Beloved Chicago Dermatologist Brutally Murdered

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Dr. David Cornbleet was a respected and loving family man in his community.

Dr. David Cornbleet operated his dermatology practice for 28 years in a 21-story office building at 30 North Michigan Ave. on Chicago's tony north side. A mild-mannered, jovial father and husband, the 64-year-old doctor ran his office as a one-man operation. His father had also been a dermatologist. David Cornbleet didn't have, nor did he need, a secretary. He was extremely efficient, and could typically see more than a hundred patients in any given week. His son Jonathan told AMW that his father was a thoughtfully consistent man of meticulous habits. "Every night he called home at the same time, 6:20 on the dot, to let my mom know that he was on his way home, and every Saturday morning he bought mom flowers."

Dr. Cornbleet and his wife Aileen, a schoolteacher, had raised two children to adulthood. By the fall of 2006, the good doctor and his wife were enjoying their life together and were proud of the type of adults their two kids had become. The family was very close. Jonathan would often come to the office on Saturdays to help his father with bookkeeping and insurance paperwork. The two were extremely close and cherished their time together. In October 2006 David and Aileen Cornbleet were as content as they could be. They loved to travel the world together and were avid readers and art collectors. Sadly, on the evening of October 24, 2006, that idyllic life was permanently shattered.

That evening when Aileen Cornbleet didn't receive her customary 6:20 p.m. phone call from her husband she soon began to worry. Her concern grew over the next couple of hours when her husband failed to call or arrive home. Around 8:00 p.m., his daughter went to check on him at the office. When she got to his 12th floor office, she found the door to her father's office unlocked. Once inside, she discovered the unthinkable: her father dead in a pool of blood. Dr. Cornbleet had been bound, beaten and stabbed to death.

Who Is This Mysterious Young Man Caught On Tape?

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David was very close with his family, and very dedicated to his wife and sons.

Homicide detectives from the Chicago police department's Area Four division quickly learned that the building had surveillance cameras in covering the office building's main entrance and the lobby area elevator doors. A young, White male who entered the building around 4:45 on the afternoon of the murder piqued the interest of the investigators. The man appeared to be in his late teens or early twenties. He was wearing a red baseball cap, a gray hooded sweatshirt, jeans and had a dark colored courier-style, bag slung over his shoulder when he entered the building and went up on the elevator.

However, when the young man came down and exited the elevator forty minutes later, he was wearing a dark skull cap, and had the sweatshirt in his hands, holding it in an obvious attempt to cover his face. Detectives located a woman who had been in the descending elevator with the young man. She told them that he seemed to trying to hide his face and that his nose was bleeding. Police believe Dr. Cornbleet fought valiantly against his killer and may have broken or injured the assailant's nose.

The video was shown on local Chicago news channels and to the Cornbleet family, but nobody could identify the mysterious young man. Could he have been a disgruntled patient, or was there some other motive behind the doctor's murder?

Victim's Son An Avid AMW Viewer

Ironically, Jonathan Cornbleet has been an avid America's Most Wanted viewer for years. "I am a major supporter of your show. I haven't missed an episode since it first came on the air in 1988," he told AMW's correspondent Tom Morris. "I never thought in my worst dreams that I would need your help one day. But now I do.

"My father was my best friend. He won't get to bounce his grandchild around. He won't be there for the special days. I miss him more than I could ever tell you, and I will not stop pursuing justice for my father. He was a good person who had no problems that we knew of with anyone. I don't know why, anyone would kill him."

Suspect In Dr. Cornbleet's Murder Confesses

For 10 months, Chicago police detectives have been tried to identify the mysterious young man seen on surveillance tape, leaving the office building on N. Michigan Avenue where Dr. David Cornbleet was found stabbed to death on October 24, 2006. Dr. Cornbleet's son, Jon, has also been on a relentless quest of his own to solve his beloved father's murder.

Jon, an avid AMW viewer long before this horrible tragedy struck his family, did everything in his power to keep the case in the public eye. He built a MySpace page about his father's murder and worked with AMW to get the case profiled in a AMW caught on tape segment that aired on April 28th, 2007. The combined efforts of Detective Steve Peterson and his Area 4 Homicide Squad and Jon Cornbleet have finally culminated in a suspect being taken into custody. Hans R. Peterson, 29, turned himself into authorities in the French Caribbean island of St. Martin on August 6th, after learning that police in Chicago were looking for him in connection with murder of Dr. Cornbleet.

Peterson, who Jon Cornbleet says was briefly a patient of his father's nearly five years ago, has reportedly provided specific details to authorities in St. Martin about the doctor's murder that had never been made public. Police believe Peterson traveled from New York City last October to Chicago to murder Dr. Cornbleet before eventually leaving the country and surfacing in St. Martin. MyFOXChicago has reported that DNA evidence from the crime scene and from an apartment where Peterson lived in New York connect him to the bloody murder. He is currently being held in jail on the island of St. Martin. Peterson was in St. Martin well past the expiration of his 90-day tourist visa when he applied for, and received a French passport because his mother is French. In August of 2007, French authorities stated that they would not extradite Peterson to face murder charges.

Unfortunately it seems like the Cornbleet family will not get the justice they deserve. Jon told AMW's Tom Morris, "I don't want him tried in France, or the Caribbean. I want to see him face to face in a court of law in Chicago. This man murdered my father, and I want him to face justice here."

Although he had not been a patient of Dr. Cornbleet's for more than four years, sources say Peterson allegedly confessed to authorities in Saint-Martin that he murdered the dermatologist because he believed that a drug prescribed by the doctor for a skin condition had rendered him impotent. The drug is called Accutane. Like many prescribed medicines, Accutane does have numerous side effects, but male impotence is not one of them. Petersen is an avid Internet gambler who's originally from Oregon, but has lived in Chicago, Wisconsin and New York City. He was living in New York when he allegedly decided to travel to Chicago to carry out is-guided, homicidal attack on the mild mannered doctor.

Chicago police issued a bench warrant for Hans Peterson on June 8th, 2007 and had traveled to New York in their looking for him. Peterson's surprising surrender to authorities on the French island of Saint-Martin has doubt over whether he will be extradited back to the United States. At a press conference on August 14th, Cook County First Assistant State's Attorney Bob Milan indicated that his office plans to "Do everything in our power to get him back here." A spokesperson with the French Consulate in Chicago told MYFOX Chicago that if Peterson was indeed able to obtain a French passport in Saint-Martin it would have been only because he presented evidence that his mother was French, but insist that French authorities will cooperate fully with American authorities to sort out the citizenship-passport issues, and that they will not seek to protect him because regardless of whether it is ultimately determined that he is, or is not, French.

The most famous extradition case in recent years was the lengthy process of negotiation between the U.S. and France that ultimately resulted in the extradition of an American convicted murderer, ex-sixties hippy guru, Ira Einhorn. Einhorn had been convicted in absentia of murdering his girlfriend in Philadelphia after he fled to France. He was living comfortably in the French countryside when John Walsh and an AMW camera crew confronted him on the streets of Bordeaux. After months of negotiations between prosecutors in Pennsylvania, the U.S. State Department and French judicial authorities, Eihorn was eventually sent back to face justice in Pennsylvania.