 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. 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. 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. 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. Maria's murder haunted the Sycamore for decades, and McCullough's conviction four years ago seemed to bring some closure. 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. Schmack concluded that he'd found "clear and convincing evidence" that McCullough had been convicted of a crime he didn't commit. Maria's friend dashed home to grab mittens, and when she came back, Maria and the man were gone. WATCH: "48 Hours:" Cold as Ice 
 
 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. At trial, prosecutors said McCullough was Johnny, because he went by John Tessier in his youth. A judge hearing the case without a jury found McCullough guilty after a week-long trial. 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. 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.
– 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.