John Wilson Jr., the man convicted in the murder of a 14-year-old girl from Indian Head Park, died, according to the state Department of Corrections, which announced his passing on Thursday.
At the Pontiac Correctional Center, he passed away on Tuesday.
John Wilson Jr., who was he?
In 2014, a jury found 41-year-old Wilson guilty of murdering Kelli O’Laughlin, a freshman at Lyons Township High School. He was sentenced to 160 years in prison.
On October 27, 2011, Wilson broke into the girl’s home in the 6300 block of Keokuk Road by putting a rock in a knit cap and hurling it through the dining room window.
When O’Laughlin returned from school, she confronted him. He took a butcher knife from the cutlery block in the kitchen and repeatedly stabbed O’Laughlin in the back, neck, and chest. Later, he dragged her from the family room into the kitchen.
Her mother found O’Laughlin’s body. Wilson was arrested a few days later. He had three convictions at the time, one of which was for armed robbery, according to the authorities, and he was out on parole.
Wilson stole O’Laughlin’s phone, using it to send mocking messages to her mother and post disparaging remarks on her Facebook page.
O’Laughlin has a Facebook page created in his honor. On her Facebook page the following day, friends of Kelli O’Laughlin, 14, who was found dead in her home on October 27, 2011, paid their respects.
On Nov. 3, after midnight, Wilson requested a phone call in the police processing area of the LaGrange Police Department. Wilson picked up the phone and immediately hung up.
Wilson allegedly told the person on the other end of a second call to look after his mother before saying, “Come get my Cricket phone because it has been with me everywhere I’ve been.”
Wilson was detained, and his Cricket phone was taken as proof.
According to Cricket cellular tower analysis, Wilson’s phone traveled from his South Side address into downtown Chicago starting at around 6 a.m. on October 27, 2011, then continued to the west suburbs, where phone activity located him in Lyons at about 9 a.m., Raschke testified.
At 3:22 p.m., a call that was directed toward the O’Laughlins’ home in the 6300 block of Keokuk bounced off a tower a few blocks from their Indian Head Park home.
Wilson ran into a police officer at the 7-Eleven on the day of the crime, where he also ordered a cab to take him to the Midway el stop. Wilson’s Cricket phone sent additional cellular signals that day that were reflected off the towers of the 7-Eleven. Later that evening, cellular activity showed that the phone had traveled south before coming to rest not far from Wilson’s home on the South Side of the city.
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