Ep. 29 - Love Triangle Murder in Quincy

Love triangles are never a good thing. Someone always gets hurt. And sometimes, someone gets dead. In the case of this story, that someone was a man named Stanley Goodside. He became friends with two former flower children and when things got complicated, Goodside was murdered. This is a tale of a pot bust, a love triangle, a murder, a body that was dismembered and had parts ending up in different places and a haunting left in the wake.

My Dad spent his early childhood living in a converted chicken coop. It was something that families of lesser means had to do to put a roof over their heads. Lani and Rodger Aldridge moved to Quincy, Illinois in 1974 and moved into a property at 1631 N. 24th Street that had two houses. The couple lived in a smaller two-story house that was in the back of the property with their six-year-old son. That house was a converted chicken coop. Another house at the front of the property, they rented out. This area of Quincy was quiet and remote in the 1970s and the property backed up to the Calvary Cemetery, which suited the Aldridges fine as they kept mostly to themselves. They were very different people then their Midwestern neighbors.

The Aldridges moved to Quincy because Rodger had gotten a job with a company called Colt Industries. Rodger worked long hours for the company and wasn't around much. Lani worked at a restaurant in downtown Quincy, the H&H Coffee House. They were like ships passing in the night. Their former days living the carefree hippie life were long in the past, but one remnant had carried over and that was Stanley Goodside. Lani and Rodger met Stanley at a John Denver concert in the early 1970s. They became fast friends with common interests, one of which was wife-swapping. The Goodsides and Aldridges switched partners for a crazy weekend and although this activity never occurred again, Stanley remained friends with Rodger and Lani. When he needed a place to live in 1974, the couple invited him to come live at their place and he would stay off and on for months.

Stanley Goodside was born in Iowa in 1943. Stanley was an anti-establishment guy, peace-loving and a bit of a drifter. He had studied wildlife biology and traveled to Mexico and the Southern United States often to study the wildlife and because he had nose polyps and the warmer climates helped him breath better. He married Nadyne Rosenberg and they had a daughter named Jennie in 1970. By 1974, he was separated from Nadyne and that is why he needed a place to live. Whether he chose the Aldridges because they were all friends or because he had fallen for Lani, I don't know. Whatever the reason, Lani and Stanley grew closer. He helped out around the house and fixed up the sun porch, telling Lani that he was "Gus the Carpenter" and he would do a little show for her, making her laugh. Stanley helped to plant a big garden in the backyard where they grew vegetables and cannabis. Lani and Stanley would spend hours in the backyard, lounging in a pup tent and listening to the neighbor, Lori Robertson, play her piano. There were apples that grew along the property and Goodside would make fresh applesauce from the apples of the trees. He also liked to bake a loaf of wheat honey bread every Friday. He would take some of the bread and applesauce over to the Robertsons. Stanley was a likeable guy and Lani fell in love with him. Lani said of the time, "Stanley was the most wonderful person I ever met, and I just fell in love. Yes, [Rodger and I] were married, absolutely, but he had his girlfriends, too." She also added, "It was like living in a sitcom. It was very pleasant and funny. We had so much fun together."

But Rodger wasn't having fun and he wasn't keen on his wife sleeping with Stanley. In September of 1975, somebody tipped off the Adams County Sheriff's Department that pot was being grown in the Aldridges' backyard. Deputies entered the premises with a search warrant and found cannabis plants drying on the porch roof and tall plants growing in the garden. Their initial report claimed that they found 930 pounds of cannabis plants, but later was revised to 33 pounds after the dirt from roots was removed. Lani, Rodger and Stanley were all arrested. An attorney named Jack Inghram represented all three and he remembered that his three clients all definitely marched to their own drums, but that they nice. Although he felt Rodger was very angry and standoffish. After the arrest, Rodger moved to Burlington, Iowa and a few months later he signed another search warrant for another drug bust at his former home. Lani and Stanley were arrested again, but after Lani plead guilty to the September bust, these other charges were dropped. Stanley, however, was going to go on trial for both busts. He would never make it to trial.

Rodger was living in Iowa with the Aldridges son and in March of 1976, Rodger had agreed to meet-up with Lani in their hometown of Sullivan, Illinois so that she could visit with their now eight-year-old son. The idea had been Rodger's and Lani believes this was part of a plan to lure her away from the home she still shared with Goodside. Rodger picked Lani up from that house on a Friday and drove her to her family's farm in Sullivan where she spent the weekend. She was able to tell her family at that time that she was pregnant with Stanley's child. Rodger returned and took her back home where she found Stanley gone. Lani called the local hospital because Stanley was going to have nose surgery there while she was gone. The hospital informed her that he never showed up for the surgery. This caused Lani to immediately become concerned and she started calling friends and talking to neighbors. She was able to conclude that Stanley hadn't been seen since that Friday that she left, March 21, 1976. She found some blood in the house and when she looked closely at the pink bathtub in the bathroom, she saw what she believed to be chips in the porcelain. 

On April 4th, a torso was found at a rest stop in Sullivan, about 10 miles from Lani's family farm. This was the 1970s, so at the time, police had no idea who it belonged to because the head, feet and hands were missing. Two days later, Lani was walking through Calvary Cemetery and in a wooded area that bordered the cemetery, she found a garbage bag. She picked it up and the bottom split open revealing a washcloth with a human thumb wrapped in it. Lani recognized the washcloth as one she owned. Thankfully, Lani had been walking with a friend who helped her to a nearby house and they phoned the police. The police searched the wooded area and found another bag containing a head, feet and hands. Goodside's body had been dismembered into six pieces and left in two different places, half a state apart with the torso being found on Rodger's route, so suspicion fell onto Rodger who had disappeared.

Three months passed without authorities being able to locate Rodger. He eventually was persuaded to turn himself in and he did so on July 25, 1976. He had been hiding in Mexico with his son. Rodger plead not guilty to the murder. Before the murder trial, Lani and Rodger had their trial for the pot bust. Lani plead guilty and got four years probation and she was allowed to go back to Arizona where she had moved earlier. Rodger went to trial and was found guilty and sentenced to 1 to 5 years in prison for the pot charges. His murder trial began in May of 1977 in Quincy with Judge David Slocum presiding over the case prosecuted by Bob Bier. It was a tough circumstantial case. There was no DNA evidence in the 1970s. There were no eyewitnesses to the crime. Rodger didn't testify. All the prosecution had was one person who said that they had heard Rodger angrily threaten that he was going to cut Goodside's head off. And the location of the torso was suspect. Based on the state of the body, pathologists were unable to determine the time of death or even where Goodside had died and there was no weapon. Rodger's home in Iowa had been searched, as was his vehicle, and nothing incriminating was found. Rodger's defense attorney Drew Schnack closed with an argument that declared the prosecution had only proven motive and so the jury must acquit. 

The trial lasted a week. The jury deliberated for ten hours. Before the verdict was read, Rodger trembled and then was washed over with relief when the verdict was read as not guilty. He rushed over and shook several of the hands of the jury. After the trial, Rodger's defense attorney Schnack admitted that he had sent Rodger to take a lie-detector test in Chicago and that he had failed it spectacularly. Schnack went on to say, "Most people thought he did it, but there simply wasn't enough evidence to convict him. Bob Bier did a very good job with what little he had. He kept those jurors out for 10 hours. There just wasn't enough to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."

The converted chicken coop where Lani and Rodger and Stanley had all lived, no longer stands. It was torn down in 2002. In 2012, a man named James Wingerter was renting the front house on the property and had been there for about 12 years. Wingerter had moved in with his now ex-wife and she had felt uneasy about the place when she found out that a murder had taken place there. Weird things started to happen at the house. It seemed that Stanley Goodside's spirit was at unrest. The ex-wife decided to plant a peace garden where the chicken coop house had once stood and that seemed to calm things down. Wingerter told the Herald-Whig in 2012, "That seemed to calm things down back there. Haven't seen or heard anything since. She did a lot of work back there to make everything calm here for the spirits."

Lani still lives in Arizona, but the few months that she lived in the house after the murder made her think that Stanley's spirit was still around. She said, "You can't believe anybody can do something so gruesome. I can understand why Stanley (his spirit) might still be in that area because when people die suddenly, often it's a very confusing thing for them. But it hurts my heart to think he's not at peace." She had continued to live in the house they had shared for a few more months, giving birth to the couple's daughter two months after Goodside's body was found. Lani claimed that she had one strange thing happen during that time. A friend had come over with her dog and the animal started acting very strangely outside of the bathroom. Lani never stopped believing that her ex-husband killed Stanley.

Other stories of Stanley being at the property at 1631 N. 24th Street were reported in 1979. A newlywed couple moved in and before long, they started hearing what sounded like a basketball being bounced on the slab floor downstairs. This usually happened in the early morning hours around 3 am. It scared the husband, Bob Brewer, enough that he started sleeping with a knife under hi pillow. He eventually asked the landlord about the noises and if other people had reported them and he just shrugged and told him to ignore them. Bob's wife came home one night to find an open Bible sitting on the bottom step of the stairs leading to the second floor. Bob told her the next morning that he had placed it there to keep the spirit from coming upstairs. That Christmas, Bob took a Polaroid picture of his wife. After the allotted time passed for the picture to form, Bob peeled the backing and saw the image of a figure looking down at his wife over her left shoulder. Bob described the picture as "the face was slightly stretched, where you could see through the face, but it had this big fog around it." A few years later, Bob saw a picture of Stanley Goodside in the archives at the Quincy Library and he immediately recognized him as being the man in the Polaroid picture.

Bob shared that picture and his experiences in a Herald-Whig blog written on Nov. 9, 2009 and Lani saw it. She immediately recognized Stanley in the picture and she said that it broke her heart because we all want the people we love to rest in peace. Bob had also reported hearing sniffling noises in the house and Lani said that clearly was Stanley as well since he had breathing problems. Items would get pushed out of the way as well and Lani said that Stanley loved to draw and he would push things out of the way so that he could that. So we are left to wonder if Stanley Goodside is at unrest because he never got justice. Does he still wander his former home? That is for you to decide!