Cold Cases Solved: True Stories of Murders That Took Years or Decades to Solve (Murder, Scandals and Mayhem Book 8) (10 page)

Victims:
Richard Ehlenfeldt, Lynn Ehlenfeldt, Guadalupe Maldonado, Michael Castro, Rico Solis, Thomas Mennes, Marcus Nellsen

Location:
Chicago, Illinois

Suspects:
James Degorski and Juan Luna 

Date of Crime:
January 8, 1993

Dates of Conviction:
May 10, 2007 and September 29, 2009

Backstory:

Brown’s Chicken is a popular restaurant franchise based in Chicago, Illinois. In 1949 John and Belva Brown opened the first Brown’s Chicken restaurant. By the 1970’s, the franchise had grown to include many restaurants around the United States.

Pasta was added to the menu in the 1980’s and Brown’s Chicken became Brown’s Chicken and Pasta. After 2005, the franchise limited its restaurants to the Chicago area.

On The Day In Question:

On January 8, 1993, the day started as usual at Brown’s Chicken in Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. Then, later that night just before closing, a man ran into the store. He was armed and yelled for everyone to get down on the floor.

Seven people were killed that night, the two owners and five staff members. Their bodies were then piled into the freezer. It was more than five hours after closing time before police discovered their bodies.

Investigation:

The first report that something might be wrong at the shop came when the parents of Michael Castro, the sixteen-year-old cook, called police several hours after the 9:00pm closing time.

The wife of another staff member, Guadalupe Maldonado, also called police. She was anxious that her husband had not returned home, and that his car was still in the Brown’s Chicken parking lot.

After her call, police visited the building and discovered that the rear door was open. When they entered the building they found the staff members’ dead bodies.

Less than $2,000 cash had been taken from the restaurant. More than two dozen shots had been fired, and so the perpetrators would have had to reload their weapons at least once.

Some of the victims were left alive for some time after watching colleagues die next to them. As well as dying from being shot, one victim’s throat was also slit.

DNA was collected from the crime scene from a half-eaten piece of chicken. DNA testing was in its infancy at the time of the crime. However, police kept the chicken preserved in the hope that technology would advance to the point it could be useful.

A taskforce was formed, consisting of more than sixty members from multiple police agencies. Together they investigated thousands of leads. Just one day after the crime a former employee of the restaurant was arrested. He was released two days later.

On January 15, another five men were arrested. All except one were quickly released, the last being held on unrelated charges.

By January 25, a reward of $100,000 had been offered.

In July, relatives of the victims hung signs in the window of the restaurant, asking who had killed seven people. It would then be March 1994 before there was another arrest. That man too was released.

Another year passed, and Brown’s Chicken re-opened at a new location. Around the same time, police asked former FBI investigator James F. Bell to work on the case. Bell had previously worked on the cases of several serial killers, including Ted Bundy.

Little progress was made, and by the time another year had passed there were now just seven people still working on the taskforce. The case had grown cold.

In March of 2002, police received a tip from a woman named Anne Lockett. She reported that an ex-boyfriend named James Degorski, along with an associate named Juan Luna, had committed the robbery and murders.

When police looked for a link, they discovered that Luna was a previous employee of Brown’s Chicken.

Then came the clincher, thanks to the forward thinking crime scene technician who had saved the partially eaten chicken. Although it was impossible when the crime had been committed, she had foreseen a day when saliva could be tested for DNA.

Now in 2002, it was possible. Police tested the sample and got a match. Luna had been in the store that night.

Police arrested both men on May 16, 2002. The case went to trial, and both men pled not guilty. As well as the DNA evidence, the prosecution presented other evidence, including a partial palm print, and a taped confession that Luna had given police on May 17, the day after his arrest.

In it, he described the murders in gruesome detail. He had known from working there that there were no alarms on the back door, and where the safe would be. They attacked just a few minutes before closing, when he knew there would be few, if any, customers in the store.

In his confession, Luna also told police that they “walked funny” to avoid creating any footprint evidence as they left the scene. They also wore latex gloves to avoid leaving fingerprint evidence. Little did they know that Luna’s impromptu chicken dinner would be their eventual downfall.

On May 10, 2007, after eleven hours deliberation, a jury convicted Luna of all charges. He was not given the death penalty. A single female juror refused to vote for it, and as it requires a unanimous decision, he received life in prison.

On September 29, 2009, Degorski was also found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, after less than two hours deliberation by the jury. In his case, there was no physical evidence.

He was convicted solely on statements made to police by his ex-girlfriend, as well as his own interview. Two jurors refused to vote on the death penalty in his case.

Current Status:

It was revealed in 2015 that Richard Zuley, a detective who served on the investigative task force was on a special assignment in 2003 as an interrogator of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

Several suspects from various investigations throughout his career as a police officer have claimed that he used techniques such as shackling them to walls for extended periods, and coercing confessions by threatening family members. He is now the defendant in at least one pending lawsuit. Zuley retired from the police force in 2007.

The employee who was initially arrested was since cleared of all suspicion. He sued the city of Palatine for wrongful arrest. The case was settled in 1997.

The victim’s families were, for the most part, pleased with the verdict. Several of them were vocal against the death penalty. Other family members of the victims felt strongly the other way, saying that when seven people were brutally killed just life in prison was not justice.

The restaurant building was razed in 2001, and in its place there is now a bank. The murders had a detrimental effect on the Brown’s Chicken franchise as a whole. Business dropped by 35% in all restaurants, and eventually one hundred were closed across the Chicago area.

In March 2014, Degorski was awarded $451,000 compensation and punitive damages, after a jury found that he had been beaten to the point of requiring surgery by a sheriff in Cook County Jail in 2002. The deputy was fired.

Victim:
Shauna Howe

Location:
Oil City, Pennsylvania

Suspects:
Eldred ‘Ted’ Walker, James O’Brien, Timothy O’Brien

Date of Crime:
October 27, 1992

Date of Conviction:
October 25, 2005

Backstory:

Shauna Melinda Howe was born July 11, 1981 in Oil City, Pennsylvania to parents Lucy & Robert Howe. She was eleven years old, and lived with her mother in Oil City, Pennsylvania. She had brown hair and blue eyes, and was described as shy.

On The Day In Question:

On October 27, 1992, Howe was walking home from a Girl Scouts Halloween Party. She was dressed as a gymnast. Before the party, she and her fellow Girl Scouts had sung for the residents of an old age home.

She left the party, held at a local church, around 8:00pm. When she hadn’t arrived home by 10:00pm, her mother called the police.

It was noted that police had also received a call several hours earlier, where a witness reported seeing a tall man snatch a little girl off the street. He appeared unkempt, and had forced the girl into a rust colored car. Had the witness seen Howe’s abduction or were the police dealing with two child abductions on the same night?

Howe was less than two blocks from her home when she was abducted.

Investigation:

Police continued to search, joined by FBI agents and civilian volunteers, but no sign of Howe was found. Two days after she disappeared one of Howe’s family members found part of her costume, a leotard belonging to Howe’s mother, lying on a hiking trail that was about eight miles from town. It was a day later when searchers found Howe’s body.

Howe was found three days after her disappearance, lying face down at the bottom of a railroad trestle. She was wedged between a rock and a log in a dry creek bed, and had fallen thirty feet. An autopsy revealed that she had been alive when she had landed in the creek bed.

She had a dislocated shoulder and broken arm, indicating that Howe may have tried to break her fall. She also had fractured ribs that were poking through her chest. The coroner reported that although her cause of death was likely injuries from the fall, it was impossible to say whether she fell, was thrown, or had been forced to jump. He did say however that Howe could have lain injured for up to half an hour before she eventually succumbed to her injuries.

Both the local police and the FBI were involved in the case, and followed up on many leads, both local and some that came from as far away as Canada. No suspect was ever identified. By the time the New Year came, authorities were no closer to solving the case, and the rumor mill had started. Many locals believed that Howe’s family had been involved in her death.

As the months passed with no arrest, the once peaceful community changed. Locked doors became common, and self-defense classes for children were offered. Children hardly ever traveled anywhere alone.

By the time Halloween rolled around again the next year, trick or treating was officially curtailed to just a couple of hours in the afternoon while the sun was still up. The next year, it continued that way and would for years.

In 1997, police hoped they might have a break in the case. Tragically, another local girl named Shenee Freeman, who was just four years old, went outside to play and was never seen alive again. A seventeen-year-old young man, who had joined the search party for Freeman, was later arrested and charged with her rape and murder.

Police hoped that he had also been responsible for Howe’s kidnapping and death, but he could not be connected to the case. The teen pled guilty to Freeman’s rape and murder and received a life sentence.

It was another ten years before investigators finally received the break they’d been waiting for. In 2002, a DNA sample was taken from a man, James O’Brien, who was in prison for attempted kidnapping in Oil City in 1995. His victim had been a grown woman.

Around the same time, police still investigating Howe’s case had revisited a possible suspect, a local, Eldred ‘Ted’ Walker. He had been originally interviewed in 1992 but had not been arrested. Pressure on Walker was intensified and his home was searched. Walker eventually told police that he’d been involved with some “really bad” people back then. 

Then came the kicker – the DNA taken from O’Brien in 2002 matched DNA found from a semen sample on Howe’s leotard.

Walker eventually confessed that he had been the one to grab Howe, but it had all been part of a prank he had planned with James O’Brien and his brother Timothy, aimed at making the town’s police look foolish.

Originally they had planned to kidnap a boy they knew, but they decided in the end that the kidnapping of a girl would get more attention. Selecting Howe as their victim had been a crime of opportunity, they had simply seen her walking home and grabbed her.

They drove her to Walker’s home, and the O’Briens then took her upstairs. Walker claimed that when he discovered they were raping the girl he threw them out of his home. They took the girl with them.

He changed his story at least fifteen times. Despite this, prosecutors still decided to offer Walker a deal. He pled guilty to third degree murder and kidnapping in return for his testimony against the O’Brien brothers. His deal included an agreement for a maximum sentence of forty years.

On October 25, 2005, on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of Howe’s disappearance, both O’Brien brothers (then 33 and 39) were convicted on multiple charges, including murder, kidnapping, and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse (a charge similar in act and severity as rape).

They were acquitted of first-degree murder and rape, in part because for first-degree murder it must be proven that the crime was premeditated. The brothers were sentenced to life without parole.

Current Status:

When the DNA evidence came to light, the O’Brien’s mother refused to believe it, saying what on earth would her sons want with a child.

James O’Brien claims his DNA was transferred to Howe’s mouth and clothing as a result of an earlier event he had in the same bedroom with a woman. He claims that Walker was the one to actually molest Howe.

After Howe’s kidnapping and death, Oil City became known as the town that banned Halloween. In 2008, three years after the O’Brien brothers were found guilty, 175 town citizens signed a petition started by a fifth-grader to allow nighttime trick or treating again.

The city agreed, and children once again were able to celebrate Halloween in Oil City.