UPDATE on November 13th at 3:48p.m: Funeral services for Chester Breiney are scheduled for this Friday at St. Peter of Alcantara Church in Port Washington from 11:30a.m. to 12:15p.m.
Members of the Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Office, WI Department of Justice/Department of Criminal Investigation, WI State Crime Laboratory, Eernisse Funeral Home, and the Lakeshore Regional Child Advocacy Center will be present for the service.
MEQUON – After initially abandoning the case of a human skull found in a Mequon culvert in 1959, Ozaukee County officials Friday announced the case had finally been cracked.
On October 4th, 1959 a human skeleton was discovered in a culvert off of Davis Road, north of Bonniwell Road and south of Pioneer Road, in the City of Mequon. At the time of the discovery, the victim was estimated to be a child between the ages of 6-8 years old.
Officials at the time investigated over 200 leads in the case over a seven-year period before learning the Houghton County, Michigan, Sheriff’s Department was conducting an investigation on a possible missing child, Markku Jutila.
Houghton County Deputies were working with the Chicago Police Department after family members of William and Hilja Jutila became suspicious of the whereabouts of their adopted child. The Jutila’s had relocated from Houghton to Chicago and were not able to articulate where their 6-year-old son, Markku, was. During an interview with police, the couple had admitted to fleeing Houghton for Chicago, disposing of the child’s body in a ditch in Mequon before arriving in Chicago. The mother, Hilja Jutila, also confessed to physically beating her son to death.
The two were subsequently arrested in 1966, but on November 10th of that year, charges were dismissed because of the absence of corpus delicti (in legal terms, a lack of evidence needed to prove a crime has been committed before a person can be convicted) and the failure of the prosecution to connect the skeleton of the child found in Mequon with the couple.
For the next 57 years, the case remained cold. Then in October of 2023, Ozaukee County officials learned that Madison State Crime Lab Analyst Hannah Moos-Classon and Dr. Jordan Karsten, Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Global Religions, and Cultures with the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, had ran tests on the 1959 skull.
DNA extracted from the skull was analyzed and was determined to have several matches to family members of the Breiney family, particularly Josephine Breiney, mother of Chester Breiney. All investigative genealogy results supported that the skeletal remains belonged to Chester Alfred Breiney.
It was determined both William and Hilja Jutila died in 1988, so no further criminal prosecution will take place.
Breiney will officially be laid to rest Friday, November 15th at St. John XXIII Parish in Port Washington.
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