Ex-sheriff details area murders in new book

As an investigator, deputy sheriff and sheriff in Southern Illinois for 16 years, Harry Spiller worked many difficult murder cases. Perhaps the most trying was the killing of a man whose skeletal remains were found four months after he was reported missing.

A psychic from Connecticut finally was brought in to help locate Ron Hicks, a Harrisburg, Ill., mechanic. When the body was accidentally found it was near a railroad trestle just as the psychic had said. She had said it was on a path where coon hunters run their dogs. The body was found on a deer trail.

Hicks, it turned out, had had sex with a friend's girlfriend. When the friend found out, he had the girlfriend lure Hicks to a secluded place where he shot him. When the police came asking questions about the girlfriend, the perpetrator tried to frame her.

"What ended up helping get him was the fact that the suspect turned his girlfriend in," Spiller said.

In his new book "Murder in the Heartland, Book 1," Spiller has collected the case files of 20 murders he either investigated himself or has researched. The book is the first of a series Spiller plans to write about killings in the region.

Spiller said he wrote "Murder in the Heartland" to inform people.

"There's a lot of vulnerability to the public," he said in an interview from his home in Marion, Ill. "People don't realize how vulnerable they are and what goes on."

Area murders

Among the murders he details is the killing of three members of the Scheper family in Cape Girardeau in August 1992. Randy and Curtis Scheper and their mother, Sherry, were killed by intruders looking for drugs and money. Spiller was not involved in that investigation in any way but was allowed to review Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle's files.

Gary Roll was executed for the murders in 2000. Two other men, David Rhodes and John Browne, are serving life sentences.

The book begins with the case of Carbondale, Ill., serial killer John Paul Phillips, who police believe killed four women between January 26, 1975, and Nov. 11, 1981. It details the many dead ends police pursued after identifying Phillips as a possible suspect from the first and then clearing him.

The first victim was Southern Illinois University student Theresa Clark. When SIU student Kathy McSherry was found dead on July 13, 1976, the similarities in the crimes suggested a serial killer was at work, but again the leads led police to no one.

Three weeks after the McSherry murder, Phillips pulled a pistol on a couple near Little Grassy Lake, handcuffed the man to a tree and then pistol-whipped him. Phillips then forced the girl into a truck at gunpoint, ordered her to drink beer and swallow some capsules and made her disrobe, continuing to threaten her life.

The girl ran away when Phillips returned to the campground. She found a fisherman who contacted police.

Phillips was arrested for attempted murder, aggravated kidnapping, armed robbery and aggravated battery.

The next killing, of SIU student Susan Schumake, occurred in August 1981, just after Phillips had received a mandatory release from prison. He worked in the communications building next to the radio station where the victim worked, and there were inconsistencies in his alibi, but Spiller writes that police had no probable cause to arrest him.

Three months later, the body of Joan Weatherall was found in a pond in Elkville. When leads went nowhere, the FBI Behavioral Science Unit was called in and determined that the killer had tortured the victim physically and psychologically.

Phillips soon was arrested for another abduction. In prison, he bragged to a fellow inmate about the killings. In 1986, with the inmate's testimony and new evidence, Phillips was found guilty of killing Joan Weatherall. In 1991, he died of a heart attack in Menard State Prison. He was 40.

Spiller has titled other cases in the book "The Anti-Freeze Murder," "Homicidal Hitchhikers," The Candy Lady" and "Buried Beneath the Basement."

Prolific writer with 9 books

When he resigned as sheriff in 1989 and accepted a position teaching criminal justice at John A. Logan College, Spiller thought murder had become only a theoretical part of his life. Then a husband and wife in his criminal behavior class were arrested for murdering a man whose decapitated body was found in the trunk of the victim's car.

"Murder in the Heartland," published by the Turner Publishing Co. in Paducah, Ky., is Spiller's ninth book. A Vietnam veteran, he is the author of several books about his experiences as a Marine recruiter during the Vietnam War.

He will participate in a book signing at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Cape Girardeau in November.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182