Distraught 911 call begins emotional first day of testimonies at Wilson murders trial

SYCAMORE – About 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 15, 2016, Sue Saari drove to her family’s home in rural Sycamore to check on her mother and brother after she couldn’t get ahold of them all day.

It wasn’t all that unusual, Sue said Thursday. Her elderly mother left the landline phone off the hook before. Her brother was hard of hearing and sometimes didn’t hear his phone. Still, Sue decided to drive to the home at 16058 Old State Road just to be sure.

When she walked inside, she saw her brother, Robert Wilson, lying on his back at the bottom of the stairs, blood pooling around him. He was not responsive. Frantic, she ran upstairs to her 85-year-old mother’s bedroom, looking for Patricia Wilson. Patricia’s bed appeared occupied. The covers were pulled up and something was bunched underneath, “looking like somebody was laying there,” Sue Saari said. She pulled the covers back, hoping she’d found her mom. Instead, multiple pairs of Patricia’s jeans were bunched on the bed covered by the blanket.

Panicked now, Sue Saari ran outside the home and called her husband of 38 years, Mike Saari to come over. Then, she called 911.

“My brother, I think he is dead,” a vocally distraught Sue Saari told a police dispatcher, gasping and crying over the phone. “I can’t find my mom. … Please hurry.”

At one point, Sue Saari told the dispatcher her mother’s car was gone, but Patricia doesn’t drive it. When the dispatcher asked if Sue was in the house, she replied, crying “No I can’t go back in there. There’s blood everywhere.”

The clip ended with Sue Saari’s voice yelling in the background, “Where is my mom? Where is she?”

Nearly a decade later, Sue Saari sat and listened to that 911 call play to a crowded courtroom in front of a jury, while the man accused in the killings watched.

She sobbed as she recounted her last image of her brother to kick off an emotional day of witness testimony Thursday.

The long-awaited double murder trial of Jonathan D. Hurst, 55, formerly of Chicago, convened Thursday morning after two days of jury selection and almost nine years after the Wilsons were found beaten to death inside their home.

Jurors filed in to DeKalb County Circuit Court Judge Marcy Buick’s courtroom – 11 men and 5 women, including alternates – to hear opening remarks in what’s expected to be lengthy criminal proceedings.

Hurst, wearing a blue-patterned tie, brown suit and black thick-framed glasses, did not appear to react visibly as lead prosecutor Scott Schwertley, assistant state’s attorney, told jurors prosecutors expect to present enough evidence to show Hurst killed the Wilsons “savagely.”

Hurst is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of home invasion. If convicted, he faces a life sentence. He’s been held at DeKalb County Jail without bail since his arrest.

Trial is expected to reconvene at 9 a.m. Friday.

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Jonathan Hurst is escorted to his seat by two DeKalb County Sheriff’s deputies Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025, during his trial at the DeKalb County Courthouse in Sycamore. Hurst is charged in the 2016 slayings of Sycamore elderly mother and son Patricia and Robert Wilson. (Mark Busch)

Prosecutors lay out arguments

“Sunday, Aug. 14, 2016, started off as a normal day for Patricia Wilson and her son, Robert Wilson,” Schwertley said in opening statements. “But that’s not how it ended.”

The Wilsons died from blunt-force trauma, according to the DeKalb County Coroner’s Office. They both suffered extensive head wounds. Robert was stabbed four times. Patricia’s hand was sliced.

Prosecutors plan to call almost 50 witnesses throughout the trial, including Wilson family members and friends. Almost two dozen law enforcement personnel also are expected to testify over the next two weeks, detailing the 3 ½-year investigation that led them to chase 1,300 leads over multiple states.

Schwertley told jurors key evidence detectives collected over a five-day sweep of the Wilson’s home will point to Hurst’s guilt. Prosecutors are expected to focus on three main things: Forensic evidence including DNA and fingerprints collected at the homicide scene, cell tower geomapping data and Patricia’s missing car, found within a walking distance of where Hurst lived at the time in Chicago, authorities said.

Hurst told authorities he’d never been to Sycamore and didn’t know the Wilsons, authorities have said. Prosecutors said they can prove otherwise.

Forensic experts are expected to testify about breakthrough DNA technology that helped investigators build a genealogy tree backwards to find a suspect.

“One of those persons on that tree was this defendant, Jonathan Hurst,” Schwertley said, pointing to Hurst, who did not visibly react.

The defense told jurors Thursday they’ll soon learn that prosecutors’ chain of evidence has holes in it.

“It’s not pretty, it’s not happy, and what happened to Robert and Patricia Wilson was horrible and should never have happened,” public defender Emma Franklin said in opening statements. “[…]But the state wants you to believe that Jonathan Hurst is responsible for those killings. And ladies and gentleman, he is not responsible for these killings.”

Loved ones and family of the Wilsons sat crowded in the front row gallery and looked on as Franklin argued that police made “a big jump” in their investigation.

“The evidence is going to show that once the police got what they thought was their first big clue in this case, they stopped investigating anything else, or any other suspect,” Franklin said. “They formed a theory and then they got tunnel vision.”

The defense is expected to bring about a dozen of their own witnesses when prosecution rests, expected sometime next week.

Son-in-law recounts harrowing moments entering Wilson home

Mike Saari, Sue’s husband, also testified Thursday about finding Patricia and Robert on Aug. 15, 2016.

He took frequent, long pauses, looking up at the ceiling as he recalled walking into a gruesome scene.

When a distraught Sue called her husband to say she feared her brother was dead, Mike drove to meet her on Old State Road. Sue would not re-enter the home, so Mike went inside.

“There was blood spatter on the staircase wall, on the sliding glass door. Bob was on his back,” Mike Saari said. “And the left side of his face was badly injured, just bruised, black. His left eye was closed, his right eye was partially open.”

Mike also tried to find Patricia upstairs, but didn’t see her. He tried calling Patricia’s name. No answer.

Instead, he went down the stairs, stepped over his brother-in-law’s body, took a left in the bright red-carpeted hallway to the laundry room, turned the light on and found his wife’s mother.

“Pat was face down,” Mike Saari said. “She was, to me, obviously deceased. I couldn’t see her face. There was a pool of blood on her right side of her head.”

Prosecutor Brooks Locke asked if he went into the room.

“I stepped in, like one step, and kind of stepped back, and trying to process what I’d just seen,” Mike Saari said. “I just turned off the light, and tried to remember how to breathe.”

Patricia was wearing blue shorts and sneakers. She lay half in a crawl space, next to the dryer on one side and hanging clothes on the other, according to crime scene photographs presented to the jury.

Police arrived minutes later.

As her husband testified, Sue embraced her Aunt Nancy Strever, Patricia’s sister, rubbing her back and watching from the gallery.

While lawyers chatted during a brief morning recess, Hurst turned his chair around and appeared to speak amicably to the half dozen people gathered behind him in the courtroom. At times, he smiled and laughed.

He’s denied being in the area, pleaded not guilty, and has no known criminal history, authorities have said. It’s not yet known if he will testify in his own defense.

The reason the Saaris had gone to check on the Wilsons was because Nancy Strever couldn’t reach them by phone all day, Strever said in testimony.

Strever, 89, said she and Patricia, who she called Patty, were close friends, more than just sisters.

“I was her sounding board I think,” Strever said of Patricia, who was four years older.

It was common for the pair to speak on a landline telephone multiple times a day, and they frequently visited each other, Strever said.

That Sunday after church and breakfast, Patricia went home, mowed the lawn and spoke with Strever many times via phone. She told Strever she didn’t feel well, and that Robert had come home and was in an outbuilding behind the house fixing a separate lawnmower.

The sisters spoke for the last time at 7:43 p.m. Aug. 14. Patricia said she planned to do laundry.

The following day, Strever rang the Wilson home throughout the day, to no avail. About 4:45 p.m. Monday, Aug. 15, 2016, Strever made a decision.

“I thought ‘Should I call Sue or not?’ and I didn’t want to bother her,” Strever said. “And finally I thought ‘Well I gotta call her.’ So I called Sue.”

Friends detail Robert’s final moments at Sycamore Moose Lodge

During Robert Wilson’s last day alive, he spent much of it doing what he’d often done: church with mom, breakfast after, then an afternoon at the Sycamore Moose Lodge downtown, witnesses said.

He was an active and longtime member, was the lodge’s treasurer and secretary, and for sometime that hot August afternoon, sat at the lodge’s bar doing paperwork.

Video played for the jury Thursday showed Robert, in a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, white shoes and a handkerchief in his pocket, at the bar. A baseball game played on TV. His friends and fellow lodge members, Janice Tripp and David Tripp, came in, greeted him and then sat down for a beer. They knew him as “Smiley.”

“He was working on the minutes. He was so happy when he got done with them that day,” Tripp said in testimony.

It was a “typical Sunday” at the lodge, Tripp said. Specials included make-your-own Bloody Marys and shrimp cocktail. When he left the lodge, Robert took two shrimp cocktails home for his mother, to “tide her over until supper,” friend and Moose member Cindy Bocklund said in testimony.

Robert had been prepping for a lodge meeting the next day, Aug. 15.

“Ms. Tripp, is Aug. 14, 2016, the last time you ever saw Smiley alive?” asked prosecutor Neil Michling.

“Yes,” Tripp said.

This story was updated at 6:13 p.m. Jan. 23, 2025.