00:00En Will County, they just captured a suspect from an incident in 2022.
00:04A former shift manager at a Joliet Walmart store stole bags of money containing $136,000 during an overnight work
00:15shift.
00:15And I'm going to bring in Special Operations Deputy Chief Dan Jungles to talk a little bit about the series
00:21of events that took place from there
00:23and what's taken three years to get this woman back in custody.
00:28Thank you so much for your time.
00:30Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Anita.
00:32I appreciate you being here.
00:34It did not take long for obvious reasons for you all to identify this woman, Melissa VanderWaal.
00:41So what was the holdup in getting to this point?
00:44Well, you know, in any case, we have to prioritize how we go about apprehending offenders.
00:52You know, usually, you know, how we have to prioritize things is by violent offenders, by those that are wanted
00:58for, you know, our most heinous crimes.
00:59So in this particular case, you know, she did, you know, steal a lot of money.
01:06She was arrested and apprehended.
01:08But then when she went to court, you know, she skipped out on her bail.
01:12So, you know, normally the division that I'm in charge of is our warrants division.
01:17We have five deputies that work in that particular unit.
01:23And at any given time, we have around 10,000 active warrants in Will County.
01:28For a town or a county that's, you know, over 700,000 people.
01:36So 70% of all those warrants are traffic offenses, 15% roughly felonies, and another 15% that are
01:44misdemeanors.
01:44So we have to kind of prioritize, you know, which ones we go after.
01:48But in this particular case, there was information that was put out to the public.
01:52Her picture was put out there.
01:55And, you know, she was apprehended in pretty short order because, you know, once people see pictures online, when they
02:02see it in the papers, you know, they're going to call.
02:06Because, you know, everyone wants to be safe and no one wants to be associated with the criminal elements.
02:13Yeah, but it seems like she was in custody, out of custody, a fugitive for at least a year.
02:20What was going on with all of that?
02:22Well, you know, I can't really say.
02:24I know, you know, she was using several aliases.
02:28So that was hampering some of our abilities to track her down.
02:32You know, once she had moved from resident to resident and then from employer to employer, it became a little
02:39bit more harder to track her down, you know, because in a lot of the information that we get, it's
02:49kind of public information, really.
02:52You know, credit card information, Social Security information.
02:54So if someone is, say, using a P.O. box or if they're moving from residence to residence, by the
03:01time some of that information gets to our databases, it's old information.
03:05So that's a lot of times what hampers our ability to track down offenders, unless we know, you know, hey,
03:13this is her Facebook account, and then we can get a warrant for IP information and then get a subpoena
03:21for those records.
03:21So it does it's it's not as easy as it seems sometimes because you have to go down some of
03:28those rabbit holes to get to the proper information.
03:31Yeah. And you mentioned the fact that she skipped bail.
03:34I'd like to talk about the cash bail system of old and of new.
03:40And this happened before the Safety Act was in effect because this happened in 2022 initially.
03:45Sure.
03:46The Safety Act didn't go into effect until 2023, the following year.
03:50So give me an understanding of how the cash bail system of old and new factors into this.
03:57Well, you know, every county handled it differently because it was it was left at the at the county levels
04:03when it came to.
