In their videotaped confessions, Juan Luna and Jim Degorski insist they entered Brown’s Chicken & Pasta at closing time on Jan. 8, 1993, with robbery on their minds. But on Saturday, authorities said the pair had planned the crime for weeks and had gone there to kill.
The two stuffed their pockets with bullets to repeatedly reload into Degorski’s .38-caliber revolver, they allegedly told a female friend shortly after the slayings.
They walked across Brown’s snow-covered parking lot “strangely, not in their own gait,” apparently to throw off investigators, the friend told police. And finally, before they entered the store, they allegedly wedged the back door shut so their victims could not escape.
None did. With Luna and Degorski donning latex gloves and trading off the revolver, prosecutors said, they herded five victims into one cooler, two in the other–and shot each of them repeatedly.
The prosecutors’ charges relied heavily on two female friends of the accused, particularly a woman who dated Degorski at the time of the slayings. She kept his secret for years out of fear that he would kill her as well.
The story she finally told laid out in brutal detail how the two former Fremd High School classmates allegedly carried out one of the worst mass killings in Illinois history.
The announcement of the charges afforded a measure of vindication for investigators who have faced years of criticism that they mishandled the hunt for the killers of store owners Richard and Lynn Ehlenfeldt and five of their employees.
“To the people now charged, you wanted to do something big. I hope you are placed in a cage that you have built through your own inhumanity towards the innocent,” said Palatine Police Chief John Koziol. “May those seven people, whose faces will forever be etched in our memory, now rest in peace.”
The charges also offered an emotional salve to Palatine residents, some of whom remain haunted by the murders even after the restaurant was demolished a year ago. Most of all it provided answers, however painful, to the families of those slain.
While investigators say they are certain the pair meant to commit murder, they don’t know why.
“I cannot explain their motivation for doing this killing,” Koziol said. “We still cannot give that answer to the families. They never really gave us one. They just did it to do something big.
“They are people without a soul, and that’s all we know about them.”
Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine said further evidence regarding that question would come out at trial. But he added: “The general belief [is] that while there was a robbery involved, that the basic motivation was to go in and to kill other human beings.”
Luna and Degorski were brought in separate squad cars from Palatine’s police lockup to the Cook County Criminal Courts building at 26th Street and California Avenue for a bond hearing Saturday morning. At the hearing, Linas J. Kelecius, an assistant Cook County state’s attorney with its cold case unit, told Judge Mary Margaret Brosnahan that the two had “been talking about pulling something like this for quite some time.”
“That particular Friday, they decided to actually do it,” Kelecius said.
The prosecutor told the judge that Luna and Degorski told his former girlfriend just days after the murders how they carried out the crime.
“Degorski asked her if she wanted to know what happened at Brown’s. She said yes,” Kelecius said of the woman, later identified by sources as Anne Lockett. “They ran it down in great detail. They talked a long time.” When he was done, “Degorski said, `If you ever tell anyone, we will kill you.'”
Lockett told investigators that Degorski described how he and Luna exchanged his .38-caliber handgun, and how he finished off one of the victims after Luna’s initial shots failed to kill him.
Luna then re-enacted how he held Lynn Ehlenfeldt around her neck and slashed her throat with a knife, according to Lockett, now a 26-year-old college student. Prosecutors said Lockett kept quiet until recently because of Degorski’s vow to kill her if she ever revealed the secret.
Last fall, she finally told someone, her new boyfriend. They were so fearful of Degorski’s threats that they and another roommate obtained firearm owner’s identification cards but did not contact police.
Then in March, another friend of Lockett’s overheard her talking about the case; that woman called police and told them they needed to talk to Lockett about the Brown’s case.
Lockett “spoke with a friend of hers who had a stronger moral compass than she did,” Koziol said. And on March 25, when police contacted Lockett, she was ready to talk.
It wasn’t the first time Lockett had gone to police. Not long after the murders, she told prosecutors, Degorski had her accompany Luna when the Palatine task force called him in to discuss the case. She sat outside as Luna–dressed nicely at Degorski’s urging, in black pants and a trench coat–spoke to investigators.
Luna, who had worked for the store’s previous owners, was one of about 300 current or former Brown’s workers police interviewed. He suggested that investigators call another female acquaintance of Degorski who could vouch for his whereabouts the night of the slayings. They did, and were satisfied.
“These guys were very calculating,” Koziol said at a 3 p.m. news conference in Palatine. “There were many employees who had no alibi.”
Last month, Lockett led them back to that second friend, who told police she got a call from Degorski the night of the killings, saying he and Luna had done “something big.” She picked up Luna and Degorski at a Jewel parking lot not far from Brown’s. They went back to a friend’s home in Elgin and got stoned.
Hours later, she drove them back to their car. Passing Brown’s on the way, they saw the place wrapped in police tape and officers everywhere, and they told her what had happened, according to prosecutors.
The next day, the woman told investigators, she helped Degorski clean up the car, and he gave her $50 from roughly $1,900 stolen from the restaurant. The two went shopping, and she spent it on shoes.
In statements to investigators, Degorski allegedly said he wrapped the gun used in the crime in a canvas bag and threw it in the Fox River. Authorities said Degorski has admitted his role in the slayings, but refused to continue partway through a videotaped confession.
Degorski, Luna and the two women kept the secret for years. What they didn’t count on, however, was a breakthrough in DNA science that allowed investigators to connect Luna to the crime scene through saliva he apparently left on a chicken bone.
Degorski apparently had the sense that the chicken dinner could be their undoing, according to one of the women informants. She said Degorski had chastised Luna for getting his hands on the greasy meal, fearing it could leave fingerprints.
Police never isolated such prints, but they did preserve the remains of a chicken dinner tossed into a garbage can in the restaurant.
At the time of the slayings, scientists could not extract enough DNA from a trace amount such as saliva. Since then, however, refined techniques allowed Illinois State Police crime lab experts to do so.
On May 9, authorities were able to corroborate one of the witnesses disclosures by matching DNA from the chicken bone to a saliva swab taken from Luna’s mouth in mid-April.
Kelecius praised Lockett as a hero. Not only did she have the courage to come forward despite a threat on her life, he said, but she also called Degorski in Indiana, allowing investigators to tap the conversation on Wednesday night.She told Degorski investigators wanted to talk to her, and the two spoke for 45 minutes. The only thing discussed was the “cover story” she was to give police, prosecutors said. During the conversation, Degorski made “absolutely no denial” that he was involved, Kelecius said.
Not everyone shared the view that the informants acted heroically.
Joyce Sojoodi, the Ehlenfeldts’ youngest daughter, said she was in shock when she finally got the phone call telling her that suspects were in custody. But that feeling turned to revulsion when she learned that two people had known about the crime for years, yet had said nothing to police.
“It’s repulsive to me, and it’s unconscionable to me to not have done that nine years ago,” she said.
The second informant, another female acquaintance of Degorski, “did not come forward to law enforcement because of her friendship with him,” Koziol said. Asked if either of the women could be prosecuted for failing to come forward earlier, Koziol said: “We need all the witnesses we can get in this case. I think there also may be a statute-of-limitations problem.”
Investigators said they also had two other witnesses who could corroborate the women’s story.
Reached by phone at her home in Oregon on Saturday, Lockett’s mother confirmed that her daughter had been “one of the people” to go to police about Luna and Degorski.
Lockett, who attended Fremd High School at the same time as the accused, was reached by phone later Saturday but declined to comment. She said she knew that prosecutors and police had described her as a hero, but she would not elaborate on her role in solving the murders.
At the midday bond hearing, Kelecius told the judge that the pair chose the restaurant as the scene of the crime because Luna was familiar with the building as a former employee. He knew it had no alarm.
Each man has been charged with seven counts of first-degree murder while committing a robbery, and Kelecius said the matter is being handled as a capital case because the crimes were carried out during the commission of a felony.
A spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said no decision has been made on whether the death penalty actually will be sought. They have 120 days to decide.
Brosnahan said the pair would be held without bond, and ordered them to reappear in court Tuesday. Both men appeared in court shoeless, wearing T-shirts, jeans and socks.
Degorski was represented by Kelly Seago of the Cook County public defender’s office, Luna by attorney Clarence Burch of Chicago. Both requested that all audio and videotaped evidence be preserved and requested that no authorities contact their clients.
Reached by phone after Saturday’s court appearance, Burch said Luna maintains his innocence. “We hope the evidence will speak for itself, and we intend to let the judicial process work.”
He said he had received no information in the case beyond what was laid out in court. He said he spoke briefly with Luna after the hearing, describing him as sad for his wife and children.
“He is very despondent that he brought his family into the spotlight in this manner,” Burch said. “He is very depressed.”
Seago did not return phone calls Saturday.
After following countless false leads for nine years, investigators became convinced that Lockett’s was different when she provided a detail of the killings that had never been revealed to the public.
During the slayings, she told them, one of the victims vomited.
That unsettling detail put investigators onto the trail of Luna and Degorski, who were arrested Thursday.
Palatine’s leaders said the crime has left a shadow over the village.
“I don’t think the uneasiness has ever really left the community,” Mayor Rita Mullins said. “We, the village of Palatine and the Palatine Police Department, want more than anyone to tell the world that we have a conclusion to this horrible, tragic incident.”
Many critics of the investigation were less confident over the years. The Better Government Association, a civic watchdog group, issued a report that accused Palatine police of letting people traipse over the crime scene.
Three years later, a team of lawyers and police appointed by the Illinois State Crime Commission defended the investigation. But the history of the case made those involved hesitant to declare it solved.
“I have my fingers crossed,” said Brown’s owner Frank Portillo. “They’re being really cautious. If they come out with another Martin Blake, you guys will beat them to death.”
Blake was arrested within hours of the slayings, setting up one of the most glaring embarrassments of the case. Blake was held for two days before being released with no charges; he later sued for false arrest, and the village settled in 1997 for less than $100,000.
Other suspects also emerged over the years, including Paul Modrowski and Robert Faraci, two men arrested in the beheading of a Barrington man. Modrowski was convicted in that case; the charges were dropped against Faraci, but he was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison in a check-writing scam.
At its peak, the investigation into the Brown’s murders consumed almost half the Palatine police force. Private citizens flocked to form and attend neighborhood watch groups.
More than nine years later, several people each month still ask Councilman Daniel A. Varroney if there are any breaks in the case.
“I think people were frightened,” Varroney said. “I think they were scared, and I think that they were horrified with the loss of life in our community. Everybody thinks it can’t happen in their community.”
At Saturday’s news conference, numerous family members of the victims joined law enforcement officials. They included Mary Jane Crow, a sister of victim Michael Castro.
“These people came from Palatine,” said Crow, 32, of Lake Zurich. “These people came from Fremd. I’m completely baffled. To think these people are that evil, I’m baffled.”
But Mullins, Palatine’s mayor, held out the hope that the darkness that settled over the village after the killings might finally recede.
“The sun was shining today,” she said. “I think everyone has a sense of the clouds lifting, and a sense of relief.”
