CHICAGO — A Cook County judge on Friday cleared the way for family members to claim the body of a woman who was found dead in the stairwell of a South Loop condo building on October 27.
A spokesperson for the family of 36-year-old Caitlin Tracey said the local judge had placed a temporary restraining order on her remains while a judge in Michigan decided if her parents had the authority to claim her body since she lived in that state at the time of her death. Tracey’s husband of six months, Adam Beckerink, wanted to claim her body, but the family won out after a Michigan judge found in their favor this week.
Meanwhile, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office has not ruled on the cause and manner of Tracey’s death, critical pieces of information that will allow police and prosecutors to decide if there was a criminal element to her death.
According to the spokesperson, Beckerink reported his wife missing on October 26, the day before she was found at the bottom of the high-rise stairwell with one of her feet severed.
While filing that report, Beckerink told investigators that he hadn’t seen his wife in about a month, but investigators found video of them together two days earlier, the Sun-Times reports.
The spokesperson said Tracey was found dead two days before a jury trial was scheduled to begin in Michigan, where Beckerink faced felony allegations of interfering with Tracey’s attempts to call 911 and then “violently resisted” arresting officers. A second domestic violence case, also filed this year, was also pending in Michigan, the spokesperson said.
While Tracey lived in New Buffalo, Michigan, at the time of her death, she had been staying with Beckerink when she died, the family said.
Beckerink has not been accused or charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Tracey’s death. He has never been charged with any crime in Cook County, according to court records.
However, Tracey filed for a protective order in Cook County last year, claiming Beckerink “contacts me approximately twenty times a day” and calls her “derogatory names like ‘liar,’ cheater,’ ‘whore,’ and a ‘piece of sh*t.’”
She also claimed that she filed a police report for domestic battery in September 2023 after, she said, Beckerink came into a hotel room at the Ritz Carlton while she was sleeping and launched into verbal and physical abuse.
Tracey said she filed a second police report because, she claimed, Beckerink became physically and verbally abusive at the South Loop residential building in August 2023, “slamming my head against a cabinet, slapping me, punching me, putting my head on a headlock, and dragging me away from the door.”
In a third allegation, she claimed that Beckerink struck her in the head with a pickle jar at her Michigan home in July 2023. She alleged that she fled the residence after he “poured vodka on my body, which burned my wounds.” He took the woman to a hospital for treatment of her “open head wound” two days later, Tracey alleged.
Her affidavit said she took police to the Beckerink’s residence after the August 2023 incident: “The police officers attempted to arrest the [man], but he refused to open the door,” she wrote.
Tracey received the protective order, but it was rescinded about a month later.
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