Inside a killer's mind

During the summer of 2003, Mike Nilles was looking for a new kind of case.

In seven years as an Aurora Police Department detective, he'd worked thousands of cases.

His specialty was gang murders. If homicide investigations are naturally complicated, gang murders are doubly convoluted. The victims are often random, sometimes with no more connection to their killer other than the hatred of a hand sign.

So Nilles trolled the unsolved Aurora murder files looking for something different. He eventually grabbed a brown file folder from a shelf -- the 1983 murder of a 64-year-old woman. The file was 5 inches thick, filled with photos, witness statements and police notes.

"I was more or less looking for an interesting read," Nilles admitted.

Nilles loves working murder cases. They're the most demanding. They take dedication and imagination. You have to walk into a room and start reading the blood, interpreting the wounds. Nilles asks himself:

If I am the killer, why am I doing this? Do I know she has something of value? Did she wrong someone? Why am I here killing this woman?

"You can go into a murder scene and almost immediately know the victim knew the killer," he said. "You can see the emotion in the crime scene. The story that it's telling is a lot more than people think."

Alone in the police department, he spent hours reading the Pollock file from front to back.

In his imagination, Nilles walked through the murder scene.

On April 4, 1983, Kathryn Pollock was supposed to meet friends for a regular dinner at 6 p.m. She never showed up.

Although Pollock lived alone since her husband died two years earlier, she wasn't a shut-in.

Over many years, Pollock collected recorded spiritual messages and religious sermons. As a member of First Presbyterian Church, she lent out her collection like a librarian. People would come from Batavia and Geneva to sign out the inspirational recordings.

By 10:15 p.m., a friend went to her home in the 100 block of South Randall Road check on her. Her 1978 blue Cadillac Seville was missing; the door between her garage and the house was open.

When police entered the small, one-story home, officers found Pollock lying in the living room, a puddle of blood around her head. She had been beaten with a blunt object. The coroner later determined she'd been dead for 12 hours.

Pollock's wallet was taken from her purse. It was later found near the Aurora Country Club. But other than the car and wallet, nothing appeared to be taken from Pollock's house. Her jewelry was untouched. Electronic equipment was left behind.

While burglary appeared the most likely motive, even that was shaky.

Within a few days, police found an Aurora man who had passed Pollock's house the morning she died. This witness saw a man knocking on Pollock's door at about 7:35 a.m.

Under hypnosis, the witness described the man as between 30 and 50 years old, possibly Hispanic, with a medium build and a rough, weathered face. The witness said the man might have been about 6 feet tall, 190 to 200 pounds with a pencil-thin mustache and dark hair.

Police used the description to generate a sketch, which they released to the newspapers. A few tips came in but, inevitably, they slowed.

A month after Pollock was killed, officer Larry Langston, who later became the department's chief, testified at a coroner's jury.

"There is no suspect at this point," he said. "I don't anticipate that right now or in the near future we will arrest anyone."

Langston's prediction was right on. Years passed. A gang war broke out in Aurora. The unsolved cases piled up and Pollock's death became one of many in need of answers.

The case fell into neglect until Nilles, eager to look at anything besides another gang murder, picked up the file.

Nilles' policy with victims' families is brutal honesty. It's not a department guideline, just a personal strategy.

He's had to make plenty of death notifications, and each time he tells the survivors exactly what happened.

"I do not beat around the bush," said Nilles. "If I was a parent I would want to know what happened to my kid."

But he softens that stance for cold cases. Even when he feels he has pretty good idea who did what to whom, he pulls in the reins a bit when talking to the family. Building up their hopes after so many years could feel like another victimization.

Nilles always makes sure he knows exactly what he has to work with first. After reviewing the Pollock file, Nilles went searching for physical evidence.

Amazingly, after decades and personnel changes -- even floods at the police station -- evidence still existed.

In 1983, officers collected scrapings from under Pollock's fingernails and hair they found in the palms of her hands.

Nilles began to see potential. He reached out to friends he's developed at the FBI to get the samples tested. But in order to eliminate Pollock's DNA profile, he would also need a sample of her DNA. The FBI lab said if none was available they could use a relative's.

It was time for Nilles to call the family.

Nilles search for relatives took weeks. When he finally found Pollock's daughter, he called, unwittingly, on the victim's birthday.

Pollock's daughter hadn't received a call from police in years so -- because of the serendipitous timing -- she thought Nilles was a prank caller. She hung up and called the local police.

After clearing up the confusion, Nilles and Pollock's daughter sat down to talk.

Pollock's daughter does not want to be identified in this story: her name, where she lives, or what she does.

It doesn't bother her to talk about her mom's murder. She's learned to live with it. But it's unsolved and the killer's motives are still unknown, so there's always that grain of fear.

When her mom was killed, she already had two of her own children and a career. There was no time for amateur sleuthing.

"I gotta worry about today and tomorrow," she said. "I have to support myself and my kids. I have to do my job and let them (police) do their job."

Still, when Pollock's daughter sat down with Nilles, she was impressed.

"It struck me that it was maybe his passion; his make-up did not allow him to rest until they were solved," she said. "I didn't get the impression that he cared about this case or my mom in particular. But there was this unsolved (case) and he can solve this."

By the time Pollock's daughter sat down with Nilles, he had found more than fingernail scrapings.

First, according to a search warrant filed in 2004, there was the two cups of coffee left on the kitchen table. Then there was the missing wig. They were the kinds of subtle clues Nilles used to read a murder scene.

If I am the killer, why am I doing this? Why am I here killing this woman?

Pollock was meticulous. And like many of her generation (Pollock was born in 1918), the Depression never really washed off. Mom using two cups when one would do seems like a stretch to Pollock's daughter.

"She'd use the same cup over and over," she said. "To get two cups of coffee dirty, that's wasn't very characteristic."

Then, when her body was found, Pollock was in her sleeping clothes, but not her wig.

An extra coffee cup, a missing wig, plus no signs of forced entry -- not exactly a bloody glove, but they help Nilles read the house.

"I'm pretty confident she knew her killer," he said. "If it was a stranger, someone she didn't know, she would have had her wig on."

Nilles won't comment on any specific suspects in the case. But the search warrant he filed shows Nilles was targeting a 48-year-old Oswego man who had once painted Pollock's house. According to sources familiar with the investigation, the Oswego man and convicted murderer Brian Dugan were part of a group of young men who terrorized Randall Road, committing burglaries north and south for years.

The DNA test results came back from the FBI labs in Washington D.C. -- the Oswego man could not be matched to the fingernail scrapings.

Nilles was discouraged but not defeated. There's always other ways to get to the truth.

"Every time you pick it (the file) up, you catch something else," he said.

And the facts around Pollock's murder give him hope. Some cold cases files are dead in the water without a sudden confession. And random drive-by doesn't leave much to go on.

But if Pollock knew her killers, there's hope the connection will still emerge from the evidence.

Like many Aurora detectives, Nilles is juggling 10 murder cases while still working other assignments -- rapes, burglaries, hostage negotiations. But he still makes time to re-read Pollock's case file, or make another call.

"The lead we followed closed," Nilles said, referring to the DNA test. "The door isn't shut on the case all the way."