Chicago Ripper Crew – Part 4: When Evil Stands Before the Bench - Dark Dialogue

Episode Transcript
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John (00:12):
By the time the Chicago River crew finally stood before a judge, the
worst of the horror was already over.
The van wasn't rolling anymore.
The attic altar was dark.
The L train still rattled overhead,but the city's monster had a
name, a face, a file number.
What nobody realized was that thelegal system was about to carve

(00:35):
the story up the same way thecrew had carved their victims.
He, by peace, uneven leaving gaps thatwould never fully heal because the
law does not speak in ritual and fear.
It speaks in charges and countsin technicalities and terms
like eligible for release.

(00:55):
And somehow the man at the centerof all of this, the self-appointed
prophet who built the cult, whoturned mutilation into worship.
Would never be convictedof a single murder.
His followers would carrythat weight for him.
In our last episode, we were in theinterrogation rooms, fluorescent

(01:16):
lights, plastic chairs, men whohad done unspeakable things, now
acting like scared kids who'dbeen caught with a broken window.
Edward Spreitzer, cracking first,stammering out, confession after
confession, trying to find the versionof the story that would hurt him least.
The Coco EZ Brothers, Andrew andThomas contradicting each other,

(01:41):
contradicting themselves, describingthe same rituals in different words.
All of Enc circling one name, Robin Gat.
He was always there in the stories.
He the one giving orders, the one readingfrom the Bible, the one holding the knife.
First, but when the talking stoppedand the paperwork began, the

(02:03):
system did what it always does.
It looked for the cleanest path to aconviction, not necessarily the most
complete version of the truth, and that'swhere this episode lives in the space
between what happened and what the lawwas willing or able to say about it.
The trials were never just about four men.

(02:24):
They were about the value ofthe women they preyed upon.
They were about which victim got namesin the headlines, and which bodies
were just case numbers unresolved.
They were about what happenswhen a justice system that's that
already discounts certain lives,tries to prosecute a cult that
specifically hunted those lives.

(02:45):
On one side, you had families who had beenliving in a kind of open-ended nightmare.
Birthdays that never came emptychairs and holidays, phone calls
from detectives that always startedwith we're still looking into it.
On the other hand, you had defenseattorneys and prosecutors wrestling
with confession tapes that didn't lineup forensic evidence eaten by time,

(03:11):
and a ringleader who refused to crack.
The result was a set of sentences thatlooked on paper like justice, and in
practice, like a fractured mirror.
One man would be executed.
One would've his death sentence commuted.
One would walk out of prison decadeslater to a world that did not want
him, but had no legal way to keep him.

(03:33):
And the man at the center, thequote, real man, the one that others
claimed to worship, would sit on aconviction that stopped just short
of murder, buried under decades ofrape, kidnapping, and mutilation, but
never officially labeled what so manybelieve he truly was a serial killer.
This isn't the episodewhere we ttell every crime.

(03:57):
We've already walked the trackswith Beverly Washington as she
fought to live long enough to speak.
We sat in the van with, withCynthia Smith as she was slashed
and thrown back into the night.
We've stood in the weeds behind amotel, staring at what was left of
Linda Sutton and tried to understandhow anyone could call that ritual.

(04:19):
Tonight we're standing somewhere else,the courtroom, the parole board, hearing
room, the tiny chapel where a stateexecutioner did his job while a family
waited outside for a phone call sayingit's over, we're going to walk through
what happened when the ripper crew wasfinally forced to answer for their crimes.
Who got life, who got death, who gotout, and who never carried the legal

(04:44):
label that matched his moral guilt?
We'll talk about how Illinoispolitics, death penalty debates,
commutations sentencing reforms,reshaped their punishment years
after the blood had already dried.
We'll talk about legal loopholes andplea bargains, how prosecutors sometimes
traded charges like poker chips, justto make sure at least something stuck.

(05:08):
And we'll talk about the part thecourt couldn't see the families who
now spend their lives writing impactstatements showing up at parole
hearings, measuring time, not inyears served, but in how many times.
They had to relive the worst day of theirlives just to keep a killer behind bars.
This is the final episode ofour Chicago Ripper Crew series.

(05:31):
The Last Stop on a Road that startedwith a red van cruising Chicago
streets and ends with a questionthe law has never fully answered.
What does justice look like whenevil hides behind everyday faces?
When a man can run a crew of ritualkillers and still duck murder
convictions when a system designedto be blind to status seems to

(05:54):
see victims on a sliding scale?
We're going to lay out thesentences side by side.
The man who died by lethal injection,the one whose death row became life in
a cell, the one who walked out undersupervision, and the one who will
likely die in prison without ever beingcalled what he really was in court.
We're going to look at how theseoutcomes became possible, not

(06:17):
just through the crime sceneevidence and legal arguments, but.
Through the quiet math of who societydecided was worth fighting for.
And when we're done with thepaperwork we're going to do
something system rarely has time for.
We're going to give the last word tothe women, not to the men who hurt
them, not to the lawyers who arguedover them, the victims named and unnamed

(06:42):
who were turned into props in someoneelse's ritual and then reduced to
exhibits in someone else's case file.
This is where we hand down our verdict,not just on the crew, but on the system
that tried them, punished them, andin some ways failed them because in
Chicago in the early eighties, evil worea work shirt and punched a time card.

(07:06):
He smiled at his neighbors, hebounced his kids on his knee.
He went to court flank by attorneysand insisted he was just a
husband, a father, a working man.
Caught up any nightmaresomeone else created.
The law gave him one kind ofsentence history and the families
he shattered have given him another.

(07:27):
Tonight, we're notchasing the van anymore.
We're standing in the courthouselooking back and asking the one
question, no verdict can really answer.
When the rituals are over and theheadlines fade, what does justice actually
look like for the people left behind?

(07:48):
Hey, Angela, how's it going tonight?

Angela (07:50):
Hi, John.
I'm good.
How are you?

John (07:51):
I'm good.
I'm good.
Yeah, I am.
I'm good.
I had really no complaints whatsoever, so.

Angela (07:58):
I can complain, but that's not what we're here for.

John (08:01):
You know, you don't want to complain to the listeners and not so much.
See if they'll send you emailstelling you what to do with your life.

Angela (08:08):
No.
'cause I don't wannalisten to, I don't wanna

John (08:12):
I understand.
I I'm not saying you have to.
I'm not

Angela (08:14):
listen to reason.

John (08:15):
I'm not saying that you should.
I'm just saying, you know, Hey.
Alright.
Well, are you ready to jumpinto this freaking mess?
This case sucks.
I don't like it at all.

Angela (08:25):
This final episode?

John (08:27):
Yes.

Angela (08:28):
Closing the book on.
I'll

John (08:30):
be glad to put these bile

Angela (08:31):
creatures.
Yeah,

John (08:32):
I'll be glad to put these freaking animals behind us forever.
So listeners, you are listeningto Dark Dialogue where we dive
into the mysteries that hauntsmall towns and big cities alike.
I'm John, and tonight we've reached theend of a story that is stretched across
blood ritual manipulation and fear.

(08:54):
The Chicago Ripper Crew isn't just a caseof sadism, it's a case of what happens
when the justice system is forced toconfront evil, wearing an ordinary face.

Angela (09:05):
Last episode, we were stuck in the interrogation rooms confessions,
unraveling lies, collapsing.
And the truth pointing again andagain towards this same man, Robin gt.
Now we're stepping into the courtroom,the parole board, and the years
that followed 'cause catching thekiller was only half the battle.

John (09:24):
What came next was a legal storm of sentencing, disparities,
loopholes, reversals, and outcomes.
The left family's asking thesame question for decades.
How did the man at the center escapemurder convictions while the men who
followed him wore that label forever?
Angela, I know thisepisode hits differently.

(09:46):
What's going through your mind?
Stepping into the finale?

Angela (09:49):
Honestly, John, the thing that gets me is how uneven everything became
once the courts got involved, when wecovered the crimes, the brutality was
consistent, the pattern was consistent.
But once the systems picked it up,it felt like the outcomes depended
on politics, timing, confessionsand technicalities, not necessarily

(10:09):
on who was the most dangerous.
And when you look at the victim'sfamilies, some of them had to
sit through decades of hearingsjust to keep these men locked up.
Some got closure, some never did.
And the one person they believeorchestrated everything.
The one everyone pointed atsomehow avoided the label.
Everyone associates with this case.

John (10:29):
Yeah, exactly.
And that's what we'regonna be unpacking tonight.
Not just the sentences, but the why behindthem, why gex slip, past murder charges.
Why one follower was executedwhile another walked out of
prison 40 years later into aworld that didn't want him back.
While the system still strugglesto decide what justice looks like

(10:51):
when the crimes are ritualisticand the testimonies are tangled.
Before we get into all thatthough, a quick reminder.

Angela (10:59):
As always, if you're watching us on YouTube, hit that
like button subscribe and tap thebell so you never miss an episode.
If you're listening onSpotify, apple Podcasts or
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Rate us five stars and leave us a review.
It only takes a moment.
It's free, but it helps to keepthese stories alive and helps
us bring more cases and morevictims' voices into the light.

John (11:21):
And if you'd like to see photos, documents, updates from this series
and for, for any show across the DarkDialogue Network, um, you can follow
us on social media or you could checkout our website, www.darkdialogue.com.
Alright, tonight we break down the trials,the sentencing, the parole controversies,

(11:42):
and the question that still echoesthrough Chicago's criminal history.
I'm your host, John.

Angela (11:48):
And I'm Angela.
And this is dark Dialogue becausethe past doesn't stay buried.
Not in a courtroom, not in a sentencingtranscript, and not in the families
who've never stopped fighting.

John (12:03):
So if you really wanna understand how the Ripper crew cases unfolded,
not the myth, not the panic, but theactual way the cases landed inside a
courtroom, you start with one year,1983, everything that would later
send three men to prison for life andone to death row hinged on a pair of

(12:24):
decisions made just a few months apart.
A single trial in September, a singleevidentiary ruling in December.
Two quiet legal moments that decidedwhat the state could prove and what
a jury would be allowed to hear.
The first of those moments was thestart of asset number one's trial.

(12:44):
That's Robin GT for what hedid to Beverly Washington.
Not, that's not funny.
The asset part is, oh, he's an asset,he's an asset king asset not for
murder because the state couldn'tmake a murder charge stick, which
makes no freaking sense to me.
I don't know, like any other case,you got like four people involved.

(13:07):
Three of them confess and saythis dip shit was also there.
Mm-hmm.
And then you have physicalevidence also substantiating.
That piece of shit was there.
In every other case.
The piece of shit is triedand convicted for murder.
How is this guy Teflon?
I mean, look at the, uh, you know,look at the Simon Schumers look at.

(13:29):
I guess, uh, Charles Manson.
I, I know, I think he got convictedof homicide, but I don't know.
It's, it's ludicrous to me and, andManson, regardless, I would have to
look, I don't remember off the top ofmy head what his charges finally were.
Let's not, he actually herefor, he wasn't actually there.
I mean, nobody said he was, they,they said that he told him to go there

(13:51):
and do it, but nobody said that heactually was there killing the people.
Right.
In this case, they said thatson of a bitch was there.
Yeah.
Leaving his

Angela (14:01):
DNA

John (14:02):
all over the place.
Right.
So no recovered breast traced back to him.
No forensic link from hishome to any of the bodies.
Nothing that could take a jury all theway from suspicion to certainty, I guess.
But they did have somethingthat the others didn't face.
A woman who survived him.
Washington had been inducted,drugged, assaulted, mutilated,

(14:26):
and dumped near railroad tracks.
And she lived, she remembered the van.
She remembered the hidden compartment.
She remembered the man.
And when she had the strength toopen her eyes in that hospital
room, she had identified Robin gt.
What'd you find out?

Angela (14:43):
Charles Manson was convicted of seven counts of first degree murder
and one count of conspiracy to commitmurder in the 1971 Tate La Bianca trial.
And an additional two counts of firstdegree murder in a separate trial for
other victims according to Google.

John (15:00):
So, yeah, I mean, he was never even accused of being at, in the Tate house.
Mm-hmm.
According to testimony, he did gointo the LaBianca and tie them up.
Mm-hmm.
And then sent the othersin there to kill 'em.
But, uh, case in point.
Yeah.
You know, he was convictedof first degree murder.

Angela (15:20):
Oh 7 8 9.
Yeah,

John (15:21):
so I don't know.
It's freaking nuts.
I itched Illinois.
Sorry to my Illinois listeners,but this is absolute insanity.
Yeah.
And this case, well,is bullshit different.
So yeah, I don't know.
But prosecutors build the casethat they could build not the case.
Everyone suspected was hiding behind it.

(15:42):
They charged him only with the countsconnected to Washington, attempted
murder, aggravated kidnapping,rape, deviant sexual assault,
aggravated battery, armed violence.
They kept the murders in the backgroundis implication, not indictment, because
they knew better than to gamble ahomicide trial with no forensic hook.

(16:02):
The irony is that this narrowcase, the one that wasn't about the
killings at all, would become thefoundation of everything that followed.
But before any juror heard a word oftestimony, the court had to decide if
Geck was even competent to stand trial.
On March 2nd, the judge ruled thathe was no mental illness, dodge, no
diversion into a psychiatric hospital.

(16:25):
He was fit, aware, andresponsible for his own defense.
The ruling cleared the path for a fullpublic trial and it shut down any attempt
at painting him is too mentally fracturedto understand the charges against him.
Pretrial motions were a fightover the sheep of the narrative.
Prosecutors pushed to include evidenceof similar mutilation attacks, other

(16:47):
women, other wounds, other knightsthat all looked eerily similar to
Washington's the defense tried to shutall of it down, arguing that it would
turn a single assault case into asensationalized mass, mass murder circus.
And to the judge's credit, he tried towalk a tightrope, allow enough similar

(17:09):
similarity evidence to show identity andintent, but avoid letting the Washington
trial became become a proxy trial forevery mutilated body found in Cook County.
Then September arrived, and on Septemberthe 20th, 1983, the trial opened in the
state's, telling Washington got intothe van as a paying date and met the

(17:31):
real G only after the door slammed shutthe gun, the pills, the restraints,
the walled off compartment in the back.
The sexual assault, the cutting,the mutilation, the dumping, the
prosecution didn't need theatrics.
The facts carried their own gravity.
They leaned into the idea that Geck wasthe ringleader of something much bigger,

(17:54):
but they reminded the jury that their joblegally was focused on this one attack.
The defense fought that narrativewith everything they had.
They painted.
Geck is a convenient villain.
A man whose old association, maybewith John Wayne Gacy, made him
irresistible to police in the media.

(18:15):
And you know, like I said in that episode,I don't believe the dude had anything
to do with freaking gacy, but whatever.
They argued that Washington'sidentification came through trauma,
pain medication, and exposure tophotos that primed her to choose him.
They pointed out over and over thatthe state had no physical forensic

(18:36):
evidence tying G to any murder scene.
And they tried to flatten theentire Ripper crew idea into
police desperation and rumor.
And I gotta say, it's too badthat DNA didn't exist then.
Yeah.
'cause they could have hung thisshit, all of it on this basket.
I know.
But the prosecution had somethingmore powerful than a theory.

(18:57):
They had Washington on the stand.
She described the van, the hiddencompartment, the restraints,
the cutting instrument.
The moment she realized that shewasn't going to get out of that
vehicle alive, doctors backed her upwith medical records near fatal blood
loss, breast removal slash marks thatmatched her story detail for detail.

(19:21):
Police testified about the scene whereshe was found naked, bleeding, dumped
like trash by the railroad tracks.
Every piece of testimony brought thejury one step closer to something
the defense could not erase.
Then came the moment nobodyexpected get took the stand himself.
It is extremely rare, mm-hmm For adefendant in a case like this to testify.

(19:47):
But this asset did.
He admitted involvement.
He denied leadership.
He denied cult activity.
He denied murder.
He said the van wasn't a torture chamberand he tried to shrink his roll down to
something that still wasn't innocent,but maybe it wasn't monstrous either.
His lawyers hammered the same points.

(20:10):
Questionable identification, noforensics, sensational press, any
narrative inflated beyond the evidence.
And while GAT was trying to separatehimself from the other three men,
something else was happening in a DuPageCounty courtroom that would decide
their fate because while Cook Countywas wrapping up Gex trial prosecutors

(20:32):
into Page were preparing for ThomasCoco les's upcoming murder trial in
the death of Lori Borowski and Thomas'sdefense team was trying to suppress the
very thing that would later define theentire Ripper crew story is confessions.
Multiple statements, multiple days,multiple agencies, the kind of detail

(20:56):
that made police believe he knewthings only a participant could know.
The locations, the wounds, therituals, the breast amputations,
the so-called chapel in GA's homewhere women were tortured and killed.
Thomas said that he wasbeaten, he was threatened.
The detective staged a mock execution inthe Schiller woods by forcing him to dig

(21:21):
and making him think he was about to die.
The police fed him information and hejust repeated what they wanted to hear.
The prosecution insistedthat he was not coerced.
They said the details were too specific,too consistent, too accurate to be fed.
They argued his statements matchednon-public information, things no

(21:43):
outsider could ever possibly guess.
And on December 4th, 1983, the judgeruled that Thomas's confessions
would be admissible in trial.
That ruling did more thandetermine what a jury would hear.
It set the tone for the entire seriesof prosecutions because with that
ruling, the courts effectively said.

(22:03):
These confessions count, they can be used.
They're voluntary, they're reliableenough, and once that door opened,
the state walked right through it.
Using those statements to prosecuteThomas, Andrew and Spicer for the
homicides they never would've been ableto prove through physical evidence alone.

(22:24):
By the time 1983 ended, the strategyfor all four men was locked in place.
GT would be taken down through theone woman who had lived, the others
would be prosecuted through their ownwords, the confessions, the patterns,
the ritualistic wounds, the story theytold in interrogation rooms that would

(22:44):
follow them for the rest of their lives.
For better or worse, this was themoment when the courts decided
what they were willing to believeand everything that came later.
Every conviction, every deathsentence, every appeal grew from the
seeds planted in that single year.
And I just gotta say, I hope to hell thatwhatever was at play in Illinois in the

(23:07):
1980s, I hope they got rid of this shit.
Because frankly, if you have torely on a defendant to confess Yeah.
In order to be able to convict them, no.
Then you might as well just giveup murder trials all together.
Yeah.
This is lunacy.
So by the time 1984 arrived, theRipper crew cases had shifted
from possibility to inevitability.

(23:29):
The courts had made their decisionsin 83 what evidence would come
in, what confessions would stand,how far prosecutors could push the
pattern, and now the question wasn'twhether these men would go down, but
how and for what and for how long.
It was the year each of them steppedinto a courtroom and found out exactly

(23:50):
what the state intended to do with them.
For Robin GT 1984 began withthe door slamming shut hard.
In February, he stood in front ofJudge Francis Mayhan to be sentenced
for what he did to Beverly Washington.
The jury had already convicted himon every count tied to her attack.

(24:10):
All that remained was the number.
This wasn't a quiet sentencingMahan flat out called him the devil.
He said the mutilation was so deliberate,so controlled that if Washington
hadn't lived long enough to identifyhim, GETT would be standing there on
murder charges instead of attemptedmurder, unless he didn't confess.
Illinois judges don't usuallyed editorialize not like that,

(24:37):
but man wanted it on the record.
This was not a man who got carried awayor lost control, or acted on impulse.
This was someone who did exactlywhat he meant to do, and then
the judge did something rare.
He built the sentence like he wasstacking bricks, one on top of the other
until the wall reached to the ceiling.

(24:59):
60 years for attemptedmurder, 60 years for rape.
60 years for deviant sexual assault, 30more for kidnapping, some concurrent,
one consecutive, A structure designedto make sure the total wasn't symbolic.
It was 120 years.
A number meant to erase the possibilityof ever seeing freedom again.

(25:22):
What made it unforgettable was thatGETT had never been convicted of a
single homicide, not one, and yet thissingle sentencing hearing, just Beverly
Washington's case, effectively took himoff the board for the rest of his life.
Hallelujah.
Thank God.
Mm-hmm.
That left the murders for theother three, and one of them

(25:43):
was about to take a shortcut.
Edward Spreitzer had watched Gex trial.
He'd watched Thomas fight theadmissibility battle, watched the state
get ready to bring him into court onfour different homicide indictments.
He knew what was coming.

Angela (25:59):
He let him watch the trial.

John (26:01):
Well, I mean, not actually watch the trial.
Oh, like, okay.
Yeah, I mean, sorry.

Angela (26:05):
I was

John (26:06):
essentially set in Excel, very

Angela (26:07):
literal there for a minute.
I was like, what?

John (26:09):
Yeah, no, this was really before televised hearings and they
didn't take him to the courtroom.
So, but I mean, he knewwhat the hell was going on.
Watch was

Angela (26:17):
in a, okay.
I was just way too literal.

John (26:20):
So he also knew what Thomas's confessions contained in his own
name, his own actions, his ownpresence at scene after scene.
Spritzer wasn't dumb.
He knew that if every one of those caseswent to trial, he'd be staring down
the death penalty four separate times.
So on April 2nd, 1984, he walked into aCook County courtroom and did something

(26:44):
none of the others had done yet.
He pled guilty.
Four murders, Rose Davis, SandraDelaware, sway Mock, and Raphael Tora.
All swallowed in a single plea.
All four, carrying life terms and attachedto those murders were things everyone
whispered about, but rarely said out loud.

(27:05):
The abductions, the sexual assaults,the mutilation, the torture, the deal
kept him off of death row for those CookCounty cases, but it also planted a seed
that would come back later because oncehe admitted to four murders, once those
convictions were on the books, theybecame the ammunition that the state

(27:25):
needed into Page County to argue thathe met the multiple murderer aggravator.
His plea didn't just end four cases,it loaded the gun for his future death.
Sentencing hearing in the murderof Linda Sutton spritzer closed the
door behind him without realizingthat he just opened another.
While those pieces were locking intoplace, another battle was underway,

(27:48):
one that would decide the fate ofthe youngest member of the group.
Thomas Coco Ellis went on trial inDage County for the kidnapping, rape,
and murder of 21-year-old LorraineLori Borowski, a daylight abduction,
not an alley, not a dark street, broadfreaking daylight on her way to unlock

(28:10):
the real estate office where she worked.
Her keys were foundright outside the door.
Her body was foundlater, partially clothed.
Stabbed so many times thatpathologists struggled to count
each wound with precision.
In the center of the prosecution'scase, the thing everything else
hung on was the confession.
The court had ruled admissible.

(28:31):
Just a few months earlier, the juryheard Thomas's words, how he and brakes
are spotted, Browski, walking towardthe office, how they forced her into
a vehicle, how they drove her to asecluded area, how they assaulted her,
stabbed her, and left her in a field.
They heard details that matched theautopsy details, that matched the dump

(28:52):
site details that matched the injuries.
But the jury also heardThomas recant every bit of it.
He told them that the police beat him,that they threatened to kill him, that
in the middle of the Schiller Woodsdetectives forced him to dig his own
grave as part of a staged execution,meant to terrify him into talking.

(29:14):
He said officers fed him details,the wounds, the order of events,
the location, and he simply repeatedwhatever they wanted to hear.
He said nothing he toldthem was voluntary.
And I gotta say, if we're talkingabout like Jesse Ms. Kelly in the
West Memphis three case or something,that's what it sounding like.

(29:35):
You can make an argument, butfor this piece of shit, mm-hmm.
You can't make any freaking arguments.
He knew shit.
Nobody could have possibly know it.
He did because he knew shit thatthe cops hadn't discovered yet.

Angela (29:49):
Mm-hmm.

John (29:50):
You know, he knew about like the breasts in the box, in
the attic and shit like that.
15 of, I mean, yeah.
It is not comparableto coerced confessions.
So the state countered with the familiarrefrain that he provided information.
No outsider could know Details nevermade public multiple statements given

(30:11):
on multiple days to multiple officers.
The detectives denied laying ahand on him, and in the end, after
hearing every word of that fight,the jury believed the prosecution.
On May 18th, 1984, they convicted him,murder, rape, aggravated kidnapping,
and just like that, Thomas becamethe third member of the crew with

(30:33):
a murder conviction on his record.
Only one question remained.
What would his punishment be?
Illinois prosecutors pushedhard for the death penalty.
They argued this murder was partof a pattern, part of a series of
crimes, more sadistic than anythingthe country had seen in decades.
But the judge didn't give them death,not yet, not for his first conviction.

(30:57):
On September the seventh, 1984, ThomasCoco Reales was sentenced to life
imprisonment for killing Lori Borowski,life for the murder, additional terms
for the rape and kidnapping, but thelife term swallowed everything else.
He left the courtroom that day with thesame legal certainty as Geck and spray.
Sir, he wasn't going home again.

(31:19):
And here's the thing that no one knew yet.
The sentence wouldn't be the last.
An appellate court would later overturnthe conviction because jurors never heard
certain co-defendant statements that mayhave helped this dip shit defend himself.
And rather than risk a retrial thatput him back in front of a capital

(31:39):
jury, he would plead out yearslater for a single 70 year term.
But in 1984, in the moment we're livingin right now, the story looks simple.
GT was buried under 120 years.
Spreitzer had locked in four murderconvictions, and Thomas had been handed
life for Lori Borowski, three men, threedifferent paths, all leading to the same

(32:04):
place the rest of their lives behind bars.
And by the end of 1984, only onemember of the crew had not yet faced a
homicide sentencing Andrew Coco relays.
But that reckoning was not far behind.
In February and March of 1985,the state finally put Andrew

(32:24):
Coco relays through the, throughhis first full homicide trial.
The case they chose was the murderof 30-year-old Rosebeck Davis, and
by the time the verdict and sentencewere in, you could see the blueprint
the prosecution was going to use onthe Ripper crew over and over again.
Build everything around detailedconfessions, back it up with medical

(32:47):
and crime scene evidence, bring in othermurders to show a serial pattern, and
then reach for the harshest punishment.
The law would allow.
The Davis case was brutal,even by Ripper crew standards.
Rose was a married woman fromChicago on September 8th, 1982.
Her nude mutilated body was found in anarrow gangway off North Lakeshore Drive.

(33:11):
She hadn't just been killed.
She'd been beaten, stabbed,sexually assaulted, and desecrated.
At autopsy, the pathologist documentedmultiple stab wounds, deep cuts
across her breasts, and a four inchpiece of wood forced into her vagina.
Those details weren't background color.

(33:32):
They were the core of the torture sexualsadism narrative the state leaned into
when they walked the jury through.
What happened to this poor woman?
The trial opened on February6th, 1985 in Cook County.
In his opening statement, assistantstate's attorney Joel Goldstein
told jurors that Andrew and cooffender Edwards Spreitzer took

(33:56):
Davis off the street and into a van.
He said they gagged her, handcuffedher, raped her, and then stabbed her
and mutilated her before dumping herIn the gangway, he described Rose
as a woman who died without dignity.
That phrase became a kind oftheme for the prosecution.
This wasn't a split second street killing.

(34:17):
This was deliberate extended cruelty.
The state built the casearound Andrew's own words.
Detectives and assistant state's attorneyand a court reporter all took the
stand and described his confessions.
In those statements, Andrew saidthat he, Robin Gag and Spreitzer
spotted Davis walking alone, forcedher into their van, raped her, and

(34:42):
stabbed her with a kitchen knife.
He went beyond Rose's case andclaimed that he had participated in
as many as 15 to 16 similar murders.
That number mattered.
It didn't just place him at one scene.
It put him right in the center of astring of attacks that investigators were
already treating as a serial pattern.

(35:04):
Over repeated defense objections,the judge allowed other
crimes evidence to come in.
Jurors heard that Andrew hadadmitted involvement in other
mutilation murders, including thoseof Linda Sutton and Shui Mock.
The state's argument was simple.
They weren't trying to tell the jurythat he was a bad man in general.

(35:24):
They were trying to show identity, intent,and a distinctive way of operating.
Women grabbed into vehicles,group sexual assaults, stab
wounds, breast centered injuries.
Bodies left in places that saidthis person doesn't even deserve
a decent resting place, medicaland crime scene witnesses gave

(35:44):
the Davis case as physical weight.
They described rose's, multiple stabwounds, the injuries to her breasts, the
piece of wood inserted into her body,and the evidence of sexual assault.
Their testimony lined up with thecore features of Andrew's confessions.
The prosecution didn't haveto rely on his words alone.

(36:05):
They can point to the body and say,this is exactly what he described.
When it was Andrew's turn, he attemptedto stand and tried to pull it all back.
He told the jury that policehad CO had coerced him.
That he'd been pressured andabused into confessing to
the things that he didn't do.
But on cross-examination, he admitted thathe told officers about participating in 16

(36:30):
murders before he said any beating began.
The state hammered that point.
If he was already describing astring of killings before the alleged
physical abuse, how much of his storycould really be blamed on coercion?
On February 11th, 1985, after arelatively short deliberation, the

(36:50):
jury came back with their answer.
They found Andrew Asshat Coco relaysguilty of the murder of Rosebeck Davis, of
raping her and of aggravated kidnapping.
In their view, his confessionscombined with the medical and crime
scene evidence and the other crimestestimony were enough to prove his role

(37:11):
in her abduction, sexual assault, andkilling beyond any reasonable doubt.
That moved the case intothe next phase punishment.
At sentencing, prosecutorswent straight for death.
They argued that Dave, that Davis'sabduction, rape, and multiple stab
wounds and sexualized mutilationput this crime among the worst

(37:33):
that Cook County had ever seen.
They reminded the court and the jurythat Andrew himself had admitted to
multiple other killings with GeckSpreitzer and his dipshit brother Thomas.
They wanted the Davis case to stand as theone that took him off the map permanently.
The jury wasn't unanimousin the capitol phase.

(37:54):
They deadlocked news coverage fromthe time makes it clear they could not
all agree to impose the death penalty.
And without unanimity, there's a word.
There is a word.
Yeah.
And without unanimity, the court wasbarred from sentencing him to die.
So the final decision failed to the judge.
On March 18th, 1985, the trialjudge sentenced Andrew to

(38:18):
natural life imprisonment forthe murder of Rosebeck Davis.
On top of that, composed anextended term 60 year sentence for
rape and an extended term 30 yearsentence for aggravated kidnapping.
Later, the Illinois Appellate Courtwould step in and reduce those extended
terms, cutting the rape sentencedown to 30 years and the aggravated

(38:42):
kin kidnapping sentence to 15.
But the life terms stood.
That's the key point for where we are inthis arc. Before DuPage County ever put
him on trial for the Lorraine Borowskicase, before there was any talk of a
death sentence out there, cook Countyhad already locked Andrew into spending

(39:02):
the rest of his life in prison for whathappened to Rosebeck Davis, 1985 didn't
just convict him, it froze his future.
It showed in a single trialexactly how the state planned
to deal with the Ripper crew.
So by 1986, the legal landscapearound the Ripper crew shifted in
two dramatic different directions.

(39:22):
In one new page, county courtroom,prosecutors pushed Edward Spreitzer from
a man already buried under multiple lifesentences into a condemned defendant
arguing that the murder of Linda Suttonwas so brutal, so deliberate, and so
consistent with his other killingsthat nothing short of death would do.

(39:43):
In another courtroom, an appellatepanel was tearing open the
conviction of Thomas Coco Ez.
In the Lorraine Borowskicase, exposing how fragile the
state's reliance on interlockingconfessions really was put together.
The year revealed just how heavilythese prosecutions leaned on statements,

(40:03):
who gave them, who recanted them, andwhich ones juries were allowed to hear.
Spreitzer 1986 Sutton trialbegan on February the 25th.
By then he had already pleaded guiltyin Cook County to four murders, Rose
Davis, Sandra Delaware, schwa Mock,and Rosario Todo, and was serving

(40:26):
life terms, but DuPage County.
It wanted its own reckoning for what hadbeen done to 21-year-old Linda Sutton.
Spritzer waived a jury for theguilt phase, leaving Judge Edward
Cowell alone to hear the case.
The state laid out the core sequence.
Sutton last seen around 11:00 PMon May the 23rd, 1981 vanished into

(40:50):
the orbit of the same people who hadbeen preying on women across Chicago.
About a week later, her body wasfound discarded and he field east of
the GR Rabbit motel in Villa Park.
Hands cuffed behind her, partially nudestabbed repeatedly in the chest, and
with both breasts removed the prosecutionargued that Spritzer, Geck and the other

(41:14):
dipshits picked her up in Chicago, droveher to the motel area, dred her into
the bushes, tortured her, mutilated her,and left her to die alone in the woods.
The center of the trial wasSpreitzer own November, 1982.
Statements, detectives and an assistantstate's attorney testified that he

(41:35):
described taking Sutton in a vanwith Geck driving her to Villa Park
and participating in her mutilation.
In one account, he said Gecksevered a breast with a wired type
device and assaulted the woundwhile she screamed the other.
He said that, get that on Dick's orders.

(41:55):
He used electrical wire from the vanto remove the second breast and that
he briefly penetrated the chest cavity.
When Spreitzer took the stand,he admitted that the November 5th
statement where he described hisrole in the mutilation was accurate.
But he tried to retreat from thebroader November 8th confession, casting

(42:17):
himself as a psychologically dependentfollower, operating under geek's
domination, not a sadist in his own right.
Judge Cal didn't buy it.
He credited the state's version of eventsfinding that Sutton's death resulted
from multiple stab wounds inflictedduring the abduction and torture.
On March 4th, he issued a benchverdict of guilty on both murder

(42:40):
and aggravated kidnapping.
When the judge read hisfindings, DuPage County shifted
immediately into capital mode.
Even with four previous lifeterms already locked into place,
prosecutors saw the Sutton caseas the one that demanded death.
Spritz are elected to havea jury decide his sentence.
That sentence hearing opened with a simplebut devastating eligibility argument.

(43:05):
Under Illinois law, a defendantcould receive death if
convicted on multiple murders.
The state introduced the certifiedSutton conviction and formal
judgments from Cook Countydocumenting the four previous murders.
Spreitzer had admittedin his 1984 plea bargain.
That was more than enough for thejury to find the statutory aggravator.

(43:27):
Satisfied the case.
Then moved into aggravation andmitigation one side portraying Spreitzer
as a sadistic serial predator whosecrimes involved abduction, sexual
assault, mutilation, and disposal.
The other, trying to frame himas an immature, psychologically
dependent young man under gex control.

(43:49):
After weighing both sides, the juryconcluded there were no mitigating
factors strong enough to block execution.
On March six 20th, they handeddown a death verdict and the judge
imposed a death sentence for Sutton'smurder, along with a lengthy prison
term for the kidnapping count.
While all of this was unfolding intoPage County, another part of the Ripper

(44:12):
crew legal structure was weakening.
Thomas Coco Rees's earlierconviction for the kidnapping,
rape and murder of Lorraine.
Lori Borowski was beingdismantled on a pill.
Thomas had originally been convictedby a jury after giving detailed
confess confessions, describing howBorowski was grabbed outside her

(44:34):
Elmhurst real estate office, taken toan isolated spot, sexually assaulted,
stabbed, and left in a field.
But his appellate lawyers arguedthat the trial court had made
a critical evidentiary mistake.
It had blocked the jury from hearinglimited properly redacted statements
from co-defendants statements that incertain places shifted blame away from

(45:00):
Thomas, or suggested that others playedmore dominant roles in Burkis murder.
I don't give a shit.
I don't give two shits.
I don't care who did what.
You are both there.
Yeah.
Hang.
Both the bastards.
Exactly.
All four of 'em.
The appellate judge agreed.
They ruled that the trial court hadaired by excluding those statements

(45:20):
entirely under Illinois law.
Defendant was entitled to presentexculpatory portions of a co-defendant's
confession as long as it was redactedto avoid confrontation problems.
Because the right was violated, Thomas'sconviction and sentence were vacated.
He didn't walk out of prison, butDuPage prosecutors were suddenly forced

(45:43):
to reconsider their entire approach.
If they retreaded him, they would haveto do it under tighter evidentiary
rules with jurors not allowed to seeparts of statements that made Thomas
look less central or at least lessuniquely culpable than the prosecution
had originally portrayed him.
In the end, based with the uncertaintiesof a second capital eligible trial and

(46:08):
the growing public scrutiny of the Rippercrew cases, DuPage County cut a deal.
Instead of taking Thomas back beforea death qualified jury, they secured a
plea that resulted in a 70 year sentence.
It kept him in prison for decadeswithout risking another appellate
collapse for the riper as a whole.

(46:28):
1986 revealed a paradox in one courtroom,the state's reliance on confessions
and prior murders made a death sentencefeel almost inevitable in another.
That same reliance cracked amajor conviction wide open.
It was the year the system provedhow powerful those confession based

(46:49):
prosecutions could be and how vulnerable.
By 1987, DuPage County was closingout the Ripper crew prosecutions
with a level of force and finality.
The earlier Cook Countycases hadn't quite achieved.
This is the year the system splitthe Coco Es brothers permanently.
Andrew was driven through a full capitaltrial for the murder of Lorraine,

(47:14):
Lori Borowski and sentenced to die.
While Thomas, whose own Borowskiconviction had collapsed on appeal,
accepted a plea that locked himin decades of imprisonment without
risking a second death penalty fight.
When the dust settled, Andrew wason death row, and Thomas had taken
a 70 year deal ending any remaininguncertainty about how DuPage County

(47:37):
intended to deal with the Brosky case.
Andrew's second Browski trialopened with a clear state narrative.
Browski disappeared on May 15th,1982, while opening the Elmhurst
Real Estate office where she worked.
Her keys were foundoutside the locked door.
Her body surfaced later nearClarendon Hills Cemetery, stabbed

(48:00):
repeatedly sexually assaulted andshowing signs of prolonged terror.
Prosecutors told jurors that Andrew andEdward Spritzer had seen her walking,
forced her into a van, driven her tothe cemetery area, beaten and stabbed
her, and dumped her body in the weeds.
Detectives described impair of nut ofNovember, 1982 confessions, one oral,

(48:25):
one handwritten, where Andrew laidout the sequence almost step by step,
cruising with Spreitzer, grabbingBorowski, driving to a secluded spot and
stabbing her until she stopped screaming.
When he took the stand, he recantedand insisted that police had beaten
him, but officers countered thathe revealed non-public details.

(48:47):
Only the killer would know.
The court allowed the state to introduceevidence from other murders, especially
the killings of Linda Sutton and SwayMock to emphasize a pattern abductions
in vehicles, sexual assaults involvingmutilation or extreme violence and bodies
dumped in isolated or overgrown locations.

(49:08):
For jurors, the similaritiesbetween those cases and Borowski
seemed to erase the notion thatthis was a one-time aberration.
On March 18th, 1987, they deliveredguilty verdicts for murder and aggravating
kidnapping, accepting the confessions,the corroborating evidence, and the
pattern testimony as proof beyond areasonable doubt that verdict pushed the

(49:32):
case straight into capital territory.
At the eligibility phase of sentencing,the state established that Andrew was
over 18 at the time of the crime and hadalready been convicted of another murder.
The killing of Rosebeck Davistriggering Illinois's multiple murder.
Aggravator.
The jury found him eligible fordeath and proceeded into the final

(49:55):
aggravation, mitigation, weighing.
Prosecutors stressed thebrutality of Burke's murder, a
broad daylight abduction, rapemore than 80 stab wounds, jeez.
And a body left any cemetery like refuse.
They reminded the jury that anothercourt had already sentenced him to
natural life for Davis's torturemurder, and they emphasized his role

(50:19):
in the broader sequence of mutilation,killings tied to the ripper crew.
The defense countered by describingAndrew as 19 at the time,
intellectually a dumb ass and dominatedpsychologically by older leader.
Robin.
Jack didn't expect that.
No, no, no.
Didn't, oh, it just pisses me off.

(50:40):
Like I don't give a shithow damn dumb you are.
Yeah.
I don't care.
Like when it comes to, whenit comes to, uh, coerced
confessions, like with Jesse, Ms.
Kelly, there's several, there'sa bunch of 'em out there.
Then you can make thatargument that they could.
It meant something that they didn'tactually do, but to say, well, they're

(51:00):
too damn stupid not to kill people.
Right.
Well, I don't give a shit.
That just means we need, they did it.
That just means we need to get rid of 'em.
They, they can't live in society.
I don't give a shit.
What the reason is that you are outraping, murdering, and mutilating women
to an extent you seldom even hear of.

(51:21):
Yeah.
I don't give a shit what the reason is.
You need to go away.
You need to be out of society forever.
Whether, whether we kill you,whether we lock you away, I
don't give a shit either way.
Yeah, but you need togo away forever anyway.
Sorry,

Angela (51:34):
I don't disagree.

John (51:36):
He was too stupid and he was dominated psychologically
by the older leader.
Robin gt, more follower thanarchitect, more pliable than predatory.
But the jury wasn't persuaded.
They thought like me.
They concluded that no mitigating factoroutweighed the aggravating circumstances.
And on April the 30th, 1987, judge EdwardCowell sentenced Andrew to death with a

(52:01):
separate term for aggravated kidnapping.
Layered beneath it, the Illinois SupremeCourt later affirmed the sentence,
and Andrew was executed in 1999.
Really?
Really.
So by the end of 1987, DuPage Countyhad achieved what prosecutors had
been building toward since the firstconfession surfaced in 1982, a capital

(52:23):
sentence against Andrew for theBrowski murder and a long determinant
term against Thomas that avoided theuncertainties of retrial the brothers.
Once co-defendants in overlappingcases now stood at opposite
ends of the penal spectrum.
One headed to death row the other, sealedinto decades of imprisonment, marking

(52:46):
the final legal separation of theirPAs in the river crew prosecutions.
Fast forward a little bit.
On March the 17th, 1999, at a littleafter half past midnight, Andrew
Coco Es became the final personexecuted in the state of Illinois.
His death by lethal injection at theToms Correctional Center marked the

(53:09):
end of a prosecution arc that had begun17 years earlier with the abduction,
rape, mutilation, and murder of21-year-old Lorraine Lori Borowski.
It also merk the end of capitalpunishment in the state as
it had existed for decades.
What unfolded that night was not simplythe conclusion of the Coco Re relays case.

(53:34):
It was the final chapter ofIllinois' modern death penalty.
In the months leading up to theexecution, Andrew's attorneys had
exhausted nearly every avenue of appeal.
They argued that his earlier naturallife sentence in the Rosebeck Davis case
should have barred a later death sentence.
And they raised the broader concernsabout the reliability of Illinois' capital

(53:57):
system, a system that had been shakenrepeatedly by overturned verdicts and
exonerations on the day of the execution.
A brief spark of hope flickered whenthe Illinois Supreme Court Justice Moses
Harrison II issued a temporary stay.
The full court dissolved itwithin hours and the US Supreme

(54:19):
Court declined for the review.
With all judicial doors closed, the finaldecision failed to Governor George Ryan.
Ryan publicly struggled with the case.
He had supported the death penaltyfor years, but Illinois's mounting
record of wrongful convictions lingeredheavily over his administration.
Even so late on the night of March16th, he denied clemency, stating

(54:43):
that Borowski murder was so brutal andthe evidence of Andrew's guilt was so
strong that he would not intervene.
He acknowledged the failings of thesystem, but concluded that certain
crimes remained within the moralbounds of the ultimate punishment.
Hours later, the state ofIllinois prepared for what
would become its last execution.

(55:05):
Andrew was moved by helicopter to theSupermax Toms Correctional Center, where
Illinois had built an execution chamberspecifically for lethal injection.
In the final days, officialsreported that he refused solid
food and drank only water.
He read from the Bible and visitedwith at least one of his brothers.

(55:25):
His demeanor in those final hourswas described as quiet, resigned,
almost inwardly focused a starkcontrast to the violent histories
that had brought him there.
Shortly after midnight, he wasled into the execution chamber
and secured to the gurney.
Witnesses later said that hesighed several times, licked

(55:45):
his lips, and seemed to whisperfaintly before the drugs took him.
At approximately 12:30 AM on March17th, 1999, he was pronounced dead.
He was 35 years old.
With that pronouncement, the stateof Illinois carried out its 12th
execution since the reinstatementof capital punishment, and its last.

Angela (56:08):
I wanna know what he said.
Happy St. Patrick's Day.

John (56:11):
That's what I would've said.
Son of a bitch.
Sorry.
I have no something for these animals.
I would dance like a freaking leprechaunon this piece of shit's grave today.
Right now, I think it's hilarious thathe was executed on St. Patrick's Day.
It's awesome.

Angela (56:27):
I mean,

John (56:27):
it's lucky

Angela (56:28):
for some.

John (56:29):
It's lucky for the rest of the world.
Lucky for the rest of the world.

Angela (56:32):
But I wanna know what he said.
They shouldn't tell us that theyseem to have said something if
they don't know what it was.

John (56:38):
You know?
I mean, I think it's great.
The dude maybe, maybe he found God, maybehe made, you know, made things right.
And if you're a believer, maybe hemade his way through the pearl gates
and yeah, all that's wonderful.
I could give two shits.
I don't care.

Angela (56:51):
Right?

John (56:52):
I care about all of the women.
I mean, whether you believe in thedeath penalty, you don't believe in the
death penalty, you're gonna have a hard,really, really hard time arguing against
it with this group of freaking animals.
Doubt.
I don't know that I could find.
A more depraved, disgusting,evil case to talk about.

(57:15):
Right.
I don't even know if it's out there.
I don't think that, and I hopeit never becomes out there.
Oh, hell no.
But you know, I don't think that we do aa, I guarantee if we do a Charlie Manson
episode, it would not compare to this.
Neither would Ted Bundys.
I mean, ed Kempers, I, I couldgo on and on Richard Ramirez.
I mean, you know, maybe like thetoy box killers, the, the sadistic

(57:40):
freaking ugly son of a bitchthat, um, killed the, the alkis.
Uh,
anyway, but the number ofkillers that out torture.
Yeah.
That get off on extendingtorture for as long as they can.
Like literally people like that.
I don't give a shit what happens to 'em.

(58:01):
Yeah.
I really do not.
Anyway.
In the years around Andrew's executioncracks in the foundation of Illinois'
death penalty widened dramatically.
13 men would eventually be exoneratedfrom death row and investigative work
across the state exposed systemic failuresfrom coerced confessions to flawed

(58:22):
forensics to prosecutorial misconduct.
These revelations reshaped the public'sunderstanding of capital punishment
in Illinois and placed Andrew'sexecution within a broader reckoning
about the risk of irreversible error.
Less than a year later on in.
And I just gotta say, I.

(58:43):
It's not funny, but your reactionsare, I mean, okay, I, I get, I can
get on board with that argument.
I can get on board with the fact that thedeath penalty is final and if we don't
know that we got it right, we shouldn't.
And I, yeah.
The false confessions and allthat kinda horse shit, whatever.
I can get on board with that.

(59:04):
And if we wanna say we're notgonna kill people in this country
anymore, we're gonna do away withthe death penalty for everyone.
Always.
Because what if we kill an innocent man?
What if we kill an innocent woman?
Mm. I can get on board with that shit.
'cause I don't want to kill somebodythat didn't commit the crime.
Right.
But I wanted to go the other way as well.

(59:26):
I want, what happens when yourelease a freaking pedophile, the
then goes out and murders babies.
What happens when you releasea rapist that then goes on
to become a serial killer?
Yeah, I mean.
This shit works and you say, um, it,you know, an irreversible punishment.
Well, what about an irreversible clemency?

(59:48):
You turn these son of a bitches outand then they go murder somebody.
That's irreversible too.
Yeah.
And preventable.
And very preventable.
Mm-hmm.
The big difference is we knowthat those bastards are criminals,
rapists, child molesters.
I mean, I can go on and onabout sex crimes because.

(01:00:09):
There is no rehabilitationfor these six sons of bitches.
They're going to re-offend.
We know they're gonna re-offend.
And how do I know that?
We know because we make themregister so we can find them.
Yeah.
When they re-offend, becausethe recidivism rate within
sexual predators is like 99%.
Mm-hmm.

(01:00:30):
No, don't quote me, butit's freaking up there.
And so I can quoting you right now,I can get on board, like I said, with
doing away with the death penalty.
But on the other side of the coin, I wantthese bastards locked away in prison Yeah.
For the rest of their lives.
And as we go through the rest ofthis episode and we learned that
one of these son of a bitches iswalking the streets right now.

(01:00:52):
No.
Well, that's, that's not okay either.
That's on the other end of thespectrum of not freaking okay.
But I will say I have noproblems with Andrew dying.
I do have a problem with Andrewbeing the only one that we killed.

Angela (01:01:08):
Yeah.

John (01:01:08):
Anyway.
Less than a year later.
He loves you anyway, less than ayear later on January 31st, 2000,
governor Ryan declared a moratoriumon executions citing the unacceptable
possibility of killing innocent people.
That moratorium remained in place until2011 when Governor Pat Quinn signed

(01:01:30):
legislation formally abolishing thedeath penalty and commuted all remaining
death sentences to life without parole.
In the sweeping arc, from reinstatementto the Coco relays execution to the
moratorium and the eventual abolition,Andrew's death stands as a fixed point.
It marked the end of one of the state'smost notorious serial murder prosecutions.

(01:01:56):
And more profoundly the last timeIllinois exercised its authority
to kill in the name of justice.
And I will just say, you couldn't havepicked a better son of a bitch to be the
last one because in my mind, all four ofthese freaking animals should be dead.
Robin could have been better.
Well, you, this is true.
Yes.

(01:02:16):
Okay, moving on.
In January of 2003, as he prepared toleave office, Illinois, governor George
Ryan made one of the most sweeping andcontroversial criminal justice decisions
in the state's history with a singleaction, a blanket clemency order covering
every condemned prisoner in Illinois, hedismantled the death row that had defined

(01:02:42):
the state's justice system for decades.
And in that mass commutation,one name carried particular
weight for the Ripper crew cases.
Edward Spreitzer.
His death sentence for the murder ofLinda Sutton became life without parole,
transforming him from a condemnedman waiting, awaiting execution into

(01:03:03):
another permanent inmate in a system,Ryan had declared two broken to
trust with life and death decisions.
On January 11th and 12th, Ryanstood before Illinois and laid
out a devastating indictment ofthe state's capital apparatus.
He cited reversals, wrongful convictions,coerced confessions, systemic errors,

(01:03:25):
and a level of arbitrariness that, in hiswords, made it impossible to quote, tinker
With the machinery of death, the clemencylist released to the public, carried the
names of over 160 condemned prisoners.
Among them was Spreitzer Edward.

(01:03:45):
His sentence, death for the abduction,torture, mutilation, and murder
of 21-year-old Linda Sutton wasconverted to life imprisonment.
No execution date would ever again hangover his head For Spreitzer, Ryan's order
didn't offer anything resembling freedom.

(01:04:07):
By 2003, he was already servingfour Cook County Life sentences.
For earlier murders, the DuPageCounty death sentence for Sutton had
simply placed him in a separate trackfrom his co-defendants, one that
would've ended in lethal injection.
Had Ryan not intervened, thecommutation closed the final door.
On that trajectory, he would remainexactly where he had been since the

(01:04:31):
1980s, a man serving stacked life termsdestined to die behind prison walls.
The impact of Ryan's decision rippledthrough every Ripper crew outcome.
It froze the group's remaininglegal landscape into its final form.
Andrew Coco Riis had been executedin 1999, becoming the last person

(01:04:52):
put to death in Illinois history.
Robin GT remained in the Department ofCorrections under a 120 year sentence
for the assault of Beverly Washington.
Thomas Coco Relay has stayed under the 70year term that he'd accepted in exchange
for avoiding a retrial and potential deathsentence, and with Ryan's pen spreader.

(01:05:13):
Once the only surviving member of thegroup under a capital sentence joined the
same permanent custody tier as the others.
Ryan's order did not distinguish betweenthe innocent and the guilty between
compelling claims of wrongful convictionand cases like spritzers, where even
appellate courts described theirbrutality and language rarely seen in ju.

(01:05:34):
In judicial opinions, the governor arguedthat the system's failings were too deep,
two structural and too unpredictableto separate one case from another.
A broken system he said could not betrusted to kill only the right people,
and so he refused to let it kill anyone.

(01:05:54):
And I just gotta say I, I don't reallygive a shit what states decide to do what.
I don't care.
Wyoming, I sure as a shitcan't say that we got it right.
We haven't killed anybodyfor freaking ages.
Mm-hmm.
But I think it should be, I don'tthink a governor should have the
authority to dismantle a penaltythat was enacted by the legislature.

Angela (01:06:17):
Is that not why their teams of people that do
checks and balances and such?

John (01:06:22):
Well, that's why we have, yeah.
Three branches of government.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, I'm all on board with agovernor having the ability to.
Offer clemency to a death rowinmate because you really have
to have that decision be held bylike that, that one last person.
Mm-hmm.
Um, if, if that's what the lawsays, then I'm all on board with it.

(01:06:44):
But I do not like any executivebeing able to dismantle the
law of state or of a country.
I don't give a shit if it'sJoe Biden or Donald Trump.
I don't want them to be ableto, with a swipe of a pen.
Mm-hmm.
Change legislation.
It, it's not designed to work that way.
Yeah.
It should not work that way.

(01:07:05):
If Illinois wants to doit, it's a death penalty.
If Wyoming wants to do it, any statewants to deal with the death penalty.
The legislature should draft legislation.
Yep.
Vote on it.
It should be passed in the house,ratified in the Senate, and then
sent on to the executive to be signedinto law and then it's official.
The idea that a governor can dothis shit I know, pisses me off.

(01:07:28):
Anyway, I'm pissed off tonight.
This case

Angela (01:07:31):
pisses me off.
And thank you for comingto John's Ted Talk

John (01:07:35):
exactly.
So by the time Ryan left office,Illinois's death row no longer
existed, what remained were life terms?
Dozens of them replacingsentences once intended to end
in execution chambers at Toms.
For the Ripper crew, it meant thefinal chapter had been written.
No more death hearings, no moreappeals addressing capital eligibility.

(01:07:58):
No more looming execution dates.
Just a collection of permanent sentenceseach representing one piece of a sprawling
and devastating series of crimes.
From that moment on the legal historyof the Ripper, crew would no longer be
measured in terms of death sentences,but in the permanence of incarceration,
Ryan's decision reshaped the entirearc of the case, cementing Andrew

(01:08:22):
as the last person Illinois wouldever execute unless they change it.
And leaving Edward Spreitzer to live outhis days under the weight of multiple life
sentences in a system that had finallyabandoned the power to take his life.
Then just when you think you're donewith these assets on March 29th, 2019,

(01:08:46):
in the quiet mid-morning hours at theIllinois River Correctional Center
in Canton, the unthinkable happened.
Don't say it.
Thomas Asshat Coco Elliswalked out of prison.
He, he says it.
He was 58 years old, 50 freakingeight years old, still way
young enough to kill people.

(01:09:06):
Mm-hmm.
The same man once indicted aspart of one of the most sadistic
murder groups in Illinois, andI would say in American history.
Convicted in the abduction, rape andkilling of a 21-year-old Lorraine.
Lori Borowski stepped into the freeworld after the state determined that

(01:09:27):
he had legally served the maximumtime required on his 70 year sentence.
There were no

Angela (01:09:34):
how, how, how.

John (01:09:37):
Yeah.

Angela (01:09:37):
How is their maximum time required in a, the sentence is

John (01:09:41):
it's 70 years not the maximum freaking time.
Time required.
Oh my gosh.
Oh yeah.
You think the same way I do.
Like if you don't want a sonof a bitch to spend 70 years
in prison, sends him to the 30.
Exactly.
But this bullshit of turningthese assholes out just ugh.

Angela (01:09:59):
And good behavior pisses me off too.

John (01:10:01):
Yeah.
How about we practice goodbehavior before we commit murder?
Exactly.
So there were no anklemonitors waiting, no

Angela (01:10:08):
calling us for judge and jury lately and, and.

John (01:10:11):
I know I get my future.
I get another free pass outta jury dutyfor the rest of my life and be like,
all right, just listen to my podcast.
Listen to the podcast.
Listen to this episode, episodefour of the Chicago Rip Crew.
And then you tell me what I think.
Yes, but, and they'll invite you to leave.
Uh, yep.
They always do.
But so there were no ankle monitorswaiting for him, no parole officer

(01:10:33):
assigned to track his movements.
The only restriction was a mandatethat he registered as a sex offender
for the first time since the1980s, a member of the Ripper crew
was free battle, fix everything.
Yeah.
The reason, laying thesentencing laws of another era.
When Thomas pled guilty in 1987 toBrodsky's murder, he did so under a

(01:10:57):
framework that allowed day for day credit.
Talk about a dumb ass stupid freakinglaw, meaning every day he served
without major disciplinary issues.
Earned him another day off his sentence.
Aw.
A 70 year term imposed under thoserules was never meant to be a

(01:11:19):
literal 70 years behind bars withcredit applied, it functioned much
more like in 35 year sentence.
And because that good time structurewas the law at the time that he
entered his plea, Illinois couldn'tretroactively change the terms.
Whatever the public thought hedeserved, whatever later reforms

(01:11:40):
tried to fix, none of it wouldapply to this total piece of shit.
So by the time he crossed the 35year threshold, the state was legally
obligated to consider his sentence served.
So, ugh.
So just so we're all clear here,this dumbass bullshit, ignorant,

(01:12:04):
nonsensical law doesn't meanthat he's eligible for parole.
It doesn't mean that he is paroled.
It means he is done paid hisdebt to society sentence served.
It's one of the dumbest freakinglaws I've ever heard of, ever.
I mean, this tops them all, even then.

(01:12:26):
So I don't know how, I don't know.
How does that freaking work?
Like if you're like Dale Wayne Eaton andyou kill your, in your, your cellmate.
Yeah.
And they decide not toprosecute you for it.
That's just what, you didn'tget a day off for that day.
Yeah.
You didn't get a gold star.
So you just gotta do 35 days in one day.

Angela (01:12:46):
Yeah.
You didn't get a gold star that day.

John (01:12:49):
Such a nonsensical start.
Bullshit freaking law.
Even then, his release didn'thappen immediately before
Illinois could discharge him.
He needed an approvedresidence for months.
That was the barrier.
Keeping him behind bars.
He was technically eligible toleave as early as 2017, but no

(01:13:09):
acceptable housing plan existed.
Not one location that satisfied mandatorysupervised release requirements while
also passing community safety reviews.
As officials later explained, heended up serving the equivalent of his
supervised release term inside of prisonbecause he had nowhere else to go.

(01:13:30):
Only after placement was arrangedand only after the state verified
that all credits and statutoryobligations had been fully met.
Did the door finally open.
On March 29th, 2019, ThomasCoco Reis was discharged with no
supervisory tail left to run nothing.

(01:13:51):
So we have no idea what happenedafter that or do we know.
So news spread immediately andnew reaction was explosive.
Lori Brodsky's, poor freaking family,described the release as a shockwave.
They had lived decades believing that thesystem would prevent this exact moment.

(01:14:11):
At a press conference held the day thathe walked, free attorney Gloria Al Allred
stood beside members of the Browskifamily, calling his release a devastating
reminder of the gaps in Illinois's law,warning that nothing legally prevented
him from contacting the victim's families.
Yeah, Lori's relatives spoke withvisible fear and anger saying that they

(01:14:34):
would now spend the rest of their liveslooking over their shoulders for them.
Justice had been delivered in 1987and completely torn out from under
'em in two in 2019 by the fine printof a statute written long before any
of them imagined the consequences.
The public concern wasn't theatrical.

(01:14:55):
Thomas's release triggered communityalerts from police departments,
including Elmhurst, whereBrowski had last been seen alive.
Officers warned residents about hishistory, about the crimes attributed to
the group that he had been a part of, andabout the fact that he was likely the only
ripper crew member who would ever rejoinsociety for many it reopened wounds that

(01:15:18):
they assumed had scarred over decades ago.
As the months passed, reporterstracked his movements across Illinois.
His attempts to settle in Aurora andthen in Peoria generated new waves of
community resistance and public anxiety.
Neighborhood meetings were held.
Questions circulated about whoexactly was responsible for

(01:15:40):
monitoring this freaking animal.
Mm-hmm.
The answer unsettling to many was no one.
His supervision term had expiredwhile he was still incarcerated.
The only legal requirementwas registration.
He could move, he could work,he could keep to himself,
all without the oversight.

(01:16:02):
Most people expected For someoneinvolved in the crimes of this magnitude.
By the spring of 2019, the storyof Thomas Coco relays had entered
its newest and strangest fees.
A former member of the Ripper Crew free,not because of a court's reassessment
of guilt or because of new evidence oradvancing innocent claims, but because

(01:16:27):
of the sentencing mechanics in placeat the time of his dumb ass plea deal.
Illinois didn't chooseto let him go in 2019.
Illinois chose to let him go in1987 when the 70 year sentence
was written into law with a clockthat would run out decades later.
And on March the 29th, 2019,that clock struck zero.

(01:16:52):
So that's what happened.
That's what happenedto the son of a bitch.
And you know, I bring up Lori Borowskifamily because, because that's
who he was convicted of killing.
But it's the familiesof all of these victims.
The son of a bitch was involvedin, who knows how many, yeah, I
think he admitted to 17 or 18.

(01:17:14):
So at least 17 or 18 women.
I mean, this is, uh, this is equivalentto turning Ted Bundy out on the street.
Yeah.
This is equal to, toreleasing Richard Ramirez.
I mean, it is absolutely absurd.
And I don't give a shitthat he's retarded and dumb.

(01:17:38):
I don't care.
This man still did it.
Murdered and mutilated women andwe're not talking about, walked
up and shot somebody in the head.
I mean, we're talking about torture blow.
You don't have to be smartto have a conscience.
You don't have to be smart to seea person or an animal suffering and

(01:18:00):
say, this is bad and I need to stop.
I need to stop whatever'scausing this pain.
Mm-hmm.
You know, you don't have to bea smart person to see someone
or somebody crying in pain andreact to want to stop that pain.
That's not, and that's nota question of intellect.

Angela (01:18:20):
Yeah.

John (01:18:20):
That's a question of humanity.
Yeah.
And if you don't have it, youare not human and I don't give a
shit what happens to you anyway.

Angela (01:18:29):
That's like the theme tonight anyway.

John (01:18:32):
Yeah.
I've gotten on a couple soapboxes, sorry, sorry, listeners.
To understand the full horror of theRipper crew, you have to strip away the
courtroom technicalities, the appellaterulings, the procedural battles, and
confront what these men actually did.
Not to who?
Not yet.
But what?
Because long before the indictmentswere organized by counties and dates

(01:18:56):
and statutory citations, a small groupof men drove through Chicago streets
at night hunting for women, and oncethey found them, the brutality that
followed wasn't impulsive or chaotic.
It was ritualized controlled,repeated their crimes formed
a pattern so grotesque and soconsistent that seasoned detectives,

(01:19:20):
medical examiners, and prosecutorsstruggled to put language to it.
These weren't assaults.
These weren't just homicides.
These were acts of torturecarried out with purpose.
Abductions from city sidewalks,women forced into vans, restraints,
handcuffs, gags, blindfolds.

(01:19:42):
Sexual assaults thatescalated into mutilation.
Amputations carried out withwires, knives, or makeshift tools.
Wounds turned into sitesof further violation.
Bodies dumped like garbage inalleys, fields, cemeteries, and
wooded strips along expressways.
Many victims died in pain thatlasted far longer than most homicide

(01:20:06):
victims will ever experience.
Some suffered more injuriesthan a coroner could count.
Some were killed in ways thatleft seasoned pathologists shaken.
Investigators would later learnthat at least some of these attacks
were framed within a kind oftwisted pseudo religious ritual.
An atmosphere of domination createdby a leader who makes sexual sadism

(01:20:30):
with mock chapel theatrics to justifywhat they were doing, whether every
man believed it, whether each oneparticipated equally, doesn't matter.
The result was the same womenabducted off the street, stripped
of dignity, brutalized, mutilated,and left to die alone in the dark.

(01:20:51):
The cruelty was not an accident.
It wasn't a momentary loss of control.
It was the point they drovearound looking for prey.
They targeted women who werevulnerable, marginalized, or simply
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They used vehicles modified forconcealment, compartments, panels,

(01:21:12):
tools kept within easy reach.
They carried electrical wire, notfor repairs, but for amputation.
They stabbed not to kill quickly, butto inflict pain and prolonged suffering.
Their violence was not merely physical.
It was psychological,ritualistic and sadistic.
This was brutality with a signature.

(01:21:33):
Every law enforcement officer whoworked this case, Chicago pd, DuPage
County Detectives, cook Countyprosecutors, medical examiners,
all would later describe a levelof depravity that felt medieval.
One detective said that the crimescenes looked like nightmares.
One prosecutor said that the mutilationswere so surgical, they bordered on quote,

(01:21:56):
acts of evil, performed with intention.
A doctor who examined a surviving victimtestified that she had lived through the
injuries that should have killed her.
Within minutes.
She survived by inches, and throughit all, the group continued night
after night, month after month.
These weren't isolatedexplosions of violence.
They were a series of hunts conductedacross the Chicago area, often

(01:22:21):
with multiple men participating.
In many cases, the only physicalevidence that remained was the body
itself and the wounds carved into it.
But the confessions when theyfinally came, some detailed, some
rambling, some self-serving, painteda picture of a pattern far broader
and more horrifying than the numberof formal charges could ever reflect.

(01:22:44):
That is the truth ofwho the river crew was.
A group of men who treated torture, likeritual, who mutilated women as though it
were privilege, who used fear, knives,wire, and domination as tools of pleasure.
Who proud the city likepredators, wearing human faces.
Their story is often framed by whathappened in courtrooms, verdicts, pleas,

(01:23:10):
appeals, reversals, sentences releases.
But before any of that, they weresimply this, a pack of sadistic cowards
who preyed on the vulnerable and lefta trail of devastation behind them.
This is the violence that wemust remember before we can
talk about where they are now.

(01:23:32):
So when you step back from the trials,the appeals, the reversals, the pleas,
and the decades of legal wrangling,you're left with a reality that still
feels impossible to justify it, four menparticipated in some of the most sadistic
crimes in the country's history, andtoday their fates look nothing alike.
One was executed, one is free, onearguably the most vicious mind behind all

(01:23:58):
of it was never convicted of murder andwill be eligible for parole in old age.
And one sits in prison for lifespared from execution, not by
mercy, but by the collapse ofthe state's death penalty system.
This is where the Ripper crew stands Now,Andrew Coco Relays is the only member of
the state of Illinois ever put to death.

(01:24:20):
He was executed by lethalinjection on St. Patty's Day.
Mm-hmm.
He was 35 years old.
His crimes were monstrous and prosecutorsargued that he was an enthusiastic
participant in the group's torture,mutilation, rituals, but the fact
remains out of the entire crew.
Only one ever faced the ultimatepunishment, and it wasn't

(01:24:41):
the man most people believed,orchestrated the violence.
Edward Spreitzer, the crew's mostactive participant, remains in
prison for the rest of his life.
He sits in a cell at atPickneyville Correctional Center,
serving multiple life terms.
Some from his Cook County plea.
One converted from his deathsentence After Governor George

(01:25:03):
r commuted every death row case.
In 2003, spritzer once faced lethalinjection for the murder of Linda Sutton.
Now because of that blanket clemencyrule, his fate is sealed not by
execution, but by the slow grind of life.
Without parole, he will die behind bars.
And then there is Captain Asshat himself,Robin Gat, the supposed ringleader,

(01:25:28):
the man whose house some co-defendantsdescribed as the site of mock chapel
rituals, mutilations and killings.
The man whose influenced prosecutors saidshaped the entire cruise sadism, the one
at the center of nearly every confession.
The one investigators believed was thearchitect of the violence, and yet he

(01:25:48):
was never convicted of murder, not one.
A lack of physical evidence kepthomicide charges off the table.
And so he was tried only forthe attempted murder, rape, and
kidnapping of a surviving victim.
He received 120 years.
A massive sentence.
Yeah, but not a death sentence,not even a natural life sentence.

(01:26:08):
And because Illinois hasparole eligibility written into
certain pret truth in sentencingstructures, GT will be eligible
for release on October 10th, 2042.
He will be 88 years oldif he lives that long.
The alleged mastermind of one of themost depraved serial torture crews in

(01:26:29):
American history could walk out of prison.
A free man.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, Thomas Coco rerelays the quieter ass hatt.
The one whose statements helpedshape the entire investigation.
Walked out of prison already.
He was released on March 29th, 2019, afterthe state determined he had fully served

(01:26:52):
a 70 year sentence under the 1980s, dayfor day bullshit nonsense dumbass system.
He served roughly 35 years, noankle monitor, no active parole
supervision, only the requirementthat he register as a sex offender.
He has since moved from Aurora toPeoria, living in ministry housing.

(01:27:13):
Unless you found something else.

Angela (01:27:15):
That's what I found.
But it also says he must check in withPeoria Police Department quarterly, and
his last check-in was August 1st, 2024.

John (01:27:25):
And so instead of, well, why do, why don't we go pick
the son of a bitch up then

Angela (01:27:30):
because he is not checking in.

John (01:27:32):
That's the other problem that I have with this whole register
as a sex offender bullshit thing.
Yeah.
Is nobody monitors it andnobody does anything about it
when they don't follow the law.
Oh, disgusting.
Son of a bitch.

Angela (01:27:45):
He moved there in May, 2024 for Aurora.
The ministry has described him asa kind and quiet person who works
in the food service departmentand performs custodial duties.

John (01:27:59):
Well, if they want him, they can have him Just keep his ass there.
And why hasn't he checkedin in over a year?
Yeah, exactly.
I got one more for you here.
And orbiting all of this history is thestrange footnote of David GT Robin's son.
Oh no.
Not part of the ripper crew, but onceconvicted of an unrelated murder.

(01:28:22):
Decades later, he spent years in prisonbefore being fully exonerated in 2022.
Ultimately settling a civilrights lawsuit for millions.
It is an odd parallel legacy.
The father accused of leading one of theworst torture murder crews in, in the
country's history, still alive in prison.

(01:28:44):
The son wrongfullyconvicted and later freed.
This is the final map of wherethe Ripper crew ended up.
One executed, one free, one servinglife because a governor, he raised
every death sentence at once, andthe alleged Mastermind, the one
the others continually pointed to,still alive, still incarcerated

(01:29:06):
and still eligible for parole.
It is a bizarre and unsettlingending to a case defined by
brutality, fear and legal complexity.
But more than anything, it'sa reminder of a truth victim's
families have lived with for decades.
Justice in this case was never equal.

(01:29:27):
And for some it neverfelt complete at all.
So when you finish tracing the arc ofthe ripper crew cases from the first
abduction to the final appeals, from theconfessions to the courtroom battles from
the death chamber at Toms to the quiet2019 release of a man who once described
ritual mutilations, you end up confrontingone of the most disturbing contradictions

(01:29:52):
in American criminal history.
Four men participated in actsso barbaric that even seasoned
detectives struggled to describe them.
Out loud, four men formed a groupwhose violence went beyond homicide,
beyond sadism, beyond anythingresembling ordinary criminal pathology.
Yet the justice system deliveredfour entirely different outcomes

(01:30:16):
from execution to freedom with theone man believed to be the architect
of the entire freaking operation,escaping a single murder conviction.
This case defies clean narrativeresolution because everything about
it bends toward the grotesque, thecrimes themselves, the psychology
behind them, the unevenness of thepunishments, the confessions that

(01:30:41):
open windows into a world almost toodepraved to believe, and the fact that.
After all of it, the state ofIllinois never succeeded in proving
a single homicide against the man.
So many investigators considered thegravitational center of this violence.
Robin Geck stands at thecore of this moral imbalance.

(01:31:03):
Even now, decades later, therecords feel warped by the
absence of a murder conviction.
Every co-defendantpointed directly at him.
Every confession placed him at the ritualcenter of mutilations and killings.
Nearly every survivor or witnessencounter traced back to his van,
his home, his influence, and yetthe lack of physical evidence.

(01:31:28):
I guess.
No recovered rests, no prints, no DNA.
No forensic anchor let him slip throughthe cracks of the homicide charges.
The man painted as the ringleader of asexual sadistic torture cult was put away
not for murder, but for the mutilationand attempted murder of a single survivor.

(01:31:49):
It is the kind of legal irony thatmakes the criminal justice system feel
both powerful and profoundly limited.
At the same time, a man accused of serialritualistic butchery will die in prison,
not because the law proved the murders,but because he left one victim alive
and she had the courage to identify him.
And then there's the psychology.

(01:32:10):
You can't study this case withoutfeeling the gravitational pole of the
psychological darkness at its center.
The crew operated not as lone wolfpredators, but as a micro cult of shared
delusion, sadism and sexual domination.
Their crime show, hallmarks ofgroup psychology gone rancid.
The diffusion of responsibility, thereinforcement of violent fantasies, the

(01:32:34):
escalation of cruelty that happens when noone in the room is the voice of restraint.
It is the kind of group pathology seenin torture units, death squads, and
other enclaves where violence becomesidentity and ritual replaces conscience.
The mutilations in these crimesfocused, repeated, intentional,

(01:32:55):
weren't random bursts of violence.
They reflected a fascination with bodilydestruction that is extraordinarily
rare, even among serial offenders.
The removal of breasts, the sexualassault of wounds, the mock religious
framing described in confessions.
These are not just murders.

(01:33:16):
They are desecrations.
They are performances of power.
They're statements of who controlledlife and who controls death.
That level of sadismisn't born in a vacuum.
It spreads.
It requires an organizing force.
A person who shapes the narrative,defines the rules, builds the
fantasy for investigators.

(01:33:37):
That person was ged.
For the men who confessed, that person wasG. For the surviving victim whose courage
saved future lives, that person was ged.
But for the law, the absenceof a body tied directly to him
meant the absence of murder.
Charges.
On the other end of the spectrum sitsHamus Coco Realis, a man who helped

(01:34:00):
carry out the group's attacks, whoconfessed in chilling detail, who once
described acts that no human beingshould ever have to put into words.
And yet he is now walking free.
Legally unmonitoreddecades after the crimes.
This is the kind of outcomethat makes you question the very

(01:34:22):
architecture of sentencing systemsand good time credit statutes.
How a man connected to a serial mutilationcrew can live in Peoria, Illinois today.
Under the same legal freedoms as anyreleased felon is something victims'
families will never reconcile.
Edward Spreitzer, multiple life sentencescondemned by a jury, saved by a governor's

(01:34:45):
sweeping clemency order, still breathingIn prison, Andrew Coco relays executed the
only one the state ever managed to kill.
And in a twist that still feelssurreal, the last human being Illinois
would ever put to death, four menbore outcomes and not one of them
neatly aligned with the nature orthe scale of the crimes themselves.

(01:35:09):
This case stands apart because itrefuses to let the darkness fade
into tiny ca into tidy categories.
It forces you to confront theboundaries between the monstrosity
and law, between what investigatorsknow and what prosecutors can prove
between what is morally certain andwhat must be legally established.

(01:35:30):
It shows how the worst crimes do notalways translate into the harshest
sentences, and how the most dangerousmind in a group can evade the very
charge that defines the group's legacy.
And most of all, it reminds us thatthese cases were never about the killers.
They were about the women whose liveswere taken desecrated and discarded women

(01:35:53):
who deserved to be remembered, not forthe horrifying ways they were killed,
but for the human lives they livedbefore the crew ever crossed their path.
Before we turn to the victim tribute,take a moment to sit with that truth.
Justice in this case wasnever evenly distributed.
It was j fragmented and shaped as muchby the limitations of evidence as by the

(01:36:17):
enormity of the crimes, but the womenat the center of a deserving story that
isn't defined by the men who ended theirlives, and that is where we go next.
Before we close this chapter, we have toturn our attention where it always should

(01:36:37):
have been toward the women whose liveswere stolen and toward those whose names
may never be recovered from the shadows.
Cases like this, cases wherecruelty becomes ritual and violence
becomes a kind of twisted creed,can pull focus toward the offenders.
But what matters in the end is notthe men who inflicted the harm.

(01:37:02):
It's the people they heard, the voicessilenced, the stories interrupted,
and the futures erased by their hands.
The women targeted by the Ripper crew camefrom different neighborhoods, different
backgrounds, different stages of life.
Some were young and justbeginning to step into adulthood.

(01:37:22):
Some were mothers carryingthe weight of entire families.
Some were women simply trying tosurvive another day in a world that
already demanded too much from them,and all of them deserved a life that
extended far beyond the brief andbrutal intersection with four men.
Who saw them not as humanbeings, but as vessels for their

(01:37:45):
own delusions and violence.
Every known victim had a name,a face, a history before the
crew ever crossed their path.
And nothing those men didcan ever take that away.
Linda Sutton had her own joys,her own struggles, her own circle
of people who loved her and stillgrieve her all these years later.
Lorraine Lori Borowski was 21 years old.

(01:38:08):
Full of the kind of youth andambition that should have carried
her decades into the future.
Shui Ma was a daughter, a sister, ayoung woman whose last moments should
never have been defined by cruelty.
Sandra Delaware was only 18.
Rosebeck Davis was a professionalwhose life should have still

(01:38:29):
been on the upward client.
Each of them mattered in ways that gofar beyond the lines in a case file, some
women survived barely painfully defiantly.
Women like Angel York and BeverlyWashington who endured trauma
so severe it would've broken.
Most people yet somehow found the strengthto live and to speak because of them.

(01:38:53):
Police found direction in a casethat could have stayed buried beneath
indifference and fear their voices broke.
The silence that the crude dependedon their courage saved future lives.
Other survivors, including CynthiaSmith, and even witnesses like Alberto
Rosario carried scars that were not justphysical, but permanent reminders of

(01:39:16):
how quickly a life can be torn apart.
They lived, but they didnot walk away unchanged.
And then there are those whosenames never made the papers.
The women known only throughconfessions or through bodies found
in places where no one should be left.
The unnamed cocktail waitress, theunidentified Hispanic woman whose injuries

(01:39:37):
echoed the crew's signature mutilations,the woman Edwards Spritzer, described the
one whose body was thrown into the waterwith bowling balls tied to her a victim.
The world never got the chanceto restore, even with a name.
And the women whose bodies werenever recovered at all lost in
the margins between confessions,rumors, and investigative dead ends.

(01:40:00):
These unknown victims matter every bitas much as the ones that we can name.
The lack of a name does notmean the lack of a life.
Each one was once.
A daughter, a friend, someone witha laugh, a nickname, a favorite
song, someone whose story ended.
Without ceremony, withoutjustice, and without the world

(01:40:23):
ever knowing who she was.
Even the cases later ruled outthe ones that sparked suspicion,
but ultimately proved unrelated.
Remind us how widespread thefear was during this era.
How easily the edges of one tragedycan blur into another when violence
becomes the backdrop of a city.
We honor every life touched by thiscase, the no one, and the unnamed,

(01:40:48):
the confirmed and the suspected,the survivors who spoke up and the
ones who never had the chance to.
And we honor the possibility, the painful,heavy possibility that the real number
of victims may never truly be known.
Because every confession hinted at moreevery pattern suggested a broader scope.

(01:41:10):
Every gap in the timeline whisperedthat the crew's cruelty did not
begin with the first body found,nor did it end with the arrests.
This tribute is not about thedarkness of their last moments.
It is about the light theybrought into the world before
the darkness ever found them.
It is about the families who stillcarry their memory, the communities

(01:41:33):
that refuse to let them be forgotten,and the truth that no amount of
horror can erase at person's humanity.
As we remember them now, we acknowledgethe full weight of what was lost.
We speak their names when we can,and we hold space for those whose
names have been lost in time.
We recognize that their storiesdeserve far more than fear and silence.

(01:41:57):
They deserved safety.
They deserved love.
They deserved years that were stolenfrom them by four men who chose
cruelty over humanity to everywoman harmed by the ripper crew.
No one unknowing named,unnamed found, or unfound.

(01:42:17):
You are remembered here.
You are honored here, and as long as thesestories continue to be told, the men who
tried to erase you will never succeed.
Your light endures.
Even in the shadow that you left behind.

(01:42:39):
Well, what do you thinkover there, Angela?
That's the end of this nightmare,but what are your thoughts?
Uh,

Angela (01:42:49):
yeah, yeah, that's just vile.
Yeah.

John (01:42:54):
Vile, vile,

Angela (01:42:56):
despicable.

John (01:42:58):
I mean, I obviously had a tremendous struggle with the sentencing part and the
way that it was all carried out, and thefact that one of these animals, the worst
story by far, I think the worst storythat we've told yet on dark dialogue.
Yeah.
Is far as, and I don't mean that anyof these lives were more valuable than

(01:43:20):
any of the rest we've talked about.
No, no.
But the depravity that wentinto their deaths is Yeah.
Far beyond anything we've talked about.
And really it's almost beyond measure.

Angela (01:43:33):
How, how do you

John (01:43:34):
measure it?
And the fact that one of theseanimals is living out there, right.
Freaking now doing what hewants, just boggles the mind.
And that Robin get, could be.
One day I don't give a shit if he's 105.
I don't want that animalout on the street.
No.
And I gotta say that that imbalancethere is hard for me to reconcile.

(01:43:59):
It's disgusting.
Yeah.
One brother was murdered.
Mm-hmm.
By the state.
And I call it murder.
'cause it is murder.

Angela (01:44:08):
Yeah.

John (01:44:08):
I'm not saying it's wrong.
Right.
It's just murder.
Right.
He was murdered by thestate for what he did.

Angela (01:44:14):
Exactly.

John (01:44:14):
The other brother is turned loose at the young age of 58.
Yeah.
That's freaking young man.
That's a lot of life.
Left hanging out at a ministry and thenyou got another one that's in prison
for the rest of his freaking life.
And an another one thatcould potentially get pro.
I mean, it is all over the map.

(01:44:36):
It's completely insane.
I have a really hard timereconciling that portion of it.
I, I don't, it's difficult,

Angela (01:44:45):
and that's not even a strong enough word.

John (01:44:48):
Yeah, it's crazy.
And it's not even like, like in theSimon suitcase, the ones, it's not
even a comparison between like theones that actually were involved in
the murders and the ones that weren't.
Because they were, uh,take Robin Geck out of it.
Yeah.
I think it's bullshitthat he wasn't tried.
Exactly.

(01:45:08):
I mean, they should have triedhim 17 different times Oh yeah.
To see if one could stick.
I, I mean, I don't give a shit if hegets, if they jury comes back not guilty.
Okay.
Next one up.

Angela (01:45:21):
Yep.
Next take a number

John (01:45:23):
and here we go.
I think that they definitelycould have convicted him, but
take him out of the equation.
You still got three thatconfessed to murder.
Yeah.
How can their sentencesrange from execution?
To release.
I, it just is insane.
I I cannot reconcile it anyway.

(01:45:44):
I ask you what you thinkand then I talk, so,

Angela (01:45:48):
but you and I agree and I don't, I don't think any different.
Like, I, I,

John (01:45:54):
it's just nuts.
There's

Angela (01:45:55):
nowhere to go with it that makes anybody feel any better.

John (01:45:59):
No.
No.
And there's no way tomake anybody feel better.
No.
Except when they announced that ThomasCoco Relay has died of a heart attack or

Angela (01:46:08):
was hit by a buzz

John (01:46:09):
or, sorry,

Angela (01:46:10):
did I say that out loud?

John (01:46:12):
Well, I you, you were nicer when I was gonna say, because my next one was
gonna be, or a family member found him.
Yeah.
You know, dealt out theirown version of Justice Lot

Angela (01:46:21):
parts of his was cut off and raped and mutilated.
Come on.
Right.

John (01:46:25):
Because I mean, I gotta say, if this was a family God knife or an I
situation here, if this was a familymember of mine, he would be a target.
I'm just saying like,he would not be safe.

Angela (01:46:35):
Right.
They're holding a lot of restraint.

John (01:46:37):
Oh, man.
That

Angela (01:46:38):
family.

John (01:46:39):
Yeah.

Angela (01:46:39):
I don't know how they're that.
I mean, I don't know whereyou harness that strength.

John (01:46:45):
I don't either, man.
I don't either.
All these poor freaking familiesin this case, I, I mean, every
case that we talk about, you know?
Yeah.
Anyway, that brings us tothe end of this episode.
Obviously, this case, it sits heavy.
There are crimes that haunt usbecause of what you don't know, and

(01:47:05):
then there are crimes that hauntyou because of what you do know.
The Ripper crew falls into thatsecond category, a level of depravity,
that it doesn't fade with time.
A case where the brutality wasn't justincidental, it was the point, and somehow
the man who built the ideology behindit and never faced a murder conviction

(01:47:27):
while the one that should have beenfirst in line for a death sentence is
still breathing, still aging behind bars.
Still eligible for parole one day.
That imbalance is somethingyou just don't forget.

Angela (01:47:41):
It's just unbelievable that someone like that could
avoid a murder charge entirely.

John (01:47:45):
Exactly.

Angela (01:47:46):
And disgusting.

John (01:47:47):
Exactly.
And at the same time, you've gotone member of the crew walking free
today as a reminder, a grim one.
That's That's so disgusting.
Yes.
The justice doesn'talways look how it should.
The only thing we can control is how weremember the victims and how we refuse
to let their stories be buried beneaththe who of this group of worthless

(01:48:12):
freaking ass ads than Joe Goman.
Right.

Angela (01:48:17):
So while we remember the victims, if you value the work that we do, if
these deep dives matter to you, pleasetake a moment to support the show.
Like the show, follow the show, subscribe.
Wherever you listen,rate and review the show.
That Five Star Rating genuinelyhelps push these cases into
the light where they belong.

(01:48:37):
Share the episode with someonewho cares about true crime, victim
advocacy, or understanding howcases like this are even possible.

John (01:48:46):
And if you want to go deeper into this community, join
the Dark Dialogue collective.
Our growing work of researchers,volunteers, and people who give
a damn about getting cases right.
Consider participating in the AdoptiveVictim program where you can help keep
unsolved and underserved cases alive.
If you want to support the workdirectly, you can do that on

(01:49:07):
Patreon Coffee or Substack.
Every bit of support helps us expandthe investigations, upgrade equipment,
and bring more cases to life.

Angela (01:49:17):
And remember.
If you have case theories,corrections, insights, or just wanna
reach out, you can always email us.
We read every message and yourinput shapes the future of the show.
And truly thank you for being here.
Cases like this are hard and it means alot that people care enough to listen.

John (01:49:34):
It really does.
And what, what we missed on that last onewas the email is info@darkdialogue.com
and you can find all, everything thatwe just talked about, ways to support
us, ways to, you can listen to all ofour different shows on our network.
Everything can be found on ourwebsite@www.darkdialogue.com.

(01:49:58):
And until then, we're gonnaput a stamp in this one.
Finally, I'm glad to be done with it.
Um, the next case that we have coming up,we're going to Florida for, so it's gonna
be, and it's a pretty intriguing one.
Okay.
It'll be a lot of fun.
But until next time, stay safe, staycurious, and keep the dialogue alive.

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Chicago Ripper Crew – Part 4: When Evil Stands Before the Bench

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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 4: When Evil Stands Before the Bench