Crime & Safety
Charges Filed After Wife and Mother-In-Law Strangled and Set on Fire, Sheriff Says
The bodies of Mary Ann Urban-Danno, 51, and Theresa Urban, 79, were discovered in a burning car in unincorporated Palos Park. Two men have been charged with their deaths.
Written by Dan Lambert
Charges have been filed against two Chicago men in a grisly double murder that saw the victims' bodies being discovered in a burning car.
Robert Danno, 50, and Jose Fernardo Martinez-Hernandez, 24, have each been charged with two counts of first degree murder, according to the Cook County Sheriff's Office.
On Saturday, Sept. 21 around 11:45 p.m. a passerby spotted a Chrysler PT Cruiser on fire in the Cap Sauer Holdings forest preserve in unincorporated Palos Park, police said.
Inside the flaming car were the bodies of two women, Mary Ann Urban-Danno, 51, and Theresa Urban, 79. Urban-Danno was Robert Danno's wife, and Urban was his mother-in-law, police said.
After the car was extinguished by the Palos Fire Protection District, an autopsy revealed that the cause of death for both women was strangulation.
Investigators believe that the two women were killed earlier on Saturday in the 5600 block of S. Neenah Avenue in Chicago's Garfield Ridge neighborhood. The bodies were then put into the PT Cruiser which belonged to Urban-Danno, police said. The car was driven out to the forest preserve and set on fire, police said.
The two men are scheduled to appear in bond court on Tuesday.
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