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 Psycho Killers A rogue's gallery of Chicago's greatest sociopaths
We live in the Jeffrey Dahmer generation.
The open wounds of our fellow Americans pump our adrenaline, raise
our eyebrows, feed our water-cooler conversation. We exist in a
cannibalistic society that devours human pain. Each week, 19.7 million
viewers tune in to watch normal people starve on CBS's "Survivor."
12.6 million watch people eat bugs and animal intestines on NBC's "Fear
Factor." And then there's Jerry Springer. We love when people lose. We
love when people cry. We love that it's not us.
We know the tales from the crypt, we search for their secrets, and
we're grateful to be at a distance, yet mesmerized that such things
occur. We desire the repulsive. And lucky for us, Chicago's history of
bloodthirsty sociopaths is something to appreciate. We have our very own
chapter in the great encyclopedia of the human predator.
As you read our Halloween-inspired guide to the Chicago sociopath,
ordered chronologically, make note of the proximity of the events.
Perhaps you live closer than you thought, or were told by your
protective parents. Do you really know who your neighbor is? H.H. Holmes
One of America's first serial killers, our very own Dr. Death, in
his wealthy, charming ways, lured countless victims into his castle,
tortured them, and disposed of their bodies by dumping their corpses
into a large vat of acid. During the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
in Chicago, he had a field day. Various travelers rented rooms in his
"Castle of Death," never to return home. The building itself, at the
corner of 63rd and Wallace on the South Side, had nearly 100 rooms, most
of which were hidden and secret, and he would often lock his victims
inside until they suffocated. It is also believed he had in his
possession an "elasticity determinator," used to stretch his victims'
limbs until they detached. Then came the acid treatment. Eventually
captured in Philadelphia, Holmes confessed to murdering twenty-seven
people, but many more probably met their doom at Holmes' hand. The
doctor has recently been the subject of renewed interest, most notably
in Erik Larson's book, "Devil in the White City." Leopold and Loeb
May, 1924. Two young men, one a student at the University of Chicago
and the other a 19-year-old ornithologist, kidnapped and murdered Bobby
Franks, a young student, in an attempt to commit "the perfect crime."
They were to collect a substantial ransom from Franks' rich father, then
simply dispose of the body. However, once the ransom pickup was botched
and the boy's body was discovered, Leopold and Loeb were
shit-out-of-luck. Leopold had woefully dropped his glasses at the
location of the body--a culvert in the South Chicago swampland, near
Wolf Lake, right by the Indiana border, with acid poured over the face
and genitals in an attempt to disguise it. Loeb was murdered in prison
and Leopold was eventually released on parole. He moved to Puerto Rico,
wrote an autobiography, married, and lived there happily until the day
of his death in 1971. Bobby Franks' tomb can be found in Chicago's
Rosehill Cemetery, and his house still stands in Kenwood at 5052 South
Ellis. Oh yeah, Richard Loeb lived directly across the street from him,
at 5017, but his family's mansion has since been hammered into the
ground. William Heirens
The infamous "Lipstick Killer," this teenage University of Chicago
student grossly murdered two women and dismembered a six-year-old child
in 1945 and 1946. The first murder, a brutal stabbing of 43-year-old
woman, has its roots on Kenwood Avenue, in Chicago's Edgewater District.
The second murder, in which yet another middle-aged woman was
unsympathetically gutted, took place in the Pinecrest Apartment
Building, at 611 Pine Grove. This is where Heirens hauntingly scrawled
on the wall, in lipstick, "For heavens sake, catch me before I kill
more. I cannot control myself." The third and most gruesome of the
murders came at the corner of Thorndale and Kenmore, where he abducted a
young child, dismembered her, and left her severed body parts under the
various sewer caps on nearby Winthrop Avenue. Heirens later claimed that
a George Murman, a man that lived inside him, actually committed the
murders. Alive today in the federal prison in Marion, Heirens proclaims
his innocence and insists that he was bullied into confessing. Several
others confessed to the crime, but were dismissed by police as lunatics.
Is the real "Lipstick Killer" still alive and well, roaming Chicago's
hallowed streets? Kenneth Hansen
October, 1955. One of the more shocking if lesser-known crimes in
Chicago's history, in which three boys, Bobby Peterson and John and
Anton Scheussler, were found dead in the Robinson Woods, located just
Northwest of Chicago's border, at East River Road and Lawrence Avenue.
The boys ventured off into the city to see a movie, were last seen in
the lobby at 111 North Wabash, and their nude, strangled bodies were
found thirty-six hours later. Years passed before any clues were
uncovered and finally, in 1994, people came forward claiming that a man
named Kenneth Hansen had bragged repeatedly over time that he committed
the murders. In 1955, Hansen worked in the Robinson Woods area for Silas
Jayne, owner of the horse stables that were nearby (close to where the
Butera is now at Cumberland and Lawrence). Hansen, who allegedly dabbled
in child molestation, was brought to trial with no evidence, only
witnesses to Hansen's bragging. As the story goes, once Jayne found out
about Hansen's venture into madness, he burned his own stables to avoid
leaving any evidence of foul play, and skipped town. Hansen stayed,
however, did his talking, and found himself with a sentence of 200 years
in prison, forty years after he allegedly committed the crime. But, in
2000, Hansen appealed to the court when evidence came forth that Jayne,
his former employer, had admitted to the crime right before his death.
Nothing doing. Hansen, still alive and convinced he didn't commit the
crime, is only nine years into his 200-year visit in jail. An ironic
side note is the unfounded rumor that the Peterson-Scheussler boys, on
the day of their disappearance, interacted with John Wayne Gacy, who was
about their age at the time and living in the area. (Gacy's death house,
discovered twenty years after the murders, was mere blocks away from
Jayne's horse stables.) The Grimes Sisters
Here's a sociopath that might still walk among us. On January 22,
1957, two sisters, Patricia and Barbara Grimes, were found dead at the
edge of German Church Road at Devil's Creek, near Willow Springs. They
had been missing for twenty-five days, last seen at Angelo's restaurant
on South Archer Avenue. Before the discovery of their bodies, the
manhunt conducted by the police department was the largest in the city's
history. The girls, found nude, showed no signs of sexual abuse, and
the coroner declared their deaths due to traumatic shock, possibly due
to the cold weather. He suggested that the girls had been kept in that
spot off German Church Road, hidden so no passersby would notice them.
The investigation, however, was drastically botched, with the state
police conflicting with the city police, blown confessions and lost
evidence. The house nearest to the crime scene was abandoned days after
the bodies were found, but the owners of the house were never questioned
or searched. The house has been leveled since, but some of the original
furniture remains on the site, which has become a spot for teenagers to
go drinking. The murders remain unsolved. The spot is widely known as
being haunted, with several people from the area reporting that they
hear a car screech up, halt, and dump something heavy onto the side of
the road. When they glanced to see what made the noise, there wasn't a
trace of anything at all. Richard Speck
To see the spot where Richard Speck earned his eternal infamy is not
to see a flat parcel of dust and weeds. The building at 2319 East 100th
still stands, unremarkable, silently holding the memories of the eight
young women who were slaughtered by Speck on the night of July 13, 1966.
When he finally died in prison twenty-five years later, most family
members of the victims felt that his heart attack was an easy way out.
But Richard Speck was not finished with his cruel mockery of justice.
Five years after his death, Bill Kurtis, then an anchor with WBBM-TV,
received a videotape in the mail, sent anonymously. On it: Speck,
repulsive and bloated, sporting a pair of man-breasts and wearing little
panties, indulging in weed and coke, and having sex with a fellow
inmate. John Wayne Gacy
Everyone's favorite clown and one of history's most notorious serial
killers lived and breathed among us, dining at our restaurants, shooting
pool at our bars. Mr. Gacy enjoyed picking up young men from various
places in the city, taking them home with him, luring them into
handcuffs, and repeatedly drugging, raping and torturing them until they
perished. On December 13, 1978, after a boy Gacy offered a job to
suddenly disappeared, the Des Plaines police came a-knockin', and found
his body plus twenty-seven others buried in the floorboards of the Gacy
residence, as well as under the garage. Gacy, caught dead-handed,
confessed to murdering more than thirty boys in all, one of which was
later found afloat in the Des Plaines River, another in the Illinois
River. Evidence found at the scene other than the collection of corpses:
samples of chloroform he used to drug the captured, an eighteen-inch
dildo used for something else, a whole batch of gay porno, and a rusty
pair of handcuffs. Gacy's estate was immediately flattened to the
ground, only to be purchased and rebuilt a few years later for a really
cheap price, obviously by people who aren't afraid of the Boogey Man.
Directions from downtown: Take I90 west to the Cumberland Avenue South
exit, travel south to Summerdale and make a left. Go east for two
blocks, and there it is, on your right, 8213 West Summerdale. Turns out,
the new house is just as creepy as the old. The Chicago Rippers
From 1981 to 1982, a clan of four men, led by Robin Gecht, abducted
seven women, mostly prostitutes. Gecht, along with Ed Spreitzer, and
Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis, would drag their victims into their van,
rape them, and then slice off their breasts, later to be eaten while
Gecht read passages from the Bible. You guessed it, Satanists!!! The
bodies were found in various locations, from the bank of the Chicago
River to the suburb of Barrington. Unfortunately for the Rippers, their
last victim survived the incredibly painful ordeal, gave the police a
description, and the nimrods were caught within days. Gecht got off easy
with the Charlie Manson defense, stating that he never actually
committed the murders, and only got life, along with Spreitzer. The
brothers got the death penalty, with Andy buying it in March of 1999.
They were all found mentally competent to stand trial, in which it was
revealed that the women would be sacrificed to the Dark Lord. Gecht
kept, as trophies, a box of severed breasts, each partially consumed by
a Ripper. And guess what? Gecht was employed by no other than a Mr. John
Gacy in the mid-seventies. Funny how those things work out sometimes,
isn't it? Laurie Dann
May 20, 1988: Laurie Dann, a thirty-year-old babysitter from Glencoe,
marched into Hubbard Woods School on Chatfield Road in Winnetka armed
with two handguns, entered a second-grade classroom, and shot six
children, killing one. She immediately left the school, and, dressed in
a T-shirt and garbage bag, wrapped in a shower curtain, she forced
herself into a nearby home, taking a family hostage. Once inside, she
allowed the parents to wait outside, keeping the son, a twenty-year-old
University of Illinois swim-team champion, at gunpoint. When the police
arrived, she shot him in the chest, and retreated back into a bedroom,
where she disposed of herself without any explanation of her crimes.
Rumor has it, Dann's bedroom was filled with raw, rotting meat she had
simply left lying around. Her parents were later sued by the family of
the boy who was killed, based on the assertion that they were well aware
that she was mentally unstable and owned firearms. Jeffrey Dahmer
Milwaukee's favorite chef made occasional field trips to Chicago,
collecting two victims from our city's streets. The first, in June of
1991, was scooped up at the Pride parade, and taken back to Dahmer's
apartment where his head and selected internal organs were found in the
freezer during the eventual police seizure, as well as his torso. The
second Chicago connection, also in June of 1991, was seduced at Carol's
Bar, 1353 North Wells, and convinced to venture back to Dahmer's haven.
The two agreed to live there as a couple, but four days later, Dahmer
dumped and decapitated him. All together, Jeff drugged seventeen boys,
dismembered their bodies, chewed some, dabbled in necrophilia, and left
most of the remains inside of his apartment. After his capture and three
consecutive life sentences, Dahmer was killed in prison within seconds.
He was only exposed to other inmates twice, the second time being the
one that did him in. The Brown's Chicken Massacre
January 8, 1993: Two gunmen entered the Brown's Chicken and Pasta
located at the corner of Smith Street and Northwest Highway in Palatine,
ushered seven people into the restaurant's cooler, and systematically
executed each one. The victims, shot and stabbed, were not robbed,
however. Instead, no motive was apparent, and the case remained unsolved
for ten years. The police suffered a great public backlash for
reportedly botching the investigation. However, DNA samples from a
partially eaten chicken dinner from the crime scene, plus the testimony
of one Anne Lockett, were just enough to indict James Eric Degorski and
his friend, Juan A. Luna, Jr., on May 18, 2002. After they were
detained, several other people came forward stating that they knew of
the two's involvement but failed to tell the police, including one woman
who was the supposed getaway driver from the bloodbath. The two accused
still await trial today, and although this particular outpost of the
empire has been long since demolished, Brown's still serves fried
chicken to Chicagoans today. Andrew Cunanan
May 3, 1997: the Gold Coast in autumn, and the site of the most
heinous murder in recent memory, one in a chain of crimes spanning the
Midwest and the South, ending with the slaughter of Gianni Versace and
the self-inflicted death of the spree-killer himself, Andrew Cunanan.
Lee Miglin certainly died one of the grisliest deaths Cunanan dealt: he
was stabbed twice in the chest with gardening shears. This would have
been sufficient to finish the 72-year-old real estate developer off, but
Cunanan wasn't finished. He nearly decapitated Miglin with a gardening
saw, then ran over the body several times with the victim's own Lexus,
all at Miglin's residence at 22 East Scott. Why should this man,
roundly described as gentle and warm, be murdered in such a terrible
way? In spite of attempts to establish a previous relationship between
Cunanan and Miglin or a member of his family, the Miglins, their
friends, and associates all maintain that the killing was the random act
of a homicidal maniac. No evidence has ever emerged to prove otherwise. Benjamin Smith
White supremacist and member of the World Church of the Creator
Benjamin Smith went hunting for any minority he could find in early July
1999. Armed with a .380 semi-automatic and a .22 caliber handgun, he
paid visits to Skokie, Northbrook, Springfield, Decatur,
Champaign-Urbana, and Bloomington, Indiana, shooting eleven people from
his car. One of the fatally wounded was former Northwestern basketball
coach Ricky Byrdsong. After Smith had stolen a van near Salem,
Illinois, the police finally found him, dead, with a bullet hole under
his chin. Later found in one of Smith's journals: "Anyone who knows
the history of this plague upon humanity who calls themselves Jews will
know why I have acted." Sleep tight, Chicago. With additional reporting by David Orr
Also by Tom Lynch Tip of the Week
Mr. Postman
Tip of Week
Tip of the Week
What the shuck?
Tip of the Week
Tip of the Week
Tip of the Week
Wacky cadavers
Our town, twisted
Their TV chariot awaits
At the old ballgame
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