CHICAGO – The parents of a woman found dead in the stairwell of a luxury South Loop apartment building are asking a judge to block the woman’s husband from claiming her remains.
A resident found Caitlin Tracey, 36, at the bottom of an internal stairwell in the 1200 block of South Prairie on Sunday, October 27 around 7:25 p.m. Her severed foot was found nearby. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office has conducted an autopsy, but results are still pending as of Saturday morning.
Now, Tracey’s parents, citing an “alleged violent pattern of abuse,” have been granted a temporary restraining order to prevent her husband, Adam Beckerink, from taking custody of her remains.
Another hearing on the case is scheduled for next week.
Although Chicago police investigators have questioned Beckerink in connection with Tracey’s death, he has never been criminally charged with any misconduct of any kind in Cook County.
However, Cook County court records show that Tracey filed and received a protective order against Beckerink, an attorney, in October 2023. The order was dismissed the following month, and records show she has not filed a new petition in Cook County since then.
These documents list the Prairie Avenue building as Beckerink’s home address.
In an affidavit seeking the order, Tracey alleged that Beckerink “contacts me approximately 20 times a day” and calls her “derogatory names such as ‘liar,’ cheater, ‘whore,’ and a ‘piece of shit.’”
She also alleged that she filed a domestic violence complaint in September 2023 after, she said, Beckerink entered a hotel room at the Ritz Carlton while she was sleeping and was verbally and physically abusive.
Tracey said she filed a second report because, she alleged, Beckerink was physically and verbally abused at the South Loop residential building in August 2023, “with my head against a closet, hitting me, punching me, my head in a headlock setting, and dragged me away from the door.
In a third allegation, she alleged that Beckerink hit her over the head with a pickle jar at her Michigan home in July 2023. She claimed she fled the home after he “poured vodka on my body, burning my wounds.” Two days later he took the woman to a hospital for treatment of her ‘open head wound’, Tracey claimed.
Her affidavit stated that she took police to Beckerink’s home after the incident in August 2023: “The police officers attempted to arrest the man [man]but he refused to open the door,” she wrote.
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