On the night of March 19, 1982, Dianne Georgia Turner Masters disappeared. Nine months later, investigators made a grisly discovery while winching up cars dumped in the Illinois Sanitary and Ship Canal in Willow Springs as part of a massive insurance scam.
Toward the end of a chilly December afternoon, Dianne Masters` white and yellow Cadillac was pulled out of the gray water. In the trunk, police found her decomposed body.
Last summer, lawyer Alan Masters and two former high-ranking police officers were convicted and sentenced to serve time in federal prisons for conspiring to kill her and then covering up the murder.
Almost a year after that trial, no one has been convicted of the actual killing.
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The leafy, serene towns south of Chicago where Alan Masters lived and wielded his influence hardly seem like places for wife abuse and murder. They are family places, nestled among the forest preserves, shopping centers and golf courses. They look so nice.
Their very serenity underscores a fact of domestic violence: It occurs randomly, in all classes, races and places.
The deadly contest between attorney Masters, 55, and his wife, Dianne, 35, was a classic domestic violence case in that it was a relationship marred by periodic brutality that intensified when she pulled away.
Before she died, Dianne Masters was terrified. But she strove to keep up the appearance of a well-cared-for, upper-middle-class wife. The day before she died, she was consulting with her hairdresser on how to escape.
She thought she was alone, but the investigation into her murder opened the door on an entire sub-world of terrified women-wives and girlfriends-who feared their husbands or boyfriends would follow Masters` lead.
Eight years after the murder, Alan Masters went to trial for planning it. It took that long because one of Masters` co-conspirators, former Cook County sheriff`s police Lt. James Keating, covered the killers` tracks by directing lower-ranking sheriff`s police officers in a sham investigation.
Masters, Keating and Michael Corbitt, former Willow Springs police chief, have been tried and now are serving sentences in federal prison, but the identity of the actual killer or killers who struck Dianne Masters on the head and then put two bullets into her brain and dumped her car in the canal, has not been determined.
The nearly successful murder cover-up relied on the direct and indirect support of a group of police officers and other men who owed Alan Masters favors. It also relied on the silent fear of the women who knew these men.
The case was cracked not by a failure of those police officers to keep the faith, but by information from a half dozen frightened women whose stories provided a map of suspects and events that, according to federal and county authorities, led to the trial and conviction.
The women, who spoke anonymously, approached special investigators with bits and pieces of the murder story told to them by boasting husbands, boyfriends and co-workers.
”Our greatest uncredited intelligence sources were the women,” said Cook County sheriff`s police Sgt. John Reed who, with former County Sheriff`s officer Paul Sabin, investigated the case with the U.S. attorney`s office.
”It got started when these women said, `Enough is enough. If I step out of line, I might be swimming around in a trunk.` ”
The women who came forward, according to Reed, were the wives, girlfriends and co-workers of men who worked in a variety of police departments, including Bedford Park, Justice, Summit, Hickory Hills, Orland Park and Cook County, as well as Illinois state troopers and the Cook County court system. None of them testified in court and none of their names appear in police records.
”It was the men bragging about it,” Reed said. ”To tell your wife or your girlfriend to `Keep quiet or the same thing will happen to you,` or `I`m buying a big car to put you in the trunk,` makes an impression.
”They thought what happened to Dianne was wrong, but for the first few years, they didn`t know what to do with their information. They didn`t know who to trust.”
Reed said the women came forward slowly, with information gleaned from stories and jokes: ”We were bumbling around with no sense of direction until then. They gave us an outline of what had happened.”
The case was reopened in 1986 by the Cook County Sheriff`s police after an unrelated federal investigation unearthed new evidence. Later, the U.S. attorney`s office took over, but County Sheriff`s officers Reed and Sabin continued working on it, reporting to federal authorities instead of the County Sheriff.
Bright beginnings
Dianne Masters grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Franklin Park. A childhood friend, Ben Naslund, 43, described her as ”extremely competitive and very bright” in school. She was valedictorian of her 8th grade class at Lincoln Grade School in Schiller Park.
Instead of pursuing a goal of becoming a writer, she married right out of Elmhurst College and settled into life as a suburban housewife. When that marriage failed after three years, while she was in her 20s, she hired Alan Masters to file her divorce in 1972.
”When she first got married, she seemed very strong-willed and independent. But she was also very vulnerable,” Naslund said. ”She wanted somebody to take care of her, look out for her. She struck out in both marriages on that count.”
Naslund said Dianne never had much money and ”knew the value of a dollar.” He also described her as a hard worker, but couldn`t recall any jobs she had. ”When she met Alan Masters, she didn`t have much money and she was looking for security. Here she was, bouncing off a failed first marriage and he represented security. All of a sudden she had a new car, nice things to wear.”
Before long, Dianne was telling friends Alan owned her.
Dianne`s friends thought she and Alan were married as far back as 1974, when Alan still had another wife and family. They didn`t actually wed until 1980, after their child, Anndra, was born.
Dianne was a fine-boned, pretty blond with big dreams when she died, but it wasn`t until her mid-30s that she began to make plans for an independent life.
At the end of her life, she had an avocation as a Moraine Valley Community College trustee, and a classy veneer purchased by her husband. She also was having a serious affair with James Koscielniak, an associate economics professor at the community college who, in his lack of prestige and money, was the opposite of Alan Masters.
Dianne had planned to initiate divorce proceedings against her husband the Monday after she disappeared. Leaving the security of a large, maid-serviced house in the Palos area was a big step for a woman who craved financial and social security.
During Alan Masters` conspiracy trial it was revealed that the security Masters provided had a price: Dianne Masters was a victim of domestic violence. One of her friends testified that she`d seen Alan shove Dianne down a flight of stairs during the early years of their 10-year relationship. Another testified that she often had ”grasping-type” bruises after fights with her husband.
Despite the violence, Dianne Masters strove to present a picture of respectability. She proudly displayed the trappings of her husband`s wealth: a Cadillac, a closet filled with furs, and jewelry estimated in value at $20,000 at the time she disappeared.
And she took up a charitable cause, helping to found the South Suburban Crisis Center, first as a hot-line. It is now one of the largest organizations aiding victims of domestic violence in the south suburbs.
