Tragic love story of long-grieving husband and his slain bride
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Tragic love story of long-grieving husband and his slain bride
Chuck and Cheryl Lynn Hall had only two years together before he came home from work and found his partially clothed 20-year-old wife in their Aurora apartment with the cord from an iron wrapped around her neck and the other end tied to the bedroom doorknob.
That crime occurred in 1981, but by all accounts Hall never recovered from losing his young bride in such a horrific way. And after his death in April at age 59 of complications from lung cancer, family members take comfort in knowing he will finally join his beloved Cheryl Lynn again.
"They were soul mates," Jackie Stiles said of the relationship between her older brother and his slain wife.
"I don't think he ever got over the fact he felt like he'd failed to protect her," added Cheryl Lynn's mother, Garnet Bailey, who was at her son-in-law's bedside when he died. "Part of his heart went with her when she died. She was the love of his life, and he could not deal with life after she was gone."
When I first met Chuck Hall in 1997, soon after Aurora police decided to reopen the cold case into his wife's killing, there was no doubt he was a man in anguish. Understandably so.
He had a good idea even back then who had killed his wife — a casual friend and co-worker who, over the decades, went on to become a family man himself and popular conductor with the Union Pacific Railroad. What was missing was the proof that Larry Galloway was guilty. And the family felt stymied in its efforts to find justice for Cheryl Lynn.
That evidence finally arrived in 2008 in the form of a DNA sample — taken from the straw Galloway had used in a local restaurant — linking him to the crime.
The day Galloway was to stand trial for murder in April 2012, Hall and Bailey reluctantly agreed to a plea agreement: voluntary manslaughter and a 10-year prison sentence that would, because of sentencing laws at the time of the crime, release Galloway in half the time.
Stiles says her brother was far from happy with such a short prison term. At least he knew, however, his wife's killer had been publicly identified and would serve time behind bars.
But even this justice delayed never made up for what was taken from this man.
His family says Hall was haunted by flashbacks and struggled with post-traumatic stress after finding his slain wife and initially coming under the umbrella of suspicion.
He was also a sensitive and compassionate man — Stiles recalls seeing her brother literally take the flannel shirt off his back and give it to a homeless man — and trying to deal with grief and guilt at not being able to protect his bride drove him to drink more than he should.
Hall tried to start anew: He remarried and had two sons. But in many ways his second wife was competing with a ghost, his family says.
Although the marriage broke up, Hall remained a loving and involved father. But life continued to throw barriers in his way. He was injured in 1998 on the job at the cable company, where he and Galloway had worked together at the time of Cheryl Lynn's death. His ankle was crushed, and he landed on disability.
Even more serious health problems arrived in 2008, the same year his wife's killer was finally arrested. Hall eventually lost part of a lung to cancer, and although he went into remission after treatment, the disease returned last year.
Then came a different sort of anguish. Days before Christmas, he received a letter from the Illinois Department of Corrections that Galloway was already out on parole, 428 days short of the paltry five years the family had been told he would serve.
Hall never recovered after that final insult.
As he grew weaker, Stiles says, Hall drew strength from knowing he would finally be reunited with his beloved Cheryl Lynn again. While they were denied a life together, their remains are now side by side at River Hills Cemetery in Batavia.
"He knew," Bailey said, "she was waiting for him."
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