Between October 1955 and August 1957, six Chicago teenagers were slaughtered in a grisly string of homicides which have remained unsolved for more than thirty years. No positive connection in the cases was deduced, but they have entered modern folklore as a series and are so considered here. The evidence required to prove -- or disprove -- a connection, like the killer, has remained elusive.

On October 16, 1955, John Schuessler, age 13, went bowling at a North Side alley with his brother Anton, age 11, and a neighbor, Robert Peterson, 14. They never made it home for supper, and a search was launched, resulting in a grim discovery two days later. Hikers found the naked, battered bodies in a ditch near the Des Plaines River, in the Robinson Woods Forest Preserve. An autopsy showed that the three boys were strangled, but police had no other clues. More than forty confessions were logged in the case, but they all came from cranks with a yen for attention.

Fourteen months later, on December 28, 1956, Barbara Grimes, 15, and her sister Patricia, 13, failed to come home from a neighborhood theater. Reminded of the triple murder, still unsolved, Chicago panicked. Elvis Presley, star of the last movie seen by the sisters, made a public appeal for the girls to go home and be "good Presley fans." Columnist Ann Landers received an anonymous letter , allegedly written by a girl who had seen the Grimes sisters forced into a car by a young man. A partial license number of the car led nowhere, and the author of the note was not identified.

On January 22, 1957, a motorist in Du Page County spotted the victims in a roadside ditch, their naked, frozen bodies laid out side by side. Both sisters had been raped and beaten, but the coroner reported that their deaths resulted from exposure to the freezing January weather. Homicide detectives stubbornly refused to comment on reports that Barbara and Patricia had been mutilated, with the lips of one girl sliced away.

On August 15, 1957, Judith Anderson, 15, went missing on the one mile walk between a friend's house and her home. There was no doubt about mutilation a week later, when her dismembered remains surfaced in two 55-gallon drums, floating in Montrose Harbor. One barrel contained the girl's head, with four .32-caliber slugs in the brain. Police discovered that the victim had been threatened by a man or boy who phoned her on the job, at a local modeling agency, but there the trail ran cold.

A short time later, homicide detectives picked up Barry Cook, a youth suspected in the strangulation death of Margaret Gallagher, a middle-aged victim, on Foster Beach. The evidence was marginal, at best, and Cook was cleared of murder charges at his trial. He subsequently went to prison for eleven years upon conviction in an unrelated case, on charges of aggravated assault and attempted rape.

Years after the fact, "psychic" Peter Hurkos fondled snapshots of the victims in Chicago, searching for "vibrations" from their killer, but he came no closer to an ultimate solution than police who had pursued the case from the beginning. The Chicago killer(s) who selected teens as victims in the 1950s is, presumably, at large today.