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. ||||| SYCAMORE, Ill. --A 76-year-old man from Washington state who a prosecutor says was wrongly convicted in the abduction and killing of a 7-year-old Illinois schoolgirl in 1957 will be released from prison, a judge ordered Friday. 
 
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 The hearing, presided over by Judge William P. Brady, was held in Sycamore, about 70 miles west of Chicago and near where Maria Ridulph was abducted as she played in the snow. Forest hikers found the girl's remains five months later. 
 
 In 2012, another judge convicted Jack McCullough in Maria's death, in one of the oldest unsolved U.S. cases ever to go to trial. McCullough was sentenced to life in prison. 
 
 McCullough, in handcuffs, appeared shaken by the judge's decision at first, rocking back and forth, then taking a deep breath. Family members behind him hugged and cried. Moments later, McCullough looked back and smiled broadly. 
 
 On the other side of the room, Maria's brother and sister displayed little emotion as the hearing ended. 
 
 Brady said McCullough would be released Friday. 
 
 The judge pointed to several factors in his decision, including records that support McCullough's long-held contention that he was about 40 miles away from Sycamore when Maria was abducted. That evidence included newly discovered phone records. 
 
 It wasn't clear until the last minute the Brady would rule as he did. 
 
 "Rest assured I am not trying this case ... You will not hear the words, 'Mr. McCullough is guilty' or 'Mr. McCullough is not guilty' coming from my mouth." 
 
 Brady's ruling was prompted by a six-month review of evidence conducted by DeKalb County State's Attorney Richard Schmack after the 2012 conviction. Schmack concluded that McCullough could not have killed Maria. 
 
 Maria's disappearance made headlines nationwide in the 1950s, when reports of child abductions were rare. 
 
 She had been playing outside in the snow with a friend on Dec. 3, 1957, when a young man approached, introduced himself as "Johnny" and offered them piggyback rides. Maria's friend dashed home to grab mittens, and when she came back, Maria and the man were gone. 
 
 At trial, prosecutors said McCullough was Johnny, because he went by John Tessier in his youth. They said McCullough, then 18, dragged Maria away, choked and stabbed her to death. 
 
 Schmack, who wasn't involved in McCullough's case and was elected to the state's attorney post as McCullough's trial came to an end, filed a scathing report with the court last month that appeared to pick the case apart, point-by-point. 
 
 McCullough's long-held alibi was that he was in Rockford, attempting to enlist with the U.S. Air Force at a military recruiting station, on the night Maria disappeared. 
 
 Schmack said newly discovered phone records proved McCullough had, as he long-claimed, made a collect call to his parents at 6:57 p.m. from a phone booth in downtown Rockford - which is 40 miles northwest of where Maria was abducted between 6:45 p.m. and 6:55 p.m. 
 
 Schmack also reviewed police reports and hundreds of other documents, including from the Air Force recruitment office, which he said had been improperly barred at trial. In his review he said the documents contained "a wealth of information pointing to McCullough's innocence, and absolutely nothing showing guilt." 
 
 He also noted that Maria's friend had identified McCullough as the killer five decades later from an array of six photographs; McCullough's picture stood out, partially because everyone but him wore suitcoats and their photos were professional yearbook pictures. 
 
 Maria's murder haunted the Sycamore for decades, and McCullough's conviction four years ago seemed to bring some closure. Those wounds now threaten to reopen. 
 
 Her family remains convinced that McCullough is guilty and have sought the appointment of a special prosecutor in an attempt to keep him behind bars. Maria's brother, 70-year-old Charles Ridulph, still lives in Sycamore and has said in recent weeks that his family feels let down by the state prosecutor's office about-face.
– 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.