The state Department of Corrections said on Thursday that John Wilson Jr., the man convicted in the slaying of a 14-year-old girl from Indian Head Park, had died.
He died on Tuesday at the Pontiac Correctional Centre.
Who was John Wilson Jr.?
A jury convicted 41-year-old Wilson in 2014 of killing Lyons Township High School freshman Kelli O’Laughlin. He received a 160-year prison term.
Wilson put a rock in a knit cap and threw it through the dining room window of the girl’s house in the 6300 block of Keokuk Road on October 27, 2011, breaking into the residence.
O’Laughlin confronted him when she got home from school. He repeatedly stabbed O’Laughlin in the back, neck, and chest with a butcher knife that he took from the kitchen’s cutlery block. She was dragged from the family room into the kitchen by him later.
O’Laughlin’s mother discovered her body. A few of days later, Wilson was detained. He was on parole at the time and had three convictions, one of which was for armed robbery, according to the officials.
Wilson snatched O’Laughlin’s phone and posted derogatory comments on her Facebook page as well as mocking messages to her mother using it.
A Facebook page dedicated to O’Laughlin has been created.
Friends of Kelli O’Laughlin, 14, who was discovered dead in her home on October 27, 2011, left tributes on her Facebook page the following day.
On Nov. 3, after midnight, Wilson asked to make a phone call in the LaGrange Police Department’s police processing room. Wilson picked up the phone and hung up right away.
When Wilson made a second call, it is claimed that he urged the caller to take care of his mother before saying, “Come get my Cricket phone because it has been with me everywhere I’ve been.”
When Wilson was detained, his Cricket smartphone was taken as evidence.
Wilson’s phone travelled from his South Side address into downtown Chicago starting at around 6 a.m. on October 27, 2011, according to analysis from Cricket cellular towers — the brand of Wilson’s phone — before continuing to the west suburbs, where phone activity located him in Lyons at around 9 a.m., Raschke testified.
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A call sent close to the O’Laughlins’ residence in the 6300 block of Keokuk bounced off a tower a few blocks from their Indian Head Park residence at 3:22 p.m.
On the day of the crime, Wilson’s Cricket phone sent other cellular signals that were reflected off the towers of the 7-Eleven, where he had run into a police officer and ordered a cab to take him to the Midway el stop. Cellular activity later that evening indicated the phone travelling south before coming to rest close to Wilson’s house on the South Side of the city.
