So there you are, sipping your morning coffee, perusing the real estate listings, when all of a sudden you come across this:
10 RMS, 4 BR, 2.5 BTH. BRICK RANCH ON SECLUDED ACRE. ELEGANT HOME HAS HIGH CEILINGS, ARCH. DETAIL, OAK FLRS & SPACIOUS RMS. SCREEN PRCH & LIBRARY ADD TO LUXURY. 2 CAR ATTCHD GARAGE WHERE PREV OWNR BLUDGEOND TO DTH.
You would not be alone if your coffee, propelled by shock, shot across the table in a stream.
Maybe such an ad is apocryphal. But for real estate brokers, the occasional challenge of selling a house with a gory history is all too real.
Here are the facts. People die in houses all the time. Usually, it’s a simple act of nature. But sometimes nature gets some help.
And this being a bricks and mortar world, once the fingerprints are lifted and the mess tidied up, there is the matter of an empty house that needs a buyer.
Amazingly, there’s always someone willing to turn the page on a checkered past. And once they shove that schefflera plant in the corner, maybe hire a feng shui master to harmonize the place, it’ll be just another address in the domestic grid.
How have some of Chicago’s houses of horrors fared on the market in recent years? We set out to trace the realty history of a few.
There’s the two-story townhouse in Jeffery Manor on Chicago’s Southeast Side where Richard Speck, an itinerant seaman, strangled or stabbed to death eight student nurses on the night of July 14, 1966.
Shortly after the murders, a schoolteacher from the neighborhood moved in with plans to write a book. Having changed hands a couple of times since, it has been owned for the past 12 years by a mother of two who wishes the news crews and the curious would go away once and for all.
“Look,” she says, “people die in hospitals all the time and people still go in there. I knew the history of this house when I bought it. That didn’t matter. People get killed all the time.
“People contact me. … They want to come in. Basically just plain out of curiosity. I’ve even had news crews call me, like the one from `Hard Copy’ on the 20th anniversary and again when Speck died (in Stateville Prison on Dec. 5, 1991).”
She can’t stand the calls. “This is not something I want to be reminded of.”
In Winnetka, there’s the turn-of-the-century, eight-bedroom English country house where on May 20, 1988, Laurie Dann, having moments before opened fire on a classroom of 2nd-graders in the Hubbard Woods Elementary School, sought refuge. Brandishing two guns, she proceeded to shoot Philip Andrew, a 20-year-old swimming star just home from college, outside the pantry, and as night fell, put one of the guns to her own head in an upstairs bedroom with a balcony and a small fireplace.
Three years later, the Andrews, who were divorcing, sold the house for $1.194 million to a couple who then got divorced themselves and filed for bankruptcy. Four years ago, that couple sold the house for $1.2 million to the head of a Chicago advertising agency and his wife. One of their two children then chose as her bedroom the very room where Dann had committed suicide.
Just days after buying what had become known as “the Laurie Dann house” in September 1993, the current owners, who were moving from Wilmette, decided to throw a big barbecue in the back yard so their kids’ friends who thought the house “creepy” could roam from the basement to the third floor and find out it was nothing but a big, old house.
Later, they landscaped according to the principles of feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of placement, in hopes of restoring a sense of balance and order to the house with what they refer to as the “double whammy” background of divorce, bankruptcy and death.
So far, says the current owner, it has been a house unhaunted–except for that one night, about a year after they moved in, when her husband was out of town and she awoke certain she’d just heard gunshots and a woman’s scream.
“It was so real to me I almost called the police,” says the woman, a former teacher at New Trier High School, who, it turns out, had once taught Dann and had known her for three years. “But then I thought, `Did I hear it, because my neighbors aren’t turning on their lights?’ Then that made me think, `Oh no, is this what we’re in for?’
“In four years, though, that’s the only incident. I have to say, despite our friends’ worries when we moved in–everyone said, How much bad stuff can you have in one house?–I loved the house when I saw it and really it’s been great. We’ve had no bad stuff. Both our children were starting high school when we bought it and now they’re in college.
“To me, a house (is) a piece of property; I feel like I’m just a caretaker, I’m just passing through. I suppose if there are places where the history is unresolved, you might think more about it. But the history here, whether you like the resolutions or not; it’s simply what happened in its lifetime. Home is where you are and where you put your heart.”
And of course, unforgettable among the houses that give goosebumps, there was the nondescript ranch house in Norwood Park Township on the city’s far Northwest Side where John Wayne Gacy killed 33 young men and boys and buried 29 of them in the crawl space in a decade-long spree that ended in December 1978.
That house was razed in April 1979, and the lot sat vacant and overgrown with weeds for nine years. It was bought at a sheriff’s sale in July 1984 by a savings and loan association for $30,544–the amount owed in back taxes and on two mortgages in the names of Gacy, his mother and two sisters. Two years later, the land was bought by a woman who built a 2,300-square-foot ranch with a half basement, presumably for her retired parents to live in. The $250,000 house was completed in December 1988, and the new owners went to court to have the address legally changed, as if the lot could be literally wiped from the map.
In Lake County, north of Libertyville, there’s the luxurious 13-room manor known locally as “Murder Mansion,” where on June 5, 1980 15-year-old William Rouse gunned down his mother while she lay in bed and then turned the shotgun on his father.
What happened next defies all odds. The house, on a wooded lot off busy Milwaukee Avenue, was bought by the crime syndicate and, according to testimony in federal court, was turned into a gambling casino, which it remained until it experienced another murder, this time of a mobster from Lake Forest who was knocked off going up the stairs and was later found in the trunk of his wife’s Lincoln-Continental in nearby Mundelein on June 2, 1982. It wasn’t long after that that the mob packed up its gambling chips and left the place behind.
It sat empty until five years ago when a new family moved in–and stayed.
In Kenilworth, nestled along the lake, there’s the 17-room English Tudor mansion once known as “Windward,” where Valerie Percy, the 21-year-old daughter of Charles Percy, was bludgeoned in her upstairs bedroom in the early morning hours of Sept. 18, 1966, shortly before her father, a millionaire industrialist, was first elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating incumbent Paul Douglas.
A year almost to the day after that election, the Percys sold the house to a close friend, the head of a major hospital supply conglomerate, who had always loved the house and lives there to this day. According to reports at the time, Percy’s wife, Lorraine, was “too terrified” to stay in the house, and upon moving to Washington, they put it behind them.
In Wilmette, in an exclusive neighborhood called Indian Hill Estates, there’s a 10-room brick ranch, filled with light and oak floors, where on Dec. 28, 1993 in the midst of a bitter divorce, Suzanne Olds was bludgeoned on the floor of the garage.
The house, long tied up by court proceedings involving her ex-husband, Dean Olds, and his former boyfriend, 25-year-old Helmut Hofer (who in 1995 was tried and acquitted of the murder), went on the market July 14. It is still out there. Asking price: $965,000.
In Palatine, there’s a roomy five-bedroom house that, until she disappeared on the rainy morning of Oct. 25, 1977, had been the home of Stephanie Lyng, a 39-year-old mother of four and daughter of Chicago newspaper columnist Dorsey Connors. Lyng lived there with her estranged husband, Edward, and their daughters, then aged 8 to 15.
Although it took 15 years to solve the mystery and the woman’s body never turned up, it turns out that her husband, a well-to-do vending machine company owner now behind bars for life, had on that morning waited for Lyng in the family room, struck her on the head with a gun, tied her up, stabbed her, wrapped her up, cleaned the blood and drove her to a site in Lake County where he buried her. He lived in the house with his daughters for 15 years, until police arrested him at O’Hare International Airport on Nov. 2, 1992, as he was about to board a plane to Egypt.
The house, on the market only 101 days, sold for $175,000– something of a steal–in May 1995 to a couple who currently leases it out, but plans to move in eventually. The family that rents it, a machine tool salesman, his wife and two young children, consider the house a novelty. “How many people do you know who live in a murderer’s house?” he asks, adding that he loves to pop the question on first-time visitors, especially out-of-towners staying overnight.
The salesman and his wife knew nothing of the home’s infamy when they first looked at it, but so gentle was the owners’ unwrapping of the tale they were hardly taken aback. And besides, they were already sold on all the space– 3,000 square feet. So in they moved.
“We began to investigate,” says the salesman, “because of our own curiosity, just how deviant this murderer was. We’ve always thought it’d make a great movie.”
And since they were the first ones to move in after Lyng went to jail, the new occupants stumbled onto some odd housekeeping. The lawn, for one thing, was a mess. That, perhaps more than the murder itself, might have been the thing that most rankled the neighbors. “One comical time, the first week or two we’re there, I’m out cutting the grass. I’m pretty meticulous. A neighbor lady comes over and says: `Well, at least you take care of your lawn, unlike the murderous bastard who used to live there.’ “
Out in Oak Park, suburb of broad lawns and Wright minds, there sits a 2,905-square-foot house built in 1929 that doesn’t look anything like some of the houses around town where tourists flock. But it’s got a history just as colorful: Back on June 19, 1975, mobster Sam Giancana was shot six times in the basement kitchen for reasons, cited in an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, that included taking more than “his cut of the pie.”
Less than 14 months later the house was in new hands, the first time in 25 years the name Giancana didn’t show up on a deed of ownership. The house sold for a mere $46,000 in August 1976. But 14 years later, when the house changed hands in May 1990, the house with the once-colorful past went, according to real estate records, for nearly 10 times what it had previously cost.
