Police explain how they solved 45-year-old North Aurora murder
Thanks to DNA testing, North Aurora police can close the case of the 1979 murder of Kathy Halle.
But they know that while it might bring some comfort to Halle’s family to know who killed her, there will be no justice. That’s because the perpetrator, Bruce Lindahl, died just two years later while committing another murder.
“This was a tough one for us,” Detective Ryan Peat said. “It (the ID) doesn’t save Kathy. It doesn’t bring any justice to Bruce.”
Halle, 19, was last seen at her apartment on March 29, 1979. She was leaving to pick up her sister from the sister’s job at a store in the Northgate Shopping Center on North Lake Street (Route 31) in Aurora. Halle also worked at the center.
Her car was found in the apartment complex’s parking lot, with a puddle of blood behind the driver’s seat.
Her body was found almost a month later in the Fox River.
Village President Mark Gaffino, a lifelong North Aurora resident, said he was the same age as Halle.
“It (her disappearance and death) was pretty scary,” he said. “North Aurora never had issues like this.”
Deputy Chief Joe Gorski read a message of thanks from the family. He also announced they had asked reporters not to question or contact them.
Why him?
Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser said Lindahl’s patterns and practices made him a suspect in Halle’s death.
In 1980, Lindahl was charged with kidnapping 25-year-old Debra Colliander from the same shopping center, taking her to his house in Aurora, raping her and photographing her. Colliander managed to escape, running naked to a neighbor’s house.
But two weeks before Lindahl’s trial in March 1981, Colliander went missing after leaving work. The charges were dismissed. Her body was found in 1982 in a farm field in Kendall County.
Lindahl died in April 1981 while stabbing a man to death in Naperville. During the struggle, Lindahl somehow stabbed himself in a femoral artery. His body was found atop the victim’s.
In 2019, Lisle police identified Lindahl as a suspect in the murder of 15-year-old Pamela Maurer, who was killed in January 1976. DNA collected from semen in her clothing was compared to DNA samples in an unspecified public genealogy database. It was linked to relatives of Lindahl’s.
Police then exhumed Lindahl’s body to get a DNA sample and directly tied it to the murder. Authorities throughout the suburbs were notified to see if any of their open murder cases might be tied to Lindahl.
North Aurora detectives had some DNA from the Halle case tested by the Illinois State Police in 2000, but nothing came of it. In 2020, the DuPage County forensics laboratory found a mixture of two people’s DNA, but the sample was too degraded to determine identity, Peat said.
Then, in 2022, Peat, attending a regional training conference, learned about another DNA analysis technique, the M-Vac System.
North Aurora Police Chief Joe DeLeo speaks during a news conference Wednesday to announce that his department and the Kane County States’s Attorney’s Office have determined that the late Bruce Lindahl, who is suspected in several other 1970s murders, i killed 19-year old Kathy Halle in March, 1979.
Joe Lewnard/Daily Herald
M-Vac sprays a sterile solution onto an item while simultaneously loosening any DNA and sucking it out. It can get DNA out of fibers below the surface of porous items such as clothing and rocks.
After receiving a grant from the nonprofit group Seasons of Justice in 2023 to help pay the $10,000 bill for testing, police had a Florida laboratory examine the evidence.
Authorities received the results in August.
If Lindahl were still alive, “We would have authorized charges,” Mosser said. “I am confident we would have finally obtained justice for Kathy.”