Citing “misleading” and “false” evidence, the DeKalb County, Ill., prosecutor said today that a 76-year-old man was wrongly convicted in 2012 of killing a 7-year-old girl in Sycamore, Ill., nearly 60 years ago, a murder that was believed to be one of the oldest cold cases to go to trial in the country.

State’s Attorney Richard Schmack said “newly discovered evidence” shows there is no way Jack D. McCullough could have been in Sycamore when Maria Ridulph disappeared on Dec. 3, 1957. He said his office will not oppose a defense motion to dismiss the conviction.

“I know that there are people who will never believe that he is not responsible for the crime,” said Schmack, who was not the state’s attorney when the trial was held. “Many of these people are my neighbors in Sycamore. But I cannot allow that to sway me from my sworn duty.”

The victim’s brother, Charles Ridulph, said he disagreed with the prosecutor’s conclusion that McCullough could not have been at the scene of the kidnapping. Schmack “ignored everything,” Ridulph said, though he noted he was not surprised by Friday’s announcement.

“We’ve met with him two times in the last six months and they have not been good meetings,” he said. “He’s been working with the defense attorney almost from the start and he’s made no qualms about it.”

McCullough is due to appear in DeKalb County court on Tuesday, when Public Defender Tom McCulloch said he will file a motion to dismiss the case. Schmack’s motion asks the judge to set aside the conviction, though it remains unclear when McCullough could go free.

“I’m absolutely pleased about it,” McCulloch said Friday. “We finally got someone to take a look at it who understood some of the geography. It’s an interesting, welcome conclusion.”

Schmack said a review ordered by the judge in the case found several problems with the conviction:

— “Recently subpoenaed” phone records show McCullough called his parents collect from a pay phone at the Rockford post office at 6:57 p.m. on Dec. 3, around the time Maria disappeared in Sycamore, nearly 50 miles away.

— Maria’s friend identified McCullough as the abductor from a photo array that was “suggestive in the extreme.” McCullough’s photo was shown alongside “professional yearbook photos” of “young men wearing suit coats.”

— McCullough’s sister testified during the trial that she saw people searching for Maria an hour before the girl was reported missing.

— “Thousands of pages” of police reports excluded from the trial “contain a wealth of information pointing to McCullough’s innocence, and absolutely nothing showing guilt.”

Maria’s body was found in northwestern Illinois several months after she disappeared. There were no charges until 2011 when police arrested McCullough, a Seattle-area resident at the time who, as a teenager in the 1950s, lived with his family near the spot where Maria was last seen alive.

McCullough was found guilty in 2012 of murder and kidnapping in a bench trial in DeKalb County and was sentenced to natural life in prison.

In documents filed in the case, Schmack noted that “all reliable evidence” showed that Maria disappeared from Sycamore between 6:45 and 6:55 p.m. on Dec. 3, 1957. McCullough’s sister, Katherine Tessier Caulfied, testified she saw police searching for Maria at 7 p.m. that day.

But sheriff department documents, as well as FBI interviews with Maria’s mother and the Sycamore police chief, “prove that her abduction was not even reported until 8 p.m.,” Schmack said.

Also, the 4-H Federation Christmas Party that Caulfield attended in DeKalb “almost certainly ran from 7 until 9 or 9:30 p.m., and not from 5 to 7, as she testified,” the prosecutor said, citing Farm Bureau newsletters and “the recollections” of the federation presidents from 1957 and 1958.

Schmack also noted evidence in the trial showed that McCullough called his parents in Sycamore collect at 6:57 p.m. on Dec. 3.

During the review, recently subpoenaed Illinois Bell records “prove that the call was placed from a pay phone in the Post Office in downtown Rockford, not some other phone booth closer to Sycamore, as had been speculated,” Schmack said.

“It is a manifest impossibility for (McCullough) to have been in Sycamore at 6:45 and also have made a phone call in downtown Rockford at 6:57,” Schmack wrote. “Even speculating, despite all evidence, that the abduction might have occurred as early as 6:30 p.m., the shortest distance from Sycamore to the downtown Rockford Post Office is 35 miles. Covering that distance in 20 minutes would have required the driver to have averaged over 100 mph for the entire trip on two-lane snow-covered county roads and heavily trafficked city streets in the dark winter night.”

Schmack said it is now “absolutely clear” that authorities were correct at the time when they cleared McCullough and that evidence that helped convict McCullough in 2012 was “mistaken” and “false,” including testimony that there was a streetlight on the corner where Maria’s friend Kathy Sigman saw a man she later identified as McCullough.

“Since McCullough was in Rockford when Kathy Sigman briefly stood on an unlighted corner in Sycamore with Maria’s kidnapper in 1957, her selection in 2010 of a black and white headshot of him as a teenager is clearly an unintentional and tragic mistake on her part,” Schmack said.

“Kathy viewed the array 53 years after the fact, and one week after being told there was a new and viable suspect in Maria’s murder,” he added. “The photos were displayed by an officer who knew which photo was the suspect, a practice now outlawed in Illinois. The array was suggestive in the extreme. The other five photos were professional yearbook photos with light backgrounds of young men wearing suit coats.

“Conversely, McCullough’s photo was a snapshot, with a dark background, of him in a shirt with no coat,” the prosecutor noted.

“Thousands of pages of improperly excluded police reports more than 20 years old contain a wealth of information pointing to McCullough’s innocence, and absolutely nothing showing guilt,” Schmack said. “This evidence is detailed in a lengthy report which I have filed with the court in accordance with my professional, ethical obligation as a prosecutor and my duties as a public official.”

In a public statement accompanying the new documents, Schmack struck a personal note. “I truly wish that this crime had really been solved, and her true killer were incarcerated for life. When I began this lengthy review, I had expected to find some reliable evidence that the right man had been convicted. No such evidence could be discovered. Compounding the tragedy by convicting the wrong man, and fighting further in the hopes of keeping him jailed, is not the proper legacy for our community, or for the memory of Maria Ridulph.”

McCullough’s attorney said he thinks authorities bent the facts to support their theory that McCullough committed the crime. The attorney said the FBI put together a credible timeline in 1957 that exonerated his client but the police who investigated the case in recent years moved up the time of the girl’s disappearance to accommodate the collect call.

The case against McCullough was brought by State’s Attorney Clay Campbell, who narrowly lost to Schmack two months after the conviction. Schmack’s decision comes a little more than a year after the state appellate court upheld the conviction.

McCullough’s appeal had argued that he was not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But Appellate Judge Kathryn Zenoff, writing on behalf of a three-judge panel in the 2nd Appellate District, disagreed.

“We conclude that the evidence was sufficient for any rational trier of fact to find that all of the essential elements of the crimes were proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” she wrote.

The justices also found that Kathy Chapman, a key state witness, had provided credible testimony. Chapman testified that she and her childhood friend, Maria Ridulph, had been playing on the street corner when a man who identified himself as “Johnny” struck up a conversation. Chapman said she went to her house to get a pair of gloves and when she returned several minutes later, Maria and Johnny were gone.

In 2010, after Illinois State Police reopened the case, Chapman identified McCullough, who in the 1950s was called John Tessier, as “Johnny.”

“Chapman not only had the ability to observe defendant on Dec. 3, 1957, she had an excellent reason to remember him for all the years afterward,” according to the opinion. “She was a witness to an event that horrified the community and caused her to be the object of law enforcement and news media attention.”

McCullough is jailed at Pontiac Correctional Center.

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