he had stabbed to death near the sliding glass door of a Naperville apartment on Ogden Avenue, Marshall said. Since Lindahl accidentally fatally stabbed himself in the attack, and there was no one to charge, that was it - for years.
That all changed when investigators, using DNA technology that wasn't available at the time of the original crimes, linked Lindahl with the 1976 strangulation of 16-year-old Pamela Maurer of Woodridge.
Now Lindahl also is suspected in the disappearance of a Downers Grove teen, the disappearance and death of an Aurora woman, and the rapes of other women.
Authorities are asking people associated with other possible victims to contact the DuPage County state's attorney's office or Lisle police.
As he stood at a news conference Monday as authorities explained the connection between these cases and Lindahl, Marshall reflected on the 1981 investigation.
Although it was tragic for the man killed in that case, the stabbing stopped Lindahl from victimizing more people, Marshall said.
"Being one of the first officers on the scene and then hearing about all these other things that he was doing in the 1970s is obviously disturbing," Marshall said. "My take-away is justice can be delivered in many different ways."
Marshall said he remembers being called along with a couple of other officers and a sergeant to the apartment where a woman later identified as Lindahl's girlfriend had found the two bodies.
"It was a very perplexing crime scene," Marshall said.
Investigators initially thought they had a double-homicide on their hands and a killer on the loose, Marshall said.
A coroner's report told them otherwise.
"We determined through the autopsy that Lindahl had, in his rage of stabbing Mr. Huber, accidentally severed his own femoral artery and had bled to death, laying basically right on top of Mr. Huber," Marshall said.
Police determined Lindahl and Huber had met at a nearby bowling alley, then called Gala Lanes, on Aurora Avenue in Naperville. But they never figured out exactly what brought Huber to Lindahl's girlfriend's apartment on the day he was killed.
Until recently, authorities said, no one knew Lindahl also was responsible for killing Maurer.
"We in law enforcement, we're relentless," Marshall said. "We never give up on these cases if they're unresolved."