Sycamore, Illinois (CNN) The man convicted in the oldest cold case ever brought to court broke into a wide grin as a judge ordered him released from prison Friday and granted him a new trial. 
 
 Jack McCullough, 76, was serving a life sentence for the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph. Judge William Brady threw out the conviction after a prosecutor found "clear and convincing evidence" that McCullough was wrongly found guilty. 
 
 He was freed shortly after the hearing and was whisked away in a car driven by a family member. 
 
 After the judge's ruling, McCullough turned toward his stepdaughter, Janey O'Connor, and flashed her a private signal that she says means "I love you." She was seated behind him and broke into tears but managed a big smile back. 
 
 Maria Ridulph's murder went unsolved for half a century. Then detectives pursued a tip, and a man was brought to trial and convicted in the 1957 murder of the 7-year-old in Sycamore, Illinois. Now that man is free. Ann O'Neill's 2013 series on the case, "Taken," raised questions about whether the trial was unfairly one-sided. 
 
 Across the aisle, Charles Ridulph, the older brother of the victim, frowned and bowed his head. More than 58 years ago, he helped search for Maria after she vanished from a street corner near their home while playing in the snow with a friend. 
 
 McCullough's lawyers and DeKalb County state's attorney Richard Schmack argued that McCullough's conviction was based on false testimony, improper legal rulings controlling the evidence presented, and a timeline that was tweaked some 50 years after the fact to rule out McCullough's alibi. 
 
 McCullough has long insisted that he couldn't possibly have abducted and killed the child because he was 40 miles away in Rockford, Illinois, talking to recruiters and trying to enlist in the U.S. Air Force when she was taken. 
 
 He repeated the alibi when he spoke with CNN in prison in March 2013. 
 
 "They proved nothing," he said at the time. "I am in here for murder. A murder I would not, could not have done." 
 
 McCullough said that when Maria was kidnapped, the telephone in his home in Sycamore was ringing. 
 
 "And I was on the other end of that phone, in Rockford, three minutes before she was kidnapped. Try and make that happen. Only Scotty could make that happen, if he beamed me up." 
 
 Jack McCullough, in prison after his 2012 conviction. Now a judge has ordered him freed. 
 
 An Illinois appeals court upheld his conviction last year. But McCullough made a last-ditch appeal in a jailhouse motion last December, saying police and prosecutors buried evidence supporting his alibi. He asked a judge to find him innocent. 
 
 Schmack, who inherited the case from predecessor Clay Campbell, was placed in the position of having to defend the conviction. He launched a six-month investigation that included a review of some 4,500 pages of documents -- old police and FBI reports, grand jury transcripts, trial transcripts, affidavits for search and arrest warrants, and even CNN's five-part series on the case, "Taken," which raised questions about whether the courtroom reconstruction of history was unfairly one-sided. 
 
 Schmack concluded that he'd found "clear and convincing evidence" that McCullough had been convicted of a crime he didn't commit. 
 
 The precise time of Maria's abduction has been in dispute almost from the beginning. 
 
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 The dark-haired second-grader with big brown eyes was with her playmate, Kathy Sigman, on December 3, 1957 when they were approached by a stranger who said his name was Johnny. He gave Maria two piggyback rides, Sigman told police at the time. Sigman, now a grandmother known as Kathy Chapman, said she went home to fetch her mittens. When she returned, Maria and Johnny were gone. 
 
 More than 600 volunteers combed the fields and woods around Sycamore in search of Maria, at times walking hand-in-hand in a grid pattern. And within 24 hours, dozens of FBI agents descended on the small farming community about 65 miles west of Chicago. 
 
 Agents interviewed some 200 possible suspects -- including McCullough, who passed a polygraph test about his alibi and was cleared. Despite the work of nearly three-dozen FBI agents, the investigation turned up no solid leads to Maria's whereabouts. 
 
 Her body was discovered 144 days later by a couple looking for mushrooms near the Iowa border. She was under a fallen tree, some 100 miles from home. 
 
 Because Maria apparently never left Illinois, the FBI pulled out of the investigation and the case went cold for half a century. 
 
 The Illinois State Police began to look into the Ridulph case again in 2008, after McCullough's half sister, Janet Tessier, emailed a tip. She said her dying mother had pulled her close some 14 years earlier and whispered, "Those two little girls, and the one that disappeared, John did it. John did it, and you have to tell someone." 
 
 McCullough was questioned in Seattle and arrested in late June 2011. A judge hearing the case without a jury found McCullough guilty after a week-long trial. 
 
 Schmack, the state's attorney, said he sat through the trial and always doubted whether there was enough evidence to support the conviction. In his review of the case, he said he found new evidence that verified McCullough's long-standing alibi. 
 
 He subpoenaed records from AT&T and found that a collect call had indeed been placed at 6:57 p.m. to McCullough's home in Sycamore from a pay phone at the post office in downtown Rockford on on December 3, 1957 -- just as McCullough said he had done. 
 
 At his sentencing, McCullough vehemently professed his innocence. 
 
 "Look in the box. The truth is in the box," he said, pointing to a cardboard box in the courtroom. It was filled with old FBI reports and other documents that the judge, James Hallock, kept from the trial, saying it was inadmissible hearsay. 
 
 Prosecutor Richard Schmack reviewed the case and asked for McCullough to go free. 
 
 Schmack did look at those documents. He built a timeline based on the statements of 21 people -- Maria Ridulph's family members, friends, neighbors and passersby -- that confirmed the FBI's original timeline ruling out McCullough as a suspect. 
 
 Maria was taken that day some time between 6:45 and 7 p.m. -- and not as early as 6 p.m., as alleged during McCullough's trial. 
 
 It would have been impossible for him to have been in two places at once. 
 
 Campbell, the state's attorney who brought the case, was defeated by Schmack in an election just weeks after McCullough was convicted. Campbell has declined to comment since Schmack released his findings. 
 
 Cold cases are particularly difficult to prosecute because evidence is often lost or destroyed, memories fade and witnesses die. And so questions have lingered over the evidence used to convict McCullough -- and whether it was strong enough. 
 
 No physical evidence ties him to the crime. ||||| (CNN) -- "Nostalgia" and flimsy evidence led to guilty verdicts in the nation's oldest cold case ever solved, according to the man serving a life sentence for kidnapping and murdering a neighbor's child in 1957. 
 
 In his 80-page appeal, former police officer Jack Daniel McCullough says he deserves a new trial because his mother was allowed to accuse him from the grave -- while he was kept from proving that he was elsewhere when a 7-year-old girl was abducted and killed. 
 
 The appellate brief, filed Thursday by the Illinois state appellate defender, noted that nobody saw who grabbed Maria Ridulph from a street corner in Sycamore, Illinois, or witnessed how or where she was killed. 
 
 No forensic evidence ties McCullough -- or anyone else -- to a crime so shocking it captured the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the appeal states. 
 
 Instead, the court papers say, prosecutors built their case on unreliable evidence, including inmate witnesses whose motives were suspect and others whose memories were dulled by the passage of time: 
 
 "The evidence against Jack McCullough," the appeal contended, "was so unreasonable, so improbable, and so unsatisfactory as to create a reasonable doubt that he was responsible for a 1957 murder, kidnapping, and abduction of an infant." 
 
 That evidence included "personal memories of what occurred 55 years ago; a photo identification made 53 years after the incident; testimony from jailhouse informants; innocuous statements from the defendant; and an improperly admitted and inconclusive statement from the defendant's mother while on morphine and Haldol just before her death." 
 
 The appeal cited many of the issues raised by legal experts who spoke with CNN for "Taken: The coldest case ever solved," a five-part multimedia series published in August. The series was the basis for an hour-long documentary that aired on HLN. 
 
 Read the appeal (PDF) 
 
 McCullough was convicted in September 2012 of kidnapping and murdering Maria Ridulph 55 years earlier. The brown-eyed second-grader vanished from the corner of Sycamore's Archie Place and Center Cross Street on the evening of December 3, 1957. 
 
 Her body was found the following spring in a grove of trees off a busy state highway about 120 miles away. The crime, which shook the small farming community to its core, is believed to be the country's oldest cold case ever prosecuted. 
 
 Now 74, McCullough is serving a life sentence at a state prison in Pontiac, Illinois. 
 
 He denied committing the crime in several letters to CNN and in a jailhouse interview last year. He also denied having anything to do with Maria's disappearance and death in a lengthy police interrogation in Seattle hours before his arrest. Prosecutors and investigators said his odd demeanor during questioning convinced them they had the right man. 
 
 The DeKalb County State's Attorney, which prosecuted McCullough, declined comment and referred calls to the Illinois state appellate prosecutor, which also declined to comment on a pending case. A court clerk said both sides should finish filing their briefs by late June and arguments could be scheduled by summer. 
 
 "I think the problem with Jack's trial is, it was all emotion-based," said Janey O'Connor, McCullough's stepdaughter and most outspoken defender. She said she hopes his lawyers can convince the appeals court to view the case with a more objective eye. 
 
 "To find a man guilty based on conflicting stories, unconstitutional rulings and emotion and not allow Jack the chance to present the evidence that cleared his name in 1957 goes against our constitutional rights," she said. 
 
 Testimony lasted little more than a week at McCullough's trial, which was decided by a judge brought in from a neighboring county. 
 
 For the most part, the appeal focused on Judge James Hallock's pretrial rulings regarding what evidence to allow and what evidence to exclude. 
 
 Hallock used an exception to the hearsay rule to let McCullough's sisters testify about a deathbed statement by their mother but excluded as hearsay police and FBI reports from the 1957 kidnapping investigation. He also excluded a Sycamore police detective's investigation during the mid-1990s that concluded that another man, now deceased, committed the crime. 
 
 "In a court with murder charges at issue, the law demands more than nostalgia," state appellate defender Paul Glaser wrote. "It demands proof beyond a reasonable doubt." Glaser did not represent McCullough at his trial; he was appointed by the state to handle his appeal. 
 
 The appeal noted that prosecutors "took great effort to describe the gentle, small-town nature of Sycamore, Illinois, in 1957." It was a time and place where the abduction and murder of a child playing in the season's first snow "was a shocking, defining and tragic event," the appeal said, but criminal responsibility for kidnapping, child abduction and murder "needed to be proven to competent evidence." 
 
 In this case, the appeal stated, the evidence presented against McCullough "woefully failed to rise to the level of proof necessary to sustain his conviction." The appeal criticized Hallock's rulings as a "gross abuse of discretion" that prevented McCullough from receiving a fair trial. 
 
 Hallock declined to comment on the case, citing Illinois' code of judicial conduct. 
 
 McCullough's appellate lawyers focused their attack on a hospital bed accusation by his sedated, dying mother that prompted Illinois State Police to reopen their investigation. The defense has long argued that it should never have been disclosed in court. 
 
 McCullough's sisters testified that their mother told them "John did it" or "he did it" but gave contradicting testimony on what she meant by "it." 
 
 Eileen Tessier, who was in the end stages of cancer, was sedated, "emotionally disturbed," sometimes "basically comatose" and at other times "pleasantly confused," the testimony showed. 
 
 Prosecutors persuaded Hallock to allow the statement under a hearsay exception, arguing that Tessier could have faced obstruction of justice charges herself for covering up for her son all those years. But the appellate lawyers countered that criminal charges weren't a realistic possibility for a terminally ill woman. 
 
 "Instead the statement was an out-of-court accusation," the appeal stated, "the admission of which should have been strictly forbidden." 
 
 Kathy Sigman Chapman was the prosecution's star witness and the last person to see Maria alive, besides the killer. Chapman, who was 8 at the time her friend vanished, was shown hundreds if not thousands of photographs as a child but didn't identify the stranger who called himself "Johnny" until 53 years after the crime. 
 
 She was in her 60s and living in a neighboring city when an Illinois State Police detective knocked on her door and showed her a group of photographs. She picked one she had not seen before -- a recropped prom photo showing 17-year-old John Tessier, as McCullough was then known -- and identified him as the young man who gave Maria a piggyback ride minutes before she vanished. 
 
 She also identified the photograph in court, but the appeal asserts that the appearance of the man in the photo differs from the description she gave in court of the man she saw on the street corner. 
 
 Three jailhouse informants testified about conversations they said they had with McCullough while he was awaiting trial. They gave varying accounts of how he described killing her: with a wire, strangling her with his hands or dropping her on her head. 
 
 The informants and several police detectives from Seattle, where McCullough was initially questioned and arrested, also testified about odd statements he made about Maria Ridulph. They said he described her as "lovely," with big brown eyes and "like a little Barbie doll." While the appeal referred to those statements and vivid descriptions of a little girl he knew 50 years ago as "innocuous," others have described them as unsettling, even "creepy." 
 
 Given the circumstantial nature of the prosecution's case, the appeal asserted, the defense should have been able to expect some leeway. But, court papers say, the judge's pretrial rulings prevented McCullough from presenting his defense. He was unable to call a witness, former Sycamore police detective Patrick Solar, who concluded during the mid-1990s that another man committed the crime. 
 
 And he was not permitted to present police and FBI reports from the 1957 kidnapping investigation that indicated he was questioned and cleared from the list of suspects because he had an alibi. 
 
 The reports indicated that McCullough spoke with military recruiters in Rockford, about 40 miles away, about the time Maria was taken from the street corner in Sycamore. They also seemed to verify his story that he made a collect call home, asking for a ride. Phone records at the time, long since lost, indicated that a collect call was placed from a pay phone in Rockford to the Tessier family home in Sycamore at 6:57 p.m. by someone giving his name as "John Tassier." The call lasted two minutes. 
 
 Illinois law does not allow police reports and other documents as a substitute for witness testimony at trials. But in this case, almost all of the FBI agents and police investigators had died, and McCullough's defense sought to introduce the reports as "ancient documents" or public records more than 20 years old. Hallock, the trial judge, rejected that argument. 
 
 "The judge's decisions to prohibit Jack McCullough from introducing FBI records prepared at the time of the offense, despite their status as ancient documents and public records and their probative value in establishing Mr. McCullough's alibi, and to prohibit Mr. McCullough from presenting testimony showing another man committed the offense, amounted to gross abuses of discretion denying Mr. McCullough his fundamental right to present a defense," the appeal stated. 
 
 By blocking the defense while allowing prosecutors to introduce "irrelevant, but highly prejudicial evidence," the judge violated McCullough's right to a fair trial, the appeal stated, before delivering a final salvo: "No rational trier of fact would have found the defendant guilty." 
 
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– A man convicted four years ago in the oldest cold case ever tried was freed Friday after an Illinois judge vacated his conviction and subsequent life sentence, CNN reports. According to CBS News, 76-year-old Jack McCullough was convicted of kidnapping a 7-year-old girl, choking her, and stabbing her to death in 1957. The case was reopened in 2008, and McCullough was arrested in 2011 and convicted the following year. After an appeal by McCullough, Illinois state's attorney Richard Schmack launched a six-month investigation that found what he calls "clear and convincing evidence" that McCullough is innocent. While the judge Friday vacated McCullough's conviction, he stopped short of declaring him innocent, and a new trial will be held, the Chicago Tribune reports. McCullough, who lived in the same neighborhood as the kidnapped girl, says he was 40 miles away at an Air Force recruiting center at the time of the kidnapping. It's an alibi that passed a polygraph test in 1957 and made it impossible for him to be the culprit based on the FBI's original timeline for the kidnapping. That timeline was later changed by police, and Schmack says documents—including phone and Air Force records—supporting McCullough's alibi were wrongly not allowed at his trial. A friend of the kidnapped girl picked McCullough out of a photo lineup when the case was reopened. But his was the only non-yearbook photo in the lineup, and she picked a different man out of a photo lineup 50 years earlier. That info wasn't allowed at McCullough's trial either. No physical evidence was ever found to support McCullough's conviction.