Over the years, evidence decays or passes through so many hands it's rendered useless. Murder weapons disappear, and witnesses' memories dim or are carried to the grave.
Those are the kinds of obstacles that have stymied prosecutors trying to crack decades-old cold cases in recent years — and that now await authorities trying to build a case against a former Washington state police officer in the 1957 slaying of a 7-year-old girl in this northern Illinois farming community.
Can the little girl's friend, now in her 60s, remember with certainty what the suspect looked like? Will an unused train ticket, discovered half a century later, undermine Jack Daniel McCullough's alibi that he was in Chicago having a military medical exam the day that Maria Ridulph disappeared?
Cold-case experts say they rarely see arrests in murders that date back so many years.
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