© Eric Litke / The Sheboygan PressRuby Klokow, 76, pleaded guilty Monday to the second-degree murder of a her 7-month-old daughter in 1957.
On March 1, 1957, a 7-month-old girl named Jeaneen Marie Klokow died at home. Sheboygan, Wisc., investigators ruled that she'd fallen off her mother's couch by accident.
For decades, that was that.
Except she'd been killed. And decades would separate the medical advances and nagging consciences that resulted in her mother's guilty plea to second-degree murder in Sheboygan on Monday morning.
"It's really an incredible thing," Sheboygan County District Atty. Joe DeCecco said by phone on Monday, and he would know: Prosecuting someone nearly 56 years after the fact required improvisation.
Hours earlier, 76-year-old Ruby C. Klokow formally pleaded guilty to what she'd recently confessed in front of Sheboygan detectives who had revived the case -- she had abused her daughter to death.
Except the second-degree murder charge she confessed to no longer exists under Wisconsin law. The crime scene was long gone -- knocked over years ago where the county sheriff's department now stands. Case files were missing, and good luck asking the original investigators where they went.
"Half the people that were around then were dead now," DeCecco said. The other half were mostly too old to remember what happened.
But some memories hadn't eroded over half a century.
Within the world of criminal investigation, infant-abuse cases can be among the toughest to prosecute. There are often no witnesses other than the suspect, and investigators often must try to find the difference between a loving mother's bad fall and something more malicious.
A 2008 tip by James Klokow, one of Ruby's sons, captured investigators' interest.
Comment: Our eating one less M&M isn't going to solve the problem. The problem is the psychopathic middlemen between the producers (the farmers and these child-slaves) and the consumers. As with all other industries, we need to excise the parasites at the top.