The Quincy woman used to live in a small house near 24th and Locust. She always wondered about the pink bathtub and the strange chip marks in it.

She called last week and wondered if we knew anything about the infamous Roger Aldridge, accused of the 1976 murder of Phil Goodside.

After reviewing the Herald-Whig clip files and talking to some of the people involved in the case, it seemed an odd coincidence to be researching a macabre murder around Halloween.

Goodside was living in the house with Roger Aldridge and his wife, Lani Aldridge. The home was demolished a few years ago.

They were involved in a huge marijuana growing operation, and it seems Goodside was having an affair with Lani Aldridge. Goodside went missing in the spring of 1976, and his head and hands were found in a plastic bag a few blocks from the house, in the northeast corner of Calvary Cemetery.

Goodside's torso was found a few days earlier in Sullivan, where Aldridge used to live. Authorities said he had been stabbed in the back, smashed in the head with a blunt object and raped.

The case immediately attracted national attention and was all the rage in Quincy. Roger and Lani Aldridge had previously been charged and eventually found guilty by a Havana jury after a change of venue on the pot charges, a case tried by Dennis Gorman and a young Adams County assistant state's attorney named Jon Barnard.

"I just remember he (Roger Aldridge) was very cold," says Barnard, now the state's attorney. "You needed to put on your winter coat when you looked at him."

Barnard was in the Quincy house and saw the chipped tub and the blood spatters in the bathroom shortly before Goodside's head was found.

"It looked like a sharp tool had been forcefully used within that tub for purposes unknown but presumed," Barnard said.

Roger Aldridge disappeared for three months to Mexico, but eventually gave himself up. He went on trial in Quincy in 1977 with defense attorneys John Long and Drew Schnack, who still practices in Quincy.

The judge was the recently retired David Slocum, and State's Attorney Bob Bier tried the case. After a week of trial, a jury deliberated for more than 10 hours before finding Aldridge not guilty.

"They just didn't have any evidence," Schnack said Monday. "I do remember it was my first really big trial and it was wild, just wild."

Blood was found in the house, but this was before DNA evidence.

"Why I didn't put more of Aldridge's flight into evidence, I don't know," Bier said Monday. "He did have people coming in and testifying as to his good character and what a good worker he was."

Bier and Barnard both think Aldridge got away with murder. Schnack was a little more coy with his answer when asked if his client was guilty.

"I don't know if he did it or not, but there wasn't any evidence pointing to anybody else," Schnack says. "I also know I got him up to Chicago to take a polygraph, which he failed spectacularly."

Schnack says he never saw Aldridge after they walked out of the courthouse. Some say he went back to his home in Iowa.

Now there are just yellowed clippings and hazy recollections of a sensational crime, apparently unsolved.

-- rhart@whig.com/221-3370