Serial killer whose victims included 2 McHenry County women is denied parole

The Illinois Prisoner Review Board has denied parole for a serial killer linked to at least 12 murders of young women and teens, including three in the suburbs, authorities announced Wednesday.

The decision means Mark Alan Smith, 75, will continue serving the 500-year sentence handed to him in 1971, after he was convicted of killing two women in McHenry County and a third in Des Plaines.

Under state law as it existed at the time, Smith became eligible for parole after serving the first 20 years of his sentence. As a result, every three to five years he appears before the prisoner review board making his case for early release – and his victims’ families and prosecutors appear to oppose it.

The latest rejection is the 16th time Smith has been denied parole, officials said.

Smith pleaded guilty to the killings of Jean Waldron Bianchi and Jean Ann Lingenfelter in McHenry County in 1971.

Bianchi, a 27-year-old mother of two, was kidnapped from a McHenry laundromat on Jan. 27, 1970, sexually assaulted, stabbed at least 17 times then left to drown under a bridge south of the city.

On May 27, 1970, Smith abducted 17-year-old McHenry High School student Lingenfelter, raped and strangled her and dumped her body in McCullom Lake.

Smith later confessed to raping and killing Janice Bolyard, a 23-year-old co-worker at a Des Plaines-area research facility, in February 1970.

He also was convicted of killing a 20-year-old woman in Mountain Home, Arkansas, in 1969 and told authorities he killed eight young women in Germany while stationed there with the U.S. Army in the 1960s. German authorities never prosecuted him for those murders.

According to Illinois Department of Corrections records, Smith’s projected parole date – without intervention from the prisoner review board – is Feb. 20, 2218. He will be able to seek parole again in 2029.

https://www.dailyherald.com/20240904/crime/state-panel-denies-parole-for-suburban-serial-killer/