Joyous reunion in South Elgin also a reminder of suburban teens who remain missing

“Kayla Unbehaun Found Safe!” the home page of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children declared this week, announcing that the South Elgin girl who went missing six years ago had been found.

While Kayla's father is rejoicing in her return, their long-awaited reunion is a reminder that many other suburban families are grappling with the pain of not knowing what happened to their loved ones.

That includes the father of Timmothy Pitzen.

Timmothy was 6 on May 12, 2011, when his mother pulled him out of his kindergarten class at Greenman Elementary School in Aurora. She took him to Brookfield Zoo, a water park in Gurnee and another in the Wisconsin Dells, which is where he was last confirmed seen.

Two days later, she checked in to a hotel in Rockford. A maid found her body the next day, accompanied by a note that Timmothy was safe and with people that loved him.

“You'll never find him,” she wrote.

Authorities thought they had in April 2019, when a young man found wandering the streets in a town outside Cincinnati claimed to be Timmothy. A DNA test, however, would prove that a lie, and the man later admitted to concocting the story after seeing media coverage about Timmothy's disappearance.

Barbara Glueckert

Barbara, 14, of Mount Prospect, went missing after she and a friend attended a rock concert on a farm field near Huntley on Aug. 21, 1976.

The two friends split up at the concert and never reconnected.

Police later identified a man who was with Barbara that day as Thomas Urlacher of Algonquin, who had a history of sexually assaulting girls, and called him a suspect in Glueckert's disappearance.

Urlacher left Illinois, but later that year he penned a 33-page letter in which he wrote, “I put that girl in the ground. ... Now I am going to go to jail for murder.”

The letter was turned over to police and Urlacher was arrested on a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The case was dropped, however, and Urlacher never was charged in Barbara's disappearance.

He was killed several years later in a drug deal gone bad in Colorado.

Michael Mansfield

Mansfield, then a 19-year-old college student, left his Rolling Meadows home to hang out with a friend in Arlington Heights on New Year's Eve 1975. He was never heard from again.

The disappearance has long haunted Mansfield's family and investigators, who are certain they know who is responsible but have not recovered the teen's body or seen him get justice in court.

At the time he vanished, Mansfield was preparing to testify against his former college roommate, a man named Russell Smrekar who had been accused of stealing record albums from another student's dorm room.

Smrekar was convicted of killing another man and his pregnant wife a year later in downstate Lincoln, where he and Mansfield attended college. The man was scheduled to testify against Smrekar in a separate theft case.

In 2011, authorities say, Smrekar gave a deathbed confession to killing Mansfield. And while investigators and Mansfield's family believed him, the teen's final resting place remains a mystery. As recently as 2017, police searched a property near Joliet - Smrekar's hometown - for his remains, but they came up empty.

Kianna Galvin

As with Mansfield, police and family members believe they know what happened to Kianna Galvin, a 17-year-old who went missing from her home in South Elgin in May 2016.

Kianna told her sister she was going to a park on the day she vanished but instead arranged to meet a neighbor to buy marijuana, according to police.

Blood matching hers was found on a neighbor's trash can, but police have made no arrests and Kianna's whereabouts remain unknown.

Deborah McCall

The 16-year-old Downers Grove girl vanished in November 1979 after leaving Downers Grove North High School, and authorities believe she may have fallen prey to suspected serial killer Bruce Lindahl.

Lindahl, who's been linked to at least three other killings, died in 1981 when he accidentally stabbed himself while killing another man in Naperville.

Police later found photos of several women and girls in his apartment, including photos of Deborah.

However, Deborah's body has never been found and police have not conclusively tied her disappearance to Lindahl.

Lee Cutler

Cutler, an 18-year-old senior at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, spent the night of Oct. 19, 2007, with buddies at a friend's house, then got up the next morning and drove one of his pals home. After he failed to show up at his job later in the day, his mom reported him missing.

Two days later, police in Sauk County, Wisconsin, found the Buffalo Grove teen's car parked along Highway 33, a few hundred yards from the Baraboo River. Several personal items - a favorite yarmulke, a book, a backpack and letters to his family among them - were found in the river or on its banks.

But despite searches by divers, an airplane crew, police dogs and even heat-sensing detectors, there's been no sign of Cutler.

His disappearance has been featured on TV shows and police have entered his DNA into a national database, but so far his disappearance remains a mystery.

A profile remains active on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website, where Cutler's likeness has been modified to show what he might look like as he's aged. Anyone with information is asked to call the national center at (800) 843-5678 or the Buffalo Grove Police Department at (847) 459-2560.

Conviction gets lawyer censured

A suburban lawyer found guilty of a battery charge alleging he groped a female client has avoided a suspension of his law license; instead he was formally censured this week by the Illinois Supreme Court.

Kevin Patrick Wendorf, whose case we first wrote about back in October 2018, was convicted of one count of misdemeanor battery after a bench trial in September. DuPage County Judge Robert A. Miller cleared Wendorf on four other battery counts stemming from the same incident and later sentenced him to a year of court supervision.

The charges were filed after a female client told police Wendorf accosted her when she went to his Glen Ellyn office in May 2017 to discuss his work for her on a criminal matter.

Wendorf, 61 and an attorney in Illinois since 2005, reached an agreement on the censure with the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. In documents laying out the deal, commission Administrator Jerome Larkin wrote that Wendorf has no prior discipline, expressed remorse for his misconduct and accepted responsibility for his conviction.

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