Will County cold case investigators value each case as if it were someone ‘we know or love’

One of the challenges facing Will County Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Mike Earnest when solving a cold case is the age of an unidentified person when they died or went missing.

If that person was in their 40s in the 1970s or 1980s, they would be in their 80s or 90s today. The question for Earnest is whether he can still find anyone in that person’s life – such as a friend or family – who could still help identify them.

“That’s what’s the hardest part,” Earnest said.

Nevertheless, even the coldest cases are important for Earnest and the investigators he works with at both the sheriff’s office and Will County Coroner Laurie Summers’ Office.

“We try to value each case as if it was someone that we know or love,” Earnest said.

Earnest works his own team, along with two investigators, for the cold case unit at Summers’ office to uncover the identities of unknown people who’ve been killed, mysteriously died or who went missing several decades ago, or even a few years ago.

Joe Piper, a retired Lockport police detective, and Gene Sullivan, a retired Romeoville police detective, both work for the cold case unit at Summers’ office.

Together, they have been able to solve the identities of bodies dating back to the early 1970s. The oldest one they’ve solved is Donald Rozek, whose skeletal remains were found in November 1974. Rozek’s body was identified last year.

The cold case unit at both the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices will collaborate on cases, especially since many of those cases involve a body found in the jurisdiction of Will County.

“We work really well together giving information back and forth,” Piper said.

Piper said the real “game changer” for solving those cases has been Othram, a company that uses advanced forensic DNA testing and other technology to solve cold cases.

Piper said they can send Othram a portion of bone, they’ll check it against DNA databases and come up with possible relatives that he and his colleagues can interview.

He said they can also ask relatives’ permission to get a copy of any DNA they’ve submitted to online databases such as 23andMe or Ancestry.com and send that to Othram for analysis.

“We had a case – the way they explained it to me – [where] there is a [family] tree with five branches. After we gave that guy’s DNA, there was one. It took all the branches away for one, so we knew we were getting closer and closer by elimination,” Piper said.

One case solved by investigators was the badly decomposed remains of Reynaldo Balleza-Banda, who was believed to be a local farm hand or rodeo worker. In 2019, his body was found in shed in Washington Township in the county.

In order to recreate his facial features, the coroner’s office enlisted the help of Community Service Officer Beth Buchholtz from the Longmont County Department of Public Safety in Colorado.

In the seven cold cases solved since 2019, four of them were solved with assistance from Othram.

The latest case involving Othram – and the one Piper considered the most high profile yet – was Webster Fisher.

Fisher’s body was found inside of a sealed crate in 1980. The coroner’s office cold case unit was able to identify his remains this month.

The case is considered a homicide since Fisher was shot multiple times and sealed in the crate that floated down the Chicago Reclamation Canal and ended up at a Lockport dam.

The case poses a tricky challenge for the sheriff’s office since Fisher has no apparent connections with Lockport or Will County.

“Everything indicates he was from Chicago. His life is there, not here,” Earnest said. “He just ended up here. Probably wasn’t even killed here.”

Piper said it was important to identify Fisher’s body.

“He was somebody’s brother, somebody’s dad, somebody’s nephew. He’s a person,” Piper said.