Carbondale police arrest Michigan man in 23-year-old crime

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Police have arrested a salvage-yard worker from suburban Detroit in the death 23 years ago of Southern Illinois University student Susan Schumake, whose strangled body was found in a thicket of bushes and trees near the campus.

Daniel Woloson, 45, of Brownstown Township, Mich., appeared Friday in Jackson County Circuit Court where Judge Thomas Jones told him he would be formally charged with Schumake's murder at an arraignment Oct. 20, State's Attorney Mike Wepsiec said.

Woloson, who was brought to Carbondale Thursday night from Washtenaw County, Mich., was assigned a public defender and did not enter a plea, Wepsiec said. He was being held Friday in the Jackson County Jail on $500,000 bond.

Schumake, 21, of Chicago Heights, was an undergraduate at SIU when she disappeared Aug. 17, 1981. Her body was found the next day.

Police say Woloson, a convicted burglar out on parole at the time of the killing, worked at a Carbondale apartment complex and was not an SIU student.

Schumake's death shocked this college town and prompted university officials to erect an enclosed walkway so students could avoid the wooded area where her body was found.

John Schumake, Susan Schumake's brother, said police told him last week they had arrested a suspect for the crime with the help of DNA tests that had advanced since 1981.

"It's been very difficult for us over the years," John Schumake said.

Susan Schumake's father, Frank Schumake, died shortly after her killing. Her mother, Caroline Schumake, lives in a nursing home in the Chicago area, her brother said.

Authorities declined to describe evidence in the case Friday at a news conference.

"We just want to do everything right," Wepsiec said.

What he and Carbondale police chief Steve Odum did say was that investigators started focusing on Woloson after a setback in the case in 2001.

That year, DNA tests failed to link convicted killer John Paul Phillips to evidence left at the crime scene, after Phillips' body was exhumed from a grave in Marion, Ill.

Investigators turned their attention to another stack of potential suspects, Odum said, one of whom was Woloson.

Woloson was on parole for a 1979 burglary conviction at the time of the killing, according to Illinois Department of Corrections records. He had been convicted in Sangamon County. He was released on parole June 12, 1981, from the Joliet Correctional Center, records indicate.

After another arrest the following December for a parole violation, Woloson completed his parole in April 1983 and had not been arrested again in Illinois, Corrections spokeswoman DeDe Short said.