Charles Huber
Appearances
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
My prayer was always like, hey, I want to be able to give this family closure. That was what was important to me on this case is saying that, okay, this is what happened to Kathy that night. And, you know, so they can have that peace.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So some of the stuff we had tested at that time showed that there was a mixture of DNA present in some of the swabbings, but the technology wasn't there to separate that stuff and figure out who was who with it.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
In the 2000s, they went back and got DNA samples from the boyfriend. They got DNA samples from her boss. And they retest the stuff compared to some of the evidence that they have.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Something would spark up and then they would test it and they'd get negative results. And then it would just kind of go cold again as fast as it heated back up.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
I've always been someone who just wants to find answers. You know, I like researching things. I like digging into things. If somebody loses something, I want to be the guy to help them find it. I've just always had that in me. I don't know what it is, but I just love the idea of being the guy that puts the pieces together.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
She was hanging out with some friends. She had walked over to a laundromat that was about a block away to buy some soda, and she was never heard from again.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
It looked like somebody had staged it to look like she had been hit by a car. She was laying like on the outside of a bridge curve in the snowbank. So she was laying in the snow alongside the road.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So that was a whole case of theirs that had been sitting on their desk for the same as ours. You know, it's just one of those that would work and they didn't have any evidence to tie anybody to it.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
The Lyle Police Department reopened one of their cold closings in 2019.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Since then, I believe that like Ancestry.com and 23andMe and these are no longer required to give information over to the police without search warrants and stuff. But at this time, it was like, hey, can you guys find this family in your database? And they were able to trace this back. to a family that lived in the area during the 1970s.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
He was really connected to the skydiving community. He worked as a meter reader for the gas company for a while, which put him in this area. There was a factory here in town that we were able to track back to find employment records that he worked in town here in North Aurora. So he kind of bounced around from job to job.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
As they dug into it a little bit further, they found out that Bruce Lindahl had actually died committing another murder in Naperville in 1981. So at that point, they're like, this may be our guy.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
I've played drums my entire life, like from the sixth grade on. Still playing. I'm playing in church this coming weekend. I've always been a big music guy, so I wanted to take a shot at working in the music industry. I went to college at a university in Florida for music production and engineering.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Charles Huber then somehow goes back to Bruce's apartment, and sometime throughout the night when they're just hanging out there, Bruce attacks him and stabs him, I mean, just multiple times. At one point, he had him from what is described, I guess, like almost like in a chokehold and was stabbing him over the top. And he actually stabs through Charles Huber into his own leg.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
She had ridden her bike to the gym at Northgate and Bruce was there and he had his hood up on his car and he's like, hey, can you give me a hand real quick? And she's like, oh, I'm okay. I'm going to go in here. She's like, oh, just give me a hand real quick. I want you to see if you can help me start my car.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So he's like, just get in and I'm going to just turn the key and see if we can get it started.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
For whatever reason, if it was drugs or alcohol or what was involved, after the sexual assault, Bruce kind of passes out and falls asleep. She kind of slinks out and goes running down the street naked to one of the neighbor's house. Please help me, please help me, like knocking on everybody's door.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
And I came out and was working in Chicago at some recording studios as an assistant engineer, engineer and producer on a couple of albums.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Without a complaining witness, all charges are dropped and Bruce is let go and is free to be out on the street again.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Again, there's never been any proof that tied into that because of the time frame. From the time she disappeared to the time she was found, it was nothing but skeletal remains. So there was no DNA or anything to tie Bruce to that murder.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
As they were processing that scene and then going back to Bruce's house, they found a box of photographs. And they found hundreds of photographs of young women in vulnerable positions. Most of them were naked. Some of them were clearly drugged. A lot of them were clearly getting these photos taken against their will. It was pretty disturbing photographs.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So Lyle PD, they do a direct comparison from Bruce's body to get DNA and they find a direct match to their murder weapon in the Pam Maurer case.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Once they do that, they send out a critical reach, which is a bulletin that goes out to all local law enforcement and basically says, hey, anybody that has any cold case homicides from the 1970s, this is the guy that we just discovered that may be a serial killer that was in the area abducting young girls and using different means of strangulation.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
When we received that, our detectives at the time kind of were like, hey, wait a minute, let's look at Kathy again. So we left with the detectives from Lyle and started looking back into our case.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
The main place where he would go to get photos developed in the 1970s was at the Northgate shopping plaza. So he was at Northgate on a regular basis, which is where Kathy was employed at the time of her homicide. So that was one of the things that kind of started putting pieces together for us on our end.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
They're doing the old, I say old-fashioned now, it's still the main way of doing DNA collection, but they take the swab and they roll it across the article of evidence and then they test that DNA that's collected on the swab and then compare it to whatever DNA they can find on there.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
They, again, test Kathy's evidence. They compare it directly to Bruce Lindahl's DNA that they have at that time. But unfortunately, our samples at that point are too degraded to get a workable profile.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So at that point, the case, you know, for lack of a better term, it doesn't go cold, but it's kind of we're back right where we started of, well, we at least know there's a male there. But, you know, was it the boyfriend or was it the guy who killed her? You know, we don't have any idea who it could be at that point. So it's just kind of we're back at square one.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
The family sees the documentary and they're like, hey, what the heck? Why are they saying that Bruce Lindahl killed our daughter or our sister? And we're like, we have zero evidence to prove that.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
One of the instructors there was Orland Park Deputy Chief Larry Rafferty, and his block of information that he presents in the class is all about Mvac technology, which is this new DNA technology that allows degraded and minuscule samples to kind of get the best possible profile based off of these filters that this Mvac uses.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So the smallest particle... of skin or whatever is being vacuumed up with that solution and collected in these filters. The filters are then tested and they were able to build better profiles off of degraded DNA because you're getting every last scrap of it pulled out of the evidence.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
This is one of the leading labs in the nation and the world, and this is their specialty, is working on these cold cases and using the NVEC to solve these types of cases. And that's how I got hooked up with DNA Labs.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
For us to find a workable profile is going to be tough because of those situations. Kathy, from all we can tell, sat in running water in the Fox River for three weeks. You know, so at that point, we're like, any DNA or anything's going to be washed away, or so we thought.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Yeah, this is our Hail Mary. Who knows what is going to be down the road 10 years from now, but this was, for our time and space right now, this was our shot to try to close this case.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Coming into this case, I really didn't know what to expect. It was just one of those cases that just kind of hung over the department for the last 45 years.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
And we came up with a plan that was like, let's start with the underwear, the tampon string and the main areas that we want to focus on. Let's test those first. And that got our price down to about, I believe, around $9,000.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Season of Justice is a nonprofit organization that basically provides grants for laboratories to do DNA research on these cold cases.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
The other portion of that is that if you don't have CODIS eligibility before you do the testing, like as soon as chemical touches evidence, you're no longer eligible to ever in the CODIS.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
And then we were concerned, like, is there going to be a chain of custody issue, you know, going through TSA and everything else? We had several totes that, you know, we probably weren't going to be able to just carry on. So we were kind of concerned about that.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So at that point, the plan was made that my partner and I were just going to drive the evidence down to Deerfield Beach, Florida, which we loaded all the stuff up on dry ice and started heading south. Ryan and his counterpart set off for the multi-day journey.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Carrying it into our hotel room where we stayed in the panhandle the first night and then carrying it back out to the car and, you know, making sure that we didn't break chain of custody and, you know, just making sure that everything was just to make sure the integrity was there the entire way down. It was a stressful drive.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So they have everything in storage in their area, and we're waiting on them to get us an answer on whether or not they're able to find anything.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
We're sitting there and he's like, you know, you may get one of the coolest phone calls in the history of the North Florida Police Department when this stuff comes back. He goes, so good luck, man.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So every sergeant that had worked back here before he promoted out or moved on to a different division had worked on this case.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
She said, this is absolutely hand of God. We have one of the best profiles we've ever gotten, and it is a direct link to Bruce Lindahl. It was 9.4 trillion times more probable originating from Bruce Lindahl than any other human on Earth.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
I got the phone call, and I could say, you know, on one of the most beautiful locations possible, too, standing on a mountain in Montana. So it was great.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
My prayer was always like, hey, I want to be able to give this family closure. The mom and dad are both still alive. Their health is failing. Like, I want to be able to give them an answer before something happens to them.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
dealt with this for 45 years not knowing. And again, nothing that we did brings Kathy back. Nothing we did will ever serve justice to Bruce Lindahl. But we were able to give family that closure. And that was what was important to me on this case is saying that, OK, this is what happened to Kathy that night. And, you know, so they can have that peace.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
We sat down with them and our chaplain and our social workers, and we had our therapy dog in there and just kind of everybody's crying and talking about it. It was just a really emotional kind of giving them those answers. So we kind of all sat down as a team, as a department, and told them together.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
And then he drove her to this rural area. So at the time, it was just a gravel road that went down to like a little, just a place you could park and fish. There were some fishing cottages down there, but it was a real rural, remote area. So we think is that he drove her down to that area and then that's where he ultimately killed her and threw her body in the river.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So if Bruce was alive, I would be confident that we would have charged him with the first-degree murder of Kathy Holly, and we would have taken that to trial and been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bruce was responsible for Kathy's death, and we would have put him in prison for the murder of Kathy Holly.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
45 years, it's a lifetime for a lot of people and hopefully it will give them some kind of peace and closure. And I don't know, it's tough.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
We called him when we got those results to let him know, and he still was sobbing. And he's like, I've lived with this for 45 years, thinking that there's something else I could have done to save her and she'd still be here. But I decided to go home that night instead of spending the night with her, and here we are. So there's a ton of survivor guilt with that.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
There's still several other circumstantial cases of missing girls that were found strangled in the river in neighboring towns. And, you know, they were abducted in two towns north of us in St. Charles and then found in Glen Ellyn or vice versa. So there's several other cases that may at some point be linked to Bruce Lindahl, but again, without
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Back then, that was the place to be. That was the hangout for all the kids. On the weekends, they'd have their car shows. That was the hangout. Everybody would go to Northgate Shopping Plaza.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Definitive answers, I don't want to say that he's responsible for them.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
And again, it's a bittersweet success to be able to be the one that types case closed on this case when so many of these seasons happened. investigators have worked on it is just a solemn pride, I guess, that I'm able to do that. It's not, I don't know, it's a, it's just really cool.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
From what I can tell, she was a responsible person. They said, this isn't like Kathy not to come pick up her sister. So they were concerned, like, no, something's not right. She would have been here.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
They all got together and kind of started backtracking where Kathy would have gone. They weren't able to find her.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
At that time, these types of things didn't happen in North Aurora. So when they initially called the police, they said, you know, she's 19 years old. She may just be out doing whatever 19-year-olds do and being irresponsible. So they didn't take it real serious at the time as far as a missing person went.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
The windows were all left down. There was a small pool of blood in the backseat on the floorboard behind the passenger seat, I believe, in her car.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Family got up on the roof of the complex and that's where they discovered Kathy's purse was laying up on top of the roof of the apartment complex.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
So the car had been ransacked. It looked like somebody had gone through everything.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
There was a discarded tampon in the backseat of the car, so that was a point of question, too, so that was collected.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
They did take photos and collect blood. At that time, blood typing was the game, you know, for evidence then. So they wanted to get a sample of the blood so that they could compare it to what Kathy's blood type and see if they could match anything up to see whose blood it actually was.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
The police were canvassing, looking in the areas. They were checking with other friends and how taxes she had. The family was very involved as far as being out looking for her and trying to put the pieces together themselves.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
As he was pulling into the parking lot, he gets out of his car and he sees this car driving at him and he looks and he's like, this guy's driving kind of reckless through the parking lot.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
When he was interviewed, he initially said that he saw a car that matches Kathy's description and there was a male driver and a female in the passenger seat that looked directly at him with a look of despair on her face.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Come to find out, later he changes the story and he's like, well, I don't think it was her. The car didn't really match. You know, he's like, I don't know what I saw that night.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
Northward is a river town, so the Fox River runs right through the middle of our town. So along the river, there's a lot of wooded areas. There's a lot of rural areas in the surrounding areas to the town itself.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
They had airplanes in the air that were doing searches and stuff for her and checking the rivers and checking around the area and seeing if they could find anywhere she may have gone.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
The water was cold being April and March in the Chicagoland area, you know, so there wasn't a ton of decomposition, but it was covered in mud. You know, she'd already started to go through the post-mortem processes, so she was not in great shape.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
He wasn't able to because of the state of decomposition at that point. And again, mostly because of the swelling and bruising. But the clothing, they said, matched hers. And so basically the clothing and then the blood typing, when it came back, they were able to identify her through her blood and I believe dental work.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
There was some bruising to her face that looked like she had been punched. The initial autopsy, they talk about a small puncture wound in the left side of her neck and in the left side of her sweater that somebody had pushed a ice pick type weapon up to her neck type of thing. There was a small mark there on her neck.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
I thought they said cause of death was strangulation, asphyxiation, so she was strangled to death.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
We think she was found fairly close to where she was ultimately killed.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
It went cold rather quick. We really didn't have any idea of who would have done this. There was a lot of speculation as far as boyfriend was a possibility, the other associates were possibilities, co-workers were possibilities, and all those people were fairly quickly ruled out.
Anatomy of Murder
Waiting for Answers (Kathy Halle, Pamela Maurer, Deborah Colliander, Charles Huber)
It was really quiet for a long time. There wasn't a lot of new information available.