Judy Hawtree, 53, was shot to death inside her family’s rural home near Monee, Illinois, on September 4, 1972, along with her husband Stephen, 56, and their 17-year-old son Thomas. Contemporary accounts describe gunmen forcing the family into the basement and shooting all three at close range in what investigators called execution-style killings. Nothing publicly reported suggested the family knew their assailants or had been involved in a dispute that explained the violence.

Investigators later linked a .25-caliber firearm tied to the Hawtree killings to the September 1972 slaying of Army Specialist Five William Richter and to other shootings across Illinois. Authorities connected weapons or patterns in those attacks to the August 1972 massacre of Paul Corbett and three family members in Barrington Hills and to the May 1972 killing of student Michael Gerchenson. Officials believed several of the incidents might have been committed by members of the same loose group known as De Mau Mau.

Will County prosecutors charged Reuben (also reported as Ruben) Taylor, Donald Taylor, Michael Clark and Nathaniel Burse with the Monee murders, and several suspects were later convicted in the Corbett case. The Hawtree prosecution, however, never reached a jury: charges in Will County were dismissed on July 20, 1994, after some defendants had been convicted or died in custody, leaving no trial or conviction specifically for the Hawtree deaths.

Did anyone in the area know the Hawtree family or have information about visitors or suspicious activity around the farmhouse in September 1972?