On a late summer day, August 26, 1972, seventeen-year-old Robin Feuerriegel, a young woman who had recently moved to Evanston, Illinois, from Ohio, vanished. She was last seen leaving her boyfriend's home in Skokie. For months, her whereabouts remained a mystery, a source of anguish for those who knew her. The painful answer to her disappearance came on November 18, 1972, when two boys made a grim discovery in an unincorporated area behind the Naval Air Station Glenview. They found the heavily decomposed remains of a young woman. Among the personal items found at the scene was a class ring bearing the initials "R" and "F," leading investigators to suspect the body was Robin's. Five days later, a definitive identification was made using her dental records. The condition of her remains made it difficult for the coroner to establish a precise cause of death, but they were able to rule out that she had been shot.
The investigation into Robin's death would eventually lead authorities to a man named Ralph Raymond Andrews, born in Evanston in 1945. Andrews was a man with a growing and violent criminal history, particularly involving assaults on women, though he often managed to evade harsh sentences. By the 1970s, he was escalating his attacks, and investigators began to see him as a suspect in the murders of several young women in the Cook County area. While he was not immediately linked to Robin's case, his pattern of violence and the locations of his known and suspected crimes placed him on the radar of law enforcement. His brutality was confirmed years later when he was arrested for the 1991 murder of 44-year-old Virginia Griffin in Chicago, a crime for which he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
While incarcerated, Andrews' name would become linked to a series of cold cases from the 1970s, including the murder of Robin Feuerriegel. After his conviction for the Griffin murder, investigators re-examined his potential involvement in other unsolved homicides. Decades after the fact, he was charged and pleaded guilty to the 1977 murder of 16-year-old Susan Clark, receiving a second life sentence. He was the prime suspect in the deaths of other young women, such as Amy Alden, Arvella Thomas, and Laura Williams. While serving his sentences at Stateville Correctional Center, Andrews reportedly boasted to another inmate about being responsible for numerous murders. Despite the strong suspicions of law enforcement that he was responsible for Robin's death, Ralph Raymond Andrews was never formally charged or convicted for her murder. He died of natural causes in prison on January 31, 2006, taking any certain knowledge of his involvement in Robin's case with him. The case remains officially unsolved, a painful lingering question for her family, with the man widely believed to be her killer never facing justice for this specific crime.
