On Oct. 16, 1955, 14-year-old Robert Peterson spent his last hours at home helping his fatherremodel their garage and listening to a Chicago Cardinals football game on the radio before he kissed his parents goodbye and left with two friends.

Malcolm and Dorothy Peterson never saw their son or the other boys alive again.

The last hours of Robert Peterson, before he and the Schuessler brothers, John, 13, and, Anton, 11, went downtown to see the movie "African Lion," were detailed Tuesday in the murder trial of Kenneth Hansen, a horseman and former stable hand.

Hansen, 62, is on trial before Criminal Court Judge Michael Toomin and a jury on charges of strangling the three boys after picking them up as they hitchhiked later that night at the intersection of Lawrence and Milwaukee Avenues.

The naked bodies of the victims were discovered two days later in a ditch in the Robinson Woods forest preserve near Lawrence and River Road.

As the case neared its close, defense attorney Jed Stone announced that Hansen would not testify, and Toomin told the seven-man, five-woman jury they would hear final arguments Wednesday afternoon.

Before the jury was dismissed for the day, they were read portions of a police interview with Malcolm Peterson on Oct. 30, 1955-two weeks after the boys disappeared.

The reading came as a stipulation by both sides of what the father, now age 79, would say if were to testify. Malcolm Peterson declined to do so, telling a reporter in a telephone interview Tuesday that he did not want to relive his last memories of his son.

"We don't have any comment at all," he said of he and his wife, Dorothy.

The Schuessler brothers' parents, Anton and Eleanor, are both deceased.

In the 1955 police interview, the Petersons described Robert as a typical 8th grader who had rarely been in trouble outside of a two-week stint of playing hookey while in the 7th grade.

While the interview is typed in a dispassionate fashion, the words spelled out the growing sense of fear and panic that enveloped the parents as the hours slipped away and their son failed to come home.

"We got up in the morning, and we kept him home from church because I had some work to do on the garage," Peterson said. "I made it four feet longer and the boards were a little long and I couldn't hold the board up myself and I kept him home to help me."

"After dinner, I sat down with him for about 10 mintes and listened to the Cardinal football game," Peterson recalled. "They played New York and I told him I am going out to clean up, you can stay and listen to the football game. He stayed in and I cleaned up around the garage, and the two Schuessler boys rode in on bikes."

Peterson said the boys went into the Peterson home at 5519 W. Farragut Ave., on Chicago's Northwest Side, where Bobby's mother helped them look through the newspaper to find a movie.

"I sat down and looked at the paper with them," Dorothy Peterson recalled. "I said the `African Lion' was playing at the Loop Theater, and they thought that would be good."

"He went out and kissed his dad goodbye," Mrs. Peterson said. "That's a routine in this house. . . .

The time was between 3:15 and 3:30 p.m.

According to the interview, Dorothy and Malcolm Peterson began to wonder about the whereabouts of the boys around 7:30 or 8 p.m.

Their worry was shared by the Schuessler boys' parents, who called later that evening and asked that the Petersons not let their sons ride their bikes home when they did return because it was dark.

"I said, `Don't worry, I will take them home in my car,' " Peterson said.

But by then, both families were concerned enough to notify police, and Peterson picked up the Schuessler boys' father, to go to the local police station and give a description of the boys and their clothing.

Then, they launched a search of their own.

"We went over to the theater, and it was closed," Peterson said. "The people were just coming out of the (nearby) State & Lake (theater), and we asked the manager if there were any boys in the show. We stayed around until the show emptied."

Police began calling other theaters and bowling alleys later in the evening, because Bobby liked to go bowling.

In fact, authorities later learned that the boys had gone to a bowling alley after the movie, but by the time the parents began calling around, they had disappeared.

Finally, around 3:30 or 4 a.m., the fathers went home.

Referring to the next day, Peterson said in the interview, "I don't remember about Monday. . . . I went over to the police station several times, but honestly I don't know what I did on Monday. I know I wasn't home. . . . I was up early."

On Tuesday, he was at a downtown newspaper with photographs of the boys in the hope that publishing the pictures would help locate them, when he received the dreaded news that their bodies had been found.

Before closing arguments Wednesday, defense lawyers plan to call a final witness to testify that Hansen and his wife, Beverly, now dead, were in Texas on a delayed honeymoon at the time of the boys' murders.