The Custody Fight That Ended in Murder: Zachary Rodriguez
Zachary Carl Orlando Rodriguez was two years old on June 7, 1987, when his father, Rolando Rodriguez, took him from Carpentersville, Illinois, and disappeared. It was not the first time. When Zachary was only two and a half months old, back in 1985, Rolando had arranged for an accomplice to kidnap the infant and spirit him off to Texas, an act investigators later concluded was driven by anger after Zachary's mother, Nadine Walter, filed for divorce. That first abduction ended relatively quickly and quietly, with Rolando returning voluntarily to Illinois on the advice of relatives and his own attorney. The second one, in 1987, never ended at all.
A Custody Fight With No Winners
By 1987, Nadine and Rolando were locked in an increasingly bitter custody dispute over their son. At one point that year, Nadine took Zachary to Tennessee without court authorization, a decision that backfired badly when a judge responded by awarding Rolando temporary custody as a consequence. Rolando then went to retrieve Zachary from a church parking lot, and the handoff turned physical enough that Zachary's grandfather was injured in the process. Nadine would later describe Rolando to authorities as abusive, telling investigators he had killed pets belonging to her and had threatened her life directly. Whatever the precise truth of the underlying relationship, both parents were now maneuvering around a small child as though he were the deciding piece in a war neither one seemed willing to lose.
On June 7, 1987, Rolando took two year old Zachary and vanished. A felony abduction warrant was not issued until September 25, more than three months later, and a federal warrant followed after that, once it became clear Rolando had crossed state lines and had no intention of returning his son voluntarily this time.
A Killing the Day After
What happened next moved the case out of family court and into a homicide investigation, though not because of anything that happened directly to Zachary. On June 8, 1987, the day immediately following Zachary's disappearance, a man named William Nally Sr. shot and killed an attorney named Timothy McNamee in the driveway outside McNamee's own law office in Carpentersville. Nadine Walter was in the car with Nally that night and drove him away from the scene afterward.
The motives behind the shooting, as they emerged later through the investigation and prosecution, were almost bewilderingly separate from one another despite converging on the same crime. Nally, by his own later account, believed McNamee and his law partner Timothy Mahoney were somehow plotting to steal from local drug dealers, and he wanted both attorneys dead over that suspicion. Nadine's reasoning was different, and directly tied to Zachary. She later admitted she believed that killing McNamee and Mahoney, the attorneys connected to the custody proceedings surrounding her son, would frighten Rolando badly enough that he would give Zachary back to her. It did not. Rolando remained gone with their son, and Nadine now carried her own direct involvement in a murder committed, by her own stated logic, in service of getting him back.
An Informant, Then a Sentence
William Nally was not arrested until November 1988, more than a year after McNamee's murder, when he was indicted on three counts of first degree murder. Investigators built their case in part by using Nadine herself, securing a court order that same November authorizing an eavesdropped conversation between her and Nally, with Nadine as the consenting party, aimed at drawing out information about McNamee's death directly from him. Nally was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he remained until his death in 2007, two decades after he pulled the trigger outside a small town law office over a motive that had nothing to do with the little boy whose custody battle happened to be unfolding at the exact same moment.
Nadine's own path through the aftermath took a markedly different turn. Her cooperation with investigators, including her role in the recorded conversation with Nally, appears to have factored into how her own culpability in the murder was ultimately handled. She entered witness protection, relocated to Florida, and rebuilt an entirely new life there, one that eventually included earning a law degree, a striking outcome for a woman who had once climbed into a car believing a killing might win her son back. Despite the relocation and the new identity that came with it, Nadine reportedly stayed in contact with Illinois investigators over the years, continuing to press for any information about what had actually become of Zachary.
A Father Who Kept Moving
Rolando Rodriguez, meanwhile, simply kept running. At one point in 1988, acting on the advice of an attorney named Mahoney, he called the prosecutor handling the McNamee case from a pay phone, offering to serve as a witness at trial in exchange for protection if he turned himself in. The prosecutor agreed to the arrangement. Rolando never called back, and never surfaced to make good on the offer. He was reportedly detained at least twice in the years that followed, once in Arizona in 1989 and again in Texas sometime in the early 1990s, but both times he was released before authorities managed to confirm his identity, apparently relying on a rotating set of aliases that included Ronald J. Hernandez, Roy Rodriguez, and Ray Rivera to stay a step ahead of anyone checking his name against an outstanding warrant.
The single most concrete lead in the decades since came in 2001, when an airport security guard in Chicago reported observing a man matching Rolando's description together with a boy who would, by that point, have been roughly sixteen years old, attempting to purchase cash tickets to San Juan, Puerto Rico. If the sighting was accurate, it would mean Zachary had survived into his teenage years somewhere alongside the father who took him, still moving, still off the radar of any official system that might have recognized him. No confirmed sighting of either of them has surfaced since.
Grown Now, If He Is Still Out There
Zachary Carl Orlando Rodriguez was born April 26, 1985, which means that if he is alive today, he is now in his forties, an adult who has spent nearly the entirety of his life somewhere outside the reach of the mother who fought so hard, and so recklessly, to keep him. Investigators have noted that his hair, blond in the childhood photographs that remain the only public images of him, may have been dyed black at some point, and that he may go by the name Marcos rather than Zachary, assuming Rolando gave him a new identity along with everything else he took from his old life. The Illinois State Police still list the case as open.
What makes Zachary's disappearance difficult to categorize cleanly is how thoroughly the adults around him let their own conflict eclipse him almost immediately. Within twenty four hours of his abduction, the custody dispute that was ostensibly about his welfare had already produced a murder motivated only tangentially, on his mother's side, by getting him back, and not at all, on the shooter's side, by Zachary himself. He became, in effect, a reason invoked rather than a child actively searched for in those critical early days, while a small town attorney lay dead outside his own office and the two adults most responsible for finding him were suddenly consumed by an entirely different crime. Whatever life Zachary has lived since, under whatever name, has unfolded entirely outside that story, unwitnessed by anyone who might have recognized him as the little boy from Carpentersville.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Zachary Carl Orlando Rodriguez
- People v. Nally, 216 Ill.App.3d 742 (Ill. App. Ct. 1991)
