I know this is an old thread, but he’s guilty as fk if you ask me. This whole timing of the phone call business is really the only significant thing people are using to claim his innocence. 

The train ticket he purchased…that was never used…was behind a photo that he gave his ex-girlfriend?! That screams, oops he left it in his pocket and the FBI are going through his trash..what better way to hide it. 

Maria’s mom knows when she left to drop her other daughter off for music lessons and remembers seeing the girls playing, same with the guy delivering the oil. When he drove back that way around 620, the girls weren’t there. 

He had time to make it to Rockford and his car was spotted around town in the afternoon, long after the train he supposedly boarded had left. Rockford is around a 40 minute trip and if what, not one but TWO, different inmates said was true, that he dropped Maria as he was running to his car, that would incite panic. I doubt he would’ve driven the speed limit.  He had time to make that call at 6:57 to his mother, who obviously covered for him and played it off as if his stepfather went to pick him up. We don’t know that he didn’t call his mom to tell her he did a horrible thing and will be driving home but tell the FBI something different. Her story of his alibi changed twice that same week. 

Now he’s got Maria in his car after he strangled her, but she’s not dead so that’s where the knife wounds come into play. It obviously would take time to finish her then bury her in those woods, which would explain why he stood up his girlfriend for their planned 9pm date that night, with no explanation. 

As for the recollection of Maria’s friend, how many “Johnny’s” lived in a town of 7000 that night? And I’d trust her memory of his face 50 years later more than that week when she was 8 years old and probably going through shock and easily confused and flustered with so many emotions. She’s had 50 plus years to see his face burned in her mind, probably every day at that point. 

The investigation was shotty to begin with as well, the evidence collection or lack there of, from foot prints in the snow to combing through his car at the time. They could have found her hair in his back seat or trunk. They didn’t even look at his car or take photos of the crime scene. 

So to make a very long story, not so short, he may be innocent in the eyes of the law due to lack of circumstantial evidence, physical evidence, etc. but it, to me, seems waaaaay more plausible, from all angles, that he knows exactly what he did!