COLES COUNTY, Ill. (WAND) - Oct. 19, 2020 marks 40 years since a nude, female body was found with the head, feet and hands cut off under Airtight Bridge in Coles County.

This was a day that retired Coles County Sheriff Darrell Cox will never forget.

"I spent 36 years in law enforcement and I never saw anything like it before or after," Cox said. 

Cox was the officer who responded to the call when the body was reported. With it being around Halloween, he initially thought the call was a prank.

"I got here and two of my friends were on the bridge and I recall them mentioning well where is everyone else at?" he said. "I said oh, come on, this is probably a joke, and I walked down to the bank where what I thought wasn't a body obviously at that point, and I got close enough and discovered that it was. I remember looking up at them and saying yeah, you're right, I'm gonna need some assistance."

Without the head, hands or feet, the Coles County Sheriff’s Department could not identify who the woman was or who killed her.

"Obviously we thought it might have been someone local, because this is a remote area and whoever dumped that body had to have some knowledge of where Airtight was at," Cox said. "Turned out not to be the case, but local cinema was we may have a murderer among us."

It would take an updated DNA tracing system and 12 years to finally identify the body in 1992 as Diane Small of Bradley, Illinois.

Once Small's identity had been realized, the department finally had a legitimate suspect - her husband, Thomas Small.

The initial interrogation and evidence couldn't confirm he was the killer, so the case remained unsolved for years.

It wasn't until the case was reopened in 2016 that the sheriff's department finally got the confession and could charge Thomas Small for the murder of his wife.

 "When we spoke to him, I felt that he was just ready to tell," Cox said. "I think he lived with it for long enough and I think he was just tired of hiding that secret."

Chief Deputy Tyler Heleine was one of the investigators who worked on the case and got Small to confess to the murder 37 years later.

Small told detectives that he killed his wife after the two got into a verbal argument that turned physical. The two lived in Bradley, but he randomly drove to Coles County to dispose of the body. However, the murder weapon, head, hands, and feet were never recovered.

Heleine said solving this case was one of the highlights of his career because he could bring the family closure.

"Justice was done, he's paying for his crime," Heleine said. "The family has got closure and so does the community. We now know that it wasn't someone that lives here in Coles County or someone local that committed a murder."

Diane Small was 26 years old and a mother to her two-year-old daughter when she was murdered.

Thomas Small is currently serving 30 years for first degree murder at Hill Correctional Center.