For days, Kathy Halle’s body lay in the Fox River, outside of Chicago, her clothing buffeted by the fast-moving current.
The young woman, described as “incredibly sweet” by family members, was last seen alive in March 1979. She left her North Aurora apartment on an errand and disappeared.
A month later, Halle’s remains were found in the Fox River. Authorities cast a wide net to find the killer, but the trail went cold.
Decades later, North Aurora Police Detective Ryan Peat attended a 2022 training seminar where experts talked about a DNA analysis technique capable of extracting obscure evidence. Peat immediately thought of Halle.
“At this point, it was the most advanced technology available to us,” he tells A&E True Crime.
A year later, Peat and a colleague gently placed Halle’s clothing in a car and headed to a Florida lab. “We didn’t want to risk shipping it overnight. If it got lost, we’re sunk,” Peat recalls.
After years of uncertainty, the untried DNA option “was definitely a leap of faith.”
‘This Is Not Like Kathy’
It was cold with lashing rain the night of March 29, 1979, when Halle, 19, threw on a white ski jacket and dashed off to pick up her sister, who worked at the nearby Northgate Shopping Center in Aurora.
“She never got to the supermarket, and she has never come home. I know Kathy and this is not like Kathy,” another sister, Michelle told the Chicago Tribune in early April 1979.
Halle’s car was initially missing from the apartment parking lot but returned later. A pool of blood had collected on a mat in the back.
“She was a very liked girl…who had a steady boyfriend, and no one can understand how this could happen to her,” North Aurora police Lt. Edward Kelley told the Tribune.
On April 24, 1979, a 12-year-old boy out fishing spied Halle’s body floating in the Fox River and alerted police.
Stalked, Raped, Murdered
Halle’s slaying was one of a number of violent crimes against young women in DuPage and Kane counties in the 1970s and early 1980s.
High school student Pamela Maurer, 16, was raped and strangled after leaving a friend’s house to buy a soda on January 13, 1976. Her body was discovered the next day on the side of a road in suburban Lisle.
Debra Colliander, 25, was kidnapped from the Northgate Shopping Center by a man named Bruce Lindahl. He forced Colliander into his Aurora home and raped her on June 23, 1980.
Miraculously, Colliander escaped when Lindahl fell asleep. Lindahl was charged but bailed out within days.
On October 7, 1980, Colliander—the key witness in Lindahl’s rape trial—vanished after finishing work at an Aurora hospital. One of her legs was found in a farm field on April 28, 1982.
But Lindahl couldn’t be questioned. He died on April 4, 1981, after piercing an artery while fatally knifing an 18-year-old boy he’d just met.
The ‘Hail Mary’ Option
Years later, advances in DNA technology prompted the Lisle Police Department to re-examine Maurer’s murder.
Using public genealogy databases, analysts linked relatives of Lindahl’s with semen found on the girl’s clothing. Police exhumed his body, and DNA testing proved Lindahl was the killer, DuPage County prosecutors announced in 2020.
On the heels of that breakthrough, North Aurora detectives reopened Halle’s case. Front of mind was whether Lindahl had been involved.
Investigators tried DNA sampling with inconclusive results until Peat learned about the M-Vac system.
The $10,000 cost was an obstacle, but police received a grant to pay for the test at Florida-based DNA Labs International.
“It was our Hail Mary,” Peat says.
A DNA ‘Vacuum’
Scientists at the laboratory, which works with multiple law enforcement agencies and the federal government, describe the M-Vac system as “a wet-dry vacuum cleaner for DNA.”
“It basically sprays out a buffer solution onto a porous item, such as clothing,” DNA Labs Director of Client Experience Cassandra Preslar tells A&E True Crime. “When the solution sprays out, it allows it to soak into the fabrics and the materials.”
The vacuum “sucks out the solution from the item. The solution then collects inside of a tube; you pour the liquid from the tube through the M-Vac filter, which is ultimately where the DNA sits. Then, we take that filter for processing, just as we would a swab,” she says.
M-Vac analysis has existed for a decade, but the time-consuming and expensive system is not the usual go-to test for labs. “The M-Vac is used on items that did not yield a result previously— where you’re seeing insufficient DNA,” Preslar explains.
A Long Shot Match
In August 2024, Peat got the confirmation he was waiting for—the DNA samples on Halle’s clothing were 9.4 trillion times more likely to have come from Lindahl than anyone else.
“It was an amazing outcome,” Peat says. “There’s no reason that we should have gotten this strong of a profile on a victim that’s 45 years old and sitting in the Fox River being washed for three weeks.”
At an October 23, 2024, news conference, Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser and North Aurora Police announced the cold case was solved.
If Lindahl was alive, “I am confident we would have secured a first-degree murder conviction,” Mosser tells A&E True Crime.
Lindahl targeted women who were alone, Mosser says. “He would be parked in these different [parking] lots, just waiting and watching, waiting for his perfect target to come up.”
“He definitely had a type, young women, brown [or] blonde hair, attractive.”
Then, “he would take them to a whole other location so that it was spreading out the crime scene, which is what a lot of serial killers do.”
Mosser met with Halle’s parents and siblings prior to the news conference. “They are a really tight-knit family and this rocked the entirety of that,” Mosser says.
For Halle’s siblings, “the greatest struggle they had is, they all got to get older and get married and have kids. But Kathy was deprived of all that, and their kids were deprived of having an aunt.”
Are There More Victims of Bruce Lindahl?
“It’s hard, there’s no justice for Kathy and nothing we can do bring her back,” Peat says.
But investigators do see a positive in that not only was Halle’s body underwater for weeks, but “back in 1979 nobody knew about DNA or how to even properly package it to preserve the DNA,” Mosser notes.
“It’s almost a miracle, [the original investigators] packaged [Halle’s clothing] in the right way that we would eventually able to extract the DNA.”
While not the answer Halle’s loved ones wanted, “at least they know what happened,” Mosser says.
Lindahl is still suspected in a number of unsolved crimes against women in northeastern Illinois.
Anyone with information about Lindahl or his victims, can contact the North Aurora Police Department at (630) 897-8705.
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