1957
The area was called the Tri Village along with Bartlett and Hanover Park and was first incorporated in 1957.
about 0:06:43The story
Stacy Ann Russell was born on 4 February 1970 and grew up in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Her life was unsettled from the start. At fifteen she and her friend Susan Blanchard stole a car and drove to St Louis to see the Arch, and after a fight over a boy she disappeared for three days. At twenty she gave custody of her young son, Daniel, to her mother because she did not feel able to raise him, which her friend later called the most mature thing she could have done. By January 1995 she had been married for ten months to Jeff Frobel, worked off and on as a gas station clerk and waitress, and was seeing another man.
She called her husband and her boyfriend; her boyfriend's mother said he was asleep and would not wake him. At 12.45 a.m. on 4 January she left alone in her white 1984 Renault Encore. Jeff did not report her missing until later that day, saying she often stayed out all night, and the police were suspicious of him from the start. Her car was found on 10 February in the parking lot of the Glendale Terrace apartments in Hanover Park, about a mile from a girlfriend's home, with her keys and purse gone.
On 16 January a German shepherd called Friendly came home carrying a two-foot section of a human leg. It had been freshly severed with a very sharp instrument, more likely a machine than a handsaw. On 21 January Friendly came home with the right leg, cut from the ankle to the middle of the thigh. On 23 January the legs went to a lab and were found to be a woman's. On 28 January investigators said they believed the remains were those of twenty-one-year-old Mena Melanie Hostetler of Valparaiso, Indiana, who had been missing for about three weeks. On 3 March the owner of a 30-acre wooded property across the street, worried that the publicity was keeping tenants away, brought in a handler named K Watt of Springfield and her golden retriever Hawthorne. Two hours into the search Hawthorne found a human skull in dense underbrush near a swampy area. The skull was not Hostetler's. On 25 March a man doing yard work in the 8700 block of 184th Street in Bristol, Wisconsin, five miles north of the Illinois border, found a human hand, wrist down. About a month later, 400 feet away, he found a foot. On 21 April another foot was found by a canoe in a field in Kenosha. No torso was ever found. DNA from the legs, matched against samples from her mother and from her father Willard Russell, an electrician living in Nashville who had not seen her since infancy, identified her.
Suspicion fell first on Jeff Frobel and on her boyfriend, who worked maintenance at a meat packing plant. Both passed three polygraph tests and had credible alibis. The FBI took over and began rebuilding her life and checking everyone she had known. His mother died when he was seventeen. In 1987, while his father and brother were out of town, he lured a fourteen-year-old schoolmate to his home on the pretext of helping a girl get marijuana, hit her over the head, handcuffed her, taped her eyes and mouth, held a knife to her throat and raped and bit her repeatedly over hours, cutting her hair and the inside of her arms. She escaped with a kitchen chair and a neighbour saw her in the street.
He stayed free. By May 1997 he was still not in custody.
DNA then linked him to two murders in Chicago: Yolanda Gutierrez and her ten-year-old daughter Jessica Munez, found dead on a burned bed in their apartment on 3 February 1997. Yolanda had been advertising a Hooked on Phonics programme for sale, and he had gone to the apartment about it. His account was that Charlene suggested a threesome with Stacy, that Stacy came to their townhouse in January 1995 and got drunk, that Charlene grew jealous and told him to kill her, and that while Stacy slept he struck her on the head as hard as he could with a barbell. He then had sex with her body and handcuffed her, and afterwards had sex with Charlene. The next day he dismembered Stacy in the bathtub with a power saw, and he and Charlene borrowed their roommate Dina Bartaloni's car and drove toward Wisconsin, scattering the parts. Bones showed cutting marks, the skull showed an injury consistent with a barbell, and carpet from the bedroom contained Stacy's blood. Dina said Charlene had been expecting Stacy on 3 January and that the couple borrowed her car the next day and used more than half a tank of petrol.
In 2011 Illinois abolished the death penalty. He is held at Pontiac Correctional Center.
Daniel, then eleven, had known from the beginning that his mother had been murdered. In January 2008, aged seventeen, he posted on a crime blog that he wanted to know the truth and that he believed Jeff, his mother's husband, had something to do with it.