Joliet Man Eyed in Unsolved 2005 Murder Beats Shoplifting Case

A Joliet man who was named a suspect in a grisly 2005 murder was found not guilty of stealing from Menards.

Julio Alex Montenegro, 44, was charged in January with retail theft. The police said he stole a small socket tool from the West Jefferson Street Menards three months prior.

Will County Judge Daniel Kennedy found Montenegro not guilty after a trial earlier this month. Montenegro, who failed to return a call for comment, was represented by attorney Todd Polito, according to court records.

In July 2005, detectives with the Will County Sheriff’s Department eyed Montenegro in connection with the brutal murder of his girlfriend, 31-year-old Melissa Mitchell.

Mitchell was found butchered in a field across Broadway from the Illinois State Police District 5 Headquarters.

Montenegro reported Mitchell as a missing person to the Lockport Police Department the day after she was last seen alive. Montenegro reportedly told the law he met up with Mitchell at Zelmo’s Full Moon Saloon on Plainfield Road in Joliet the night before. He said she was “upset with him because he got there late, and they got into a little argument.”

Montenegro told how Mitchell took off on him, police said, but he managed to find her as she was walking up Plainfield Road.

Mitchell refused to get onto Montenegro’s motorcycle, so “he grabbed her and put her on the bike; however she was able to get away and started to walk away,” police said.

Montenegro claimed he “stopped his bike, put the kickstand down, and went after his girlfriend, but … she disappeared in between two houses, and that is the last he (saw) of her,” police said.

Mitchell’s body was found the next day. Two days after that, while detectives were trying to obtain a search warrant for Montenegro’s home on Campbell Street in Joliet, his garage burned down with his motorcycle inside it. City police at the time called the blaze suspicious but no criminal charges were ever brought in connection with the fire.

According to Mitchell’s ex-husband, Scott Mitchell, Montenegro went to the Lockport home where she was living with a girlfriend the same day he reported her as missing. Montenegro pulled photos of himself and Melissa Mitchell from their frames, Scott Mitchell said, and also took a journal. Scott Mitchell said the journal and photos were never found.

Four years after Mitchell was killed, the spokesman for the sheriff’s department, Pat Barry, said investigators identified Montenegro as their only suspect.

After Montenegro’s arrest on the theft charge in January, Mitchell’s daughter, Melanie Mitchell, asked to meet with detectives investigating her murder. The detective who got back to her sounded less than enthused.

“We have had zero new leads,” a detective said in a voicemail to Melanie Mitchell. “You’re welcome to come in if you wanted to come in, if you had any additional information. At this time we have received no further information so, from my end it wouldn’t be a very productive meeting. If you have more information though I’d be more than happy to sit with you and jot down whatever you have, but on our end we have nothing, nothing further.”

But soon after, Deputy Chief Jerome Nudera claimed that wasn’t true at all and insisted the case “is an open and active homicide investigation.” Nudera said this in a letter to the Illinois Attorney General’s office. He was trying to convince an assistant attorney general that his department should not have to release reports on the murder investigation to Patch. The attorney general’s office has yet to render its decision.

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