More than 60 years after the Starved Rock killings, a lawyer for the man convicted in what became one of the Chicago area’s most notorious murder cases says he has turned up a police report of an overheard conversation on a pay phone that he says proves Chester Weger wasn’t the killer.

Attorney Andy Hale says the police report is a “smoking gun” indicating that others, not Weger, killed three women from Riverside who’d been hiking in the popular state park 100 miles southwest of Chicago.

Hale says he found the report while poring over thousands of pages of police and court records in an effort to clear Weger’s name.

Weger, 83, was paroled two years ago after spending nearly six decades in prison following his conviction in the 1960 bludgeoning death of one of the hikers, Lillian Oetting, 50. Authorities said he also was suspected of killing Oetting’s friends Frances Murphy, 57, and Mildred Lindquist, 50.

The bodies were found in a canyon in the park.

In February 2020, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board paroled Weger — who had been the longest-serving inmate in the state prison system — saying he had been a model prisoner.

But that didn’t erase his conviction, and the courts haven’t cleared him.

Despite his conviction and having initially confessed, Weger has long said he didn’t kill anyone. Hale has been working on his behalf in an effort to get the courts to deem him innocent.