Starved Rock: A Fresh Look at My Hometown’s Familiar and Infamous Murder Story
When you’re born and raised in a place, you take things for granted. Even the unthinkable. For me, it was a gruesome triple homicide that happened sixteen years before I was born. The reality of the brutality never concerned me. It had happened in a time when photos were black and white and my parents were still in grade school. In other words, fairly ancient local history.
Three women were murdered and a local man named Chester Weger was in prison for the crime. End of story, as far as I was concerned. I never became interested in the specifics, never questioned the boilerplate narrative. It simply had not occurred to me to be overly curious about this particular piece of local history. Even when I occasionally heard people express their firm belief that Weger did not do it, I was not curious. After all, everyone’s entitled to their conspiracy theories and alternative opinions.
The tragedy was simply known as The Starved Rock Murders, the emphasis being on the location of the crime rather than the victims, who were middle-aged women from the Chicago suburbs. I gave them little thought, never even learned their names. The crime seemed to matter mostly because of the notoriety it brought to our community, known as the Illinois Valley.
Illinois’ Starved Rock State Park is gorgeous and it attracts visitors from Chicago and beyond. But for locals like myself, Starved Rock was so familiar and accessible that it was normal to take a short hike on the marked trails or a stroll through the Lodge on a whim.
For two summers when I was in college, I worked at Starved Rock Lodge. I was a shy, clumsy waitress who once spilled a tray of beers on a group of customers. I worked not in the formal dining room with the linen napkins but on the casual outdoor veranda, where burgers were served on paper plates and there was usually live music. The customers were a mix of local people and tourists. Despite my social awkwardness, I found the job exciting.
Tourists were part of the deal. Being a local, I had a sense that the visitors did not appreciate the park in the same way locals did. But that’s true anywhere there’s tourism, and it’s not a bad thing, just a matter of different perspectives. Meeting people from far and wide was interesting, and I felt proud that so many people wanted to experience what our beautiful little area had to offer.
As I bustled in and out of the kitchen on Saturday nights, I doubt I thought about Chester Weger working in that same kitchen thirty-some years before. I must have known that he had worked there. I had to have. But that’s the thing with living someplace your entire life: you don’t consider what you know or don’t know or what is even significant. You don’t remember learning some things. They’re just part of your mental library. I was working somewhere Chester Weger had once worked. Not important.
Did I consider the fact that at the time of Chester’s employment there, he was the same age I was when I worked there all those years later? Probably not, because at that age, it’s hard to comprehend anyone older than yourself — especially someone dubbed the Starved Rock Killer — ever being young.
I never gave much thought to those three murdered women, either. Had they had some connection to the area or to anyone I knew, I might have, but they were from the suburbs, which was slightly foreign territory to me back then, when I was still a small town girl from the Illinois Valley.
I moved away when I was twenty-three. I am now a middle-aged woman with a comfortable, suburban life in another state. And only recently, with the Starved Rock Murders back in the spotlight, have I considered those women and taken time to know their names: Lillian Oetting, Mildred Lindquist, and Frances Murphy. In midlife, I finally consider what I may now have in common with those women.
As new evidence comes to light and the case is once again in the news, I have developed a fascination with the case that I never had as a twenty-one-year old waitress at Starved Rock Lodge.
I finally know enough to realize it’s unlikely that Chester Weger had anything to do with the crime. I now believe it possible that one of the victims’ husbands was responsible. I know that such a statement is loaded, defamatory, and potentially slanderous. But at this point, in the summer of 2022, with everything we now know, I think it’s even more slanderous to insist Chester Weger killed those women. Chester Weger was probably an easy scapegoat, coerced by law enforcement into confessing.
If an affluent, respected suburban man decided that the best way to rid himself of an unwanted wife was to pay someone to kill her, he is responsible for so much more than the deaths of his wife and her friends. He used Starved Rock State Park for bloodshed. Less than 100 miles from his home but socially a world away. And when a working-class man from the Illinois Valley paid the price, the white-collar man from the suburbs didn’t bat an eye.
Chester Weger was not even in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in his normal place, living his normal life at that point in time, when circumstances far removed from him and his life suddenly got dumped on his young shoulders.
It’s sickening to think of someone ordering up a murder from the suburbs, disregarding the effect his selfish choice would have on a community not so far away. Sad, the thought of a disgruntled husband using Starved Rock for his selfish crime. Starved Rock and the Illinois Valley have been tied to this story for decades, and the person who set the whole thing in motion probably got away with it.
If a man from Riverside was responsible, his living family members will not want it to be so, and I sympathize. It would be a nightmare to learn that your grandfather had your grandmother murdered. Devastating. Nobody wants to believe such a thing. But the Weger family has also been devastated.
What matters is the truth. A man likely got away with murder, and I hope the truth comes out soon.
