QUINCY, ILL. -- Wednesday night's unsolved mystery in the Tri-States starts in the Gem City.
A man was shot and killed in a downtown Quincy office building in 1974.
His killer was never found.
Thirty-six years have passed, but that doesn't mean police have filed away the case forever.
Thirty-seven year old Benjamin Fresno was shot four times. He was working inside what was then Credit Control Services on the third floor of the Western Catholic Union building. Employees found his body shortly after 7 a.m. on June 3rd of 1974. The murder weapon, a .38 revolver, also was found at the scene.
Fresno had worked as an executive vice president at the business for about two years. Rumors circulated that it was an out-of-town, organized "hit." A man was arrested for the crime, but those charges were dropped.
Lt. Jason Simmons said, "We received a lot of information from a lot of sources. Some of that had, what we felt, to be some connections which Mr. Fresno may have been involved with. We're looking at all these speculations, but we could never tie to any type of organized crime or syndicate operations positively in the Fresno case."
Fresno had a criminal background. He was arrested six months before his death on gambling charges. He also had spent time in a Pennsylvania prison for forgery. The gun that killed Fresno was stolen from a sporting goods store in the Chicago area in 1960.
Simmons said, "This is what we consider to be an open case or active case. We do look at any new information that may come in on this case. In fact, based on a review of some of the evidence, we are in contact with the state crime lab in Springfield to see if there would be any possibilities exploring some of the evidence that was collected. I'm not overly optimistic at this point that that would be the case. We're hopeful that someday, we'd be able to put something together and get somebody charged in this case."
The case you just heard about is one of three major cold cases on the Quincy Police Department's radar.
Lt. Jason Simmons said those cases are reviewed periodically.
He said, "Our intent is to see if there is any new information, or if there are any new advances in the field of forensics that would allow us to go in to possibly reopen these cases."
Our next unsolved mystery takes us to Monroe City, Missouri, where a young man went missing in 1968 -- 42 years ago Wednesday night, in fact.
KHQA's Rajah Maples spoke with the man's sister, father and an investigator about that case, and we'll show you what happened Thursday night on KHQA.
TV Station Profiles & Public Inspection Files forKHQA