advertisement

Sugar Grove man acquitted of 1981 murder

Cook County jurors have acquitted a 49-year-old deaf Sugar Grove man accused of murdering his disabled teenage girlfriend 30 years ago.

Jurors on Monday found Gary Albert not guilty of stabbing Dawn Niles of LaGrange Park to death in an attack on St. Patrick's Day 1981. Judge Joan O'Brien told Albert he was "free to go."

Fishermen found Niles' body four days after her disappearance in a pond in a Cook County Forest Preserve in Palos Park. She was three months pregnant and stabbed 34 times. At the time Albert was an 18-year-old high school senior.

Cook County sheriff's detectives reopened the case in 2006. Albert was arrested in 2008 after DNA tests found he'd had sex with Niles shortly before her death.