Recent days have provided what could be answers to the excruciating Brown’s Chicken & Pasta murder mystery that has devastated scores of lives over the last nine years.
It will be difficult enough to pry open the minds of the two alleged killers, James Degorski and Juan Luna. But that could come in time as the case makes it way to trial.
More difficult, though, is to understand exactly why at least three other people kept secret for years their knowledge of who allegedly committed one of the worst mass slayings in Illinois history. Four other individuals reportedly learned the secret more recently, but did not call police.
How could anyone remain so tight-lipped with information that could have brought earlier closure to families of the seven Palatine victims? How could the silence-keepers protect alleged killers knowing they might strike again?
Maybe there’s legitimacy in Anne Lockett and Eileen Bakalla’s contention that they felt threatened about revealing their secret to police. Though with nine years to think it through, and with one of the suspects living in another state, it’s hard to fathom why neither woman could figure out that her information would likely lead to immediate apprehension of the suspects by police.
As satisfying as prosecution of these hesitant witnesses might sound, the gesture ultimately would ring hollow. Prosecutors always need as many friendly witnesses as they can get to make sure those who perpetrated an atrocity pay for it.
Even if the statute of limitations on prosecuting obstructing justice hadn’t already expired for those who may illegally have kept their silence, a maximum prison sentence of three years yields little dividend if it means trading away their cooperation. And yes, some did finally talk.
We all carry secrets. We know about adulterous affairs, about abusive relationships, about threats of harm. Must we reveal every one? No. That is the struggle: deciding which secrets are worth revealing, even at risk of personal harm, betrayal of friendship, or even the possibility that nothing will come of the telling.
We are a nation of individualists. We build our fences and keep to ourselves. For a half hour in 1964, Kitty Genovese’s New York City neighbors ignored her screams as she was brutally stabbed to death outside her apartment. Sociologists created the term Genovese Syndrome to describe the disconnectedness of individuals from their neighbors’ troubles.
Hundreds, probably thousands, of people going about their disconnected lives right now have information that could immediately resolve longstanding cases of murder, rape and serious battery. But they don’t reveal it.
Eileen Bakalla and Anne Lockett now have the rest of their lives to pay for their nine years of silence. If it was not immediately clear to them as callow adolescents, surely they will learn in the coming days and months how every action–and every inaction–carries consequences that ripple far beyond their insular world of friends and self.
And when the secret is murder, to the families of the victims–and to everyone who cares about justice–those ripples feel more like tidal waves.
