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- Man appeals murder, kidnapping convictions in country's oldest cold case ever solved
- Jack McCullough was sentenced to life in 2012 for 1957 death of neighbor's child
- Appeal challenges rulings that allowed dead mother's accusation but blocked alibi
- Brief cites many of the issues raised by legal experts in CNN's "Taken" series
(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
