1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl may have its case opened once again. The man serving his life for the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl has just appealed his murder conviction. 

The man appealing for his freedom and the verdict of his case on the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl is former police officer Jack Daniel McCullough. Serving a life sentence for kidnapping and murdering a neighbor's child in 1957 and held guilty for the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl, McCullough said that the guilty verdict was decided through insubstantial evidence.

McCullough's appeal for his verdict on the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl case is a long and well-thought 80-page plea. In it, the former police officer entreats for a new trial as his mother was allegedly allowed to accuse him from the grave. Meanwhile, he was kept from proving that he was elsewhere when a 7-year-old girl was abducted and killed.

Filed Thursday by the the Illinois state appellate defender, the plea on the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl verdict on McCullough detailed that nobody actually saw who grabbed victim Maria Ridulph from a street corner in Sycamore Illinois, or witnessed how or where she was killed.

The appeal states that contrary to everyone's judgment, there was no forensic evidence actually tying McCullough, or anyone else for that matter, to the crime that held the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The conclusion of the court, as said in the 80-pager, is that prosecutors built their case on the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl on unreliable evidence, which also included inmate witnesses whose motives were suspect and others whose memories were dulled by the passage of time.

The appeal challenged, "The evidence against Jack McCullough was so unreasonable, so improbable, and so unsatisfactory as to create a reasonable doubt that he was responsible for a 1957 murder, kidnapping, and abduction of an infant."

That evidence as told in the appeal included "personal memories of what occurred 55 years ago; a photo identification made 53 years after the incident; testimony from jailhouse informants; innocuous statements from the defendant; and an improperly admitted and inconclusive statement from the defendant's mother while on morphine and Haldol just before her death."

In September 2012, McCullough was convicted of the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl. He allegedly  kidnapped and murdered Maria Ridulph in 1957. The second-grader little girl disappeared from the corner of Sycamore's Archie Place and Center Cross Street on the eve of December 3, 1957.

The brown-eyed girl's body was found next spring in the woods along a busy state highway 120 miles away from the scene of disappearance. The crime of the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl shocked the small farming community. And now this case of the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl is believed to be the country's oldest cold case ever prosecuted.

74-year-old McCullough is now serving a life sentence at a state prison in Pontiac, Illinois for the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl.

According to CNN, he denied committing the crime of the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl in several letters, and even in a jailhouse the previous year. He also denied the crime in a long police interrogation in Seattle hours before his arrest. According to prosecutors and investigators, McCullough's strange behavior at the time of questioning had them convinced that they had the right man.

1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl was thought of having been solved already. However, this current plea from the man convicted of the murder might turn things around for the case. According to CNN, the DeKalb County State's Attorney, who also prosecuted McCullough, did not comment on the plea. He also referred any calls to the Illinois state appellate prosecutor, which also declined to comment on a pending case. According to a court clerk, both sides of the case of the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Illinois girl will be able to finish filing their briefs by late June and arguments may start by summer time.