The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (42 page)

Watts was at that time incarcerated at a maximum-security prison in Ionia, Michigan. He died there of prostate cancer on 21 September 2007.

It was almost a case of history repeating itself. Over 100 years had passed since the infamous murders of Jack the Ripper in Victorian London in 1888. But in 1981 in Chicago a series of grisly murders rekindled the memory of those horrifying murders.

A serial killer, dubbed a modern-day Jack the Ripper by the media, was stalking young women in Chicago, killing them and mutilating their bodies. Like the detectives of Victorian London, police had no clues as to the identity of the killer.

The series of killings began on 23 May 1981, when 28-
year-old
Linda Sutton was abducted from a Chicago suburb. Ten days later, her mutilated body minus the left breast was recovered from a field nearby. She had been bound with handcuffs, had a cloth gag in her mouth and still wore a sweater and knickers; both had been pulled down to her thighs. Stuffed in her socks was a small bundle of dollar bills, so robbery had not been a motive.

On 12 February 1982, a 35-year-old cocktail waitress was abducted from her car. She had possibly sought help at the time of abduction. Her handbag was on the front seat and the keys were still in the ignition. A search turned up her naked body on an embankment near the road. She had been raped, tortured and mutilated; one of her breasts had been cut off.

A few days later, the body of a Hispanic woman wearing an engagement ring was discovered. She had also been raped and strangled. While her breasts were not removed, they had been badly bitten. Her killer had also masturbated over her body. A psychiatric assessment of this crime pegged the attacker as a local man who probably loved animals and had a family. He also had a dark side that no one knew about, turning into a cruel psychopathic murderer at night.

The next acknowledged victim in the series disappeared. On 15 May 1982, 21-year-old Lorraine Borowski was due to open up the office where she worked. When the other employees turned up for work, they found the office locked. Borowski’s shoes and scattered contents from her handbag were strewn outside the door. Police were called at once, but it would be five more months before her body was found, on 10 October, in a nearby cemetery. Advanced decomposition left the cause of death a mystery.

Two weeks later, on 29 May, Shui Mak was reported missing from Hanover Park, in Cook County. Her mutilated body was found at Barrington on 30 September.

On 13 June, prostitute Angel York was picked up in a van. She told police she had been picked up by two men in a red van who initially handcuffed her. They then raped her and tortured her, forcing her at one point to use a large knife to cut her own breast. This, she stated, drove one man into a frenzy. He cut her more and then masturbated into the wound before closing it with duct tape. They then threw her out of the van. She gave police details of her attackers but they were unable to trace them.

The murders then became more frequent. On 28 August, teenage prostitute Sandra Delaware was found stabbed and strangled to death on the bank of the Chicago River, her left breast neatly amputated and her bra knotted around her throat.

Rose Davis, aged 30, was found in an identical condition in a Chicago alley, on 8 September – stabbed, raped and strangled. A black sock was tied around her neck and her clothing was in disarray. Her face was crushed and she was lying in a pool of blood. She had been beaten with a hatchet. Deep cuts were evident on her breasts and her abdomen was full of small puncture wounds.

Three days later, 42-year-old Carole Pappas, wife of the Chicago Cubs’ pitcher, vanished without a trace from a department store in nearby Wheaton, Illinois.

On 6 October, police got their first break in the case. That morning, prostitute Beverly Washington, aged 20, was found naked and severely wounded beside a Chicago railway track. Her left breast had been severed, the right deeply slashed, but she was breathing and emergency treatment saved her life. Hours later, in a seemingly unrelated incident, drug dealer Rafael Torado was killed and a male companion wounded, when the occupants of a cruising van peppered the phone booth they were in with rifle fire.

The details of the van and occupants as given by the two
surviving victims proved to be helpful in making an arrest. Within three weeks, on 20 October 1982, the police pulled over a red van and questioned the driver. He had red hair and did not resemble the victim’s description, but the van was a perfect match. The driver told them his name was Eddie Spreitzer, and that the van belonged to his boss, Robin Gecht (b. 1953). The officers directed Spreitzer (b. 1958) to Gecht’s house and had him beckon Gecht outside. They hoped that he would be their man and, when he came out, he did indeed fit the description, down to his shirt and boots. Yet he acted as if he had no worries at all and was quite willing to help. Either he was innocent of these crimes or utterly arrogant, confident that he was untouchable.

Gecht was an unemployed carpenter, aged 28. He was identified by one of the victims and police charged him with the assault on Beverly Washington. They also suspected him of being responsible for wounding prostitute Cynthia Smith before she escaped from his van. Gecht was an odd character, once accused of molesting his own younger sister. Authorities immediately linked him with the Ripper slayings, but they had no proof and he was released on bail.

At first, Spreitzer and Gecht did not yield much useful information, but eventually Spreitzer appeared as if he would break down. He seemed to be genuinely afraid of Gecht. Police questioned Spreitzer yet again and he succumbed, feeling guilty about what he had done. Spreitzer’s interrogation produced a 78-page statement.

Spreitzer first admitted to driving the van as Gecht committed a drive-by shooting in which a man died and another was left paralysed. Police quickly identified the incident. Then Gecht directed him to slow down to pick up a black prostitute. Gecht had sex with her, then took her into an alley and used a knife to remove her left breast. He placed it in the van, on the floor. Spreitzer was quite upset as he spilled out these gory details, claiming he did not like all the blood. He added that during such incidents, Gecht sometimes had sex with the breast on the spot.
He also described how Gecht had shot a black woman in the head, chained her up and used bowling balls to weight her down in water. He believed that she had never been found. He also told how he had watched Gecht batter a woman with a hammer; the sight of this had made him vomit. But on another woman, he removed the breasts himself, cutting off both. He thought she was dead when he did this, but did not try to find out for certain. He said that Gecht had forced him to have sexual contact with the woman’s gaping wounds. By the time Spreitzer was finished, he had given details of seven murders and one aggravated battery.

Meanwhile, detectives had learnt that Gecht was one of four men who rented adjoining rooms at Villa Park’s Rip Van Winkle Motel, several months before Linda Sutton was murdered nearby. The manager remembered them as party animals, frequently bringing women to their rooms, and he surprised investigators with one further piece of information: he believed that the men were ‘some kind of cultists’, perhaps devil worshippers. Two of the Rip Van Winkle tenants, brothers Thomas and Andrew Kokoraleis (b. 1958 and 1961), had been kind enough to leave a forwarding address, for any post they might receive. Police found 23-year-old Thomas Kokoraleis at home when they called. Following questioning, he agreed to go with them to the police station where he was given a lie-detector test, which he failed. When questioned in greater depth, he told police about a ‘satanic chapel’ that had been set up in Gecht’s upstairs bedroom, where captive women were tortured with knives and ice picks, gang-raped and finally sacrificed to Satan by members of a tiny cult including Gecht, Thomas’s brother Andrew and 23-year-old Edward Spreitzer.

Thomas went on to describe the cultic rituals, which included severing one or both breasts with a thin wire garrotte, each celebrant ‘taking communion’ by eating a piece before the relic was consigned to Gecht’s trophy box. At one point, Kokoraleis told detectives, he had counted 15 breasts inside the box. Some
other victims had been murdered at the Rip Van Winkle Motel, out in Villa Park. Thomas identified a picture of Lorraine Borowski as a woman he had picked up, with his brother, and had taken to the motel, where she met her death. Thomas told the police that they would all kneel together around the altar and Gecht would produce the freshly removed breasts. He would read passages from the Bible as each man masturbated into the body part. When everyone was finished, Gecht would cut it up and hand around the pieces for them to eat. Thomas said that he had witnessed two murders himself and had participated in nearly a dozen such rituals. When the detectives asked him why he had done such macabre and illegal activities, he told them in all seriousness that Gecht had the power to make them do whatever he wanted. ‘You just have to do it,’ he said with conviction. Apparently he was convinced that Gecht had some supernatural connection, and he had been afraid of what Gecht might do to him if he did not do as he was told.

On 5 November, police arrested 20-year-old Andrew Kokoraleis. A search of Gecht’s apartment had revealed the satanic chapel described by Thomas Kokoraleis. Police found a rifle, which they were able to connect to the Torado shootings. Satanic literature was also retrieved from the apartment occupied by Andrew Kokoraleis. With their suspects in custody, police speculated that the gang might have murdered 18 women in as many months. Thomas Kokoraleis was charged with the murder of Lorraine Borowski on 12 November and formally indicted by a grand jury four days later. Brother Andrew and Edward Spreitzer were charged on 14 November with the rape and murder of victim Rose Davis.

Robin Gecht was found mentally competent despite trying to raise an insanity plea and his trial opened on 20 September. Gecht took the witness stand the next day, confessing to the attack on Beverly Washington. Convicted on all charges, he received a sentence of 120 years in prison. Although Gecht’s associates and other witnesses implicated him in some of the deaths, police never
had enough evidence to charge him with murder. Although he initially confessed to murder, Thomas Kokoraleis changed his plea to not guilty, with his attorneys seeking to stop the reading of his statements in forthcoming trials, but on 4 December 1983, the confessions were admitted in evidence.

On 2 April 1984, Edward Spreitzer pleaded guilty to four counts of murder, including victims Davis, Delaware, Mak and Torado. Sentenced to life on each count, he received additional time on conviction for charges of rape, deviant sexual assault and attempted murder.

On 18 May 1984, Thomas Kokoraleis was convicted of Lorraine Borowski’s murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a scheduled release date of September 30, 2017. While awaiting sentencing, he led police to a field where Carole Pappas was allegedly buried, but searchers could find no remains. On 7 September 1984, he was given a further life sentence for the murder of Pappas, whose body was later found in 1987 in a shallow pond only four blocks from the Pappas home, with the cause of death being accidental drowning.

Andrew Kokoraleis was tried in two separate counties. The first trial was for the murder of Rose Beck Davis. In his confession, he had admitted that he had abducted Davis with the other men, forced her into the van and had beaten her with a hatchet until she was dead. The jury deliberated for just over three hours before finding him guilty of rape and murder. They sentenced him to life in prison.

At his second trial, Andrew Kokoraleis decided to recant everything he had confessed to and denied that he had killed or raped anyone. He claimed that the police had coerced each of his confessions, had made false promises and had even beaten him into admitting what they wanted him to say. Andrew insisted that they had told him exactly what to say. He also indicated that one police officer had told him the details of the crime scene, giving him all that he needed to confess. Yet when Detective Warren Wilkes took the stand to describe his interrogation, he
said that when he had shown Kokoraleis a line of photos, he had picked out Lorraine Borowski and said, ‘That’s the girl Eddie Spreitzer and I killed in the cemetery.’

The jury deliberated for just three hours. They found Andrew Kokoraleis guilty of the murder of Lorraine Borowski and sentenced him to death. At his sentencing hearing, he once again denied the charges and his attorneys argued later that, despite the verdict, the act did not merit the death penalty. In addition, a prison chaplain and a counsellor testified that Kokoraleis was non-threatening and could be rehabilitated. In addition, Kokoraleis argued that he had received ineffectual counsel at sentencing and that, in the case of the murder of Rose Beck Davis (from the earlier trial), that offence had not warranted the death penalty but life in prison. He insisted that the court had not proven his intent to kill or any degree of premeditation. Nevertheless, the court saw otherwise, as the panel of judges dismissed the appeals and upheld the sentence in 1989. He was executed by lethal injection on 16 March 1999.

Spreitzer pleaded guilty on 2 April 1984 to murdering Rose Davis, Sandra Delaware, Shui Mak and drug dealer Rafael Torado. He received life sentences for each murder, as well as time for a multitude of charges, from rape to deviant sexual assault. Yet he still had to go to trial for the Linda Sutton murder. He appeared in a bench trial in front of Judge Edward Kowal on 25 February 1986, but retained his right to have a jury decide his sentence. He admitted that he and his comrades had abducted Linda Sutton as she was walking near Wrigley Field and took her to a wooded field near a hotel where he was staying. He then handcuffed her, raped her and removed her breasts. Then she was raped again and left to die.

Spreitzer’s bid for mercy failed. He was convicted on 4 March of aggravated kidnapping and murder. Two weeks later on 20 March, a jury deliberated for an hour before giving him the death penalty for this crime. He exhausted all of his appeals, despite claims by his attorney Gary Prichard that he had been denied due
process and that an examination after the trial indicated that he had brain damage. Prichard argued that the jury had not been correctly instructed. Yet, despite the appearance that this case was now at an end, there was one more unexpected development.