Just days before Christmas, Mary Ann Clibbery was murdered inside the cabinetry showroom she helped build from the ground up. With no forced entry and staged signs of a robbery, suspicion turned inward—and a bag found near a bridge would blow the case wide open. Clues is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t Miss out on all things Clues! YouTube: @CluesPod | @crimehousestudios Instagram: @cluespodcast | @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia Clues is hosted by Morgan Absher & Kaelyn Moore Instagram: @morgsyabsher | @itskaelynmoore TikTok: @twohottakes | @heartstartspounding To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who was Mary Ann Clibbery and what happened to her?
There was no sign of forced entry, no clear motive, but the truth didn't stay hidden for very long. We'll get into it right after this quick break.
Okay, Morgan, before we jump into this episode, what's been going on in your life?
Not much. Just trying to lay low, relax, clean my house. I'm like in my spring cleaning era. Oh, nice. It is that time of year. It is that time of year.
Yeah. Yeah, we're hanging out this weekend. We're going to a true crime podcast live show together. I know. Maybe getting some inspiration for our own. I've never seen a true crime podcast live. Oh, I have. I've been to a few. I'm really excited. No, me too. Me too. It's really fun to follow a case in real time, like with the people as they're telling it. But you've done a lot of touring yourself.
I've done some live shows.
You've done a lot of live shows. I did a few. You've done maybe the most live shows of any podcast I've ever heard of doing.
It was a busy year. Yeah, how many did you do last year? I did total, I think within a year span, I think it was 38. That's almost one a week. It was a lot.
It was a lot.
We broke it up a little bit luckily and a lot of them were double headers, but live shows are really fun. Getting to meet the listeners. Did you have a favorite place that you did a live show? Oh my gosh. New York got rowdy. Seattle. and Portland. Super rowdy cruise there. So there's so much fun. Every show is so different. So that's a perk.
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Chapter 2: What were the initial findings in Mary Ann Clibbery's murder?
Yeah, because the crowd's always different. You're getting different reactions. I love that. That's really fun. Super excited for this weekend. But shall we get into this case today? Yeah, let's dig into this one. So we are opening the case file for the murder of Mary Ann Clibbery.
So on Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004, Mary Ann was found dead in Loves Park, Illinois, a suburb of Rockford, at Al Zulo Remodeling Specialists.
A little bit about Marianne. Marianne Romaine was born on May 21st, 1935. She was one of five children from a poor family. She was born in the Chicago Projects and then moved to Arkansas, but then moved back to Illinois to outside of Rockford specifically. And when she moved back, she actually moved to a house that had no hot water.
According to one source I found, Marianne was married twice and had five children. At least one of her husbands had left her widowed, but it's actually not clear whether she was divorced or the other one had passed away. And by 2004, when this happened, Marianne had been dating a man named Gene Sundin.
They'd been together for 15 years, and in one interview I found, Gene described Marianne as his life, his love. They were clearly very attached and happy. Yeah. Marianne had been working at Al Zulo's since 1959, so over 45 years. She actually started out at the company as doing like almost Vanna White commercials and pointing to the cabinetry. The videos were really cool.
And in 1999, 40 years after she started working there, the original owner, Al Zulo, retired. And he gave the business to two people, Marianne and her co-worker, George Hansen, who then became business partners. Marianne was the CFO. She was in charge of all the company's accounting and financial records.
There are some sources that say she was just such a good boss, like she would front employees their salaries up front out of her own pocket to make sure they were OK. Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
And then you have George, who was in charge of sales. And the two of them were well known locally for their TV ads.
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Chapter 3: Who was suspected in the murder of Mary Ann Clibbery?
Prosecutors speculated that after the killer attacked Marianne, they might have noticed that she was still alive, so that they came back and attacked her again. Both times, her head was beaten with a hammer. If this was a robbery, she probably wouldn't have been attacked twice and so viciously. So police did have some initial suspects.
They immediately focused on a recently fired employee named Kevin Doyle. Not only did Kevin notably not like Mary Ann, he also still had keys to the office. According to Marianne's brother, Lou Romaine, Kevin Doyle was fired under great stress, and it did appear like he was having some kind of nervous breakdown.
When Kevin was questioned, he gave police the alibi that he had been home sick that night, but no one else could corroborate this. No roommates, no family, no friends. So it was kind of a convenient answer, they felt. And get this, on Thursday, December 23rd, the day after, Kevin Doyle actually shows up to try to offer the Clibbery family help.
He said, I can save the business by returning to work for you guys. Don't worry. Which immediately seems suspicious. I mean, as we talked about in our very first episode, sometimes criminals do return to the scene of the crime.
Right, and want to interact with law enforcement and be a part of the investigation. Yes. Be helpful. Right.
But around this time, a tip comes in from an unnamed citizen that changes the investigation. The morning after Marianne's murder, someone sees a black plastic garbage bag on the ice under the Roscoe Road Bridge. And it looks like it had been thrown over the bridge in an attempt to get into the river, but it had missed the water and landed on a sheet of ice.
And just for perspective, this is about 9 or 10 miles from Al Zulo's, but they didn't immediately connect it. And one reason for that is that about a week earlier, a garbage bag was found in the same town with a deceased infant inside of it. So they weren't really sure what was happening. They just could see another bag.
And just so I don't leave everyone on a cliffhanger with that, it was found later that the baby was murdered by its mother. So authorities block traffic on the bridge and retrieve this bag from the ice. Firefighters actually use a ladder truck to lift the bag from the ice and then bring it upon the bridge.
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Chapter 4: How did the discovery of a bag change the investigation?
In the bag, they discover Marianne's purse containing her ID, a bloody hammer, bloody cardigan, and bloody black leather gloves. The items are then sent to a crime lab for processing. It's clear that whoever discarded Marianne's bag attempted to throw it in the river to get rid of it, but missed by a little bit. Though we can't confirm if any money had been taken from her wallet.
Again, it could have been taken to stage an appearance of a robbery. but it's unclear. Looking into the items in the bag a little bit more, the gloves and the sweater, those are going to become one of our next big clues. There was blood found on both of these items. Based on testing, the blood on the gloves and the yellow cardigan sweater was determined to be Marianne's.
The blood splatter on the sweater was along the right sleeve, which would correspond to a right-handed person hitting her from behind. The collar of the sweater was swabbed to look for skin cells. There were a few different DNA profiles that this came back with. Mary Ann, Al Zulo, the original owner, and George Hansen.
And something to note here is that everyone kind of knew that this sweater was a community sweater, and it was kind of accessible to a lot of people in the office.
Yeah, so it made sense that all of their DNA was on it. It's not really something that really tipped the police off as to what happened. Exactly.
But there were more items in that bag, as we know. Inside of the bag was also a hammer. Scientists analyzed the plastic bag and the hammer for fingerprints. They were placed in a sealed chamber filled with a chemical compound that's actually found in superglue. Basically, the fumes of that chemical stick to oils left by fingerprints.
Then the bag and hammer were processed with fingerprint powder, a fine black powder, which was dusted all over the surfaces. This powder adheres to the chemical compound to make the fingerprints more visible. From this, they discovered three distinct fingerprints and one palm print on the bag. Can you guess who they belonged to? I think I know. Okay. They belonged to George Hansen.
Yeah.
George's fingerprints were not found on the hammer, though. And if the bag was taken from the office, it could make sense that his fingerprints got on the bag somehow.
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Chapter 5: Why was George Hansen under suspicion?
He admits that Mary Ann had confessed to him before she died that George was involved in the disappearance of money from the company and that she actually feared for her safety.
I mean, everything's starting to point towards George.
Yeah.
And the fact that she felt unsafe. Right. So let's talk about who George Hansen was. George was born February 12, 1941. At the end of 2004, when Marianne was murdered, he was 63 years old. He was originally from Wisconsin, but moved to Rockford, Illinois in the 1960s, and George was married with children.
According to his former employee, Raymond Beardsley, George had a temper and became unglued under stress. Another former employee, Randy Baxter, the one who was actually with George when they found Marianne on December 22nd, said this about George. Quote, he likes to stay in control. He drinks decaffeinated coffee. So it seems like some employees did witness George having outbursts.
Although some sources I saw did say that Marianne and George like to keep any business conflicts away from employees. Totally. George is often described as flashy and outgoing, a salesman type.
And none of that necessarily points to why George would have wanted Marianne Clibbery dead. But remember how earlier I did say something about Marianne had recently sent out Christmas cards to a lot of the suppliers that worked with Al Zulo? Yeah.
Well, according to Marianne's boyfriend, Gene Sundin, a couple of those suppliers actually sent the cards back to Mary and they included angry notes with them. And these notes all said that they hadn't been paid. And when Marian gets those notes back, she's completely surprised. Blindsided. Absolutely blindsided because she's the CFO of the company. So she does what any CFO would do.
And she starts looking through the company's internal records because what do you mean none of these suppliers have been paid? And the records show that the payments had been made. But she got enough like independent letters back to her that clearly they hadn't. So something was still very much not adding up.
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Chapter 6: What financial discrepancies were uncovered in the investigation?
And when George's SUV was searched, police found a large fishing lure and rope, kind of like he was going to go try and fish the bag off the ice and try to actually put it in the river, which was probably his original intention. But despite this, George claims he didn't murder Marianne.
Which is hard to believe, I think, for me and maybe a lot of you guys out there listening. I mean, if I were to discover someone, I wouldn't touch anything. I'd want the police to be able to gather evidence and find things. So it's a little suspicious that George would bag everything up himself and then throw over a bridge.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
On Tuesday, December 28th, Marianne's funeral was held. It was held at St. Anthony's Catholic Church. Hundreds attended, including community leaders and members of the various clubs Marianne belonged to.
Two days after Marianne Clibbery's funeral, on December 30th, a judge denies George Hansen bail after a hearing. In the petition written by the Winnebago County Deputy State's Attorney, the main evidence is that Mary Ann confronted George about stealing from the company, and he admitted it.
Mary Ann said that she thought he was trying to poison her, and George admitted to police that he got rid of the weapon, purse, sweater, and gloves over the Roscoe Row Bridge. The Deputy State's Attorney also wrote that three key witnesses in the case, Mary Ann's boyfriend and two Al Zulo employees, feared for their safety. She called George's killing of Mary Ann an act of desperation.
She also said, quote, This is a man who was interested in murdering her to eliminate her as a potential witness against him. He has information on all of the witnesses from the business. It would be a concern that he would become desperate again. And on January 28th, George pleads acquiescence. Not guilty to the murder of Marianne Clivery. Of course.
The prosecution gave the following allegations against George. George killed Marianne because she was a potential witness against him if he were to ever be charged with embezzling money from their business. Marianne told her boyfriend that she confronted George about stealing, and he admitted to her that he did steal $7,000.
Marianne went to her doctor days before her death, worried that George was trying to poison her. A plastic bag was found atop the frozen rock river containing a bloody hammer, Marianne's purse, a sweater, and a pair of gloves. The gloves and sweater have been identified by Al Zulo employees as being worn by George.
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