Wern was being held at the Will County Jail late Monday night on one count of first-degree murder and was expected to appear today for a bond hearing at the county courthouse in Joliet.<\/p>\n
Surdel said the mother’s identity was being withheld Monday night until other family members were notified of her death.<\/p>\n
Despite Wern’s confession, the reason for the slaying remained unclear Monday night, police said.<\/p>\n
“Detectives said they questioned (Wern) on two different occasions, and they cannot pinpoint a motive,” Surdel said.<\/p>\n
He said Wern previously lived elsewhere in Mokena but had been living with her mother at the condo for about six months.<\/p>\n
Mokena police, evidence technicians and officials from the Will County coroner’s office spent much of Monday evening combing through evidence in the home in the Pheasant Ridge condominium complex.<\/p>\n
A van from the Mokena Emergency Services and Disaster Agency blocked off the entrance to the complex, while authorities could be seen moving around the second-story condo in the back of the complex.<\/p>\n
Some Pheasant Ridge residents said Monday night that while they didn’t know the 89-year-old woman well, she was a pleasant neighbor.
\n“She was a very friendly person whenever I talked to her,” Ron Kuchar said.<\/p>\n
John Scanell, a 25-year resident of the complex, said he rarely saw the woman outside of her home other than her trips to the mailbox.
\n“She usually had Christmas lights on her garage,” he said.<\/p>\n
The murder is the second in the quiet suburb in less than a year. In May 2009, 18-year-old Keith Randulich was charged with stabbing to death his 4-year-old half sister, Sabrina Clement. He’s in the Will County Jail awaiting trial.<\/p>\n
Authorities said at the time that it was the first murder in Mokena in 25 years.<\/p>\n
Distributed via Chicago Press Release Services<\/a><\/p>\n A Mokena woman was charged Monday with murder in the brutal stabbing death of her elderly mother. Gaye Wern, 57, came into Mokena’s police station at 1:45 p.m. Monday and confessed to killing her 89-year-old mother, police Cmdr. Chris Surdel said. Police executed a search warrant at Wern’s mother’s condominium in the 19500 block of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
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