A Mt. Prospect man who confessed to the 1993 Brown’s Chicken murders said he had a “vision” about the killings and that he may have been drugged and taken to the fast-food restaurant in Palatine the night of the killings, a prosecutor who worked on the case testified Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court.
Assistant State’s Atty. John Dillon, testifying for the prosecution in the state’s rebuttal in Juan Luna’s murder trial, also said that the man gave several different accounts of the crime when he was questioned in 1998.
“He was going back and forth,” Dillon said. “He gave five different statements, none of which was identical. … At the conclusion of those five statements, I sent him home.”
In one version, the man said an accomplice showed up at his home at 10 p.m. on Jan. 8, 1993, after the crimes were committed, dressed in bloody clothes, Dillon testified. In another version, the man claimed that he and an accomplice used a semi-automatic handgun to commit the crime. And in another version, he said he told an accomplice to shoot him rather than force him to shoot the victims.
The testimony came on the 12th day of trial for Juan Luna, 33, who along with James Degorski, 34, was charged in 2002 with the murders. Degorski is awaiting trial.
Dillon said he did not believe that the Mt. Prospect man was responsible for the murders, even though Palatine police arrested him a year later and he confessed on videotape.
Dillon said he told the head of a task force leading the investigation to notify him if the man was questioned again, but he was never called. He later learned that Palatine police took the man’s confession and recorded it on Aug. 6, 1999. The man and an accomplice were never charged.
In the video statement, which was played for jurors Wednesday, the man said he and an accomplice went to the restaurant because the other man was hungry.
As the tape played, Luna’s lawyer, Clarence Burch, asked Palatine Police Sgt. Steve Bratcher, who took the videotaped confession, whether he or other officers fed key details to the man, such as where the victims were found or if a steel fryer hood had been shot at in the kitchen.
“Not in my presence,” Bratcher said.
In the video, the man said he and the accomplice sat in the west side of the restaurant, where they ate the chicken meal. Investigators later found a partially eaten chicken meal on the west side of the restaurant, from which they were eventually able to find DNA that matched Luna’s. The also found a partial palm print belonging to Luna.
Investigators have testified that neither DNA nor fingerprints belonging to the man who gave the 1999 statement or the accomplice he implicated were found in the restaurant.
According to the videotaped statement played Wednesday, the man said his accomplice told five of the employees to “bunch up” and get into a freezer. The accomplice then told the man to lock the two other employees in a cooler. He said the accomplice then began shooting into the freezer with the five people and ordered him to shoot the other two, he said on the videotape.
“I said no, you do it. I argued a few more minutes. He wouldn’t let me go,” the man said on the videotape.
He said he shot through plastic strips that were used to prevent cold air from escaping from the freezer and believed he hit two people. The accomplice had a knife, he said, and the accomplice stabbed two or three people after shooting them.
“I just saw his arm going up and down,” the man said in the videotape.
Two victims, Lynn Ehlenfeldt, 49, and Michael Castro, 16, were found with stab wounds, but their wounds are not consistent with the man’s account, medical experts said. Ehlenfeldt’s throat was slashed and Castro had a single stab wound in his abdomen, experts said.
Defense lawyers rested their case on Wednesday.During the state’s rebuttal, testimony from a crime lab expert raised the question of whether evidence may have been withheld. State police officials have said that a computer that contained Luna’s DNA information was eventually discarded as scrap, but Jamie Gibson from the state crime lab said she downloaded the data onto a computer disk beforehand.
Experts eventually found the computer and recovered the information from its hard drive, but state police officials had said such a disk didn’t exist.
Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan ordered lawyers to look into the matter.
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csadovi@tribune.com
