Mascoutah banker was burned alive in 1978; case still unsolved

Q: A few years ago, your paper ran an article about unsolved murders in St. Clair County. One murder that wasn't listed but I believe remains unsolved is the murder of a Mascoutah banker. In about 1974, he was kidnapped, taken to a country road and burned alive. At the time the article appeared, I wrote the writer and asked about this murder but never received a response. I would like to know if anyone was ever convicted of the crime and, if not, why was his name omitted from the article.

A: It has been nearly 40 years since the agonizing screams of Joseph Dressler woke Orville and Bernice Kinzel from their slumber early during the night of Aug. 6-7, 1978.

From the bedroom window of their home in rural Freeburg, they saw a car engulfed in flames. Bernice called for help as her husband ran to his truck and drove to the burning vehicle.

“When I got up there, (Dressler) was two or three rows deep in the bean field (and) running toward me, yelling “Help me! Help me!” Orville told us that night. “It was the worst thing I have ever seen. I helped him all I could, but there wasn’t much I could do for him except comfort him till the ambulance got there.”

The 34-year-old Dressler was vice president of Mascoutah Bank and Trust. That night after riding in the Mascoutah Homecoming parade, Dressler took his wife, Jane, and two young children home. He later returned to the homecoming, where he was supposed to escort the queen candidates.

He never enjoyed that honor, and investigators to this day have never found who kept him from it. Instead, he wound up with first-, second-, and third-degree burns over 90 percent of his body. He fell into a coma the following day and died Aug. 12 at St. John’s Mercy Hospital in St. Louis.

Before he died, though, he managed to tell investigators what had happened but, unfortunately, not the names of the perpetrators who had committed the heinous act. Dressler told them that “two boys” had abducted him at knifepoint from Scheve Park, the site of the annual festival.

The boys allegedly forced Dressler to drive his gold Buick Century to Jefferson Road between Mascoutah and Freeburg, where police figured the kidnappers robbed Dressler and doused the car with gasoline. They set the car aflame with Dressler locked inside.

The inferno was so intense that the windshield melted away. How Dressler escaped the car at all remains a mystery. Police said the doors were still locked when they examined it.

Two days after Dressler died, Joann Juenger, a 15-year-old Mascoutah girl, told a friend that she had been involved in the crime. On Sept. 22, she was taken into custody and told authorities that she had driven the getaway car for the two youth who had killed Dressler. In all, she implicated six youth in the plot, five by name.

But if investigators thought this was the miracle break they were hoping for, they would be badly disappointed. Four of the youth on Juenger’s list were rounded up, and three soon were cleared. Police said a fourth could neither be cleared nor implicated. The remaining two on Juenger’s list were never found.

With no other solid leads, police charged Juenger with murder on Dec. 21, and she was certified to stand trial as an adult. But her case, too, quickly fell apart.

As investigators began to probe other suspects unrelated to Juenger’s story, St. Clair County Assistant State’s Attorney John Mohan made a discovery that turned the Juenger case on its head. Two years before, a psychiatric evaluation had found Juenger was prone to inventing fanciful tales and that, even as a 13-year-old, she enjoyed notoriety.

So, on Jan. 8, 1979, just as jury selection began, Mohan and Eric Young, Juenger’s attorney, agreed to give Juenger a lie-detector test. As they now expected, the examination showed Juenger, who already had recanted all involvement in the crime, likely fabricated the entire story. Three days later, all charges were dropped.

When we revisited the story 10 years later, both Mohan and Illinois State Police Detective Edward Muzzey said they were positive Juenger had nothing to do with it.

“It took me time to piece it together,” Mohan said. “I spent a month between 80 and 100 hours a week working on it. It took me that long to be convinced she was the wrong person.”

All Juenger could do was apologize for her actions and for taking resources away from tracking down the true perps.

“I knew nothing in the first place and I know nothing about it now,” the then 25-year-old woman told us in 1988, adding that she had no idea why she confessed. “I wish they would catch the guys who did do it because I don’t like it hanging over my head. It’s been thrown back in my face for the past 10 years.”

But those who investigated her for the murder probably wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that those succeeding 10 years had been tumultuous ones for Juenger. After being cleared of murder, she spent two years in the county’s juvenile detention center for skipping school. She eventually earned her GED and later married in 1983, but divorced the following year after having a son.

Then in 1986 while working at a Monroe City, Mo., radio station, she was raped by her ex-husband, but would give birth to the girl who had been conceived during the assault. By the time the News-Democrat found her again, she was in jail for involuntary manslaughter, the result of a traffic accident that had killed an elderly man and injured five other members of his family.

“I’m an alcoholic — I can admit that now,” she told us four months into a five-year sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center. “With a lot of work and faith in God, I will have a bright future.”

Life also went on for Dressler’s widow, Jane. Forced to try to make her 8-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter understand that Daddy was never coming home again, she said she spent the next few years in fear before finding love again and marrying Louis Sindel, of Mascoutah.

Now, nearly 38 years later, no one has ever been tried for the crime. Why Dressler’s name was not included in the report you saw, I can’t say. If it’s the one I found in our morgue — a look at the area’s Major Case Squad — all I can say is that the story was not meant to be a comprehensive list of all cold cases. Instead, it merely mentioned a few of the major unsolved murders to give readers a taste of what the squad did. I hope this answer makes up for it.

Today’s trivia

What unusual item accompanied the mummy of Ramses II when it was flown to Paris for scientific examination in 1974?

Answer to Wednesday’s trivia: In its advertising, the Pringles potato chip people like to brag, “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop!” Sadly, that’s no longer true for Fredric John Baur. Baur was an organic chemist and food storage technician who developed various frying oils and freeze-dried ice cream. But he is probably best remembered for designing the familiar tubular Pringles container and the method of packaging the stackable chips. He developed the system in 1966 and won a patent in 1970. Then when he died in 2008 at age 84 in Cincinnati, his children granted his final wish: A few of his ashes were buried in a Pringles container alongside most of the rest of his remains in a more conventional urn.

This story was originally published April 7, 2016 at 6:56 AM with the headline "Mascoutah banker was burned alive in 1978; case still unsolved."