In the summer of 1987, the life of 19-year-old Kristina Marie Povolish was tragically cut short. The young female from Belleville, Illinois, was last seen by her mother shortly after midnight on July 25, 1987. A neighbor had given her a ride to a local Moto Mart gas station on West Main Street. Three days later, on July 28, a mail carrier made a grim discovery in a weed-covered ditch on Triple Lakes Road, just north of Imbs Station Road near Dupo. It was the body of Kristina Povolish.
An investigation by the St. Clair County Sheriff's Department, with assistance from the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis, determined that she had been strangled. Her murder set off a long and painstaking investigation that would remain officially unsolved for decades, leaving her family and the community searching for answers.
The investigation into Kristina's death eventually became linked to a series of other unsolved murders of young women in the Belleville area. Over the years, suspicion began to center on a man named Dale R. Anderson, who was already serving a life sentence for the brutal 1989 murders of a mother and her young son. Robert K. Ressler, a renowned former FBI profiler who coined the term "serial killer," concluded that Anderson was a "sexual psychopath" and the "very model" of a serial killer. Ressler stated he was 80 percent sure that Anderson was responsible for the deaths of Kristina Povolish and at least three other women, whose cases bore striking similarities. When police searched Anderson's home in 1989, they found file folders in his locked safe containing memos, notes, and newspaper articles about Kristina and two other murdered women. Despite his denials, the circumstantial evidence and expert profiling pointed heavily toward his involvement.
Although Dale R. Anderson was never formally charged with or convicted of the murder of Kristina Marie Povolish, he remains the primary suspect in her death. Anderson, who had once worked as a St. Clair County sheriff's jailer, had a history of manipulative and violent behavior. The series of murders, including Kristina's, created a pattern that investigators and profilers found too strong to ignore. All the victims were young women, their bodies were moved and concealed, and there was no evidence of a struggle at the abduction sites, suggesting the killer may have used a ruse, perhaps even posing as a police officer, a tactic Anderson was known to employ. While another man was wrongly convicted for one of the other related murders and later exonerated, the case against Anderson as a serial predator responsible for Kristina's death, among others, grew stronger in the eyes of many investigators, even without a confession or a conviction for her specific case. The death of Kristina Marie Povolish is officially an unsolved homicide, a cold case that highlights a dark period in Belleville's history and points to a convicted killer who likely took the secrets of other horrific crimes to his grave.
