July 14, 2025 • 58 mins
Something Big tells the story of the infamous Brown’s Chicken massacre, a brutal case that captivated Chicagoland after remaining unsolved for nearly a decade.
Customers know Brown's Chicken for its crispy buttermilk fried chicken and flaky biscuits. The Illinois-based franchise has a reputation for delicious but simple comfort food. But through no fault of its own, the words "Brown's Chicken" are also synonymous with one fateful night in January of 1993.
“A Real Hometown” is the trite but apt motto of Palatine, Illinois, a quaint middle-class suburb west of Chicago. On a snowy Friday evening, the staff and owners of the city’s local Brown’s Chicken franchise were closing up when two final customers arrived just past 9 p.m. As the night drew on and the employees hadn’t returned home, the families of the owners and workers began to worry, prompting police to investigate. When they entered the dark building, police were shocked to find seven bodies stacked in the restaurant’s freezer and fridge. The killers, of course, were long gone. In the months that followed, the horrendous story rocked Chicagoland and the case remained unsolved for nine years.
The Brown’s Chicken massacre is one of the most infamous cases in Illinois history, yet it is often misremembered. In Something Big, Patrick Wohl gives a new account of the story, taking readers behind the scenes and sharing the perspective of the people who lived it.
SOMETHING BIG:The True Story of the Brown's Chicken Massacre, A Decade-Long Manhunt, and the Trials That Followed-Patrick Wohl
Customers know Brown's Chicken for its crispy buttermilk fried chicken and flaky biscuits. The Illinois-based franchise has a reputation for delicious but simple comfort food. But through no fault of its own, the words "Brown's Chicken" are also synonymous with one fateful night in January of 1993.
“A Real Hometown” is the trite but apt motto of Palatine, Illinois, a quaint middle-class suburb west of Chicago. On a snowy Friday evening, the staff and owners of the city’s local Brown’s Chicken franchise were closing up when two final customers arrived just past 9 p.m. As the night drew on and the employees hadn’t returned home, the families of the owners and workers began to worry, prompting police to investigate. When they entered the dark building, police were shocked to find seven bodies stacked in the restaurant’s freezer and fridge. The killers, of course, were long gone. In the months that followed, the horrendous story rocked Chicagoland and the case remained unsolved for nine years.
The Brown’s Chicken massacre is one of the most infamous cases in Illinois history, yet it is often misremembered. In Something Big, Patrick Wohl gives a new account of the story, taking readers behind the scenes and sharing the perspective of the people who lived it.
SOMETHING BIG:The True Story of the Brown's Chicken Massacre, A Decade-Long Manhunt, and the Trials That Followed-Patrick Wohl
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
written about them Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good Evening, Something Big tells the story of the infamous
Brown's Chicken massacre, a brutal case that captivated Chicago land
after remaining unsolved for nearly a decade. Customers know Brown's
Chicken for its crispy, buttermilk fried chicken and flaky biscuits.
(01:00):
The Illinois based franchise as a reputation for delicious but
simple comfort food, but through no fault of its own,
the words Brown's Chicken are also synonymous with One Faithful
Night in January of nineteen ninety three. A real hometown
is the trite but apt motto of Palatine, Illinois, a quaint,
(01:23):
middle class suburb west of Chicago. On a snowy Friday evening,
the staff and owners of the city's local Brown's Chicken
franchise were closing up when two final customers arrived just
past nine p m. As the night drew on and
the employees hadn't returned home. The family of the owners
(01:45):
and workers began to worry, prompting police to investigate. When
they entered the dark building, police were shocked to find
seven bodies stacked in the restaurant's freezer and fridge. The
killers of corps were long gone. In the months that followed,
the horrendous story rock Chicago Land, and the case remained
(02:08):
unsolved for nine years. The Brown's Chicken Massacre is one
of the most infamous cases in Illinois history, yet it
is often misremembered. In Something Big, Patrick Wall gives a
new account of the story, taking readers behind the scenes
(02:28):
and sharing the perspective of the people who lived it.
The book they were featuring this evening is Something Big,
The true story of the Browns Chicken Massacre, a decade
long manhunt, and the trials that followed, with my special
guest author, Patrick Wall. Welcome to the program, and thank
(02:51):
you very much for this interview. Patrick Wall, Dan, thanks
for having me. Congratulations on this book Thing Big, Well.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I appreciate it, and I I appreciate you reading and
the response so far from people, which has been very positive.
So I'm happy to see people or it's resonating with people,
so I'm excited to talk to you about it today.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Thank you. Let's talk about your preface in this book,
and you talk about that. In nineteen ninety five, the
Brown's Chicken massacre made national headlines and it was followed
by people in Chicago Land for years. You did as
you got older as well followed this case. And you
were raised not far from where it occurred, and you,
(03:42):
in fact had been at this restaurant or ate food
from this restaurant chain. The case always stuck with you,
but the story was distant, something you had read about
in the papers and followed on the news as a child.
Tell us nearly thirty years later, what the empethus were
where this book was. Why did you choose to write
(04:02):
this book? Tell us a little bit about the origins
of something big well.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
As you mentioned, Dan, my connection to this story is
similar to that of a lot of Chicagoans in that
I have always known about it. It's always stuck with me,
and I followed it very closely over the years. I
was actually born the year after this took place. I
was born in ninety four. This took place in ninety three,
but it was around for so long, with various ups
(04:32):
and downs, with suspects, potential suspects being arrested and then
let go because they weren't the person, or eventually the
arrests in two thousand and two, the trials and seven
and nine, and then it's been in the news for
various reasons even after that, So it's always stuck with me.
And I grew up not too far from where this
(04:55):
took place in sort of a similar suburban setting in
the northwest side of Chicago, and I also ate at
the restaurants like a lot of people in Chicago. Brown's
Chicken used to be a huge chain in the nineties
and two thousands and many decades before that as well,
with many many locations, And that's part of the story
(05:16):
here too, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But I
was surprised in looking at this how little had been
written about this case. It's a very very well known
case in Chicago. There's lots of murders unfortunately that are
well known. In Chicago, you've got Gacy and Leopolden Lobe,
(05:38):
and you know in Milwaukee you've got Dall murders. These
kinds of names that are very prominent in true crime circles,
and I would say this is a case that people
talk about too, although for whatever reason, it's maybe just
not talked about as much nationally. When I started looking
at this book and looking at podcasts that had been
(05:59):
done on the case, and there had been a previous
book or two, actually, I was struck that there was
not much written about the people involved in this case,
whether it was the police who investigated it, the defense
attorneys and prosecutors who worked on these cases which took years,
or people in the community, and most importantly, the stories
(06:23):
of the victims and what others had to go through
after this tragedy had really been left out of the story.
They were just sort of footnotes in other retellings of this.
So I tried to really focus on the more human
element of this tragic tale by giving people a picture
(06:45):
of what the lives of these people before they were killed,
and tried to portray them as people rather than just victims,
as I think some true crime books or podcasts tend
to do. So each chapter in the book is based
on a different individual, and roughly the first third is
(07:07):
focused on a couple of people, but mostly the victims.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
You achieved this by saying that these people you convinced
them to share some incredibly intimate stories about you, about
this awful event that profoundly impacted their lives. So, like
I say, congratulations on being able to get that kind
of incredible access to write this complete story.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Well, it was certainly a challenge and I had. This
is my second book. My first book was about a
political campaign in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, also in
the nineties, that got a lot of attention, and it
was a very different tale. It's obviously not life and death.
So I had to really learn how to gain people's trust,
(07:57):
and I certainly didn't. There were so many people I
could have spoken to for this book. I interviewed more
than forty people. Unfortunately, some of the family members. Some
of the victims had family members who were no longer around,
and so I had to rely on certain other things
for their stories. But for those who I spoke to,
(08:20):
what I really tried to convey to them was that
I was going to write this in a different way,
focusing on their stories, and of course I talk about
the crime because you can't tell this story without saying
what happened on January eighth, nineteen ninety three in Palatine, Illinois.
But the focus is less on the gore of the
(08:43):
crime and more on telling that narrative. And it has
certainly been an interesting process and interesting balance to strike
because on the one hand, you want people to read
the book and you want it to be, for lack
of a better word, entertaining.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
But you also when you're meeting these.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
People, when you're talking to them on the phone or
getting coffee with them or getting lunch with them, you
want to be honest with yourself and them and make
sure that you're not offending them in some way either.
So I hope I achieved that balance, because that was
certainly what I was trying to do with this story.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yes, let's get to Belva and John Brown and the
origins of Brown's Chicken, and you take us to Chicago
or outside Chicago and Bridgeview. He comes to Chicago from
Indiana in nineteen thirty eight, John Brown and purchase a
small lot of farmland, and then his girlfriend at that
(09:49):
time seemed to be his wife, Belva. She had to
prove her usefulness on the farm by ringing a chicken's neck.
So just tell us briefly about the origins of this business,
Brown's Chicken, but also I ate pivotal an important character
in this story and to the business, Frank Portillo Junior.
(10:09):
How they met and teamed up together.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
And the Portillo name is named that a lot of
people will recognize, even who are not from Chicago. But
the story of Brown's Chicken as a business is an
interesting book in itself, I think, And so nobody had
really written about the story of the business how it
came to be, and I wanted to include that because
(10:35):
or people who maybe don't know the chain or haven't
heard of it. It was really, I mean huge in Chicago.
Their advertising was all over the place. They had a
very well known slogan. He's better is the was the slogan,
and people knew it because they had TV ads on
(10:55):
constantly and radio. They had franchises all across Illinois and
the greater Midwest. But it's the business started from very
humble beginnings. The Browns, John and Velvet Round were farmers
just outside of Chicago, and they put together a trailer
that they took their chickens from the farm and plucked
them and fried them up and served that to people
(11:18):
in the area, and it became very popular, and they
decided to try to open up a restaurant in suburban Bridgeview, Illinois,
and so they took the trailer set up, moved into
a restaurant, and they had sort of a chance encounter
with a man named Frank Ortillo, who was then a
(11:39):
young man, a draftsman, who worked on one of the
early restaurants, helping make some renovations. And it was a
fortuitist moment because they eventually became business partners, and John
Brown and Frank Ortillo Junior basically took the restaurant from
(11:59):
just two locations to over one hundred and fifty and
grew it into a huge corporation at that time. And
there's some interesting elements here of different inflection points in
the business. And I think the story of Belva Brown
is interesting too. She was certainly one of the founders,
but it's not always spoken about that way. So I
(12:20):
talked to her son, who told me about what it
was like there in those early days building this quite
essentially Chicago business.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
It coincides this the.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Story of the business with as you mentioned, a very
sad and tragic event. Just a couple of days before
the massacre at Browns Chicken and Palatine in nineteen ninety three,
John Brown himself committed suicide just before the massacre in Palatine,
and so it was just a very tough time for
(12:50):
the business he had, at least as his son explained
it to me, felt very distant from it and was,
I'm sure struggling with other issues. But it was a
horrible event, because you know, the death of anyone is tragic,
but the founder of the business was gone, and they
thought it was a horrible moment. But just a few
(13:11):
days later they would experience something that was even more
tragic than the death of seven individuals. In case people
have maybe recognized the name Portillo, it is because Frank
Portillo is brothers of the founder of Portillo's restaurant Portillo's
Hot Dogs in Chicago, and they started off with an investment.
(13:35):
Frank Portillo gave his brother Dick Portello, some money to
open up a dog excuse me, a hot dog stand.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
It's called the Doghouse.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
It was in Villa Park, Illinois, outside Chicago, and eventually
that business far exceeded expectations. And the success of Brown's Chicken.
Now it's a publicly serated company, there's some all across
the country, but it is the same family. So it
speaks to just how central of a business and a
(14:06):
name this was to Chicago in that time and still today.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
You introduced a couple of people that decided to take
a chance research franchises, Dick ellen Feld and his wife Lynn,
and they he had always had Dick had always had
some interest in a restaurants, so they finally researched franchises
that were available, and one was in Palatin, and so
(14:32):
Lenn and Dick ellen Felt had one of these franchises.
Tell us a little bit about this couple.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Well, Lenn and Dick Youngfeld were really an incredible couple.
They were very, very charitable. They had worked in all
different areas of the country, and Lynn was dedicated to
social services and raising the kids. Dick had been in
the seminary and then worked in politics for it time,
and he was out of work in nineteen ninety three.
(15:04):
In nineteen ninety two, when he was searching for something
else to do, he had moved the whole family to
Arlington Heights, Illinois from Madison Wisconsin, where they were from
for a previous job, and so they were looking for
something to do while their kids finished high school and
to take them in a new direction. So they found
(15:25):
this franchise opportunity in Palatine and it was a good
move for them because they had thought about opening a
restaurant as something that had always interest interested Dicky Elenfeld,
and they decided a franchise would be great because it's
a more safe kind of avenue business. There's proof of concept,
(15:45):
and so they went at it. They bought the franchise
with basically all the money to their name and money
from friends and family, and they purchased it and made changes.
They implemented program and made renovations to the restaurant and
really poured their heart into it. They were really two
(16:06):
people who were very dedicated to their community. I'll give
you one example. There was a story that one of
his daughters told me that when they were closing up
one night, none came in and justsed in bowl habit
and she asked She presented them with thirty It was
thirty coupons of for free chicken meals and they had
(16:31):
been given out by the previous owners and they were
very apologetic, but Dick said, you know, I can't. We
can't give away thirty free meals. This was from the
previous owner. But maybe maybe we can work something out
where we can give you all our leftover chicken at
the end of the night.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
And so they did, and each.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Night they would take the chicken from the restaurant and
bring it to the convent, which they would use to
feed others.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
So they were just just a small example of and
how charitable and kind they were.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
But they purchased a restaurant in nineteen ninety two and
by June had had it I think for only about
nine months, so that not even not even a year
at that point.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now they were running this restaurant and they
were very benevolent and helpful. Couple. Tell us about Rico
Solis and Michael Castro.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
So one of the most unfortunate aspects of this crime
is that there were seven victims, and two of them
were young high schoolers. Rico Solis was a seventeen year old.
He was a recent immigrant from the Philippines. He had
moved from the Philippines after his father was murdered actually
(17:57):
in Manila, and his mother had moved out to the
United States before that.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
They had been.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Separated, so he was with his grandfather and his two
sisters in the Philippines when his mother said, why don't
you come join us in Chicago.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
So the three kids immigrated.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
He was the older brother of two sisters, and they
adjusted to life in America, which I'm sure was difficult
as someone moving into a new school in kind of
the middle of the year, learning a new language. But
he was fortunate in that Chicago has a very vibrant
(18:38):
Filipino community, both in the city and in the suburbs.
And when Rico was at Palatine High School, where he
was a sophomore, he met a young man named Michael Castro.
And Michael Castro was his parents had immigrated from the Philippines.
(18:58):
He spoke language, she was. Their family was very involved in,
you know, other cultural events, and they got to know
each other. They were in classes together, and Michael worked
at a restaurant that was Brown's Chicken. He was saving
up for a car he loved, was trying to soup
up his car rather with new speakers, and was enjoying
(19:22):
the work and having the freedom that comes with, you know,
a young being a young person and finally getting a paycheck.
And so he suggested to his friend Rico that he
did a job at Brown's Chicken, and so he.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Set him up with the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
We goo met with the owners and with Lynn, who
typically handled those those those interviews and the process and
work with employees. He got to work as eventually a
cashier at the restaurant, but started off doing other things,
baking biscuits, washing dishes, the typical things you'd expect in
a restaurant. And so the Tube became very close friends.
(20:00):
They had a lot in common, and Michael certainly helped
we go just to the United States, certainly he by
the time nineteen ninety three rolled around, had only been
in the United States a couple months really, so it
was of course a tragic and short lived time in America.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
You introduce a character named Christian Lenstrom, happens to be
the boyfriend of Jim Degorski. They both went to Fremd
High School. You just introduce Jim de Gorski. He's a
six foot guy, chubby, lives in Hoffman estates tell Us
a little bit about Jim Degorski and this little story
(20:46):
that involves Christian Lenstrom and just the demonstration of maybe
future behavior.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Well, one of the things that's unique about this book
is that sometimes the suspense of a true book is
figuring out who the killer is.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
And this is a story.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
That I knew a lot of people in Chicago would read,
and it's resolved. People know the names if they followed us,
and so I had to write this a little differently,
and so Jim de Gorski and Wan Luna, the killers
are introduced early, and then the third chapter there was
a story about Kristen, as you mentioned, who was a
(21:27):
girlfriend of James tu Gorski and who he was incredibly
abusive towards. He would punch her and hit her, and
there was an incident where he basically abducted her and
took her to another town and threatened her.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
So he displayed this very violent behavior. Jim came from
a very rough house. He had a tough upgriming.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
I would certainly say his father had mental illness and
other issues, and that's built out into obviously dysfunction with
the family. So he certainly had a tragic upbringing and
That's one of the things I talk about in the
chapters that weave in his story.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
One of the things that was really fascinating to me
in writing this book is.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
When I spoke to the particularly the daughters of the founders.
One of the things they said to the franchise owners,
the unfls.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
One of the things they expressed to me was they.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Asked her, are you going to write the story of
Jim and One? And I was sort of hesitating, saying, yeah, well,
I'm gonna talk about them, so you obviously have to
to tell his story.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
And I thought they were.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Suggesting they didn't, you know, maybe they didn't want me
to or something like that, And what they were actually
getting at was they wanted me to tell it. They
wanted me to explain who the men were in a
fair way, honest but fair. It really came from view
that One and James were trouble kids, and they were
(23:05):
exactly the kind of youth who their parents would have
helped out through their work in the community, through Lynn's.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Social service work.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
And so that I found to be just very incredible
because it was not necessarily the way that I would
have reacted if someone had had murdered my parents, and
so I was just very astonished by their grace in
that manner, and that's something a lot of the families
displayed even at the trials, which I am sure will
get to a sort of preview of it. When the
(23:37):
decision the question of the death penalty came up, there
were a number of families who opposed it and even
attended rallies with the families of Juan Luna's family to
jointly oppose posing a death sentence, which again was something
that I found very astonishing, just because I don't know
(23:58):
how my reaction would be in that instant, but I
found there's to be just incredible.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
You're right that one Luna originally from Mexico, and Jim
Degorski met at the frem High School and they became
close buddies. Tell us a little bit about one Luna
and his background.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Well, one, as you mentioned, immigrated from Mexico. He family
originally came into the moved to the city, then the suburbs.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
And they were a pretty normal family.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
He you know, would work the or or do the
signs of things that kids in the suburbs do, hanging
out with friends, working jobs, just getting drunk, hanging out
in basements doing no good, but for the most part,
was not necessarily someone who got in a lot of trouble.
(24:53):
He was someone who was one of the only non
white people in his school Palatine, was not necessarily at
least friend high school where they went, wasn't the most
diverse place, and he was a little shy, I would say,
more so than Jim. Definitely, of the two, Jim was
sort of the one who was more aggressive and more
(25:15):
in charge. They're obviously both responsible for the eventual killings,
but just gives you a sense of sort of his
demeanor in all of this as well.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now,
you take us to January ninth and just the working
arrangement at Brown's Chicken, and you introduced some workers and
characters in this story. Marcus Nelson and also Guadaloupe and
(25:49):
also Tom Menez introduced these three characters and the arrangements
for working that weekend at Brown's Chicken.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Sure, so there were three other individuals who were working
that night to have passed. Guadalamube Maldonado was a father
of three. He was forty seven and slave forties. Had
lived in the United States a couple times before that,
but had moved back and forth between the northwest suburbs
(26:21):
of Chicago and Mexico, and he had moved about a
month before the killings. This was his third time back
in the United States, and he came with his now
wife and their three sons, and so it was really
a classic immigrant story of someone coming to the country
(26:41):
in search of a different opportunity for their children. And
he was a very hard working man. He had worked
at several restaurants before this, and one of the restaurants
he went to was kind of an old It was
called the Old Town in it's exactly.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
How you would imagine.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
There were, you know, old timey vibes and music there sometimes,
and it was kind of a classic American restaurant that
he'd worked at. And when he went back to see
if his job from his last stay in the United
States was available, it was nuts, so he had to
look for other works. So he eventually applied for a
(27:21):
job at Brown's Chicken. The Elon Feltz took a liking
to him. He was older than most people. They wanted
someone who was mature and reliable and he had cooking experience,
so it was a good good fit for him.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
There were other individuals working that night.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Guatela Pemo Nana was the cook. Tom Ennis was a
thirty two year old man. He was sort of quiet,
not necessarily shy, but just more discerning about who he
would speak to. Some people might call him a little quirky,
but a nice guy. He rode his bike around Palatine.
He didn't like to drive because he'd been in an accident.
(27:59):
He took his brother's car out once and crashed into
the garage and decided he wasn't going to drive anymore,
so he wrote he would ride his bike around Valatine.
He was a twin too. He was working that night,
helping with breading the chicken and baking biscuits and doing
all the other tasks in the restaurant. And then there
(28:20):
was Marcus Nelson, who was a veteran. He was a
Navy veteran. He had been on the management track at
the restaurant, and he was someone who had gone through
a divorce that certainly impacted him. He was sort of
blamed himself for it and was trying to make right
getting a job working on himself and his struggle with alcoholism,
(28:46):
and he was making very very good progress on things.
He was doing well at Brown's Chicken, and they were
sending him to training classes and things so he could
learn more about how to manage the business and was
certainly enjoying that that new experience in a new work
environment that was definitely working for him. So he was
(29:07):
the last of the seven individuals working that night.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Now the owner Lynn Eldenfeldt, she was not scheduled to
work that night, but her daughter was Dana, but she
wanted to be with her boyfriend and her parents to
meet their parents or her parents' pardon me, and so
Lynn took over the shift from her daughter Dana. There's
closing time and two men arrive at the doors. What
(29:33):
is the policy even though they were closed at the
Brown's Chicken regarding closing and the sale of chicken.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Well, they were not one to turn down customers, and
so if someone came to the restaurant and they were
closed technically it was after nine o'clock, they would still
let people in the front. Owners had a policy that
if there was still chicken under the the heat lamps
(30:06):
in the restaurant behind the counters that they would they
would serve that to anyone who showed up just passed close.
So on January eighth, nineteen eighty three, two men showed
up at the restaurant and they were let in and
they ordered a four piece chicken meal, then sat in
a booth and ate it while the people around them.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
Mopped up the floors.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
They counted the money, They cleaned the grease friars, and
continued their morning excuse me, their closing routine that night.
That is when eventually Juan Luna and Jim do Gorski,
the two men who showed up, decided to go about
killing seven people in the restaurant. It was essentially a robbery.
(30:52):
It looked like a robbery gone wrong to people. They
held people up and stacked them excuse me a force
them into the cooler in the freezer, five in one,
two in the other, and shot them in there. Then
they proceeded to pick up the bullets shells so there
would be no trace of them at the restaurant kind
(31:14):
of sloppily, took a took a mop and clean up
the blood. They shut off the lights to the to
the restaurant and then then left left them there, which left.
As time went by, of course, people wondering where their
loved ones were and why they hadn't come home.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
You say that a patrolling officer checks Brown's chicken later
on and notices that the door is open and goes
in and sees blood on a mop handle and then
calls for backup when also, though this story continues, when
Michael Castro is supposed to come home right after work,
there's some plans with his family and also another one
(31:56):
of the employees as well, the brother I believe, goes out.
So tell us what happens when a couple of these
employees don't come back home when they're supposed to.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Well, this is the first sign for a lot of people,
and the families all start wondering right away why their
loved ones hadn't come home. The mother of Rico is
worried waiting for her son, feeling uneasy, wondering why isn't there.
The family of Manny Castro goes to the restaurant to
(32:29):
check on him. His brother goes and is told that
he's probably out drinking, which they knew immediately wasn't the
case because he wasn't a drinker.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
So they begin to worry more.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Even even by that others arrive at the restaurant or
call trying to figure it out. The family of Michael Castro,
his parents go to the restaurant to look a number
of times that night because they know something's wrong, and
eventually his father is there that that night, just falling
(33:00):
close behind one of the officers as they enter and
figure out almost immediately that this is a crime scene.
It's a sad scene because of the fact that there's
they kind of know what has happened, but they won't
know until many hours later when police tell them more.
They announce officially the deaths and who is passed, and
(33:22):
so the chaos of the investigation begins. Almost immediately the
police close down the crime scene, they start putting together
a log of who's going in and out. They unferral
police tape around the scene as crowd begins to grow,
and it's at this point in the early morning of
(33:43):
now Sunday, excuse me, Saturday, January ninth, nineteen ninety three.
The media is there almost instantly as well, from the
very beginning filming taking pictures. They're very present on the scene.
This was interesting for me, just realizing how present. They
had been, because there's a video of this story almost
(34:06):
from the very beginning, like I said, of police on
the scene and a point when they still don't even
know what's going on, So they were very present throughout
this entire entire case.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
You introduce a pivotal character in this story. This Jane Homeyer,
North Illinois's police crime lab analyst where they examine toxology,
zerology and handling biological evidence. This is her first murder investigation,
only her second crime scene, but she understands the developments
(34:42):
in DNA and bags some evidence that someone at the
crime scene. Other police technicians question why she's even doing it.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yes, this is one of the most pivotal moments in
the case, although people don't realize it until much later.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
When the killers were at.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
The restaurant, they decided to eat a meal. It was
not part of the plan, and one Luna takes a bite,
they throw it in the garbage can before they decide
to kill everyone. And when crime scene investigators and crime
scene technicians and law enforcement are combing through the crime
scene and processing evidence, they noticed almost immediately that the
(35:25):
restaurant was very clean and that the garbage cans were
mostly empty except for one where there was this four
piece chicken dinner.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
So it sort of sits there for.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
A little while, and eventually Jane homer Are, the crime
scene technician at the scene, decides she's going to freeze it,
and people kind of look askance at her, not sure
what the value is. And that's because in nineteen ninety three,
distracting DNA from a saliva sample that small just simply
wasn't a thing.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
So I think common sense today you would, of course.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
You would save it, maybe you can get DNA, but
at that point that simply was not technology did not exist,
and so she was very shrewd and knew that this
was the DNA technology was advancing rapidly, and so she
decided to freeze the chicken bone, and eventually, later in
(36:19):
nineteen ninety eight, when the technology was more advanced, she
was able to extract They were able to extract DNA
from it and eventually connected to one whatever.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Even in nineteen ninety eight, they didn't have a.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
DNA profile to connect it, so it was just a
sample without a match, which took years to connect, which
we'll talk about.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
You're right that this case becomes a huge media story
nationally media frenzy, and there was a rest of a
couple suspects, one being someone named Martin Blake. And Martin
Blake had been in a form employee and police thought
he might be a disgruntled employee because he had been
fired not that previous to these to this massacre. But
(37:10):
for the sake of this story, Martin Blake is cleared eventually,
and this case with the police, Cook County and Palatine
police have no answers and the perpetrators go free.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
One of the things I really wanted to do with
this book is share all sorts of unique perspectives on it,
not just from the view of police investigating, or the
views of the families or the attorneys in the cases,
but even people who are suspects. And so Martin Blake
was the first one. His name was completely run through
(37:47):
the ringer. They had his face plastered on the front
pages of all the Chicago newspapers, which was a big
deal back then, still would be, but much bigger deal then.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
His face was the broadcast in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
His home video of him was obtained saying all sorts
of silly things, and he was made out to be
basically convicted in the court of public opinion even before
they could say otherwise. So within forty eight hours his
name is completely destroyed. And he talked to me about
how eventually he had to leave the state as a
result of this, because of how intense the the stigma
(38:24):
of being.
Speaker 4 (38:25):
That first person was.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
You also write about Frank Portillo's fate. He offers up
a big reward and wants to and thinks the police
are are lax in their investigation, and so he's very active,
but also he's trying to rescue his business from rune
as well. And you talk about Frank Portillo again, a
(38:51):
major character in this story. Tell us a little bit
about Brown's Chicken and its fate during all of this.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
In the immediate aftermath of this, the business suffered because
people were afraid to eat at the restaurants. They don't
know if it's connected in some way to Brown specifically.
And this is both an emotional quandary for Frank Potilla
because he actually knew the owners, he had helped train
them and tried to get to know all the new franchises.
(39:22):
But it's also a huge business problem, and so he
becomes someone who is very helpful to the police in
the beginning, giving them information where he can, records of employees,
past employees, things like that he sent Chicken to the
pass force that had been set up to investigate the crime.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
And eventually, as things drag on, he sort of loses
fate with all time.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Police and eventually he pushes an outside group, a nonprofit
called the Better Government Association, to publish a report on this,
to invest the from the outside. It becomes a whole
thorn in the side of the Palatine.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Police because BGA is.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
A credible organization. They do a lot of great work
and investigated corruption and other things in the city of Chicago,
and so when they decide to look into this, it
becomes a problem for the police.
Speaker 4 (40:18):
But they can't share information with an.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Outside group because it's an ongoing investigation, and so the
police are sort of sort of forced with this difficult
decision of whether or not to respond to the criticism
they have and maybe potentially give out some evidence that
might be helpful, nots giving out or just kind of
taking it. And that becomes a theme throughout this.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now you take us to episode ten of
the nineteen ninety seven season of America's Most Wanted, aired
on Sunday in May. By that time, the show had
helped to put an end to nearly five hundred cases
(41:05):
You write viewers in all fifty states, and Anne Lockett
was one of those viewers. Tell us what she saw
and what it stirred in her that airing of America's
Most Wanted.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Well, Anne had been paying attention to this story. An
Lockett was told in the immediate aftermath of the crime
by her boyfriend Jim de Gorski and Jan Luna, and
she worries for her life because she had been threatened
by Jim de Gorski that if she came forward that
(41:44):
they would kill her. And so he calls in to
check up with her over the years and kind of
keeps tabs and she knows she said should come forward,
but doesn't obviously, but she tries to drop a little
hints for friends and sort of create a space for
her to maybe come forward. She talks about the case
with friends, will take walks around the Browns Chicken restaurant
(42:08):
or around Palatine and always end up there and she
sort of asks you know, what do you think people
wonder about this case? Or do you think the families
think about it? And nobody thinks anything of her asking
those questions, she writes a letter to America's Most Wanted,
as you mentioned, laying out the everything she knows, and
(42:29):
then sort of the needle in the haystack. Obviously she
should have went forward directly to the police. That would
have been a much cleaner way to do it. It
was one sign that she had sort of sent to people.
And of course the police had to be very unique
in their approach, and so they actually worked with the
producers to put on this show to hopefully shake up
(42:51):
some new tips. But this unfortunately is lost. I'm sure
for a variety of reasons. It was probably anonymous and
and they've probably got thousands of tips. This is one
of the biggest case files in the history of Illinois,
and so the amount of information was just incredibly overwhelming
(43:12):
at that time.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
You're right about this formation of a task force to
address this, this multiple crime, multiple murders. Tell us a
little bit about who are members of this task force.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Well, the Palatine Police is their suburban police department, kind
of a medium sized suburb not a ton of crime,
but there certainly had been murders in the past.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
They bring in.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Experts, They bring in everyone you can think of in
the immediate aftermath, from.
Speaker 4 (43:46):
The FBI and profilers.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
And some of Chicago's most experienced homicide detectives to assist
with the case, as.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
Well as other people in the suburbs.
Speaker 3 (43:55):
And so the pass force is set up, run by
the Palatine Police and with the assistance of these groups,
and it balloons to over one hundred people working on
the case in the weeks following the crime.
Speaker 4 (44:07):
And I think it's important to.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Understand that one of the criticisms that the police faced
for a long time was that they were very protective
of the order the investigation. They somehow botched it because
they didn't they didn't have the resources or they know
how to do it. But the reality is they brought
in immediately everyone who could possibly be helpful, and nobody
(44:33):
was able to help because of the simple fact that
this case was only going to be broken by someone
coming forward, and eventually.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
That is that is how it solved.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
You read about Melissa Ben's and her pivotal role in
all of this. When Anne Leckett gives her a call,
and you write that Melissa sort of prize information out
of her that and wanted to express.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
And yes, and this is one of the pivotal moments.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
Melissa Benz is a high school friend of Anne Lockett
and she decides.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
To working one night late.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
She runs a landscaping business with her husband, and she
gets a call from Anne, which is normal, they catch
up once in a while. They're old friends, and Anne
starts talking about the Browns Stricken murderers, and she asks
her do you remember that? And she's very sort of
nondescript about it, and eventually she tells Melissa, well, I
know who did it. And it leads to a whole
(45:31):
saga with the police and Melissa convincing Anne that she
has to come forward and convey this information.
Speaker 4 (45:39):
To the Palatine Police, and so she does.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Her friends, her friend convinced her finally to come forward,
and they connect with Bill King, a detective who'd worked
on the case for a long long time in Palatine,
and initially he's sort of not skeptical is the right word,
but he had seen it all about that point. And
as I mentioned, this is one of the largest cases
in the history of the state, and so they've gotten
calls from all sorts of people, so he approaches it
(46:05):
with a healthy amount of skepticism. But when he speaks
with in Lockett, he gets a detail that is unique,
and that is that one of the victims threw up
French fries at the scene after they were killed. It's
a gruesome detail, but it's one that the police had
never released publicly, and there's no way that anyone else
(46:25):
could have known about it. So they know that ant
Lockett is telling the truth and that busts the case
wide open. The police eventually are able to get a
DNA sample from Wan Luna because he had worked at
the restaurant before. They just kind of play it off as, oh,
we're just going back to everyone again who worked there.
They get a sample from Jim do Gorski, asking him
(46:47):
to come to the police station when he's in town
from Indianapolis, where he lived at that point, and they're
able to connect the DNA from the chicken bones that
they rose in nineteen ninety three, extracted a sample from
the nineteen ninety eight and then in two thousand and
two gotten a match between the chicken and o Wan Luna,
(47:07):
which eventually leads to their arrests. One of the biggest
stories resolved in Chicago of that last decade, and.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
It really all come down to that preservation of the
chicken bones by Jane han Eire and her having the
foresight of DNA advancements in the future.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
Absolutely otherwise it would not have been solved.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
And one of the interesting things that one of the
sisters of the victims told me was a Locket was
criticized for not coming forward earlier, and we all hoped
that we would have, in a similar situation come forward earlier.
But she said to me, you know, it probably worked
out the way it was supposed to because had she
come forward earlier, they would not have had DNA evidence
(47:55):
to support her claim, right, and they also could just
completely assassinate her character her. She was a very imperfect witness,
I think, a good person who did the right thing
in the end, but at that time had had been
in a mental facility, had struggled with drugs and alcohol and.
Speaker 4 (48:13):
The sort of things that at a trial don't necessarily
look good or speak well. So she was talmage.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
So in the end it sort of worked out the
way it should because there was support for the story
that she told police in the form of DNA evidence.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Now, when you introduced another crucial character as Sergeant Bill King,
when these two one Luna and Jim de Gorski, are interviewed,
are interrogated. When they're interrogated, it isn't too hard to
get those people, these two killers, to admit their involvement.
(48:55):
It's a different story at the trial once they get lawyers,
and of course they plead not guilty. But initially these
people think that the gig is up and are willing
to talk to police, aren't they?
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Yes, and both wan Laya confesses on tape, and it's
an extensive tape. Illinois at that point had required confessions
to be taped. Jim de Gorski confesses immediately when he's
arrested in the says something I'm paraphrasing along lines says,
well you finally finally, or it took I'm surprised it
(49:28):
took you this long, essentially, and then he talks about
it in the car with with the police on the
ride home from Indianapolis, where he lived at that point,
back to a police station in Illinois to be interrogated,
and he openly said that that they did it and confesses.
So obviously the story has changed later on and as
you can expect, but he does somewhat confess on tape
(49:52):
as well. He convinces to police in the station and
then when they want to record it, he sort of
have heartedly does it, which becomes an issue at trial later.
But they both did admit to it almost immediately after
being arrested.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
Because it's a capital punishment case, of course, there are
excellent lawyers that vibe for to be able to represent
these two characters, these two defendants. Joy ellen Felt, though,
said that the parents had taught them that they would
be firmly opposed to the death penalty. The death penalty
(50:30):
was able to be had in Chicago at that time.
Tell us what the jurors had in terms of their decision.
You write about unanimity being essential for this three phases
of a trial in this capital punishment case.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Yes, so there are three phases in the death penalty
cases in Illinois. There's guilt and innocence.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
There's the.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Eligibility phase where someone is ruled eligible or eligible for
the death penalty, and then there is sentencing, which in
the third phase is essentially deciding whether to sentence someone
for a murder like this to life in prison or.
Speaker 4 (51:14):
To death to give them capital punishment.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
So this was a very closely watched case because Illinois
had at the turn of the century put a moratorium
on the practice, and a number of governors in Illinois,
Republican and Democratic, had commuted sentences and at that time
rob Igoivitch, who was governor who I'm sure people know,
(51:38):
had kept a moratorium in place, but it was still
a sentence that could be imposed, and if a different
governor was an employee a launch, then it was possible
for the death penalty being posed. So this was very
closely watched, and it was also a case that was
unique in that some people in Illinois attorneys viewed it
(52:00):
as an opportunity to potentially outlaw the death penalty in Illinois.
So that becomes a flashpoint in this case. But as
I mentioned, and you allude to, one of the unique
aspects of this is that some of the family as
now ultimate jurors don't see that because it's outside the
(52:23):
courthouse and they're sequestered.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
But I think it's.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
A unique aspect of this, and so at trial, Juan
Luna and mc gorski are put on trial in two
thousand and seven and two thousand and nine, respectively, and
it becomes a very closely watched event. They're both ruled
eligible for the death penalty and guilty of the murder
(52:46):
of these seven individuals, but it becomes a question of
whether or not to sentence them to death, and this
is something that obviously jurors agonized over. I spoke to
a jur who talked to me about what it was
like to be in that room and make that decision. Ultimately,
with the first trial with Wanna, there was one woman
who was a holdout to very emotional decision, but she
(53:07):
stuck to her ground with that, and the same with
de Gorski. There were a couple more jurors who disagreed,
but without a unanimous decision on that, they're sentenced to
life and sent to a stateful prison. But it's a
unique case in number of ways because some of the witnesses.
You obviously have the police. You've got people like doctor
Henry Lee, who is a very well known forensics expert.
(53:31):
People might know Hi from the oj trial and the
staircase case, and I talked to him about it and
what it was like to testify and be a part
of this, and he was certainly a character in this
and provided some moments of levity in an otherwise very
tense trial. One of the I think most intense portions
(53:53):
of this trial comes after their sentenced exees me after
their found guilty. In the eligible there's the mitigation phase
where statements are read by ones both the victims families
and then of course the killers themselves too, to sort.
Speaker 4 (54:11):
Of sympathy if you will.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
I'm kind of boiling it down, but from jurors to
not sentenced them to death or to you know, to
give them a lighter sentence. And it's very emotional to
hear the stories of the people who who passed and
the courage they have standing up there and.
Speaker 4 (54:27):
Having to do that. So it was a Sometimes.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Trials are hard to write about and make interesting, so
I try to weave in the most interesting parts and
keep it, keep it flowing well. But it was certainly
very helpful for understanding the stories of people as well.
Through that testimony, You're.
Speaker 2 (54:47):
Right about and locket, and what we didn't mention was
that she had been contacted when she was at this
at a hospital, a psychiatric hospital and given the news
that Jim de Gorski, her boyfriend, had done something big
him and Wan and then she was later in on
the details of something Big. City officials decide that Anne
(55:11):
Lockett and Melissa Bens would split the almost one hundred
thousand dollar reward. You write in the very end that
really the only thing something big, something big would really
apply to Michael Castro's goal of joining the military. Something
big was the story of Rico Solis and his transition
(55:31):
to life in America. Something big was Marcus Nelson's deep
love for his daughter. Something big was Tom Menne's gentleness
and adoration for his family. And something big was the
dedication Lynn Ellenfeld had for helping others, and Dick ellen
felt the chance he took at opening a restaurant in
(55:54):
hopes of providing financial stability for his family. And something
big was Loupe Maldonado's dream of a better life for
his children in Chicago. You also say that in acknowledgements
that you want to thank authors Dennis Sheer The Last
Meal and Morris Posley's The Brown's Chicken Massacre and the
(56:17):
series forty four Minutes just give us a little bit
about that initial goal to present this book as an
honor to these victims and their families. Just tell us
something insummation, please.
Speaker 3 (56:36):
Well, the headle of the book is something big, and
that is the excuse or the motive that the killers
give for their actions that day. They said that they
decided to kill seven people because they wanted to do
something big, and to this day, no one really understands
exactly what that means, and it's sort of a very
(56:57):
unsettling end to this. So I tried to sort of
turn that on its head in the end of the
book and talk about what was really big, like you said,
and that was the dreams and aspirations of people who
were just seven hardworking, very decent individuals past for no
reason other than just a very heinous and selfish, horrendous act.
(57:22):
So I hope that it ties the focus back and
the end nicely to others involved in this case, and
a focus that is different than how the story has
been told in the past.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
Absolutely, I want to thank you Patrick Woolf for coming
on and talking about your extraordinary something Big, the true
story of the Browns Chicken massacre, a decade long manhunt,
and the trials that followed. Thank you so much. For
this interview. For those people that might want to find
out more information about this story in this book, and
(57:55):
do you have a website or social media that you
could refer us to.
Speaker 3 (58:00):
I do. You can find more information on Patrickwall dot
com and my social media is there as well, so
check it out.
Speaker 2 (58:07):
Thank you so much, Patrick Wool. Something Big the true
story of the Browns Chicken massacre, a decade long manhunt,
and the trials that followed. Thank you so much for
this interview, Patrick Wool, have a great evening and good night,
good night,
You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
written about them Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good Evening, Something Big tells the story of the infamous
Brown's Chicken massacre, a brutal case that captivated Chicago land
after remaining unsolved for nearly a decade. Customers know Brown's
Chicken for its crispy, buttermilk fried chicken and flaky biscuits.
(01:00):
The Illinois based franchise as a reputation for delicious but
simple comfort food, but through no fault of its own,
the words Brown's Chicken are also synonymous with One Faithful
Night in January of nineteen ninety three. A real hometown
is the trite but apt motto of Palatine, Illinois, a quaint,
(01:23):
middle class suburb west of Chicago. On a snowy Friday evening,
the staff and owners of the city's local Brown's Chicken
franchise were closing up when two final customers arrived just
past nine p m. As the night drew on and
the employees hadn't returned home. The family of the owners
(01:45):
and workers began to worry, prompting police to investigate. When
they entered the dark building, police were shocked to find
seven bodies stacked in the restaurant's freezer and fridge. The
killers of corps were long gone. In the months that followed,
the horrendous story rock Chicago Land, and the case remained
(02:08):
unsolved for nine years. The Brown's Chicken Massacre is one
of the most infamous cases in Illinois history, yet it
is often misremembered. In Something Big, Patrick Wall gives a
new account of the story, taking readers behind the scenes
(02:28):
and sharing the perspective of the people who lived it.
The book they were featuring this evening is Something Big,
The true story of the Browns Chicken Massacre, a decade
long manhunt, and the trials that followed, with my special
guest author, Patrick Wall. Welcome to the program, and thank
(02:51):
you very much for this interview. Patrick Wall, Dan, thanks
for having me. Congratulations on this book Thing Big, Well.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I appreciate it, and I I appreciate you reading and
the response so far from people, which has been very positive.
So I'm happy to see people or it's resonating with people,
so I'm excited to talk to you about it today.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Thank you. Let's talk about your preface in this book,
and you talk about that. In nineteen ninety five, the
Brown's Chicken massacre made national headlines and it was followed
by people in Chicago Land for years. You did as
you got older as well followed this case. And you
were raised not far from where it occurred, and you,
(03:42):
in fact had been at this restaurant or ate food
from this restaurant chain. The case always stuck with you,
but the story was distant, something you had read about
in the papers and followed on the news as a child.
Tell us nearly thirty years later, what the empethus were
where this book was. Why did you choose to write
(04:02):
this book? Tell us a little bit about the origins
of something big well.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
As you mentioned, Dan, my connection to this story is
similar to that of a lot of Chicagoans in that
I have always known about it. It's always stuck with me,
and I followed it very closely over the years. I
was actually born the year after this took place. I
was born in ninety four. This took place in ninety three,
but it was around for so long, with various ups
(04:32):
and downs, with suspects, potential suspects being arrested and then
let go because they weren't the person, or eventually the
arrests in two thousand and two, the trials and seven
and nine, and then it's been in the news for
various reasons even after that, So it's always stuck with me.
And I grew up not too far from where this
(04:55):
took place in sort of a similar suburban setting in
the northwest side of Chicago, and I also ate at
the restaurants like a lot of people in Chicago. Brown's
Chicken used to be a huge chain in the nineties
and two thousands and many decades before that as well,
with many many locations, And that's part of the story
(05:16):
here too, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But I
was surprised in looking at this how little had been
written about this case. It's a very very well known
case in Chicago. There's lots of murders unfortunately that are
well known. In Chicago, you've got Gacy and Leopolden Lobe,
(05:38):
and you know in Milwaukee you've got Dall murders. These
kinds of names that are very prominent in true crime circles,
and I would say this is a case that people
talk about too, although for whatever reason, it's maybe just
not talked about as much nationally. When I started looking
at this book and looking at podcasts that had been
(05:59):
done on the case, and there had been a previous
book or two, actually, I was struck that there was
not much written about the people involved in this case,
whether it was the police who investigated it, the defense
attorneys and prosecutors who worked on these cases which took years,
or people in the community, and most importantly, the stories
(06:23):
of the victims and what others had to go through
after this tragedy had really been left out of the story.
They were just sort of footnotes in other retellings of this.
So I tried to really focus on the more human
element of this tragic tale by giving people a picture
(06:45):
of what the lives of these people before they were killed,
and tried to portray them as people rather than just victims,
as I think some true crime books or podcasts tend
to do. So each chapter in the book is based
on a different individual, and roughly the first third is
(07:07):
focused on a couple of people, but mostly the victims.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
You achieved this by saying that these people you convinced
them to share some incredibly intimate stories about you, about
this awful event that profoundly impacted their lives. So, like
I say, congratulations on being able to get that kind
of incredible access to write this complete story.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Well, it was certainly a challenge and I had. This
is my second book. My first book was about a
political campaign in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, also in
the nineties, that got a lot of attention, and it
was a very different tale. It's obviously not life and death.
So I had to really learn how to gain people's trust,
(07:57):
and I certainly didn't. There were so many people I
could have spoken to for this book. I interviewed more
than forty people. Unfortunately, some of the family members. Some
of the victims had family members who were no longer around,
and so I had to rely on certain other things
for their stories. But for those who I spoke to,
(08:20):
what I really tried to convey to them was that
I was going to write this in a different way,
focusing on their stories, and of course I talk about
the crime because you can't tell this story without saying
what happened on January eighth, nineteen ninety three in Palatine, Illinois.
But the focus is less on the gore of the
(08:43):
crime and more on telling that narrative. And it has
certainly been an interesting process and interesting balance to strike
because on the one hand, you want people to read
the book and you want it to be, for lack
of a better word, entertaining.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
But you also when you're meeting these.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
People, when you're talking to them on the phone or
getting coffee with them or getting lunch with them, you
want to be honest with yourself and them and make
sure that you're not offending them in some way either.
So I hope I achieved that balance, because that was
certainly what I was trying to do with this story.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yes, let's get to Belva and John Brown and the
origins of Brown's Chicken, and you take us to Chicago
or outside Chicago and Bridgeview. He comes to Chicago from
Indiana in nineteen thirty eight, John Brown and purchase a
small lot of farmland, and then his girlfriend at that
(09:49):
time seemed to be his wife, Belva. She had to
prove her usefulness on the farm by ringing a chicken's neck.
So just tell us briefly about the origins of this business,
Brown's Chicken, but also I ate pivotal an important character
in this story and to the business, Frank Portillo Junior.
(10:09):
How they met and teamed up together.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
And the Portillo name is named that a lot of
people will recognize, even who are not from Chicago. But
the story of Brown's Chicken as a business is an
interesting book in itself, I think, And so nobody had
really written about the story of the business how it
came to be, and I wanted to include that because
(10:35):
or people who maybe don't know the chain or haven't
heard of it. It was really, I mean huge in Chicago.
Their advertising was all over the place. They had a
very well known slogan. He's better is the was the slogan,
and people knew it because they had TV ads on
(10:55):
constantly and radio. They had franchises all across Illinois and
the greater Midwest. But it's the business started from very
humble beginnings. The Browns, John and Velvet Round were farmers
just outside of Chicago, and they put together a trailer
that they took their chickens from the farm and plucked
them and fried them up and served that to people
(11:18):
in the area, and it became very popular, and they
decided to try to open up a restaurant in suburban Bridgeview, Illinois,
and so they took the trailer set up, moved into
a restaurant, and they had sort of a chance encounter
with a man named Frank Ortillo, who was then a
(11:39):
young man, a draftsman, who worked on one of the
early restaurants, helping make some renovations. And it was a
fortuitist moment because they eventually became business partners, and John
Brown and Frank Ortillo Junior basically took the restaurant from
(11:59):
just two locations to over one hundred and fifty and
grew it into a huge corporation at that time. And
there's some interesting elements here of different inflection points in
the business. And I think the story of Belva Brown
is interesting too. She was certainly one of the founders,
but it's not always spoken about that way. So I
(12:20):
talked to her son, who told me about what it
was like there in those early days building this quite
essentially Chicago business.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
It coincides this the.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Story of the business with as you mentioned, a very
sad and tragic event. Just a couple of days before
the massacre at Browns Chicken and Palatine in nineteen ninety three,
John Brown himself committed suicide just before the massacre in Palatine,
and so it was just a very tough time for
(12:50):
the business he had, at least as his son explained
it to me, felt very distant from it and was,
I'm sure struggling with other issues. But it was a
horrible event, because you know, the death of anyone is tragic,
but the founder of the business was gone, and they
thought it was a horrible moment. But just a few
(13:11):
days later they would experience something that was even more
tragic than the death of seven individuals. In case people
have maybe recognized the name Portillo, it is because Frank
Portillo is brothers of the founder of Portillo's restaurant Portillo's
Hot Dogs in Chicago, and they started off with an investment.
(13:35):
Frank Portillo gave his brother Dick Portello, some money to
open up a dog excuse me, a hot dog stand.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
It's called the Doghouse.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
It was in Villa Park, Illinois, outside Chicago, and eventually
that business far exceeded expectations. And the success of Brown's Chicken.
Now it's a publicly serated company, there's some all across
the country, but it is the same family. So it
speaks to just how central of a business and a
(14:06):
name this was to Chicago in that time and still today.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
You introduced a couple of people that decided to take
a chance research franchises, Dick ellen Feld and his wife Lynn,
and they he had always had Dick had always had
some interest in a restaurants, so they finally researched franchises
that were available, and one was in Palatin, and so
(14:32):
Lenn and Dick ellen Felt had one of these franchises.
Tell us a little bit about this couple.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Well, Lenn and Dick Youngfeld were really an incredible couple.
They were very, very charitable. They had worked in all
different areas of the country, and Lynn was dedicated to
social services and raising the kids. Dick had been in
the seminary and then worked in politics for it time,
and he was out of work in nineteen ninety three.
(15:04):
In nineteen ninety two, when he was searching for something
else to do, he had moved the whole family to
Arlington Heights, Illinois from Madison Wisconsin, where they were from
for a previous job, and so they were looking for
something to do while their kids finished high school and
to take them in a new direction. So they found
(15:25):
this franchise opportunity in Palatine and it was a good
move for them because they had thought about opening a
restaurant as something that had always interest interested Dicky Elenfeld,
and they decided a franchise would be great because it's
a more safe kind of avenue business. There's proof of concept,
(15:45):
and so they went at it. They bought the franchise
with basically all the money to their name and money
from friends and family, and they purchased it and made changes.
They implemented program and made renovations to the restaurant and
really poured their heart into it. They were really two
(16:06):
people who were very dedicated to their community. I'll give
you one example. There was a story that one of
his daughters told me that when they were closing up
one night, none came in and justsed in bowl habit
and she asked She presented them with thirty It was
thirty coupons of for free chicken meals and they had
(16:31):
been given out by the previous owners and they were
very apologetic, but Dick said, you know, I can't. We
can't give away thirty free meals. This was from the
previous owner. But maybe maybe we can work something out
where we can give you all our leftover chicken at
the end of the night.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
And so they did, and each.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Night they would take the chicken from the restaurant and
bring it to the convent, which they would use to
feed others.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
So they were just just a small example of and
how charitable and kind they were.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
But they purchased a restaurant in nineteen ninety two and
by June had had it I think for only about
nine months, so that not even not even a year
at that point.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now they were running this restaurant and they
were very benevolent and helpful. Couple. Tell us about Rico
Solis and Michael Castro.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
So one of the most unfortunate aspects of this crime
is that there were seven victims, and two of them
were young high schoolers. Rico Solis was a seventeen year old.
He was a recent immigrant from the Philippines. He had
moved from the Philippines after his father was murdered actually
(17:57):
in Manila, and his mother had moved out to the
United States before that.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
They had been.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Separated, so he was with his grandfather and his two
sisters in the Philippines when his mother said, why don't
you come join us in Chicago.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
So the three kids immigrated.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
He was the older brother of two sisters, and they
adjusted to life in America, which I'm sure was difficult
as someone moving into a new school in kind of
the middle of the year, learning a new language. But
he was fortunate in that Chicago has a very vibrant
(18:38):
Filipino community, both in the city and in the suburbs.
And when Rico was at Palatine High School, where he
was a sophomore, he met a young man named Michael Castro.
And Michael Castro was his parents had immigrated from the Philippines.
(18:58):
He spoke language, she was. Their family was very involved in,
you know, other cultural events, and they got to know
each other. They were in classes together, and Michael worked
at a restaurant that was Brown's Chicken. He was saving
up for a car he loved, was trying to soup
up his car rather with new speakers, and was enjoying
(19:22):
the work and having the freedom that comes with, you know,
a young being a young person and finally getting a paycheck.
And so he suggested to his friend Rico that he
did a job at Brown's Chicken, and so he.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Set him up with the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
We goo met with the owners and with Lynn, who
typically handled those those those interviews and the process and
work with employees. He got to work as eventually a
cashier at the restaurant, but started off doing other things,
baking biscuits, washing dishes, the typical things you'd expect in
a restaurant. And so the Tube became very close friends.
(20:00):
They had a lot in common, and Michael certainly helped
we go just to the United States, certainly he by
the time nineteen ninety three rolled around, had only been
in the United States a couple months really, so it
was of course a tragic and short lived time in America.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
You introduce a character named Christian Lenstrom, happens to be
the boyfriend of Jim Degorski. They both went to Fremd
High School. You just introduce Jim de Gorski. He's a
six foot guy, chubby, lives in Hoffman estates tell Us
a little bit about Jim Degorski and this little story
(20:46):
that involves Christian Lenstrom and just the demonstration of maybe
future behavior.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Well, one of the things that's unique about this book
is that sometimes the suspense of a true book is
figuring out who the killer is.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
And this is a story.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
That I knew a lot of people in Chicago would read,
and it's resolved. People know the names if they followed us,
and so I had to write this a little differently,
and so Jim de Gorski and Wan Luna, the killers
are introduced early, and then the third chapter there was
a story about Kristen, as you mentioned, who was a
(21:27):
girlfriend of James tu Gorski and who he was incredibly
abusive towards. He would punch her and hit her, and
there was an incident where he basically abducted her and
took her to another town and threatened her.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
So he displayed this very violent behavior. Jim came from
a very rough house. He had a tough upgriming.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
I would certainly say his father had mental illness and
other issues, and that's built out into obviously dysfunction with
the family. So he certainly had a tragic upbringing and
That's one of the things I talk about in the
chapters that weave in his story.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
One of the things that was really fascinating to me
in writing this book is.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
When I spoke to the particularly the daughters of the founders.
One of the things they said to the franchise owners,
the unfls.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
One of the things they expressed to me was they.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Asked her, are you going to write the story of
Jim and One? And I was sort of hesitating, saying, yeah, well,
I'm gonna talk about them, so you obviously have to
to tell his story.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
And I thought they were.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Suggesting they didn't, you know, maybe they didn't want me
to or something like that, And what they were actually
getting at was they wanted me to tell it. They
wanted me to explain who the men were in a
fair way, honest but fair. It really came from view
that One and James were trouble kids, and they were
(23:05):
exactly the kind of youth who their parents would have
helped out through their work in the community, through Lynn's.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Social service work.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
And so that I found to be just very incredible
because it was not necessarily the way that I would
have reacted if someone had had murdered my parents, and
so I was just very astonished by their grace in
that manner, and that's something a lot of the families
displayed even at the trials, which I am sure will
get to a sort of preview of it. When the
(23:37):
decision the question of the death penalty came up, there
were a number of families who opposed it and even
attended rallies with the families of Juan Luna's family to
jointly oppose posing a death sentence, which again was something
that I found very astonishing, just because I don't know
(23:58):
how my reaction would be in that instant, but I
found there's to be just incredible.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
You're right that one Luna originally from Mexico, and Jim
Degorski met at the frem High School and they became
close buddies. Tell us a little bit about one Luna
and his background.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Well, one, as you mentioned, immigrated from Mexico. He family
originally came into the moved to the city, then the suburbs.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
And they were a pretty normal family.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
He you know, would work the or or do the
signs of things that kids in the suburbs do, hanging
out with friends, working jobs, just getting drunk, hanging out
in basements doing no good, but for the most part,
was not necessarily someone who got in a lot of trouble.
(24:53):
He was someone who was one of the only non
white people in his school Palatine, was not necessarily at
least friend high school where they went, wasn't the most
diverse place, and he was a little shy, I would say,
more so than Jim. Definitely, of the two, Jim was
sort of the one who was more aggressive and more
(25:15):
in charge. They're obviously both responsible for the eventual killings,
but just gives you a sense of sort of his
demeanor in all of this as well.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now,
you take us to January ninth and just the working
arrangement at Brown's Chicken, and you introduced some workers and
characters in this story. Marcus Nelson and also Guadaloupe and
(25:49):
also Tom Menez introduced these three characters and the arrangements
for working that weekend at Brown's Chicken.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Sure, so there were three other individuals who were working
that night to have passed. Guadalamube Maldonado was a father
of three. He was forty seven and slave forties. Had
lived in the United States a couple times before that,
but had moved back and forth between the northwest suburbs
(26:21):
of Chicago and Mexico, and he had moved about a
month before the killings. This was his third time back
in the United States, and he came with his now
wife and their three sons, and so it was really
a classic immigrant story of someone coming to the country
(26:41):
in search of a different opportunity for their children. And
he was a very hard working man. He had worked
at several restaurants before this, and one of the restaurants
he went to was kind of an old It was
called the Old Town in it's exactly.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
How you would imagine.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
There were, you know, old timey vibes and music there sometimes,
and it was kind of a classic American restaurant that
he'd worked at. And when he went back to see
if his job from his last stay in the United
States was available, it was nuts, so he had to
look for other works. So he eventually applied for a
(27:21):
job at Brown's Chicken. The Elon Feltz took a liking
to him. He was older than most people. They wanted
someone who was mature and reliable and he had cooking experience,
so it was a good good fit for him.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
There were other individuals working that night.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Guatela Pemo Nana was the cook. Tom Ennis was a
thirty two year old man. He was sort of quiet,
not necessarily shy, but just more discerning about who he
would speak to. Some people might call him a little quirky,
but a nice guy. He rode his bike around Palatine.
He didn't like to drive because he'd been in an accident.
(27:59):
He took his brother's car out once and crashed into
the garage and decided he wasn't going to drive anymore,
so he wrote he would ride his bike around Valatine.
He was a twin too. He was working that night,
helping with breading the chicken and baking biscuits and doing
all the other tasks in the restaurant. And then there
(28:20):
was Marcus Nelson, who was a veteran. He was a
Navy veteran. He had been on the management track at
the restaurant, and he was someone who had gone through
a divorce that certainly impacted him. He was sort of
blamed himself for it and was trying to make right
getting a job working on himself and his struggle with alcoholism,
(28:46):
and he was making very very good progress on things.
He was doing well at Brown's Chicken, and they were
sending him to training classes and things so he could
learn more about how to manage the business and was
certainly enjoying that that new experience in a new work
environment that was definitely working for him. So he was
(29:07):
the last of the seven individuals working that night.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Now the owner Lynn Eldenfeldt, she was not scheduled to
work that night, but her daughter was Dana, but she
wanted to be with her boyfriend and her parents to
meet their parents or her parents' pardon me, and so
Lynn took over the shift from her daughter Dana. There's
closing time and two men arrive at the doors. What
(29:33):
is the policy even though they were closed at the
Brown's Chicken regarding closing and the sale of chicken.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Well, they were not one to turn down customers, and
so if someone came to the restaurant and they were
closed technically it was after nine o'clock, they would still
let people in the front. Owners had a policy that
if there was still chicken under the the heat lamps
(30:06):
in the restaurant behind the counters that they would they
would serve that to anyone who showed up just passed close.
So on January eighth, nineteen eighty three, two men showed
up at the restaurant and they were let in and
they ordered a four piece chicken meal, then sat in
a booth and ate it while the people around them.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
Mopped up the floors.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
They counted the money, They cleaned the grease friars, and
continued their morning excuse me, their closing routine that night.
That is when eventually Juan Luna and Jim do Gorski,
the two men who showed up, decided to go about
killing seven people in the restaurant. It was essentially a robbery.
(30:52):
It looked like a robbery gone wrong to people. They
held people up and stacked them excuse me a force
them into the cooler in the freezer, five in one,
two in the other, and shot them in there. Then
they proceeded to pick up the bullets shells so there
would be no trace of them at the restaurant kind
(31:14):
of sloppily, took a took a mop and clean up
the blood. They shut off the lights to the to
the restaurant and then then left left them there, which left.
As time went by, of course, people wondering where their
loved ones were and why they hadn't come home.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
You say that a patrolling officer checks Brown's chicken later
on and notices that the door is open and goes
in and sees blood on a mop handle and then
calls for backup when also, though this story continues, when
Michael Castro is supposed to come home right after work,
there's some plans with his family and also another one
(31:56):
of the employees as well, the brother I believe, goes out.
So tell us what happens when a couple of these
employees don't come back home when they're supposed to.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Well, this is the first sign for a lot of people,
and the families all start wondering right away why their
loved ones hadn't come home. The mother of Rico is
worried waiting for her son, feeling uneasy, wondering why isn't there.
The family of Manny Castro goes to the restaurant to
(32:29):
check on him. His brother goes and is told that
he's probably out drinking, which they knew immediately wasn't the
case because he wasn't a drinker.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
So they begin to worry more.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Even even by that others arrive at the restaurant or
call trying to figure it out. The family of Michael Castro,
his parents go to the restaurant to look a number
of times that night because they know something's wrong, and
eventually his father is there that that night, just falling
(33:00):
close behind one of the officers as they enter and
figure out almost immediately that this is a crime scene.
It's a sad scene because of the fact that there's
they kind of know what has happened, but they won't
know until many hours later when police tell them more.
They announce officially the deaths and who is passed, and
(33:22):
so the chaos of the investigation begins. Almost immediately the
police close down the crime scene, they start putting together
a log of who's going in and out. They unferral
police tape around the scene as crowd begins to grow,
and it's at this point in the early morning of
(33:43):
now Sunday, excuse me, Saturday, January ninth, nineteen ninety three.
The media is there almost instantly as well, from the
very beginning filming taking pictures. They're very present on the scene.
This was interesting for me, just realizing how present. They
had been, because there's a video of this story almost
(34:06):
from the very beginning, like I said, of police on
the scene and a point when they still don't even
know what's going on, So they were very present throughout
this entire entire case.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
You introduce a pivotal character in this story. This Jane Homeyer,
North Illinois's police crime lab analyst where they examine toxology,
zerology and handling biological evidence. This is her first murder investigation,
only her second crime scene, but she understands the developments
(34:42):
in DNA and bags some evidence that someone at the
crime scene. Other police technicians question why she's even doing it.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yes, this is one of the most pivotal moments in
the case, although people don't realize it until much later.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
When the killers were at.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
The restaurant, they decided to eat a meal. It was
not part of the plan, and one Luna takes a bite,
they throw it in the garbage can before they decide
to kill everyone. And when crime scene investigators and crime
scene technicians and law enforcement are combing through the crime
scene and processing evidence, they noticed almost immediately that the
(35:25):
restaurant was very clean and that the garbage cans were
mostly empty except for one where there was this four
piece chicken dinner.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
So it sort of sits there for.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
A little while, and eventually Jane homer Are, the crime
scene technician at the scene, decides she's going to freeze it,
and people kind of look askance at her, not sure
what the value is. And that's because in nineteen ninety three,
distracting DNA from a saliva sample that small just simply
wasn't a thing.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
So I think common sense today you would, of course.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
You would save it, maybe you can get DNA, but
at that point that simply was not technology did not exist,
and so she was very shrewd and knew that this
was the DNA technology was advancing rapidly, and so she
decided to freeze the chicken bone, and eventually, later in
(36:19):
nineteen ninety eight, when the technology was more advanced, she
was able to extract They were able to extract DNA
from it and eventually connected to one whatever.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Even in nineteen ninety eight, they didn't have a.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
DNA profile to connect it, so it was just a
sample without a match, which took years to connect, which
we'll talk about.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
You're right that this case becomes a huge media story
nationally media frenzy, and there was a rest of a
couple suspects, one being someone named Martin Blake. And Martin
Blake had been in a form employee and police thought
he might be a disgruntled employee because he had been
fired not that previous to these to this massacre. But
(37:10):
for the sake of this story, Martin Blake is cleared eventually,
and this case with the police, Cook County and Palatine
police have no answers and the perpetrators go free.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
One of the things I really wanted to do with
this book is share all sorts of unique perspectives on it,
not just from the view of police investigating, or the
views of the families or the attorneys in the cases,
but even people who are suspects. And so Martin Blake
was the first one. His name was completely run through
(37:47):
the ringer. They had his face plastered on the front
pages of all the Chicago newspapers, which was a big
deal back then, still would be, but much bigger deal then.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
His face was the broadcast in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
His home video of him was obtained saying all sorts
of silly things, and he was made out to be
basically convicted in the court of public opinion even before
they could say otherwise. So within forty eight hours his
name is completely destroyed. And he talked to me about
how eventually he had to leave the state as a
result of this, because of how intense the the stigma
(38:24):
of being.
Speaker 4 (38:25):
That first person was.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
You also write about Frank Portillo's fate. He offers up
a big reward and wants to and thinks the police
are are lax in their investigation, and so he's very active,
but also he's trying to rescue his business from rune
as well. And you talk about Frank Portillo again, a
(38:51):
major character in this story. Tell us a little bit
about Brown's Chicken and its fate during all of this.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
In the immediate aftermath of this, the business suffered because
people were afraid to eat at the restaurants. They don't
know if it's connected in some way to Brown specifically.
And this is both an emotional quandary for Frank Potilla
because he actually knew the owners, he had helped train
them and tried to get to know all the new franchises.
(39:22):
But it's also a huge business problem, and so he
becomes someone who is very helpful to the police in
the beginning, giving them information where he can, records of employees,
past employees, things like that he sent Chicken to the
pass force that had been set up to investigate the crime.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
And eventually, as things drag on, he sort of loses
fate with all time.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Police and eventually he pushes an outside group, a nonprofit
called the Better Government Association, to publish a report on this,
to invest the from the outside. It becomes a whole
thorn in the side of the Palatine.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Police because BGA is.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
A credible organization. They do a lot of great work
and investigated corruption and other things in the city of Chicago,
and so when they decide to look into this, it
becomes a problem for the police.
Speaker 4 (40:18):
But they can't share information with an.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Outside group because it's an ongoing investigation, and so the
police are sort of sort of forced with this difficult
decision of whether or not to respond to the criticism
they have and maybe potentially give out some evidence that
might be helpful, nots giving out or just kind of
taking it. And that becomes a theme throughout this.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now you take us to episode ten of
the nineteen ninety seven season of America's Most Wanted, aired
on Sunday in May. By that time, the show had
helped to put an end to nearly five hundred cases
(41:05):
You write viewers in all fifty states, and Anne Lockett
was one of those viewers. Tell us what she saw
and what it stirred in her that airing of America's
Most Wanted.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Well, Anne had been paying attention to this story. An
Lockett was told in the immediate aftermath of the crime
by her boyfriend Jim de Gorski and Jan Luna, and
she worries for her life because she had been threatened
by Jim de Gorski that if she came forward that
(41:44):
they would kill her. And so he calls in to
check up with her over the years and kind of
keeps tabs and she knows she said should come forward,
but doesn't obviously, but she tries to drop a little
hints for friends and sort of create a space for
her to maybe come forward. She talks about the case
with friends, will take walks around the Browns Chicken restaurant
(42:08):
or around Palatine and always end up there and she
sort of asks you know, what do you think people
wonder about this case? Or do you think the families
think about it? And nobody thinks anything of her asking
those questions, she writes a letter to America's Most Wanted,
as you mentioned, laying out the everything she knows, and
(42:29):
then sort of the needle in the haystack. Obviously she
should have went forward directly to the police. That would
have been a much cleaner way to do it. It
was one sign that she had sort of sent to people.
And of course the police had to be very unique
in their approach, and so they actually worked with the
producers to put on this show to hopefully shake up
(42:51):
some new tips. But this unfortunately is lost. I'm sure
for a variety of reasons. It was probably anonymous and
and they've probably got thousands of tips. This is one
of the biggest case files in the history of Illinois,
and so the amount of information was just incredibly overwhelming
(43:12):
at that time.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
You're right about this formation of a task force to
address this, this multiple crime, multiple murders. Tell us a
little bit about who are members of this task force.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Well, the Palatine Police is their suburban police department, kind
of a medium sized suburb not a ton of crime,
but there certainly had been murders in the past.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
They bring in.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Experts, They bring in everyone you can think of in
the immediate aftermath, from.
Speaker 4 (43:46):
The FBI and profilers.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
And some of Chicago's most experienced homicide detectives to assist
with the case, as.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
Well as other people in the suburbs.
Speaker 3 (43:55):
And so the pass force is set up, run by
the Palatine Police and with the assistance of these groups,
and it balloons to over one hundred people working on
the case in the weeks following the crime.
Speaker 4 (44:07):
And I think it's important to.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Understand that one of the criticisms that the police faced
for a long time was that they were very protective
of the order the investigation. They somehow botched it because
they didn't they didn't have the resources or they know
how to do it. But the reality is they brought
in immediately everyone who could possibly be helpful, and nobody
(44:33):
was able to help because of the simple fact that
this case was only going to be broken by someone
coming forward, and eventually.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
That is that is how it solved.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
You read about Melissa Ben's and her pivotal role in
all of this. When Anne Leckett gives her a call,
and you write that Melissa sort of prize information out
of her that and wanted to express.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
And yes, and this is one of the pivotal moments.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
Melissa Benz is a high school friend of Anne Lockett
and she decides.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
To working one night late.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
She runs a landscaping business with her husband, and she
gets a call from Anne, which is normal, they catch
up once in a while. They're old friends, and Anne
starts talking about the Browns Stricken murderers, and she asks
her do you remember that? And she's very sort of
nondescript about it, and eventually she tells Melissa, well, I
know who did it. And it leads to a whole
(45:31):
saga with the police and Melissa convincing Anne that she
has to come forward and convey this information.
Speaker 4 (45:39):
To the Palatine Police, and so she does.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Her friends, her friend convinced her finally to come forward,
and they connect with Bill King, a detective who'd worked
on the case for a long long time in Palatine,
and initially he's sort of not skeptical is the right word,
but he had seen it all about that point. And
as I mentioned, this is one of the largest cases
in the history of the state, and so they've gotten
calls from all sorts of people, so he approaches it
(46:05):
with a healthy amount of skepticism. But when he speaks
with in Lockett, he gets a detail that is unique,
and that is that one of the victims threw up
French fries at the scene after they were killed. It's
a gruesome detail, but it's one that the police had
never released publicly, and there's no way that anyone else
(46:25):
could have known about it. So they know that ant
Lockett is telling the truth and that busts the case
wide open. The police eventually are able to get a
DNA sample from Wan Luna because he had worked at
the restaurant before. They just kind of play it off as, oh,
we're just going back to everyone again who worked there.
They get a sample from Jim do Gorski, asking him
(46:47):
to come to the police station when he's in town
from Indianapolis, where he lived at that point, and they're
able to connect the DNA from the chicken bones that
they rose in nineteen ninety three, extracted a sample from
the nineteen ninety eight and then in two thousand and
two gotten a match between the chicken and o Wan Luna,
(47:07):
which eventually leads to their arrests. One of the biggest
stories resolved in Chicago of that last decade, and.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
It really all come down to that preservation of the
chicken bones by Jane han Eire and her having the
foresight of DNA advancements in the future.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
Absolutely otherwise it would not have been solved.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
And one of the interesting things that one of the
sisters of the victims told me was a Locket was
criticized for not coming forward earlier, and we all hoped
that we would have, in a similar situation come forward earlier.
But she said to me, you know, it probably worked
out the way it was supposed to because had she
come forward earlier, they would not have had DNA evidence
(47:55):
to support her claim, right, and they also could just
completely assassinate her character her. She was a very imperfect witness,
I think, a good person who did the right thing
in the end, but at that time had had been
in a mental facility, had struggled with drugs and alcohol and.
Speaker 4 (48:13):
The sort of things that at a trial don't necessarily
look good or speak well. So she was talmage.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
So in the end it sort of worked out the
way it should because there was support for the story
that she told police in the form of DNA evidence.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Now, when you introduced another crucial character as Sergeant Bill King,
when these two one Luna and Jim de Gorski, are interviewed,
are interrogated. When they're interrogated, it isn't too hard to
get those people, these two killers, to admit their involvement.
(48:55):
It's a different story at the trial once they get lawyers,
and of course they plead not guilty. But initially these
people think that the gig is up and are willing
to talk to police, aren't they?
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Yes, and both wan Laya confesses on tape, and it's
an extensive tape. Illinois at that point had required confessions
to be taped. Jim de Gorski confesses immediately when he's
arrested in the says something I'm paraphrasing along lines says,
well you finally finally, or it took I'm surprised it
(49:28):
took you this long, essentially, and then he talks about
it in the car with with the police on the
ride home from Indianapolis, where he lived at that point,
back to a police station in Illinois to be interrogated,
and he openly said that that they did it and confesses.
So obviously the story has changed later on and as
you can expect, but he does somewhat confess on tape
(49:52):
as well. He convinces to police in the station and
then when they want to record it, he sort of
have heartedly does it, which becomes an issue at trial later.
But they both did admit to it almost immediately after
being arrested.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
Because it's a capital punishment case, of course, there are
excellent lawyers that vibe for to be able to represent
these two characters, these two defendants. Joy ellen Felt, though,
said that the parents had taught them that they would
be firmly opposed to the death penalty. The death penalty
(50:30):
was able to be had in Chicago at that time.
Tell us what the jurors had in terms of their decision.
You write about unanimity being essential for this three phases
of a trial in this capital punishment case.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Yes, so there are three phases in the death penalty
cases in Illinois. There's guilt and innocence.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
There's the.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Eligibility phase where someone is ruled eligible or eligible for
the death penalty, and then there is sentencing, which in
the third phase is essentially deciding whether to sentence someone
for a murder like this to life in prison or.
Speaker 4 (51:14):
To death to give them capital punishment.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
So this was a very closely watched case because Illinois
had at the turn of the century put a moratorium
on the practice, and a number of governors in Illinois,
Republican and Democratic, had commuted sentences and at that time
rob Igoivitch, who was governor who I'm sure people know,
(51:38):
had kept a moratorium in place, but it was still
a sentence that could be imposed, and if a different
governor was an employee a launch, then it was possible
for the death penalty being posed. So this was very
closely watched, and it was also a case that was
unique in that some people in Illinois attorneys viewed it
(52:00):
as an opportunity to potentially outlaw the death penalty in Illinois.
So that becomes a flashpoint in this case. But as
I mentioned, and you allude to, one of the unique
aspects of this is that some of the family as
now ultimate jurors don't see that because it's outside the
(52:23):
courthouse and they're sequestered.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
But I think it's.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
A unique aspect of this, and so at trial, Juan
Luna and mc gorski are put on trial in two
thousand and seven and two thousand and nine, respectively, and
it becomes a very closely watched event. They're both ruled
eligible for the death penalty and guilty of the murder
(52:46):
of these seven individuals, but it becomes a question of
whether or not to sentence them to death, and this
is something that obviously jurors agonized over. I spoke to
a jur who talked to me about what it was
like to be in that room and make that decision. Ultimately,
with the first trial with Wanna, there was one woman
who was a holdout to very emotional decision, but she
(53:07):
stuck to her ground with that, and the same with
de Gorski. There were a couple more jurors who disagreed,
but without a unanimous decision on that, they're sentenced to
life and sent to a stateful prison. But it's a
unique case in number of ways because some of the witnesses.
You obviously have the police. You've got people like doctor
Henry Lee, who is a very well known forensics expert.
(53:31):
People might know Hi from the oj trial and the
staircase case, and I talked to him about it and
what it was like to testify and be a part
of this, and he was certainly a character in this
and provided some moments of levity in an otherwise very
tense trial. One of the I think most intense portions
(53:53):
of this trial comes after their sentenced exees me after
their found guilty. In the eligible there's the mitigation phase
where statements are read by ones both the victims families
and then of course the killers themselves too, to sort.
Speaker 4 (54:11):
Of sympathy if you will.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
I'm kind of boiling it down, but from jurors to
not sentenced them to death or to you know, to
give them a lighter sentence. And it's very emotional to
hear the stories of the people who who passed and
the courage they have standing up there and.
Speaker 4 (54:27):
Having to do that. So it was a Sometimes.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Trials are hard to write about and make interesting, so
I try to weave in the most interesting parts and
keep it, keep it flowing well. But it was certainly
very helpful for understanding the stories of people as well.
Through that testimony, You're.
Speaker 2 (54:47):
Right about and locket, and what we didn't mention was
that she had been contacted when she was at this
at a hospital, a psychiatric hospital and given the news
that Jim de Gorski, her boyfriend, had done something big
him and Wan and then she was later in on
the details of something Big. City officials decide that Anne
(55:11):
Lockett and Melissa Bens would split the almost one hundred
thousand dollar reward. You write in the very end that
really the only thing something big, something big would really
apply to Michael Castro's goal of joining the military. Something
big was the story of Rico Solis and his transition
(55:31):
to life in America. Something big was Marcus Nelson's deep
love for his daughter. Something big was Tom Menne's gentleness
and adoration for his family. And something big was the
dedication Lynn Ellenfeld had for helping others, and Dick ellen
felt the chance he took at opening a restaurant in
(55:54):
hopes of providing financial stability for his family. And something
big was Loupe Maldonado's dream of a better life for
his children in Chicago. You also say that in acknowledgements
that you want to thank authors Dennis Sheer The Last
Meal and Morris Posley's The Brown's Chicken Massacre and the
(56:17):
series forty four Minutes just give us a little bit
about that initial goal to present this book as an
honor to these victims and their families. Just tell us
something insummation, please.
Speaker 3 (56:36):
Well, the headle of the book is something big, and
that is the excuse or the motive that the killers
give for their actions that day. They said that they
decided to kill seven people because they wanted to do
something big, and to this day, no one really understands
exactly what that means, and it's sort of a very
(56:57):
unsettling end to this. So I tried to sort of
turn that on its head in the end of the
book and talk about what was really big, like you said,
and that was the dreams and aspirations of people who
were just seven hardworking, very decent individuals past for no
reason other than just a very heinous and selfish, horrendous act.
(57:22):
So I hope that it ties the focus back and
the end nicely to others involved in this case, and
a focus that is different than how the story has
been told in the past.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
Absolutely, I want to thank you Patrick Woolf for coming
on and talking about your extraordinary something Big, the true
story of the Browns Chicken massacre, a decade long manhunt,
and the trials that followed. Thank you so much. For
this interview. For those people that might want to find
out more information about this story in this book, and
(57:55):
do you have a website or social media that you
could refer us to.
Speaker 3 (58:00):
I do. You can find more information on Patrickwall dot
com and my social media is there as well, so
check it out.
Speaker 2 (58:07):
Thank you so much, Patrick Wool. Something Big the true
story of the Browns Chicken massacre, a decade long manhunt,
and the trials that followed. Thank you so much for
this interview, Patrick Wool, have a great evening and good night,
good night,
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