More than 11 years after an Elgin woman was found beaten to death in a remote field, police announced Thursday they have charged her half-brother in the slaying.
Jose Luis Gonzalez, 47, who had moved to Falfurrias, Texas, a small town in the southern part of the state, after the 1991 beating death of Angelita Molina, 18, was arrested April 30 in Huntsville, Texas. He waived extradition and arrived in Elgin on Wednesday.
Police in Texas also said Thursday that Gonzalez is a suspect in the 1996 strangulation of his mother, Blanca Molina, whose body was found buried in a shallow grave near her apartment. He has not been charged in her death.
“He is our No. 1 suspect,” said Falfurrias Police Chief Baldemar Rivera. “We’ve been talking to people in Illinois, and the similarities in the murders are great.”
Gonzalez showed no emotion as he was arraigned Thursday before Cook County Criminal Court Judge John Scotillo in the killing of Angelita Molina, an Elgin High School dropout who was raising a 3-year-old daughter. Bail was set at $1 million.
Police said DNA testing completed in fall 2000 indicates that Gonzalez sexually assaulted his half-sister before she was killed. The cause of her death was blunt trauma to the head, police said.
Last month, Elgin detectives flew to Texas to interview people familiar with Gonzalez and got enough information for an arrest warrant, said James Lamkin, Elgin’s acting police chief.
Gonzalez, Molina and Blanca Molina were living in an apartment in the 1100 block of Spruce Lane in Elgin before Molina was reported missing to Elgin police on Jan. 22, 1991.
Three days later, Schaumburg police arrested Gonzalez on an unrelated charge of aggravated kidnapping–a family member said the charge was brought forward by a girlfriend.
Less than three weeks later, Molina was found dead, with signs that she had been sexually assaulted, in a field not far from her home. When Gonzalez was questioned about the death, police said they became suspicious because he was behaving oddly.
Gonzalez served time on the kidnapping charge, but no charges were filed in Molina’s death. Gonzalez later moved to Texas, following Blanca Molina, who moved to be closer to her mother.
In January 1996, six days after friends had last seen Blanca Molina and reported her missing, her body was found buried in a crude grave near her apartment in Falfurrias.
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Weeks after Blanca Molina was found slain, Elgin Police Detectives Bill Wood and Greg Welter went to Texas to reinterview Gonzalez and obtain samples from him to conduct DNA testing. At the time the testing was inconclusive, Lt. Mike Turner said.
In fall 2000 the cold case unit of the Illinois State Police reopened the investigation of Molina’s death. DNA testing technology had advanced, and Turner said new tests proved that Gonzales had sexually assaulted Molina. But investigators believed they needed to go back and do more interviews to get the evidence they needed for a murder charge, Turner said.
Until recently, Gonzalez was employed for seven years as a maintenance worker for the City of Falfurrias, where he lived with his wife and child, said Cook County Assistant Public Defender Barry Lloyd.
Romana Rodriguez, 90, Gonzalez’s maternal grandmother, said Thursday she did not think that her grandson was involved in the slayings.
“After his mother died, he was crying a lot,” Rodriguez said. “The police were looking for him, and I asked him if he had done it. I said, `Tell me the truth, my boy. No lies. If you had something to do with this . . . .’ He told me, `As much as I’ve been a criminal, I never touched my mother or my sister either.'”