Herculaneum Police Chief Mark Tulgetske said he is disappointed after the excavation of an unmarked burial plot in an Illinois cemetery didn’t help solve a 42-year-old mystery.
Authorities dug up a plot recorded as a pauper’s grave Dec. 17 at Greenwood Cemetery in Fairview Heights, Ill., with hopes that the body of Geneva Adams, who vanished July 24, 1976, would be found.
Instead, the plot was empty.
“We are confused and going back to square one to try and find it again,” Tulgetske said today (Dec. 28). “There was nothing in the spot it was supposed to be.”
Adams, who lived in Festus, was 53 when she disappeared after visiting the old Artesian Lounge in Herculaneum and then accompanying a man she met there to an after-hours club 40 miles away, in East St. Louis.
The day Adams went missing she was last seen dancing with Jimmie Lee Mills, who has been a person of interest in the case ever since he told police that after he met Adams at the Artesian, they went to a club in East St. Louis and then he dropped her off at a doughnut shop in Crystal City.
Six weeks after Adams went missing, a body was found in a brushy area off St. Clair Avenue in Washington Park. That body, which was never identified but had similar features to Adams, eventually was buried in a metal box called a “Ziegler Case” at Greenwood Cemetery.
“We are still convinced that the Jane Doe that was recovered in 1976 is our victim, but we were not successful in locating the grave of that Jane Doe,” Tulgetske said. “We believe it is in that graveyard. The location records reflect it, but there is nothing there. The records are not correct.”
If a body had been found, the remains were to be transported to the University of North Texas, which specializes in human identification, and DNA from the body would have been tested to see if it matches Adams’ DNA.
Steve Crump, one of Adams’ 10 children from her first marriage, said this was the third time the family believed they were close to finding the body of their missing mother.
The first was in 1985 when authorities searched property Mills leased in Perryville for a possible burial site. In the mid-2000s, a body was found buried along Joachim Creek near where the Artesian Lounge formerly was located, and initially people thought it might have been Adams.
“It has been a rough few holidays here, but we’ve been disappointed before, so it is nothing new,” said Crump, who grew up in Festus and lived in unincorporated Fenton before moving to Ozark in 2003.
“They (authorities) gave us encouragement that they are still going to be looking, and we are still hopeful that maybe they will find it. I will just try to keep it going and keep the pressure on, so they will continue to try to search for the grave.”
Tulgetske said authorities will continue to try to find the grave in the Illinois cemetery.
“We are not going to give up,” Tulgetske said.
Mills, who is now 76, is serving a 10-year prison sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina for possession of a firearm. He is scheduled to be released on Aug. 12, 2019.
He is a person of interest in another unsolved case – the killing of Cynthia Horan.
Horan was 21 when she disappeared on July 18, 1985. She was a secretary for the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and had occupied a boarding house-type residence in Missouri at the same time as Mills.