Chicago Ripper Crew — Part 1: The Van of Death | Rituals, Control & the Devil in a Red Van - Dark Dialogue

Episode Transcript
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John (00:11):
Chicago
1981, a city of steel and smokewhere the skyline gleamed like knives
against the night and the L train'srattle was a lullaby for the dam.
The factories were closing.
The jobs were drying up, and thestreets were ruled by the desperate.
On the south side, the streetlightsbuzzed over broken glass and whispered

(00:34):
secrets to no one In particular,the police scanners never slept.
Somewhere in that chaos, evilwas learning how to drive.
The disappearances started small womenwho lived on the margins, women whose
names the newspapers rarely printed.
They were mothers, daughters survivors.

(00:55):
And in Chicago's underbelly, theywere invisible When their bodies
began to surface mutilated inways that defied comprehension.
Investigators first blameddrugs, gangs, and the city's
growing list of serial predators.
Nobody imagined thatthe horror was mobile.
That death itself was cruising thestreets in a red van, its stores closing

(01:20):
on the last breaths of the forgotten.
Behind the wheel set.
Robin Geck, a wiry man withice behind his eyes and a smile
that didn't reach his face.
He worked in construction, ran a sidebusiness repairing motel rooms, and
claimed he once labored under JohnWayne Gacy, Chicago's other monster.

(01:40):
If you believe the stories Jack learnedmore than carpentry on that job.
He learned control.
He learned how to make.
Horror look ordinary with himwere Edward Spicer and the Coco EZ
Brothers, Andrew and Thomas followerswho mistook Gex Madness for purpose.
They called him the real man.

(02:02):
He promised them power.
Women and communion was something unholy.
What he delivered was carnage.
Together they became wet.
Papers would later christenthe Chicago Ripper.
Crew.
Victims were snatched off the street,found and tortured in rituals.
The blended SatanicTheater with sexual sadism.

(02:24):
They used knives, candles, andsometimes screwed surgical tools.
The killings were systematic,ritualistic mutilations performed with.
Precision and in and indifferent.
Some women vanished entirely.
Others like Beverly Washington survivedlong enough to describe the horror.

(02:44):
A dimly lit van, a small altar,and gex cold voice resetting words
that no one should ever hear.
By the time police began connectingthe dots, the crew had been
operating for months, maybe years.
Their crimes bled acrossjurisdictions, Chicago, proper Villa
Park, Elmhurst, leaving detectiveschasing ghosts in 1982 alone.

(03:10):
The city re recorded more than700 homicides to the system.
These women were just another statisticin each city losing its soul, but be
but beneath the bureaucratic apathywas a pattern one that would eventually
reveal not just a murder spree, buta cult of cruelty led by a man who
signed himself as a prophet of pain,and somehow despite witness testimony,

(03:36):
physical evidence in a trail of bloodthat led straight to his doorstep.
Robin Gt never served a day for murder.
Just as it seems as a blind spot whenthe devil dresses like a working man,
we're peeling back the rotted fabricof the Chicago Ripper Group, a story
of power manipulation and ritual thatturned the streets of a major American

(03:59):
city into a sacrificial ground.
We'll trace the van's route throughthe neighborhoods that still carry its
ghosts through the investigation thatstumbled and through the legal loopholes
that let a killer fade into the cracks.
I'm John, and this is Dark Dialoguewhere we confront the darkness
that hides behind everyday facesand ask why we keep looking away.

(04:22):
Tonight we begin with the beginning,the van, the victims, and the city that
didn't realize how close it came to hell.
The following episode contains extremelygraphic descriptions of violence.

(04:42):
Sexual assault mutilation andritualistic acts, including cannibalism.
These crimes are among the mostdepraved and disturbing ever
discussed on dark dialogue and maynot be suitable for all listeners.
We believe in presenting cases as theytruly occurred, not to sensationalize the
horror, but to understand the depth ofhuman cruelty, the failures that allowed

(05:07):
it to continue and the lives it destroyed.
Listener discretion is strongly advised.
These stories are horrifying, but thevoices of the victims and the truth
behind their suffering deserve to be hurt.
Hey, Angela, how's it going tonight?
Hey,

Angela (05:25):
John.
I'm good.
How are you?

John (05:26):
I'm doing all right.
Yeah, I mean, it's just alsodiscombobulated and every time I
think we're getting back on track,we get off track again and so, but

Angela (05:36):
we gotta talk to that track master

John (05:38):
something.
Yeah, we gotta do something.

Angela (05:40):
Yeah.

John (05:41):
All right, well, we ready to jump, dive, slither, crawl into this one.

Angela (05:45):
It feels like slither.

John (05:47):
It's is upon

Angela (05:48):
us.

John (05:49):
Yeah, it's a bit slithery.

Angela (05:50):
Yeah.

John (05:52):
So welcome back listeners to Dark Dialogue where we dive
deep into the mysteries that hauntsmall towns and big cities alike.
I'm your host, John, and tonightwe're heading into Chicago, a city
of ambition, grit, and shadow.
A place where steel shines onthe surface and rots underneath.

(06:12):
Angela, you don't know this case yet.
Not really, and honestly,most people don't.
But by the end of tonight, you'regoing to understand why it still
chills the city even decades later.
You ready for what we'reabout to walk into?

Angela (06:28):
Guess as ready as I can be without knowing what's
coming, which is hard for me.

John (06:32):
Is this true?
All this?
This is true.

Angela (06:35):
I know Chicago in the early eighties was struggling.
Crime, corruption,neighborhoods falling apart.
But that's about all I've got going in

John (06:44):
perfect place to start.
Because while the city was buckling,four men were out there using the chaos
as camouflage, and they weren't justkilling, they weren't just torturing.
They believed what they were doingwas ritual, worship, devotion.
At the center of it all was a mannamed Robin, get a construction

(07:06):
worker, a family man, a guy who.
Waved to his neighbors and puncheda clock every morning and maybe just
maybe a former employee of John WayneGacy, but behind the normal facade, he
was building something truly monstrous.
His followers, Edward Spicer andBrothers Andrew and Thomas Coco

(07:27):
s became his disciples of death.
These men Proud ChicagoStreets between 1981 and 1982.
In a red van, abducting women,mutilating them and performing rituals so
grotesque that even hardened detectiveshesitated before describing them.

Angela (07:48):
And I still can't believe Geck wasn't convicted of a single murder.
His followers got life forthis, but he somehow skated.

John (07:56):
Well, he dodged murder charges, but he didn't skate.
What finally put himaway wasn't a homicide.
So yeah, he escaped murder convictions,but he didn't escape justice altogether.
And that constraint, the man whobuilt the cult versus the men who
carried out the slaughter is part ofwhat makes this case so disturbing.

(08:20):
And just like the previous case thatwe covered are the Simon Sue murders.
Yeah, very freaking similar.
These two, except this oneis way more disturbing.
So.
Over the next four episodes, we're pullingthis nightmare apart piece by piece.
So tonight we're gonna talk aboutthe abductions, the early victims,

(08:41):
and the Chicago landscape that letthese men operate in plain sight.
Then we're gonna talk about the restof the victims, their rituals, their
methods, the twisted theology thatGeck instilled in his followers.
We will talk about the investigation,the interrogations, the confessions,
and how the facade finally cracked.

(09:01):
And then finally the trials inthe aftermath where justice landed
hard, but stop just short of fullyunraveling the man at the top.

Angela (09:11):
So this isn't just true crime, it's psychology, sociology,
and a warning about what happenswhen people fall through the cracks.

John (09:19):
Exactly.
This isn't a ghost story, butit's just as freaking haunting.
It's about charisma used as a weapon,belief twisted into brutality, and the
price we pay when a city looks away fromthe women who were already on the margins.
I'm your host, John,

Angela (09:36):
and I'm man.

John (09:37):
And this is dark dialogue because the past doesn't stay buried.
Not in Chicago's alleys andnot in the stories of the
women who never made it home.
Now, Angela, you dug into the locationand the area that we're gonna be talking

(09:59):
about throughout this whole episode.
So what can you tell us aboutChicago as the eighties began?

Angela (10:06):
What can I tell you?
Indeed,
Chicago is synonymous with manythings depending on who you ask.
The Cubs, the bowls, the bears, and theBlack hawks for sports fanatics, deep
dish pizza, Italian beef, Sams Hot dogs,cracker Jacks, and Tootsie Rolls for
the foodies, Lalapalooza and the ChicagoMarathon, or perhaps CloudGate, AKA The

(10:30):
Bean, which happens to be one of theworld's largest permanent outdoor art
installations located in Millennium Park.
Just might come to mind as well.

John (10:42):
Not for me, I

Angela (10:43):
know, but none of those things came to mind.
Absolutely none of them.

John (10:49):
Uh, deep dish pizza would come to mind.

Angela (10:52):
I was sweet

John (10:53):
and I guess the
Chicago Bears.

Angela (10:56):
Bears, yeah.

John (10:57):
Um, and I don't know Al Capone, the St. Valentine's Day
massacre.

Angela (11:04):
Well, the great

John (11:05):
fire of 1918.

Angela (11:06):
Get to them.

John (11:07):
Okay.

Angela (11:08):
That's, I don't do normal, remember?

John (11:11):
I, I understand.
No, a hundred percent.
That's why you do you.

Angela (11:16):
Uh, however, before all of that took place, it needed a home.
Chicago was founded in 1837 as a railand shipping hub, and by 1840 the census
reported 400 or 4,470 people modestbeginnings for what it would later
become because by the 1980s aroundwhen our topic tonight took place, the

(11:39):
census reported 3,005,072 residents.
And oddly, it has reduced to an estimated2,721,308 Chicago winds residing there.
Now

John (11:53):
there's your denim,

Angela (11:54):
my denim.
I love it.
The, uh, great Chicago fireof 1871 destroyed much of the

John (12:01):
city.
It was 1871.
I said 1918.
I was way freaking up and Iknew better than that crying.
How

Angela (12:08):
dare you.

John (12:09):
How was it started?
A woman was milking her cow, andthe cow knocked over the lantern and
the lantern lit the straw and stuffthat was on the barn floor and the
whole freaking town burned down.

Angela (12:24):
Well, damn that cow,
it destroyed much of the city,but spurred innovative rebuilding,
birthing the first skyscraper, thehome insurance building in 1885.
Also resulting of the fire.
Queen Victoria donated 8,000 booksto help rebuild what was assumed to
be a lost library, when in realityChicago didn't have a public library.

(12:49):
So the Queen essentiallycreated the very first one.
Yeah.
Very nice of her.
Yeah, it was, yeah.
So I'll use that as a little tidbit,as a jumping off point to my favorite
part of the location, seeking out theweird and potentially lesser known
stories such as these next ones,because John knows the known stories.

John (13:08):
Yeah.
Well definitely the crime ones.

Angela (13:11):
Yeah.
I go with the lesser known Perfect.
1897 meat packing magnate Alfred,the Sausage King loot was convicted
of murdering his wife Louisa anddissolving her body in a sausage
grinding bat at his factory.
He served just three years beforebeing released for good behavior.

John (13:30):
Wow.
And I said, I knew the crime ones,but I didn't know that story.
Yeah.

Angela (13:33):
And good behavior.
Three years.
Three

John (13:35):
years?
Yeah.

Angela (13:36):
Nice.
In 1915, divers pulled a 40 footsubmarine from the Chicago River's bottom,
complete with a human skeleton and dog'sbones inside dubbed the Fool Killer.
It was likely an experimental 19thcentury lifeboat, but it vanished
from a park exhibit in 1916.
Its origins still debated, huh?

(13:58):
Anybody know where it is?
Wanna tell us

John (14:01):
the submarine?

Angela (14:02):
Yeah.

John (14:03):
Where,
where it is or where it was from?
It

Angela (14:05):
vanished.
It vanished from a parkexhibit where it is.
Where it came from.
Does anybody know?
Anybody wanna tell?

John (14:14):
That's really freaking interesting.

Angela (14:16):
Yeah.
Huh?
In 1980, the suburb zoo just outside ofChicago became the first in the world
to successfully operate on a gorilla'sbrain, removing a blood clot from a
7-year-old lowland gorilla named in.
Saved her life inadvanced primate medicine.

John (14:35):
Isn't that like your favorite hero's daughter's name?

Angela (14:39):
No.
Her name is Bindi

John (14:40):
pre freaking close.
He's not

Angela (14:41):
my favorite hero.
He's just one of me.

John (14:44):
I get, uh, a or a thumbs up or something because I was close.

Angela (14:49):
Thumbs up.
Here you go.
Alright,

John (14:50):
thank you.

Angela (14:51):
Bindi.
Bindi.

John (14:52):
Bindi.
Pretty freaking close.

Angela (14:54):
Pretty close
as I laugh.
Now let's talk about crimesince that's why we're here.
Chicago experienced a major risein violent crime in the 1920s.
Hello, Al Capone.

John (15:11):
Yep.

Angela (15:12):
Another bump in the sixties and again in the 2020s.
The most prominent crime categoriesthey face are homicide, armed robbery,
gang violence, and aggravated battery.
Chicago has a higher murder rate than thelarger cities of New York and Los Angeles.
However, while it has a large, absolutenumber of crimes due to its size, Chicago

(15:33):
is not among the top 25 violent cities,most violent cities in the United States.

John (15:39):
I have a hard time believing that I did

Angela (15:40):
too.

John (15:41):
I think it's probably the way they reported or something, because
every weekend like 40 freaking peopleget shot in that freaking place.
Yeah.

Angela (15:50):
So we have DuPage County that John has also asked me to touch on,
which is in the Chicago metropolitan areaabout 25 miles west of downtown Chicago.
DuPage County is the second most populouscounty in Illinois, boasting 658,835
residents around the time of this case.

(16:13):
With the most recent estimation increasingto 937,184 people, it is described as an
affluent county known for high qualityof life, excellent public schools.
Think.
40, some of them, 43 of them.

John (16:30):
Hmm.

Angela (16:31):
And vibrant arts and Culture scene.
The county seat is Wheaton,which is where the Belushi
brothers, John, and Jim grew up.

John (16:38):
Right on.

Angela (16:40):
DuPage County is also home to some major players in the science world.
Biy National Accelerator Laboratory,or Fermi Lab has operated in the county
since 1973 as a hub for high energyparticle physics research, as well as
Argonne National Laboratory, one of theUS government's oldest and largest science

(17:01):
and engineering research laboratories.
However, nature enthusiastslisteners do not despair because
despite all of the industrial andeducational areas, there are still
areas to enjoy the outdoors as well.
The Forest Preserve district manages over25,000 acres of prairies, woodlands, and

(17:21):
wetlands with approximately 175 miles.
Trails for hiking and biking.
They host events such as pumpkinhikes and haunted tours in October.
Of course, I was gonna mention that one.

John (17:34):
Of course.
Of

Angela (17:34):
course.
Now that it's over, it's dedicatedto preserving flora, fauna and
scenic beauty for public recreation.
There you have it.

John (17:45):
Well, thank you very much for that.

Angela (17:47):
I'm so freaking welcome.
I can't even handle it.

John (17:51):
So we have got like a whole plethora of assets to talk

Angela (17:59):
about.
Yeah.
Let's keep a list.

John (18:03):
An asset list.
An

Angela (18:03):
asset list.

John (18:05):
Yeah, I think that's a good idea.

Angela (18:07):
There will be a test at the end.
Not for me assets, not for me.
And not for you.
For our listeners.

John (18:14):
Okay.
Well that sounds like a plan to me.
The first couple assets that we gottatalk about are a couple of brothers,
Andrew and Thomas Coco es, and we havesome wonderful freaking names in this.
Yes, we do.
Whole episode to talk about.
So the Coco Reis brothers grew up inVilla Park, Illinois, which is a quiet
suburb about 20 miles west of Chicago.

(18:36):
The family was Greek Orthodox.
They were traditional,modest, and close knit.
There was no history of crime, nogenerational curse of violence,
just ordinary people trying to makeends meet in the shadow of his city.
So Thomas was born in 1960 and hewas the oldest of the two boys.
He was small, quiet, andslow to catch on in school.

(18:59):
Teachers described him aspolite, but easily confused.
A boy who needed a little extratime and rarely raised his hand,
his IQ was later measured at 75,low enough to make everyday life a
little harder, but not low enoughfor any kind of formal intervention.

(19:20):
His younger brother Andrew, camealong in 1963, and the pattern
repeated is IQ tested at 74.
Same struggles, same isolation.
They lived in a world that oftenmoved too fast for them to follow.
So growing up, neither ofthem had close friends.
They weren't bullies andthey weren't victims.

(19:42):
They just were kind of backgroundcharacters in the lives of everybody else.
They spent time helping theirparents, working small jobs, going
to church on Sundays, and Villa Parkwas safe, predictable, and quiet.
The kind of place where the loudestsound at night was the hum of
passing traffic on Roosevelt Road.

(20:02):
So neither Thomas or Andrew showedany signs of cruelty or rebellion.
There were no arrests, noviolence, no dark stories that
were whispered behind their back.
Thomas learned painting andhe was an odd job laborer.
Andrew drifted between shortterm work, mostly menial tasks
that didn't require any kindadecision making or confrontation.

(20:26):
Their lives followed a patternof repetition, simplicity,
work, church, family, sleep.
And if you'd asked anyone who knewthem, they'd have been described
with the same phrase, nice boyswho were just a little bit slow.
So what they lackedthough was independence.
Both relied heavily on others to tellthem what to do, how to act, what was

(20:50):
right, what was wrong, and that passivitywould later become their undoing.
But at this stage in their lives,they were absolutely harmless.
Just a couple of quiet young menshaped by their routine, sheltered
from the harsher edges of Chicago life.
There was nothing in theirupbringing that pointed to murder.

(21:12):
Nothing that hinted at the brutalitythey'd one day be a part of.
They were products of an ordinary life,and maybe that's what makes what came
next so freaking terrifying because.
Monsters don't always begin as predators.
Sometimes they begin as peoplewho never learned how to say no.

Angela (21:32):
Right?

John (21:33):
So the next asshat that we have to talk about is three as hat number three.
Edward Seitzer and Edward Spreitzerwas born on January 5th, 1961 in
Chicago, and his childhood neverhad a chance to be ordinary.

(21:55):
He was raised by a teenage motherand overshadowed by a father
who saw him as a disappointment.
So he grew up chasing approval that hewas never going to get from an early age.
He learned how to stay quiet,how to disappear into the corners
of a room, how to make himselfsmall enough not to be noticed.
Teachers described him as shy,withdrawn, and disconnected.

(22:18):
While other children played andformed friendships, Edward kept
to himself spending most of histime helping the school janitor
rather than participating in class.
His academic performance legs so farbehind that, he eventually shared a
grade level with his younger sister,a humiliation that carved into

(22:41):
his already fragile self-esteem.
He wasn't aggressive, he wasn't defiant.
He was simply lost a boy out of step withthe world, watching it from a distance.
But by the time he reachedhigh school, he'd already
began to fade into the margins.
His grades collapsed, andso did his sense of purpose.

(23:03):
In his third year, he dropped outtrading classrooms for uncertainty.
When he wrecked the family car at age 18,his father threw him out and that was it.
The last tethered to stability hadbeen severed with nowhere else to go.
And Edward rented a room at the BearRabbit Motel in Villa Park, a place

(23:24):
that would later become the quietstaging ground for some of the most
horrific crimes in Chicago's history.
He took a job at Winchell's Donuts,a forgettable stretch of late
night shifts and minimum wage.
The people who knew him describedhim as timid, awkward, and eager
to please the kind of man who woulddo anything just to be included.

(23:47):
Psychological testing with later label,he with an IQ in the low seventies,
immature, impulsive, and simplistic.
He displayed schizoid personality traits,struggling to connect with others, and
reacting to the world with bursts ofnervous compliance rather than conviction.

(24:07):
Edward was in every sense,a man without direction.
He wanted acceptance.
He wanted purpose.
He wanted someone to tell himwho he was supposed to be.
That's when he met Robin Geck.
A man eight years older,confident, composed and everything.

(24:28):
Edward wasn't.
Their paths crossed at Winchell'sDonuts where Gch would come in
regularly radiating a strangeauthority that drew Edward in.
When Edward's car broke down onenight, it was Gch who offered him
help fixing more than his engine.
He gave him attention, validationand the illusion of friendship.

(24:49):
And from that point forward,Edward began orbiting Gex world.
He moved into the same motel complexwhere the Coco relay his brothers lived.
Locals noticed them almost immediately.
A group of quiet young men withstrange routines coming and going
at hot hours talking about thingsno one else could quite understand.

(25:11):
Some called them cultish.
Others just called them off.
But when no one realized was thatEdward's lifelong need for acceptance
had found its master, and under RobinGeck, that quiet, rejected young man
would become something else entirely.
Not by nature, but by command.

(25:32):
So the King Asshat himself is Robingt before the self-appointed prophet
of Chicago's most sadistic cult.
Robin Geck was already astorm forming in quiet places.
He was born in Menard, Illinois.
He grew up in what most peoplewould call a broken home, chaotic,

(25:56):
cold, and full of rumors thatstill hang over his story today.
Some accounts alleged that as a boy,Geck molested his younger sister and
acts so disturbing that relatives senthim to live with his grandparents.
Get denied it yearslater in prison letters.
But whether the claim was true or justa rumor, it set the tone for everything

(26:19):
else that followed shame, secrecy, anda fascination with power over others.
As a teenager, he gravitated towards theoccult, not the philosophical kind, but
the theater of darkness, black candles,blood symbolism, and the idea that
pain could open a doorway to control.

(26:42):
Classmates rememberedhim as quiet but odd.
Someone who lingered on violenttalk longer than anyone should.
By the time most kids were planning theirfutures, Robin GT was building an identity
around dominance, sex, and ritual.
He learned his trade the ordinary waythrough construction and electrical

(27:04):
work, but even that path wouldlater gain an unholy association.
It's widely reported that GT brieflyworked for John Wayne Gacys, PDM
contractors in the late 1970s, aclaim that GT would later deny whether
they truly crossed paths or not.
The shadow of Gacy added a layer ofinny that GT never managed to shake

(27:29):
two predators, one city, and a chillingcoincidence that made Chicago's underbelly
feel like the gathering point for evil.
Outwardly, he seemed settled.
A married man with threechildren, a small house, a steady
work, but behind closed doors.
Gex world was anything but stable.

(27:51):
Former partners described him as sadistic,a man who demanded control through pain.
He turned intimacy into performance,insisting on acts that blurred sex
and mutilation, asking women tostab or cut themselves to please.
His obsession with women'sbreasts bordered on mania.

(28:13):
He told people it was a family traitas if cruelty could be inherited.
So by the time he met EdwardSpicer at Winchell's Donuts,
G had mastered his disguise.
He presented himself as confident,successful, even protective.
The kind of older man, a lostkid might look up to Spicer

(28:35):
adrift and eager for belonging.
Sign him a mentor.
Jack saw something else entirely,a mind that he could shape.
Robin G's early years read like a slowburn blueprint for what came next.
Abuse, domination, performance, and anappetite for control that would eventually

(28:55):
find its outlet in ritual murder.
So by the time the red van startedrolling through Chicago's streets,
the stage was already set.
The devil didn't find GT in 1981.
GT had been building him all along.

(29:22):
By the late 1970s, GT had perfectedhis mass, the outside world.
He was a husband, a father, anelectrician with steady work.
But behind that suburban facade, therituals were already taking shape.
Private rehearsals ofpower, pain, and control.
And like every manipulator whocraves an audience get soon

(29:45):
began to gather followers.
The lowly, the slow witted, theones who confused dominance with
strength, they were drawn tohim like moss, to a quiet flame.
It started small.
A cup of coffee at a donut,shop a job, offer a ride home.
But every gesture was calculated.
By the time Edward Spritzer steppedinto his orbit and the Coco Es brothers

(30:09):
followed, the blueprint was set.
What began as influence wouldsoon become obedience and
obedience would become blood.
The creation of the Chicago Rippercrew didn't happen overnight.
It wasn't a pact made in bloodor a sudden decision to kill.
It was a slow corrosion.

(30:31):
One man's will bending three others untilthey became something unrecognizable.
At the center of thattransformation stood Robin Geck.
Geck was older, sharper, andinfinitely more dangerous than the
men that he surrounded himself with.
His confidence had gravity.
People like Edward Spicer and the CocoRelays brothers mistook it for strength.

(30:54):
What they couldn't see was that itwasn't confidence, it was control.
So like I said earlier, it beganat Mitchell's Donuts in Villa Park.
A place as ordinary as theevil that would grow from it.
Spritzer was working the counterafter dropping out of school.
He was broke.
He was homeless.
He was living at the Bra rabbit Motel.

(31:17):
Geck was a regular customer,older, married, steady on the
surface to a man like Edward.
Geck looked like success, a job, ahome, a wife, a sense of direction.
So when Edward's car broke downthat night, Geck offered to help
him and that simple gesture, aride a favor, that became the hook.

(31:39):
Soon Edward was taking advice fromGeck, then rides and then work.
Jet gave him something that he'd neverhad before, and that was approval.
Approval became obedience.
When get hinted at special gatherings,Edward went along when the violence
started, he didn't question it, and bythe time he was driving the red van on

(32:02):
their first abductions, he had stoppedthinking for himself altogether, the
cocoa relays brothers, Andrew and Thomascame next slow, polite, and easily led.
They had grown up in Villa Park twoand through loose social ties and
occasional construction work, theyfound their way into Geck Circle.

(32:24):
Andrew was the youngest, barelyout of his teens, and for a
time even lived with G'S family.
The closeness blurred theline between loyalty and fear.
Both brothers limited in intellectand desperate for belonging,
accepted G'S authority as absolute.
He didn't have to threaten them.

(32:44):
His belief in his ownpower was thread enough.
The four men Spritzer andthe Coco Es brothers began
orbiting one another constantly.
They rented adjoining rooms at the RipVan Winkle or the Rare Rabbit Motel,
which it's, it's weird as shit to me.

(33:04):
It's the same motel, but itgoes by two different names.

Angela (33:08):
Weird,

John (33:08):
depending on you what sources you're looking at and stuff.
I gotta like

Angela (33:13):
nicknames or actual legit names.

John (33:16):
Source.
Actual legit names.
Huh?
One is the Rare Rabbit Motel and theother one is the Rip Van Winkle Motel.
I

Angela (33:26):
weird.

John (33:27):
So anyway, so you rented rooms together and then they just, I don't,
the whole thing's weird as shit.
Yeah.
For somebody like me who hates people,that's the last thing I would want.

Angela (33:42):
You make that you don't hate people.

John (33:44):
I hate being around people.

Angela (33:46):
That's different than hating

John (33:48):
people.
I sure don't wanna get no freakingadjoining rooms with somebody.

Angela (33:52):
Exactly.

John (33:54):
So anyway, the place seemed like it was kind of a a shit hole, honestly.
And it was described as having likepeeling paint and a reputation for noise.
And none of these guys aremaking very damn much money.
So I can imagine it was a shit hole.
Right?
So locals called them party animals.
They were men who drank too much and keptto themselves, but the manager thought

(34:18):
that something else was happening.
He'd seen the candles and thelate night chanting and the way
they carried themselves, likesoldiers waiting for orders.
People whispered that theywere devil worshipers.
And this is during the time that.
That was a huge thing.
Yeah.
Back in the eighties.
Yeah.
And not only were there a wholebunch of people, including Con

(34:41):
Congress that were going after allthe devil worshipers and Satanists.
This was a little before theSatanic panic that would come along
in a couple, two or three years.
Right.
But.
I can remember as a kid, thiswas the time when it was all
backward masking in the rock music.
Mm-hmm.
They had satanic me messages.
Yeah.
You played 'em backwards.

(35:02):
You could hear the devil tell youto do all this kinda stuff and, and

Angela (35:06):
animals

John (35:07):
went missing.
Oh, well yeah, because you have allthe parents that are telling their
kids you can't listen to rock musicand this is like when Metallica
was kicking off ac dc mm-hmm.
And I can remember, 'cause you know, Igrew up during this time same way you did.
I can remember as a kid being toldthat it A CDC stood for after Christ

(35:27):
Devil Pumps just shit like that.
Yeah.
You know, and now as an electricianI'm like, are you sure it didn't have
some alternating and direct current,because that kinda makes sense.
But yeah.
So this is during that time and youknow, if you, if you grew up in that
time period, it was like everywhere.
On both sides.
It was parents and the adultsand everything saying that all

(35:50):
the kids were listening to Satanmusic and it was like Footloose.
Yes.
Have to save the kids.
And then all the kids were rebelling,or not all the kids, but there
was a huge group of kids that wererebelling against that Christian

Angela (36:03):
Yeah.

John (36:03):
Shit that was going on.
And so they're like, oh, youwant me to be a satanist?
Yeah.
That's when like a lot ofus got into the, if you're

Angela (36:10):
accusing me, I might as well just be it.

John (36:12):
Well, yeah.
And that was a time when like alot of us first tried Ouija boards
and, and all that kinda shit too.
That not yours.
Truly.
No, I didn't.
And, and so that's kind ofalso what happened with, I can
imagine that's where Robin Geckprobably got exposed to this shit.
Yeah.
'cause now.

(36:33):
First of all, it's way more accepted.

Angela (36:36):
Mm-hmm.

John (36:36):
You know, like, it isn't this, oh my God, you're a satanist.
It's like, yeah, whatever.
Freak.
Get the hell away from me.
Exactly.
And then, you know, like with Wiccans andshit like that, like, you know, back then
if you were a wicked, you were a satanist.
Yeah.
And now it's completely different.
Right.
I mean, so it has really changed.
But at this time, satanismwas, it was terrible.

(36:58):
Yeah.

Angela (36:58):
And it was terrible and all the bad things,

John (37:02):
right?
Yeah.
So inside the motel rooms get cemented.
His rule, he spoke of Satan.
He spoke of sacrifice.
He spoke of power, of proving devotionthrough pain and to the others.
He was no longer just a man.
He was a figure of fear and fascination.
They believed that he could read mindsand put curses on him, that he could

(37:26):
even summon punishment from beyond.
He reinforced it with ritual.
Space carved out in the attic of his home.
It was draped with symbols and candle litwhere he preached the theology of cruelty.
So what began his talk soon turnedinto action, get's obsession with

(37:46):
control, sex, and blood, mergedinto something ritualistic.
He told his followers that they werechosen, that each act of violence brought
them closer to understanding his truth.
Mm-hmm.
They believed him, they obeyed,and they followed him down a path
that would stain Chicago forever.

Angela (38:09):
Right.

John (38:10):
So the river crew wasn't born from this sick shared desire.
It was born from manipulation.

Angela (38:17):
Mm-hmm.

John (38:18):
It was a leader who knew exactly which buttons to press, and the three
followers who never learned how to say no.
The motel rooms and his freaking weirdass little attic became their church.
The van became their altar, andunder Robin G's command, the
leaf itself became a weapon.

(38:48):
So in Chicago's dark folklore, there'sa rumor that just refuses to die,
and that's the claim that Robin Geckonce worked for John Wayne Gacy.
So it, we have to talk about it.
It's the kind of story that soundstoo perfect to be coincidence,

Angela (39:03):
right

John (39:04):
to sadists.
Both hiding behind construction jobs,both living in the same city, both
turning their private obsessions intocarnage for years, the idea of their paths
crossing has lingered like an echo inthe city's criminal history, according to
old police reports and later retailing.
G supposedly worked briefly as anelectrician or subcontractor for

(39:29):
Gacys Company, PDM contractors,sometime in the late seventies,
right around the time that GacysCrawlspace was filling up with bodies.
Yeah.
The image of one monster learningfrom another was too intoxicating
for the public to resist.
It offered an explanation for howgeck would become what he did.

(39:52):
A student of evil taking lessons froma master, but when you peel back the
rumor, the evidence starts to vanish.
There's no payroll records, noemployment logs, no photographs
that placed them together him onlike gacys job sites or anything.
Right.
And the two men's victim profilescould not have been more different.

(40:14):
Gacy preyed on boys and young men.

Angela (40:17):
Mm-hmm.

John (40:17):
He was gay.

Angela (40:18):
Right.

John (40:19):
G on women, and he had a fascination with breasts.
And while Gacys crimes ended in 78,Gex wouldn't begin until years later.
So there's no overlap.
No, no overlap in their activity.
Only proximity and coincidence so, andfrom prison get as flatly denied any

(40:42):
connection in letters and in interviews.
He's claimed that the story wasborn from a detective's attempts to
rattle the crew during interrogation.

Angela (40:51):
Oh.

John (40:52):
Some sarcastic comment that spiraled into myth.
But it's spread anyway, how whereverit came from, it is out there.
And I, I don't think there'sany merit to it whatsoever.
I mean, I think that first of all, Gacywasn't, Gacy wasn't somebody that's
gonna take somebody under his wing No.

(41:13):
And teach him how to kill ifGeck would've been in G's house.
Gacy would've raped him andburied him in space, or would've
got him to dig the graves.
I mean, there was some people thatgot that Gacy didn't kill, but,

Angela (41:26):
well, and G's bad enough that if it was true, why would he deny it?

John (41:33):
Exactly.
You know?
And

Angela (41:36):
I mean, what's he gaining from denying it if

John (41:38):
it's true?
Well, guys, it's all assheads, so who the hell knows?
But I mean, true.
I mean, there's just nothing there thatI could find that brutally gave any
credence to it, except for the factthat you have two seriously, six sons
of bitches operating in the same city.
Yeah.
Within a couple years of each other.

(41:59):
So they have to be connected becauseas long as we can connect them, we can
explain how this could possibly happen.

Angela (42:05):
Right.
Well, and their jobswere the same and Yeah.

John (42:08):
Yeah.
I mean, they both workedin construction, so I mean.
Gacy was, their personalitieswere totally different.

Angela (42:17):
Mm-hmm.

John (42:17):
You know, Gacy was like the charismatic public leader.
I mean, he was like the presidentof the jcs and shit, and
everybody in town loved him.
And, you know, Geck was kindof, uh, family managed shit, but
he was not like a politician.
He was not out whining and dining with,

Angela (42:36):
he wasn't dressing up like a clown.

John (42:39):
And he wasn't dressing up like a clown.
No.
No.
So, I, I don't know.
I don't think that there's really muchabout that, but I had to bring it up
because, you know, it's out there.
And then the, the other big differencebetween the two, like I kind of alluded
to before, Gacy was a, a lone predator.
He was not taking somebody underhis wing and showing him the ropes.

(43:00):
And GT was completely different.
GT was a manipulator.
He was like a, yeah.
A Charles Manson type of character.
He

Angela (43:07):
wouldn't have wanted to be the student.
Right.
No, he didn't have that capacity.

John (43:13):
He was the leader.

Angela (43:14):
Yeah.

John (43:15):
Absolutely.
Yep.
And, but one, uh, a detectivewould later say that Geck made
Manson look like a boy scout.
Now I don't know about that, but Ido know that his depravity compared
to Manson, there's no comparison.
Like Manson had no problem killing peopleor ordering people to be killed, but he

(43:36):
wasn't driven by the thickness that Yeah.
That you're gonna learn about with gt.
He, I mean, GT is one of themost brave freaking lunatics
I've ever freaking heard about.
I mean, this guy, the sexualdepravity that we have to talk
about in these episodes is almostunmatched by anything I've ever heard.

Angela (43:58):
Wow.

John (44:00):
And you can't say that about Manson.
Manson was an evil bastard, andhe was scary for his ability to
manipulate, but he wasn't fascinated.
He wasn't a sadist.
Mm-hmm.
He, he didn't get sexual pleasureout of hurting other people.

Angela (44:15):
Right.

John (44:16):
It was just a means to an end.
So control.
Right.
Yep.
And I mean, I think that he maybe didhave a belief that we were gonna have
a race war and that, you know, plaqueywas gonna kill Whitey and all of that.
Think he

Angela (44:32):
did have a belief that there was, he was high about something,
he was gonna control something.
But

John (44:40):
yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean, he was so freaking strung out
on LSD and everything all the time.
I think he did believe thatthe Beatles were talking to
him and all that kinda shit.
But his goal was not that of a sadist.
He, he wasn't derivingpleasure from causing pain.
Gotcha.
And.
So kinda sum this all up, the getGacy connection, it just remains

(45:04):
that it's a story, it's a rumor.
It's been repeated over and over again.
But as we know, there can definitelybe two freaking independent monsters
working at the exactly the same time.
Near proximity to each otherand have nothing to do with

Angela (45:22):
each other.
Well, there was 3million people there, so.

John (45:25):
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you know, I mean, a little bitlater in the eighties, you're gonna
see that occurring in Californiawhere we had multiple serial killers.
Yeah.
Working and, and I mean it, we've really,we saw all throughout the seventies,
eighties, and summoned into thenineties where you had multiple serial
killers working all at the same time.
It's not like they

Angela (45:45):
take role.
Oh, you're already here in Chicago.
Okay, I'll move on.
Well, exactly.

John (45:50):
Yeah.
And I'll find somewhere else, you know,during this period of time where you
had Ted Bundy, who was operating, youhad John Wayne Gacy, who was operating
at Dennis Rader, who was operating atthat same time, and there was like.
I dunno, four or five more of 'em.
I think that, um,

Angela (46:06):
not to mention the tiny ones,

John (46:08):
I think like the dating game douche bag was operating right at this
same, yeah, in this same period of time.
Manson was just, you know, alittle bit earlier than these guys.
And so this is like the sweet spotfor serial killers about the Cecil

Angela (46:22):
Hotel guy.
I was right about thesame time too, wasn't it?
What is his name?
Ri Ramirez,

John (46:26):
Richard Ramirez.
It was a little bit later.
I mean, it was about the sametime that Robin GT was killed.
It was in the early eighties, but, youknow, during the late seventies and into
the eighties, I mean, that was, that wasserial killer central in this country.
So we had all kinds ofthem operating all at

Angela (46:43):
the same.
Yeah.

John (46:46):
So every cult begins with a test, and that's a moment when belief becomes
obedience and obedience becomes action.
So for the men who followed Robing. That test came in May of 1981
with a woman named Linda Sutton.
She was 31 years old, a mother of two.

(47:07):
And like so many of the ripper crewseventual victims, she lived on the edges
of Chicago's forgotten streets wherepoverty, addiction, and danger blurred
together under the streetlights tomost Sutton was invisible to Robin Gch.
She was an opportunity, asacrifice to prove control.

(47:28):
So by then, GKT had already chosenhis student in Edward Spritzer.
Edward was still working nightsat Weill's Donuts, sleeping at the
Brera Rabbit motel, and clinging tothe illusion that GT was his mentor.
GE saw what he needed to see alonely, slow witted guy, desperate for

(47:48):
approval, who was the perfect recruit.
So one night after closing.
Geck offered Spritzer a ride.
And the story goes that as the cityrolled past outside the van's tinted
windows, Geck told him that they weregoing to quote, pick up some whores.
It wasn't a suggestion, it was acommand disguised as camaraderie.

(48:10):
Mm-hmm.
Spritzer who was uncomfortable anduncertain, did what he always did, and
he, that's followed, followed pack.
He did what he was told.
So when they found Linda, Linda Sutton,GK made his first movie, he charmed her,
offered her money, and then he dosedher spreader, waited in the shadows
of the van, half aware that somethingwas wrong, but too afraid to act.

(48:35):
When Geck called him over.
The order was simple, dragher body into the woods.
So Sprite are hesitated.
And that's when Gch began the lesson.
Gch didn't just kill for pleasure.
He also killed for control.
What he wanted wasn'tblood but allegiance.
He forced righter to watch, toparticipate, to cross the line with him.

(49:01):
The mutilation thatfollowed wasn't random.
It was ritual.
A performance meant to shatterconscience and replace it with
obedience when it was over.
Spreitzer wasn't just anaccomplice, he was fully initiated.
So that night marked thebirth of the Ripper crew.
Jack had proven that, that hecould make another man commit the

(49:24):
unthinkable, and once a person crossesthat line, there's no going back.
Spritzer silence afterward.
Wasn't loyalty, it was fear.
The kind of fear that bindsa man to his tormentor.
As the months passed, Gex reach expanded.
He brought in the Coco EZ Brothers,Andrew and Thomas, both men of limited

(49:47):
intellect, both eager to belong.
And he told them that he had supernaturalpowers, that he could read their thoughts
and control their bodies, even killthem without laying a hand on them.
And they believed him.
They said that he could put theminto quote a trance, and if they

(50:08):
disobeyed, they'd suffer his wrath.
So what began his intimidation evolvedinto ritual in the addict of G's
house, the same home where his wifeand three children were sleeping.

Angela (50:22):
Wow.

John (50:22):
He built a shrine of candles and symbols turning
sexual violence into ceremony.
The others said, he calledit quote, the satanic altar.
There get conducted his rituals oftorture, rape, and mutilation, forcing his
followers to take part in acts so brutal.
They would later describe them as quotecommands from something not human.

(50:49):
And this, I mean, this gets just vile,but yeah, it, it just is what happened.
So the victim's severed breastsbecame the centerpiece of those
rituals, tokens of devotion tothe darkness that kept worshiped.
They did consume parts of theflesh, a grotesque attempt to seal

(51:11):
loyalty through shared desecration.
Whether or not every detail is literal,the psychology behind it is clear.
Gex control wasn't physical anymore,it was spiritual, or at least he
made them believe that it was.
Coco EZ Brothers later said thatthey had no choice but to obey.

(51:32):
Spritzer said that hefeared Gch more than death.
And Robin Gkt, the man they called thereal one, had turned three men into
willing instruments of his madness.
The murder of Lin the Sutton wasn'tjust the beginning of a killing spree.
It was an initiation, a ritual ofsubmission built to test loyalty,

(51:53):
find obedience, and erase humanity.
And from that moment on, theyweren't for men sharing a secret.
They were a cult united by fear,violence, and the belief that their
leader could control even their souls.
So in talking about the murder ofLinda Sutton, Spicer would later
say that, um, she was draggedor she was drug and handcuffed.

(52:18):
Left helpless on the floor of the van.
Geck then raped her and then hebegan to mutilate her body slicing
off one breast before forcingSpreitzer to watch and then to learn.
He used piano wire to remove theother breast, explaining the process
like a craftsman teaching a trade.

(52:39):
He wasn't just killing her,he was training his disciple.
Sutton's death was not quick.
Get drew it out, turningagony into ceremony.
And like I said before, theguy was a freaking s sadist.
So the more pain that hecould inflict, the better.

Angela (52:57):
Yeah.

John (52:58):
So 10 days later, on June 1st of 81, the staff at the Bra Rabbit motel
complained about a, about a foul odor thatwas coming from behind the property and
what they found was or beyond description.
Linda Sutton's body lay in ashallow patch of brush decomposing.
In the early summer heat, her hands werecuffed a cloth gag stuffed into her mouth.

(53:23):
Her pants and sweater were pushed up.
Her lower body exposed.
The left breast had been amputated.
The mutilation that would latermark every ripper crew victim.
The coroner noted that she hadbeen dead only about three days,
meaning she'd endured agony beforedeath and that decomposition had

(53:43):
accelerated from the open woundsand the infestation that followed.
It was a gruesome discovery, but atthe time, it barely made the news.
Another murdered woman in acity already drowning in them.
Police cataloged the scene, tookphotos, filed the report, and moved on.
No one yet realized that thiswasn't an isolated act of violence.

(54:07):
It was the beginning of a sequence,methodical, ritualized, and
spreading across Chicago streets.
So Linda Sutton's death establishedeverything that would define the ripper
group, the red van, the bondage, themutilation, and the signature desecration.
It was murder as initiation.

(54:28):
Violence is instruction, and acity too overwhelmed to connect
the dots subjected, proven thathe could command others to kill.
Spreitzer had proven that he wouldobey, and in that dynamic power
fear submission, the machineryof the ripper crew began to turn.
Linda Sutton's name deserves morethan a footnote in their story.

(54:52):
She was the first to fall victim to asystem of control that weaponized faith,
fear, and obedience her life like toomany others, became the proof of how
far evil can go when no one is watching.
And so I'm gonna discuss theautopsy findings of Linda Sutton.

(55:14):
And then as we move through the victims,I'm not gonna do this on everyone,
I'll just because it's the same.
It's pretty much the same, and it'sfreaking gruesome and carbon copy gross.
And it's not some shit that I wantto repeat over and over again.
So

Angela (55:29):
he's just gonna let us know it's the same.

John (55:32):
Yeah.
So the official autopsy and coronerreports for Linda Sutton's murder
offered investigators their firstundeniable proof that the violence
was not random, it was ritualistic.
The filings which were preserved incourt records and medical testimony
documented the brutality with precision.

(55:52):
The examination was performed byDr. David Barrett, a director of
Pathology at Central DuPage Hospital.
When he received the body decompositionwas advanced, the he, the exposure and
the open wounds had accelerated decayfar beyond what the timeline suggested.
At first glance, theinjuries seemed too severe.

(56:15):
The entire anterior chest wall was gone,both breasts were missing, and several
of the ribs bore clean linear cuts.
Initially, Dr. Barrett assumed thedamage came from animal activity,
but as he cleaned and catalogedthe remains, something didn't fit.
The edges were symmetrical.

(56:37):
The cuts precise and thepattern consistent with an with
amputation, not with tearing.
Later after reviewing photographsalongside investigative reports and
the confessions that followed, Dr.Barrett concluded that what he'd
seen wasn't decomposition at all.
It was deliberate removal, perforatedwith a knife or a thin wire.

(57:02):
The wounds terminated in uniform lines.
Each incision ending abruptly as ifdrawn by design that pattern would
become the ripper Crew's signature.
The autopsy confirmed that thecrime scene had only what the crime
scene had only hinted at LindaSutton had been raped, handcuffed,
gagged, and mutilated before death.

(57:24):
The corridor ruled that she died frommultiple stab wounds and subsequent blood
loss with the mutilation of her chestoccurring while she was still alive.

Angela (57:34):
Ah.

John (57:36):
The findings became the backbone of the prosecution's
case later and the physical proofthat tied the confessions to fact.
So during the trial, thestate's attorney introduced Dr.
Barrett's testimony alongwith corroborating statements
from the crew's own members todemonstrate intent and ritual.

(57:56):
Investigators emphasized thesymmetry of the wounds and the
postmortem positioning of the body.
Clear evidence that thiswasn't some frenzied violence,
but a practice repeated act.
Each point aligned with the suspect'sown accounts of G'S instructions
and the use of wire to sever thebreast during the ritual, despite

(58:19):
the condition of the body, Dr.
Barrett estimated that Sutton had beendead only about three days when she
was found, meaning her body had leanexposed for a week before discovery.
The rapid decomposition he explained wascaused by the size of the open wounds,
which allowed mega infestation andtissue breakdown far faster than usual.

(58:43):
The conclusion was inescapable.
This wasn't a crime of impulse.
It was a structured act of cruelty.
The precision of the cuts, the ritualisticremoval, and the post-mortem presentation
all pointed to an offender or offendersoperating from doctrine and not for rage.
Linda Sutton's autopsy didn't just revealhow she died, it revealed how they thought

(59:09):
the method, the order, the deliberateperformance of violence that was meant to
bind a group through shared desecration.
It was the first forensic glimpse intothe anatomy of the Ripper Crews madness.
So after the murder of Linda Sutton,in May of 81, something shifted.
The Ripper crew was no longera handful of men circling

(59:31):
Chicago's shadows for victims.
They had become a system,a hierarchy, a cult.
And at its center was Robin Gagged,the architect, the freaking lunatic,
the piece of shit captain ass hat.
This guy just disgusted me.

Angela (59:48):
I can't tell.

John (59:49):
Oh God, he's something there.
So the murder of Sutton wasn't just an actof violence, it was a ceremony of control.
And for Edward Spicer,it was baptism by blood.
The moment that get proveddominance through terror.
And for Andrew and Thomas CocoEz, who joined soon after, it
was the point of no return.

(01:00:10):
They entered guest circle, not asequals, but as believers men with
limited understanding, desperate forbelonging, and too afraid to question
the man who promised them purpose.
At the rib van Motel, sometimescalled the Rare Rabbit Motel
to explain that shit to me.
I don't know.
The transformation became visible.

(01:00:31):
The men, like I said, rented adjoiningrooms coming and going at odd hours,
the air heavy with smoke and secrecy.
And, you know, I, for the staff, forthe people there, they had to have been
like, who are these freaking lunaticsburning candles and chanting and doing
all this weird ass shit that, so by thestart of 1982, the river cruise violence

(01:00:55):
had begun to follow a rhythm, a gruesomecycle of hunting ritual desecration, the
killing of Linda Settin had set theirpattern and now the pattern was spreading.
So on February 12th of 82, a 305-year-old cocktail waitress was
driving home when her car ran outof gas on a Chicago area freeway.

(01:01:17):
When police later found herabandoned vehicle, the doors were
unlocked, the keys were still inside.
Hours later, her nude body wasdiscovered along an embankment
nearby, discarded like waste, butmarked by the unmistakable brutality
that had come to define the crew.
She'd been raped, tortured, and mutilatedher breast amputated with precision.

(01:01:40):
It was the same ritual cutthat investigators would come
to recognize again and again.
Detectives kept the amputation secretfrom the press, using it as an identifying
marker, a private thread to connect,otherwise disconnected bodies that were
beginning to appear around Chicago.

(01:02:00):
The hope was that by withholding thatdetail, it might help isolate the
killer when the next victim surfaced,but the next victim came quickly.
Days later, police found the body ofanother woman, an unidentified Hispanic
female wearing an engagement ring.
She'd been raped,strangled, and left nude.

(01:02:21):
The assault clearly sexual in nature,but ritual and tone, unlike the earlier
victims, her breasts had not been removed.
Instead, they bore deep bite marks,chewed and torn by human teeth.
Forensic reports described theinjuries as severe, and investigators
noted the presence of semen on herbody, evidence that the killer had

(01:02:44):
masturbated over her corpse after death.
These were the first signs of whatprofilers would later describe as
escalation through experimentation.
The violence was increasing inboth frequency and in complexity.
The mutilations werechanging, the ritual evolving.
Whether Gch was testing new formsof control or simply refining his

(01:03:08):
own depravity, each crime carriedhis signature of purpose, something
deliberate, practiced and personal.
Both of these women, their names largelylost to the public record, became the
invisible victims of a transformation.
So between Sutton's death in 1981 andLori Barrow's abduction in May of 82,

(01:03:33):
which will beginning to the Rippercrew had evolved from predators into
priests of their own perverse religion.
And by the time the next killingcame, they no longer hunted
for impulse or for pleasure.
They hunted for worship.
I think that applies for everybodybut gt 'cause I think GT was a true
sadist and he was getting all kindsof pleasure out of all of this,

Angela (01:03:57):
if you need a slight break from the depravity, I have an answer
for you on the name of the hotel.
Okay, shoot.
So it says, and this is accordingto the AI overview, the rare rabbit
motel in Chicago was also calledthe Rip Van Winkle because its
owner was known for being very lazy.

(01:04:19):
And the name Rip Van Winklewas used to describe people who
were oblivious or seemed to bein a permanent state of sleep.
The nickname likely played on thestory of the character who slept
for 20 years, implying the owner wassimilar, similarly lazy and inactive.
The owner's perceived laziness wasa direct reason for the nickname.

(01:04:40):
And the hotel was named after afamous character associated with
prolonged sleep and inactivity.
Interesting.
So that's why it moved.
And it's known as both 'causethe owner was a lazy, lazy man.

John (01:04:52):
And so that just pretty well describes the conditions of place.

Angela (01:04:56):
Exactly.

John (01:04:57):
It was a shit hole.

Angela (01:04:58):
Exactly.
Awesome.
I put some things togetherback to the depravity.

John (01:05:01):
Well thank you very much for that.
'cause you're, it's, it was curious.

Angela (01:05:06):
It was.
And I wanted to know,

John (01:05:07):
and when you're researching it, it doesn't say like sometimes
referred to as, it's like somereports say the Pri fa Winkle Hotel.
Other reports say the BriRabbit and you're like, yeah.
So awesome.

Angela (01:05:21):
When I can find things, I will find them.

John (01:05:23):
Well I appreciate it.
So by the spring of 82, theRipper crew had become a machine.
It's rituals perfected, it's hierarchyfixed, it's violence accelerating.
The death of Lorraine or Lori Ann Borowskiwould mark both the peak of their cruelty
and the beginning of their undoing.

(01:05:52):
So on May 15th, 1982, in Elmhurst,Illinois, which was a quiet suburban town,
the kind of place where nothing trulybad was supposed to happen, lo Borowski
was 21 full of life and no one for hereasy laugh and unshakable kindness.
She worked at a small real estate officeon York Road and had walked to work

(01:06:15):
that morning the way that she alwaysdid her purse on her shoulder a few
minutes early, ready to unlock the door.
When her coworkers arrived, they foundthe front steps covered in her belongings.
Her shoes, her keys, makeup, and acan of hairspray scattered across the
sidewalk as if it had been droppedin a struggle, but Lori was gone.

(01:06:38):
Witnesses later reported seeing a reddishorange van parked nearby the same color
and shape that it appeared in scatteredreports across Chicago's west suburbs.
At the time, it was justanother van on another morning.
Only later would it become infamous.
The abduction was carried out byEdward Spicer and Andrew Cuckoo

(01:07:02):
acting under Robin G's orders.
According to their confessions,they took Lori to a secluded spot,
some version, say a wooded area.
Others say a cemetery.
And what followed was not just murder,it was torture, dressed as ritual.
This poor girl was repeatedlyraped, stabbed more than

(01:07:23):
80 times with an ice pick.
Mutilated while she was still alive again,her left breast was severed with wire.
The ACT GK, reserved ashis personal signature.
Spreitzer would later tell investigatorsthat GK performed a sexual act
with the severed tissue, completingwhat he called the ceremony.

(01:07:46):
Some accounts mentioned broken bones,suggesting sustained violence, uh, not
frenzy, but endurance, and then silence.
For nearly five months, herfamily searched, prayed,
and hoped flyers went up.
The van descriptioncirculated, but no leads came.
Then on October 10th, 1982, agroundskeeper in a Clarendon Hills

(01:08:11):
Cemetery discovered a shallow grave.
Inside lay the decomposedremains of a young woman.
Her body had been buried hastily,the soil thin and uneven.
Despite the passage of time,the violence was still visible.
The stab wounds, the mutilation,the unmistakable pattern that
matched Sutton's autopsy.

(01:08:33):
She was identified as Lorraine Borowski byher jewelry and fragments of her clothing.
The coroner could not pinpointa single cause of death.
Decomposition had re had erasedany precision, but the evidence
was overwhelming torture, multiplefreaking stab, wound, stab wounds,
mutilation and extreme sexual assault.

(01:08:58):
The cruelty spoke for itself.
Investigators now knew thiswas not an isolated killing.
It was the continuation of somethinglarger and something organized.
The murder of Lori Borowski exposedthe Ripper Cruz full evolution.
It wasn't impulsiveanymore, it was patterned.

(01:09:18):
It wasn't rage, it was ritual.
And for the first time, the public beganto glimpse the scale of the nightmare.
Moving beneath the suburban Chicago.
Lorraine Borowski had been everything.
The crew was not kind open-hearted,trusting her murder shattered the illusion
that evil only hunted in dark alleysand forgotten neighborhoods In Elmhurst.

(01:09:42):
On a clear morning in May,it had found daylight.
The Ripper crew had crossed anotherlight, and the investigation that would
eventually expose them had just begun.
Then two weeks after thedisappearance of Lori Borowski,
the Ripper crew struck again.
Their next victim was sway mot.

(01:10:03):
30 years old.
Recently arrived from Chinaand just beginning to find her
place in the American Midwest.
She was bright, determined, andtrying to balance family expectations.
With a new life in Illinois onMay 29th, 1982, all of that ended
on a roadside in Hanover Park.

(01:10:24):
That evening, Shui was returninghome from the family's restaurant in
Streamwood riding with her brother.
The two reportedly got into an argument,some kind of a family dispute about
her sister's wedding to an American,and in frustration, her brother
stopped the car and let her out.
He assumed their relatives whowere following behind in another

(01:10:45):
vehicle would pick her up, butthat second car never came.
And what came instead wasthe Ripper Cruz Red van.
Inside were Robin Gt, Edward Spreitzer,and the Coco Relays brothers.
They pulled up beside her, offeredher a ride in which she hesitated.
Gex charm took over that confidentdisarming tone that had lured

(01:11:09):
women before Shui accepted steppingunknowingly into a nightmare.
The cruelty began immediately.
They hurled racist slurs at her, mockingher accent, turning hatred into fuel.
When she fought back, theybeat her unconscious, then
dragged her deeper into the van.

(01:11:29):
Spritzer used a lengthof wire to choke her.
While Gex struck her repeatedly asrage spilling into ritual, they drove
her to a remote construction sitewhere the violence reached its peak.
What happened next mirrored the patternof Linda Sutton's murder, but with an even
greater frenzy get sliced off her breast.

(01:11:52):
The act.
He turned into both symbol andsacrament and then raped the open
wounds, repeating the desecrationhe had inflicted on other victims.
This time there was no ceremonyin the attic, no candles, no
recitation from the Satanic Bible.
The attack was chaotic, rushed andoverflowing with sadism when it was

(01:12:15):
over, sway, mock lay, broken in thedirt, multiple skull fractures, two
shattered ribs and a severed forearm.
She had been beaten, mutilated,raped, and left to die where she fell.
Her body wasn't founduntil September 30th of 82.
Four months later, when constructionworkers uncovered human remains

(01:12:38):
at a job site less than a milefrom where she'd last been seen.
Investigators described the scene ascatastrophic the remains for the same
ritual mutilation as the earlier victims.
Deep slashes missing tissue, and thesignature post-mortem injuries that had
become unmistakably tied to the crew.

(01:12:59):
One officer told reporters that herbody looked as if she'd been quote,
sliced to rivets for investigators.
The discovery confirmed whatthey feared most, that the crew's
killing cycle had accelerated.
Each victim was attackedfaster than the last.
The rituals performed more brutally.
The controlled geck exertedover the others more absolute.

(01:13:21):
There was no pretensive restraint anymore.
The ripper crew had crossed fullyinto mania for sway mock, A woman who
came to America seeking a better life,her death became another proof of the
cruise depravity, a crime that fusedracial hatred, sexual sadism, and
cult ritual into one horrifying act.

(01:13:44):
So by late 1982, thepattern was undeniable.
Chicago wasn't facing a single killer.
It was facing a collectivebound by blood and belief.
And the next woman they targeted wouldsurvive, but only barely, and her courage
would bring their darkness into life.

(01:14:14):
So by the summer of 82, fear hadbegan to ripple quietly through
Chicago's western suburbs.
And another woman crossedpaths with the river crew.
Her name was Angel York.
And her survival would mark one ofthe first cracks in Robin G's armor.
So in June of 1982, angel York waswalking the streets of Chicago when a

(01:14:37):
red van slowed to a crawl beside her.
Behind the wheel set, Robin Geck,his eyes fixed on her like prey.
Inside were Edward Spreitzerand the Coco Brothers.
The same men who'd alreadymurdered Linda Sutton, Lorraine
Borowski, and sway Mock York.
Didn't know their names, but sherecognized danger before she could run.

(01:15:02):
The sliding door opened andthe crew dragged her inside.
She was handcuffed immediately,wrist pulled tight together
and forced to the floor.
Then came the psychologicaltorture that defined Gex control.
He handed her a knife and toldher to cut off her own breast.
When she hesitated, hepromised to kill her.

(01:15:23):
York later told investigators that shebegan to comply, shaking, terrified,
trying to survive one second at a time.
I mean, the depravityof this shit is unreal.
Yeah, I mean, this is like the,those I, and I hate these movies,
but those freaking saw movies.
Mm-hmm.

(01:15:44):
Taken.
To the it ninth degree, you know, I mean,but before she could actually act and cut
her own breast off, Jack overcome withhis own frenzy, ripped the knife from
her hand and stabbed her in the chest.
The attack escalated intothe crew's signature ritual.

(01:16:06):
Gex sexually assaulted the wound,masturbating into the open flesh and
ejaculating as the others watched.
When he was finished, someonepressed duct tape over the wound
as if sealing in the ritual orsome weird shit, I don't know what.
And then they opened the van doorand threw her into the street,

(01:16:28):
bleeding and broken and expectedher to die where she landed.
But Angel York did not die.
A passerby found her minutes laterand rushed her to the hospital where
she underwent emergency surgeryand survived against all odds

Angela (01:16:44):
dang.

John (01:16:45):
When detectives arrived to take her statement, she was coherent enough to
speak and what she described, gate police,their first real break, she told them
about the red van, the tinted windows,the wooden divider, and even the strange
little details like feathers in a roachclip hanging from the rear view mirror.

(01:17:06):
It was the kind of description thatonly a survivor could give and one
that would later match exactly.
The van registered to Robin, g York'stestimony also confirmed something
investigators had only suspected,and that was that this was a crew.
It was not a lone predator.
Multiple attackers, a shared method, arepeating pattern of ritual mutilation.

(01:17:32):
Which is so weird and odd and unheard of.
Yeah.
In the annals of true crime.
Mm-hmm.
Like, I'm not sayingthat it's never happened.
Right.
Of course it has.
Right.
But it is rare and for it to be, wealready talked about like the Mansons.

Angela (01:17:50):
Mm-hmm.

John (01:17:51):
For it to be a group that is killing in a sadistic, a sexually sadistic way.
Yeah.
It is very, very, very odd.
Mm-hmm.
Like I just off the top of my head,I can't think of another example.

(01:18:11):
I mean, pairs, there's a few pairs.
Yeah.
But as far as like a groupthat's, these guys are like Yeah.
All on their own.
So Angel York had seen the structureof their violence from the inside,
the hierarchy, the obedience, theway that they waited for GS signal.
Before doing anything, her survivalturned rumor into certainty.

(01:18:35):
The city wasn't dealingwith a serial killer.
It was dealing with a ritualistic cultoperating out of a red van prowling.
For women like her, angel York's namerarely appears on the same list as
the murdered Women of the Ripper crew.
But her endurance wasevery bit as defining.

(01:18:55):
She was living proof of what they wereand what they could no longer hide.
So by late summer of 82, the RipperCrew's violence had reached a fever pitch.
Their failed attempts at restraint andthe near exposure from Angel York's
survival hadn't slowed them down.
If anything, it made them moredetermined to prove their devotion

(01:19:16):
to Robin G's Twisted Ritual.
Their next victim was SandraDelaware, who was just 18 years old.
On August 28th, 1982, the quietalong the Chicago river was
broken by something unspeakable.
Police responding to a call, foundthe nude body of a young woman lying

(01:19:37):
on the riverbank wrist, tied tightlybehind her back with a shoe laze and
her own bra wrapped around her throat.
The makeshift ligatureused to strangle her.
The location was isolated, shieldedby overgrown brush and train
tracks, the kind of forgotten placewhere predators feel invisible.
She had been dead only a few hours.

(01:19:59):
Investigators would soon identify heras Sandra Delaware, teenager adrift
in the city, described by some as arunaway and by others as a young sex
worker, and both of which could be true,

Angela (01:20:13):
right?

John (01:20:14):
Whatever her circumstances, she had become the latest target
in the crew's escalating ritual.
The autopsy would reveal that she had beenstabbed multiple times with the pattern
of wounds indicating torture before death.
And once again, the signaturemutilation was there.
Her left breast hadbeen cleanly amputated.

(01:20:35):
Andrew Coco relays would later confess,and it was supported by forensic
evidence that the men had forced arock into her mouth to stifle her
screams a cruel detail confirmed bythe coroner and that they then stabbed
and sexually assaulted her, forcing awine bottle inside of her body causing

(01:20:56):
severe internal trauma and bleedingthat was noted during the autopsy.
And finally, they strangled herwith her bra and then performed the
ritual amputation that GE demandedof every quote unquote offering.
The attacks showed all the hallmarksof their pattern along torture sexual

(01:21:17):
violence and postmortem mutilation.
Each step choreographed to mimicgeek's so-called religious rights.
What began with one woman in 1981had now become full-blown liturgy.
Every wound had meaning to him.
Every desecration, asermon for investigators.

(01:21:37):
Delaware's murder was confirmationthat the crew was still active, still
hunting the consistency of method,the precision of the mutilation and
the physical evidence tied her deathdirectly to the same group responsible
for Borowski, mock and Sutton.
So the ripper crew had refined theirviolence into a ritual, cruelty into

(01:21:59):
ceremony, and as the investigation closedin their devotion to Gex control, only
deepened Sandra Delaware's death stoodas both tragedy and a turning point.
It proved that the cruise crimesweren't about lu or opportunity.
They were about belief, aboutperformance, and about power.

(01:22:20):
So by early summer of 82, Chicagohad become the hunting ground
of a cult that thrived on pain.
Each killing had been worse thanthe last, more deliberate, more
performative, more ritualized.
And for Rosebeck Davis, a 30-year-oldmarketing executive walking along
Rush Street that night, it would meanthe most sadistic killing of all.

(01:22:45):
On September 7th, 1982, Rose Davis washeading home after an evening downtown
when the red van pulled alongsideher inside where Robin Geck, Spicer
and Andrew Coco, a, according toAndrew's later confession, they were
cruising for someone to offer to G's.

(01:23:07):
Weird ass sick ritual.
Davis became that someone, they grabbedher off the street, forced her into
the van, driving through the city'snight until they reached an alley
behind a Lakeshore Drive apartment.
There Davis's Orde began.
She was restrained and beatenwith a savagery that surpassed

(01:23:28):
even the crew's prior acts.
Her face was shattered, her nosebroken into fragments and a black
sock or stocking was pulled aroundher neck and it was used to strangle
her until she lost consciousness.
Her wrist board, deep ligature marksher sweater pushed up and her slacks
and underwear pulled to her ankles,exposing her for what was coming next.

(01:23:54):
The assault on Rose Davis wasprolonged frenzied and ritualized.
Geck raped her while the othersheld her down, and then in an
act that the prosecutors latercalled beyond all comprehension.
He struck her in the facewith a hatchet when she fell.
He used the handle of the samehatchet to penetrate her body with

(01:24:17):
such force that the wooden handlepierced her abdomen later it would be
discovered embedded deep inside her.
During the autopsy, herbreasts were slashed.
Deep cuts running from her armpits inward,the incisions matching the surgical
patterns seen in the other victims.
She suffered multiple stab wounds,small puncture marks, and split

(01:24:41):
skin across her chest and abdomen.
Bruises covered her body, her back,wrists and midsection, all showing
signs of restraint and repeated blows.
Blood pooled beneath her body and spattermarked the wall beside her evidence of the
brutality and the duration of the murder.
The.

(01:25:01):
I mean, these are horrible enough withouteven talking about, I told you I was
gonna skip all the autopsy details.
Yeah.
It's bad enough.
Just explaining what the freakhappened without going into
all of the details of it.
And some of 'em are

Angela (01:25:14):
just a little bit different.

John (01:25:17):
Right?
Yeah.
So from the first night, LindaSutton was dragged into the woods.
The Ripper crew wasn't a group of equals,it was a hierarchy built on fear, a cult
of violence led by a man who understoodhow to twist weakness into obedience.
So as we said at the top wasasset number one, Robin Geck.

(01:25:41):
And he was the oldest of the group.
And he put this together, you know,because he, we talked about it when
we were talking about Simon Sue,when we were talking about how he,
how they know exactly who to, yeah,who to pick their great profilers.
And, you know, he picked.
I mean, none of theseguys are freaking mm-hmm.

(01:26:03):
Very smart.
You know, they're all IQs in thelow seventies, you know, so they're,
they're struggling mentally anyway.
And man, he zeroed right inon that, put them together.
And then after the murder of LindaSutton, his controlled just deepened.
And he told them that hepossessed supernatural power.
And we talked about all that.

(01:26:24):
He could murder 'emwith his mind, not even

Angela (01:26:27):
touching them.

John (01:26:28):
Yeah.
And so as the murders continued,the violence turned, methodical,
choreographed almost to ceremony.
And then in the addict of Kicks home,we already talked about, he set up this
Satanic chapel up there, and it wasa shrine of red light and candles and

(01:26:49):
ritual where the acts of mutilation werereenacted under the pretense of devotion.
So they would all gather aroundwhat get called an altar.
Mm-hmm.
There he would read from the SatanicBible, which is a dumbass book written
by a dumbass moron, Anton Lavay.

(01:27:11):
Mm. Who's a totalfreaking loser, dumb ass.
But I

Angela (01:27:15):
think Lavay, but I couldn't remember the first name.

John (01:27:17):
He is such an idiot.
I mean, he is such a phony

Angela (01:27:21):
and doing all this while still being a husband and father.
His kids are playing downstairsand they're none the wiser.
Yeah.

John (01:27:31):
Aha.
Or he was raising them up to be,

Angela (01:27:34):
but the wife like, what

John (01:27:36):
baby?

Angela (01:27:37):
What was she doing?

John (01:27:38):
I dunno.

Angela (01:27:39):
Okay.
Anyway,

John (01:27:41):
so then he would read from the Satanic Bible and then he would direct
them to perform a grotesque communion.

Angela (01:27:49):
Mm-hmm.

John (01:27:50):
With the severed remains of their victims.
Yeah.
So for the followers, therituals blurred the boundary
between reality and nightmare.
Each session deepened theirdependency and erased what little
individuality they had left.
What started as fear became faith,not spiritual faith, but faith in the

(01:28:11):
authority of a man who demanded obedience.
Mm-hmm.
Through horror, the progressionfrom 81 through 82 shows a clear
psychological descent in the beginning,hesitation marked the crimes spread,
sir. And the brothers flinch.
Deferred or looked away, butrepetition, dulled their reactions.

(01:28:31):
Mm-hmm.
With each abduction, SuttonBorowski mock, Delaware gex
lessons became more rehearsed.
His command sharper inthe group, more efficient.
What had once been shockingbecame routine abduction rate,
mutilation, disposal and ritual.

Angela (01:28:51):
Yeah.
They knew what he wanted and they just

John (01:28:53):
robotic.
Yeah.
And the more you see it, the, yeah.
Just the next one.
So the crew stoppedseeing victims as people.
They were symbols, they were offerings,and they, the ax themselves became
a twisted form of affirmation.
Get fed on domination.
Sprite are fed on approval, and thecocoa relays brothers fed on fear.

(01:29:16):
Together that triad of needs formeda closed system, self-sustaining,
self-reinforcing, and entirelydisconnected from the moral world outside.
So by mid 82, the four men,we'd already said they were.
It's a, so Geck was a little bit odd.
He had a house

Angela (01:29:36):
a little bit.

John (01:29:39):
Okay.
The way that Geck livedwas a little bit odd.
Thank you.
So he had a, he had a life, youknow, in the suburbs with his
wife and his kids or whatever.
Oh yeah.
But then he was still, he was alsospending nights at the RIP family.
Yeah.
Rare rabbit, whatever.
Freaking motel.
And, and then they would have theirweird ass ritual, whatever the freak you

(01:30:03):
want to call it, kind of in both places.

Angela (01:30:06):
I

John (01:30:07):
know.
I,

Angela (01:30:09):
I can't figure it out.

John (01:30:10):
It's, it's weird, but I mean, they did he, I mean he did.
With them.
It's, it's so funny because we just endedup covering Simon Sue, and it wasn't him
on purpose that these were so closelytogether, but just like Simon Sue.
He isolated these guys.

Angela (01:30:29):
Yeah.

John (01:30:29):
So they were even

Angela (01:30:30):
more than they were.

John (01:30:31):
Right.
They rarely interacted withoutsiders and those who knew
them, described them as secretive.
Mm-hmm.
Nocturnal and off.
Yeah,

Angela (01:30:41):
just off.

John (01:30:42):
Yeah.

Angela (01:30:43):
Okay.

John (01:30:44):
And, but you know, I mean, nobody knew they were killing people.
Well, I mean, they werejust weird, you know?
And you hear that so many times, theseserial killers, they're like, you.
It really wasn't, you know,the bad guy or whatever.
He was just a little off.
It's

Angela (01:30:57):
just weird.
Yeah.
And

John (01:30:58):
it was just a little, he felt something not right.
Yeah.
But you know, like I said,the isolation was deliberate.
Geck kept them dependent financially,emotionally, and psychologically,
which ensured that their only senseof belonging would come from him and
the violence that he orchestrated.
So by the time that Rose Daviswas murdered in September of 82,

(01:31:22):
the transformation was complete.
What had began as one man's depravityand three followers, fear had hardened
into a ritualized killing order.
Jack was the unchallengeable leader.
His commands were absolute.
Spreitzer had become his eager apprentice,desperate to prove his loyalty, and

(01:31:44):
the Coco Riis brothers functioned assilent accomplices performing their
parts with mechanical obedience.
Their empathy was gone.
Their fear redirected inward, andtheir shared crimes had fused them
together in a bond of contaminationand secrecy within the small circle.

(01:32:06):
There was no morality, there was nofriendship, and there was no escape.
Only hierarchy.
Yeah.
Superstition.
This weird ass devil worship bullshitreligion thing that he cooked up.

Angela (01:32:20):
Mm-hmm.

John (01:32:20):
You know, I'm not saying like the, the devil worship
doesn't exist or whatever.
Right.
I'm telling you, this dip shit justmade this shit up out of thin air.
No,

Angela (01:32:29):
this, this menu of it

John (01:32:31):
Right.

Angela (01:32:32):
Was made up by him.

John (01:32:33):
Yes.
And you know, I bring up like AntonLavay and the Satanic Church and the,
the Book of Saint and all becauseit was all just a bunch of bullshit.
It was the same thing.
Yeah.
It was just cooked up out ofthis lunatic's freaking mind.
I'm not saying there's not true satanists

Angela (01:32:52):
Yeah.

John (01:32:52):
Out there.
And I'm not saying that there's notreally evil, like what's his nuts?
Alex Di Crowley OusterCrowley is far more devoted.
Yeah.
Evil Satanist than AntonLavay ever was an Anton.
Lavay was all in it for the publicity.
Mm-hmm.
But Alex di Crowley was in it because hebelieved a lot of that shit, you know?

(01:33:17):
So, I don't know.

Angela (01:33:19):
He wanted to be Satan, didn't he?

John (01:33:21):
Well, he called himself the B 6 6 6.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Angela (01:33:25):
Okay.

John (01:33:26):
So, but I mean, there was a, his beliefs were a lot of
metaphysical shit and stuff.
I mean, you really almost have todo LSD to try to read his books.
I've read a couple of them,but you're like, what is this?
What, what is this guytalking about there?
It's all, all over the place.
But anyway, sorry, get off on a tangent.
It's just,

Angela (01:33:46):
it's not a, you're describing that these, they're writing their own recipes.

John (01:33:51):
Well, it's just, they're just making this shit up.
Yeah.
It's not like, you know, thePope sends down a a mm-hmm.
Rule to the bishops and the bishop.
You know, it's not like that.
Yeah.
It's like these lunaticsjust make the shit up.
Mm-hmm.
And just because they read fromthe Satanic Bible, it's just
a book that they came across.

(01:34:12):
Yeah.
It could have been one of a hundredthousand Satanic books that have
been written over the years.
It just happened to beAnton LE's Satanic Bible.

Angela (01:34:21):
They're also interpreting it the way they want to.

John (01:34:26):
Absolutely.

Angela (01:34:26):
So,

John (01:34:28):
yeah, and so I don't know, but this was The Ripper crew in its purest
form, not four killers acting together,but one man's will imposed on three lost
souls, bound by blood ritual and terror.
A self-contained cult.

(01:34:49):
Operating unseen inthe shadows of Chicago.
So in the year between Linda Settonscreams in the dark and Rose Davis's body
found in an alley off Lakeshore Drive.

(01:35:12):
Chicago changed not on its skylineor its streets, but in the quiet
space between them, where womendisappeared one after another, while
the city slept through the sound.
What began with one woman lefthandcuffed in the weeds behind a
motel, evolved into something colder,sharper, and infinitely darker.

(01:35:36):
A group of men, three followers andone leader drifting from job sites and
donut shops into a nightmare that wouldcome to define a generation of fear.
They didn't stalk their victims for money.
They didn't kill out ofpanic or opportunity.
They killed because theirleader told them to do it.

(01:35:58):
And that perhaps is the most chillingtruth of all, how easily the human
wheel can be broken, bent, and trainedto serve someone else's darkness.
From the outside, they looked ordinarySpreitzer, the quiet one, the Coco EZ
brothers, simple, polite, forgettable,and Robin gt, the man with the calm

(01:36:21):
smile and the wife at home, the manwho preached Satan by candlelight
and wore decency like a mask.
Together, they formed a cult withoutscripture, a church without salvation.
They believed they'd found power.
What they'd really foundwas mutual destruction.
The city never saw them coming.

(01:36:43):
Different suburbs, differentjurisdictions, different names on case
files, all orbiting the same red van,the same ritual, the same absence of
mercy, and as each woman vanished.
Sutton Barki mock Delaware Davis, thepattern deepened invisible only because

(01:37:05):
no one dared to imagine it could exist.
Behind closed doors in that attic whereget built his altar and the four of them
rehearsed their blasphemy over and over.
Each ritual stripped away anotherlayer of humanity until they were no
longer men at all, but extensions ofhis will, moving through Chicago's

(01:37:27):
shadows like apostles of cruelty.
By the end of 1982, the killingshad become second nature.
Method, routine habit.
The fear was gone, the hesitation wasgone, and the ritual was complete.
For the women who crossed their path,there was no pattern to avoid, no

(01:37:47):
safe street to choose, there was onlytiming, the worst kind imaginable.
And for law enforcement,there was only confusion.
Too many victims, too few connections, anda silence thick enough to hide monsters.
In this part of the story, there isno justice yet, only blood secrecy,

(01:38:09):
and for men who believe theirshared depravity found them forever.
The Ripper crew was not finished, notby a long stretch, but by the fall of
1982, their transformation was complete.
They had become somethingfar beyond a gang of killers.
They were a brotherhood of terror,a pact in blood and silence.

(01:38:36):
Before the police reports andthe trial transcripts, before the
headlines about Satanic murder andritual mutilation, there were women,
daughters, mothers, sisters tryingto make their way through the world.
Each of them had routines, laughter,small struggles that should never

(01:38:57):
have ended the way they did tonight.
Before we close, their namesdeserve to be spoken as more
than footnotes of horror stories.
They were the reason thatthis story matters at all.
Linda Sutton.
Linda Sutton was 20 something.
A young mother raising twochildren in a hard city.

(01:39:18):
She juggled survival family, andthe kind of daily uncertainty that
doesn't leave much room for rest.
She was flawed.
Yeah,
like all of us.
But she loved her.
Her kids fiercely, and her mother neverstopped waiting for her to come home.
When her body was found behind the rarerabbit motel, she was reduced in the

(01:39:39):
papers to a quote, no one prostitute.
But she was more than theshorthanded circumstance.
She was a woman tryingto keep her family fed.
Living day-to-day in a city thatjudged survival more harshly than sin,
she should have been given safety.
Instead, she became the first victim ofa group of men whom mistook cruelty for

(01:40:03):
power, the unnamed victims of February 82.
In February, 1982, two more womenvanished into the same darkness.
One, a 30 5-year-old cocktail waitresswhose car ran outta gas on the freeway
was found discarded on an embankment.
Her body bearing the unmistakablemark of the crew's ritual.

(01:40:25):
The second, a young Hispanic womanwearing an engagement ring was found
only days later, raped and strangled.
Her body left desecrated inways too cruel to repeat.
Their names were never released.
Their stories reduced to evidence, numbersand morgue tags, but they mattered.
They laughed with friends, made plans,fell in love and expected to see tomorrow.

(01:40:49):
They never did.
Lorraine Lori Ann Borowski.
Lori Borowski was 21bright-eyed and quick to laugh.
The morning she vanished.
She was unlocking the real estate officewhere she worked a simple, ordinary start
to an ordinary day When her coworkersarrived, her shoes and her keys were

(01:41:09):
scattered across the sidewalk as ifshe'd been lifted off the earth mid step.
Her family searched for months.
They never stopped believing that she'dcome back when her body was found five
months later, buried in a shallow grave.
The pain didn't end, it calcifiedinto something Permanent.
Lori's story is one of stolen potentialof a young woman whose life was ribbed

(01:41:33):
away before it even began to take shape.
Shui mock Swei Mock was 30 newto America and working to build
a better life for her family.
She spoke limited English, but she workedlong hours at her family's restaurant,
saving what she could, adjusting toa country that promised opportunity.

(01:41:55):
The night she died, she wasarguing with her brother.
The kind of family disagreement thatfeels huge in the moment, in small, in
hindsight, minutes later, she was gone.
Her remains were found monthslater at a construction site.
Her body mutilated beyond recognition.
Sima's death carried a cruel irony.

(01:42:17):
She came to America chasingsafety and freedom and instead.
Found monsters hidingin its quiet suburbs.
Angel York.
Angel York lived, and thatsurvival is a kind of defiance.
She endured what no one shouldtorture, mutilation, the edge of

(01:42:38):
death, and somehow she still hadthe strength to crawl towards light.
Her body bore the evidencethat tied the river crew to
its pattern of ritual violence.
Her testimony gave investigatorssomething tangible to chase,
but beyond the courtroom, shecarried scars that never healed.

(01:42:59):
Survival is not the same as peace, butangel's courage gave voice to those
who couldn't speak for themselves.
Sandra Delaware.
Sandra Delaware was 18, barely an adult.
Her life was uncertain.
Her circumstances unstable.
A teenager who'd slipped through society'scracks, but she was still a kid, one

(01:43:23):
who deserved a chance to figure it out.
When her body was pulled from the banksof the Chicago River, her hands bound her
throat strangled by her own bra, and herbody violated in every imaginable way.
The brutality stunned, even hardeneddetectives, Sandra Delaware's death was
not just a murder, it was a message.

(01:43:44):
It marked the crew's complete descentinto ritualized, cruelty, and the
loss of yet another young womanwho deserved far better than to be
remembered for the violence done to her.
Rose Davis.
Rose Davis was 30, a marketingexecutive, successful, confident,
alive in the city's nightlife.

(01:44:05):
On September 7th, 1982, she vanishedfrom Rush Street not far from where
she worked, not far from home.
Her body found the next day,beaten, stabbed, and mutilated
in ways to defy belief.
In her case, the cruelty reached its peak.
Every actor reflection of powerand hatred, not passion or impulse.

(01:44:28):
Rose Davis's murder was the final echoin a summer of horror, the point where
the violence could no longer be ignored.
She was not a symbol or a statistic.
She was a woman with a career, friends,and a future, and she was taken
because four men believed they couldplay God with other people's lives.

(01:44:49):
These women, knowing and unknown, are morethan the sum of the cruise atrocities.
They were individuals who deservedprotection, compassion, and a
world that paid attention Whendanger first began to stir.
Their stories remind us that evil oftenhides in plain sight behind ordinary

(01:45:09):
faces in quiet neighborhoods, under thehum of fluorescent lights and the hum
of denial For every victim we can name.
There are others whose stories neverreach the headlights to them too.
We owe remembrance and an unflinchingpromise that their pain will not fade

(01:45:30):
into the margin of Chicago's history.
This episode is dedicated to thememory of the women whose lives
were stolen by the Ripper crew.
May their names be spoken,their stories remembered, and
their silence never repeated.
The story of the Ripper crew is oneof control, ritual, and power, and

(01:45:53):
of the lives stolen along the way.
We just walked through how fourmen twisted belief into violence,
how fear became a binding force,and how ordinary Chicago streets
turned into hunting grounds.
But before we move forward, it's worthremembering something important behind

(01:46:13):
every case, file lies a human being.
And behind every horror like this,there's a chance to stop the next one.

Angela (01:46:22):
It's a lot to take in.
John.
Hearing this for the first timetonight, I keep thinking about all
the missed signals, all the placeswhere someone might have spoken up or
stepped in, and it makes you wonderhow different things could have been.

John (01:46:35):
And that right there is why we do this.
To talk about the cases that hauntsmall towns and big cities alike,
because silence never protects anyonebringing light to what's been hidden.
That is the heart of dark dialogue,

Angela (01:46:51):
and it's why the work continues long after we stop recording.
So if you believe in what we're doingin telling these stories and honoring
these victims, you can support theshow on Patreon Coffee or through our
substack newsletter, we share extendedcase files, bonus episodes, behind
the scenes updates, and the field workthat goes into each investigation.

John (01:47:13):
You can also join the Dark Dialogue Collective.
Our boots on the ground networkof researchers, volunteers,
analysts, and listeners committedto pushing cold cases forward.
And if you want to take aneven more personal step, visit
our adoptive Victim program.
There.
You can help keep a victimstory alive through research,

(01:47:34):
advocacy, and real world support.

Angela (01:47:38):
All the links are on dark dialogue.com, including ways to
listen, subscribe, and follow everyshow across the Dark Dialogue Network.
You can find us on Facebook, Instagram,and YouTube for updates, episode
drops and behind the scenes content.

John (01:47:53):
And if you have information, tips, questions, theories, or just
something on your mind about a case,email us at info@darkdialogue.com.
Every message matters, everyconnection matters, every story.
Matters.

Angela (01:48:09):
Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.
Remember the victims learn from thepast and never stop asking questions

John (01:48:18):
because it's only by facing the darkness that we can understand it.
Until next time, I'm John.

Angela (01:48:25):
And I'm Angela, and this is Dark Dialogue.

John (01:48:29):
Stay curious, stay compassionate, and keep the dialogue alive.

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Chicago Ripper Crew — Part 1: The Van of Death | Rituals, Control & the Devil in a Red Van

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Chicago Ripper Crew — Part 1: The Van of Death | Rituals, Control & the Devil in a Red Van