On this day, Dec. 3, in 1957, 7-year-old Maria Ridulph was snatched off a street in Illinois in what may be the oldest solved cold-case murder in American history.

Maria's disappearance shocked the country. President Dwight Eisenhower even asked to be kept up to date.

Jack McCullough, 17 at the time, was briefly a suspect, but his mother backed up his alibi that he was in Chicago for a medical exam.

But decades later, McCullough's mother confessed on her deathbed that she had lied about her son's alibi. And a former girlfriend discovered McCullough's unused train ticket to Chicago the day Maria disappeared.

McCullough, 72, a retired Washington state police officer, was arrested for the murder last year and convicted in September. He has not yet been sentenced.

-- Scott McCabe