In the summer of 1966, Suzanna Marino, a 15-year-old girl known to her friends and family as Susan, was living in Joliet, Illinois. Her life was cut short in an act of brutal violence by a trusted family member, a crime that would be the first in a series of violent acts committed by her killer over several decades.
On the afternoon of July 21, 1966, Suzanna met with her brother-in-law, 18-year-old John William Agrue, in downtown Joliet. Agrue, who was married to Suzanna’s older sister, persuaded the teenager to accompany him to the nearby Hammel Woods forest preserve, a sprawling natural area southwest of the city. In a secluded, wooded part of the preserve, Agrue made unwanted romantic advances toward his young sister-in-law. When Suzanna firmly rejected him, he flew into a rage and viciously attacked her with a knife, stabbing her approximately a dozen times in the chest and abdomen. Her body was left near a footpath in the woods.
After the murder, Agrue returned home and confessed to his wife what he had done. Initially, she did not believe his horrific story. To prove it, Agrue drove her to the crime scene, pointing out where he had left Suzanna’s purse and shoes as evidence of his deed. Horrified, his wife pleaded with him to turn himself in to the police. Instead, Agrue sought out a local priest and confessed to him. The priest then contacted the authorities. Two days later, on July 23, 1966, John Agrue was arrested by the Will County Sheriff's Office. During his interrogation, he admitted to killing Suzanna because she had spurned his advances.
The investigation proceeded quickly, aided by Agrue’s own confessions to his wife, the priest, and the police. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He was charged with murder, and his trial took place in the Will County Circuit Court. In 1967, John Agrue was convicted of the first-degree murder of Suzanna Marino and received an indeterminate sentence of 20 to 50 years in prison. He was incarcerated at the Joliet Correctional Center to begin his sentence.
Agrue’s time in prison was not without incident. In 1975, he was temporarily transferred to a hospital in Chicago to donate a kidney to his sister. While recovering from the surgery, he managed to escape by climbing through a bathroom window and stealing a car. He was captured a week later in Nebraska. Despite the escape, Agrue was paroled in January 1982, after serving about 15 years of his sentence. He moved to Colorado to live with relatives, but his freedom was short-lived and marked by further violence.
In the summer of 1982, Agrue murdered two women in Colorado: 20-year-old Susan Becker and 94-year-old Orma B. Smith. On July 15, 1982, he was arrested while attempting to kidnap another woman at knifepoint on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. He was convicted of attempted abduction in March 1983 and returned to Illinois for violating his parole. He remained in prison until being paroled again in 1989, after which he returned to Joliet.
John William Agrue died of an accidental prescription drug overdose on June 29, 2009. After his death, investigators were able to use DNA evidence to definitively link him to the 1982 murder of Orma Smith. Based on this and other evidence, authorities also named him the primary suspect in Susan Becker's murder, posthumously identifying him as a serial killer. The case of Suzanna Marino, while legally closed for decades, remains a dark chapter in Joliet’s history, a reminder of a young life violently taken and the long shadow of her killer's crimes.
