Andrew Kokoraleis was 19 when Chicago police took him from his family's home in Villa Park, a western suburb, on the evening of November 7, 1982. Within two days he had given statements that tied him to the deaths of several young women in Chicago and DuPage County. Two juries later convicted him of murder: a Cook County jury in 1985 for the death of Rose Beck Davis, and a DuPage County jury in 1987 for the death of Lorraine Borowski, a 21-year-old secretary from Elmhurst. The first jury spared his life. The second sentenced him to death.
At both trials he took the stand and said he was innocent, that detectives had given him the facts of the crimes and beaten him until he repeated them. Neither jury believed him, and a long run of state and federal appeals failed. In the early hours of March 17, 1999, he was executed by lethal injection at the Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois. He was 35. No one has been executed in Illinois since. Within a year Governor George Ryan, who had let the execution go ahead, halted executions in the state; in 2003 he emptied death row, and in 2011 Illinois abolished the death penalty.
His case was one part of a wider investigation that the Chicago press called the Ripper Crew case, involving Kokoraleis, his brother Thomas, his friend Edward Spreitzer and the man he and Spreitzer worked for, Robin Gecht. Press accounts have blamed the group for the deaths of anywhere from more than 15 to about 20 women in the early 1980s. Those totals are attributions, not court findings.
The courts record little about his early life. A birth certificate placed in evidence at his 1987 sentencing hearing gave his date of birth as July 18, 1963. He grew up with at least two brothers, Thomas among them, and a sister; his siblings testified for him at his DuPage County trial. A psychiatrist retained by his appeal lawyers in the 1990s wrote that his mother had died when he was 12 and that the loss left him feeling abandoned. The same expert described his father as emotionally detached, and argued that the two together left the teenager, in the words the Illinois Supreme Court quoted, "psychologically adrift."
He met Edward Spreitzer in 1978 or 1979, when he was in his mid-teens, according to his own trial testimony. From the middle of 1981 until May 1982 he worked for Robin Gecht, an electrician, and for a time lived in the Gecht household as a babysitter for Gecht's children. At his DuPage County sentencing hearing, his sister and a landlord testified that Gecht had a strong influence over him. He had no criminal record before his arrest, the federal district court noted in 1997, and from the age of 19 he never left custody.
His family was Greek Orthodox. By the time of his execution, the church was among his strongest advocates: officials of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago led the religious leaders who asked Governor Ryan to spare his life, and a senior cleric of the Metropolis, its chancellor, served as his spiritual adviser.
The earliest death in which Kokoraleis was implicated was that of Linda Sutton, 26, who lived with her mother in Chicago. She disappeared on the evening of May 23, 1981. Her body was found on June 1, 1981, near Villa Park.
Kokoraleis was never convicted of her death. He was indicted in DuPage County, with Spreitzer and Thomas Kokoraleis, for her murder and aggravated kidnapping, and Spreitzer, tried separately before a judge, was found guilty of both crimes on March 4, 1986, and sentenced to death. The courts that reviewed Andrew Kokoraleis's cases say he admitted a part in her death in his statements to police. Both of his juries heard evidence about the Sutton case as "other crimes" evidence, offered to show a common pattern and to support his confession. At his DuPage trial his sister and brother testified that the family had visited a cemetery together over the 1981 Memorial Day weekend, and his sister said he had arrived at the family house that Sunday morning. Spreitzer, in a statement to police on November 8, 1982, said Andrew Kokoraleis had been present when Sutton was taken.
Lorraine Borowski, known as Lori or Lorry, was 21 and worked as a secretary at a real estate office in Elmhurst. The office was about three blocks from her apartment, and she usually walked to work.
On Saturday, May 15, 1982, a neighbor saw her leave for work at about 8:15 a.m. Between 8:45 and 9 a.m. her employer arrived at the office and found her shoes, her keys, cosmetics, coins and a small tool lying on the pavement outside. He called the Elmhurst police. A man who passed the office lot at about 7:50 that morning later testified that he had seen a reddish-orange van parked there.
She was missing for five months. On October 10, 1982, her remains were found in Darien, in DuPage County, and identified. Her mother later identified her belongings in court. In a 2017 news interview her mother said she had believed her daughter's killers would die in prison, and her brother started a public petition that year to keep Thomas Kokoraleis from being paroled. In the petition he wrote that one of the group "that killed my sister (and others)" was getting out after serving only half of his sentence.
Shui Mak, 30, was the next woman whose death the courts linked to Kokoraleis's statements. Her family ran a restaurant in Streamwood and lived in Lombard. At about 1 a.m. on May 30, 1982, as the family returned home from the restaurant, they found that she was missing. Her remains were found on September 30, 1982, in northwest Cook County.
According to his statement as the Illinois Supreme Court summarized it, Spreitzer stopped the van when Shui Mak was walking alone and offered her a ride, which she accepted, and she was then taken to a field. Spreitzer later pleaded guilty to her murder. Kokoraleis was never tried for her death; evidence of it was used at both of his trials as other-crimes evidence. A member of her family testified at his DuPage trial.
Rose Beck Davis was 30 and married. At about 10:30 p.m. on September 7, 1982, she telephoned her husband; it was the last time anyone heard from her. Her body was found the next day, September 8, 1982, in Chicago. She had been beaten and stabbed.
In his statement to Chicago police, as the Illinois Appellate Court later summarized it, Kokoraleis said that he, Spreitzer and Gecht had abducted a woman in Chicago, assaulted and killed her, and that he had stabbed her on Gecht's orders. Her death was the one for which he was first tried and first convicted.
The investigators' list grew well beyond these four women. Spreitzer pleaded guilty in Cook County in April 1984 to four murders: those of Shui Mak, Rose Beck Davis, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado. Tirado, a man, was shot in October 1982 alongside another man, who survived. At Spreitzer's sentencing, prosecutors also referred to Lorraine Borowski and to two women killed in 1981 who had not been identified.
Andrew Kokoraleis told police he had been involved in some 15 or 16 killings beyond those of Sutton and Mak, according to the Illinois Appellate Court. When he testified at his DuPage trial, he said he had spoken with an officer about "some 16 different cases," that the officer had supplied the information about them, and that he was innocent of all of them. The Seventh Circuit, reviewing his case in 1997, wrote that he had confessed to killing as many as 18 women. News accounts from 2017 and 2019 have said the group was blamed for more than 15, nearly two dozen, or up to 20 deaths. None of those totals was tested in court, and no court convicted Andrew Kokoraleis of any killing other than those of Rose Beck Davis and Lorraine Borowski.
The break in the case came from a woman who survived. In October 1982 she was attacked and left alive, and she was able to give Chicago police a description of the van her attackers had used. DuPage County investigators connected her account with the Sutton case and with the van seen near Lorraine Borowski's office.
On October 20, 1982, Chicago police stopped a reddish-orange van that matched the description. Edward Spreitzer was driving. He told officers that the van belonged to his employer, Robin Gecht. Knives were found inside, and the Illinois Appellate Court later recorded that they had blood on them. Spreitzer and Gecht were both taken to police headquarters and then released.
On November 5, 1982, Spreitzer admitted to police that he had taken part in the Sutton case and in the attack on the surviving woman, and later that night he described other killings. He gave further statements on November 8 that differed from his first and added another killing. In them he named Andrew Kokoraleis.
On the evening of November 7, 1982, Spreitzer led police to the Kokoraleis family home in Villa Park. Andrew Kokoraleis was taken to the Chicago police Area 5 headquarters, given Miranda warnings, and questioned over the next two days.
According to the courts' summaries of his statements, he told Chicago detectives that he, Spreitzer and Gecht had abducted a woman in Chicago and killed her, and that he had stabbed her because Gecht told him to. Detectives matched that account to the death of Rose Beck Davis. He also admitted involvement in the deaths of Linda Sutton and Shui Mak.
On November 9, two DuPage County detectives, Warren Wilkosz and John Sam, showed him photographs of Lorraine Borowski. According to their testimony, he said: "That is the girl that Eddie Spreitzer and I killed in the cemetery." He then wrote out a statement by hand that repeated the account. In it, as the Illinois Supreme Court summarized it, he said that he and Spreitzer had seen her in a parking lot in Elmhurst, forced her into Gecht's van and driven to a cemetery, where she was killed and her body left in the weeds. He gave further statements to an assistant state's attorney and another detective. His brother Thomas was taken into custody by DuPage County sheriff's deputies on November 10, 1982.
Kokoraleis later said none of it was true. At both trials he testified that the police had fed him the facts, promised him leniency and hit him, and that he had been questioned through the night and struck during questioning on the afternoon of November 8. The officers denied it. In the Davis case the trial judge refused to suppress his statements, and the Illinois Appellate Court found that ruling was not against the manifest weight of the evidence. In a 1999 appeal for clemency, Amnesty International noted that he had "maintained for many years" that he confessed only because of beatings by the police.
Kokoraleis was tried first in Cook County for the death of Rose Beck Davis. At trial he testified that he had been at home on the night she was killed. Over defense objections, the prosecution was allowed to present evidence of the Sutton and Mak cases under the modus operandi exception to the rule against other-crimes evidence.
On March 18, 1985, the jury found him guilty. The certified record of the judgment, later placed before the DuPage County jury, showed four counts of murder, two of rape and two of aggravated kidnapping. The prosecution sought the death penalty, and the Cook County jury rejected it. He was sentenced to natural life in prison for the murder and to extended terms for the rape and kidnapping.
On April 2, 1987, the Illinois Appellate Court, in an opinion by Justice Linn, affirmed the murder conviction and the natural life sentence and upheld the rape and aggravated kidnapping convictions. It held that the extended terms were improper and reduced them to 30 years for rape and 15 years for aggravated kidnapping. It rejected his challenges to the other-crimes evidence, the jury selection, the questioning of jurors about the death penalty, the photographs shown to the jury and the refusal to suppress his statements.
The DuPage County case, for the death of Lorraine Borowski, came to trial in 1987. The prosecution called the man who had seen the van, her employer, the pathologist who examined her remains, the detectives and prosecutor who had taken Kokoraleis's statements, the doctors who had performed the autopsies in the Sutton and Mak cases, her mother and a member of the Mak family. The trial judge allowed evidence of the Sutton and Mak deaths but kept out evidence of the Davis case at the guilt stage.
Kokoraleis testified that he had been "framed." He denied any part in the deaths of Lorraine Borowski, Linda Sutton and Shui Mak and said he had known nothing of them before investigators talked to him. Defense witnesses included a liquor store manager, a man who identified Spreitzer's car, a woman who described seeing a girl at a gas station, a police detective, and his brother and sister, who gave the family alibi for the Sutton date. Under cross-examination he spoke about the 16 cases he said police had discussed with him, and the Illinois Supreme Court later held that the questions were proper because they undercut his claim of coercion.
The jury found him guilty of murder and aggravated kidnapping. The sentencing hearing began on March 19, 1987. The jury found him eligible for death on two grounds under Illinois law: that he had been convicted of murdering two or more people, relying on the Cook County judgment, and that the murder had been committed in the course of an aggravated kidnapping. At the second stage the prosecution put in his statements about the Davis case. His lawyer, as the federal courts later described the strategy, argued that there was room for doubt about his guilt and tried to show him as a person who could be redeemed. A jail chaplain and a volunteer counselor said he had been helpful and could be rehabilitated, a former girlfriend's mother spoke for him, and he described his religious activities in jail. The court also heard that he had once persuaded a girlfriend who had run away to return home.
The jury found no mitigating circumstances sufficient to preclude a death sentence. The judge sentenced him to death for the murder and to an extended term of 30 years for the aggravated kidnapping.
On October 25, 1989, in an opinion by Justice Miller, the court affirmed his conviction and death sentence. It held that the Sutton and Mak evidence had been properly admitted because it showed a common pattern and corroborated his confession. It found that officers' references to Spreitzer's statements implicating him were harmless, because his own lawyer had brought out similar information as part of the framing defense. It found that asking him whether the state's witnesses were lying was generally improper but caused no prejudice in his case.
On the sentence, the court agreed that the Cook County judgment should not have recorded four separate murder convictions for one death, but held that the error made no difference, writing: "We are certain that the multiple-murder circumstance was established here." It held that the evidence supported a finding that he had himself inflicted the fatal injuries. It declined to recognize a right for a capital defendant to make an unsworn statement to the jury, and rejected his challenges to the jury instructions, to the prosecutor's closing remarks and to the Illinois death penalty statute itself. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case in 1990.
In January 1991 he filed a petition for post-conviction relief in DuPage County. The circuit court dismissed it without a hearing. With new lawyers, he argued that his trial counsel had been ineffective for failing to investigate his mental and family history. A psychiatrist's affidavit traced his vulnerability to Gecht to the loss of his mother and to his father's detachment.
On March 31, 1994, the Illinois Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Freeman, affirmed the dismissal. It held that his lawyer's decision not to build a mental health case was not unreasonable, because Kokoraleis had "steadfastly maintained he was 'framed'" and a psychiatric defense would have contradicted that sworn denial. It also noted that the defense had fought to keep out evidence of cult rituals, which a mitigation theory based on Gecht's influence would have brought in. "What investigation is reasonable depends on the informed strategic choices of, as well as the information supplied by, the defendant," the court wrote. It held that his other claims, including the argument that the Cook County jury's decision to spare him entitled him to a new sentencing hearing, were barred because they had been or could have been raised on direct appeal. It set an execution date of September 14, 1994. He was not executed on that date; his case moved on to the federal courts.
In federal court he renewed his arguments. On May 2, 1997, Judge Zagel of the U.S. District Court denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The judge gave little weight to a new psychiatric opinion that diagnosed borderline personality disorder and said Gecht's influence had overwhelmed his self-control, noting that the expert had assumed guilt and that the crimes at issue had taken place without Gecht present. He also gave no weight to a law professor called to testify that trial counsel had been ineffective.
On December 16, 1997, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Easterbrook joined by Judges Bauer and Diane P. Wood, affirmed. It held that his claim that the Davis judgment did not prove two separate premeditated murders had been forfeited, and that a state may impose a separate penalty for each crime, so the life sentence in the Davis case did not bar a death sentence for the Borowski murder. Trial counsel's choice to argue lingering doubt and good character, rather than mental impairment, was a reasoned strategy that could not be squared with a client who denied guilt. Rehearing by the full court was denied on January 12, 1998.
Governor George Ryan had only recently taken office. Kokoraleis's execution was set for March 17. On March 1, Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal on his behalf, citing his long-standing claim that his confession had been beaten out of him.
His lawyers made a final attempt in the courts. On March 12, 1999, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay so that they could investigate evidence that, they said, showed he might not have committed the Borowski murder. Justice Moses Harrison II dissented, writing that the majority had treated the appeal "as nothing more than a bureaucratic nuisance," and on March 15 he issued an emergency stay so the U.S. Supreme Court could consider the claim. On March 16 the full Illinois Supreme Court voted 4 to 3 to lift that stay, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to postpone the execution.
A group of religious leaders, led by officials of the Greek Orthodox Church to which Kokoraleis belonged, asked Ryan to commute the sentence and to declare a moratorium on executions. Amnesty International reported that the governor declined to meet them. On the evening of March 16, Ryan denied clemency. Amnesty noted that his possible involvement in other killings, and the life sentence he was already serving for one of them, had reportedly reduced public sympathy for his claim of innocence in the Borowski case.
Andrew Kokoraleis was executed by lethal injection in the early hours of March 17, 1999, about four and a half hours after the governor's decision. He was the first person executed at the new Tamms facility in southern Illinois. An Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution described three sighs and a lick of his lips before he died. Amnesty International counted his execution as the 12th in Illinois and the 526th in the United States since executions resumed there in 1977.
Ryan later reflected on his part in the execution. "He wouldn't have died if I hadn't signed the order," he said, according to a 2015 account in The Southern Illinoisan.
No one has been executed in Illinois since. In March 1999, the month of his execution, two other men were freed from Illinois death row after being exonerated; one of them, Anthony Porter, had been the subject of an investigation by Northwestern University journalism students. In January 2000 Ryan declared a moratorium on executions. In January 2003, as he left office, he commuted the sentences of 167 people on death row and pardoned four. Edward Spreitzer was among those whose death sentences were commuted.
On March 9, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn signed a law abolishing the death penalty in Illinois, effective July 1, 2011, and commuted the sentences of the 15 men then on death row to life without parole. By then, according to the Associated Press, 20 people had been freed from Illinois death row after evidence showed they were innocent or had been wrongly convicted.
Among those at the signing was Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos, the chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, who had been Kokoraleis's spiritual adviser. An account of the signing written for Greek Reporter and republished by the Orthodox Peace Fellowship said he had become more active against capital punishment after the execution, had served as president of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and called the new law "a spiritual triumph of the conscience for all those opposed to capital punishment."
Each of the four men in the case ended differently.
Edward Spreitzer pleaded guilty in Cook County in April 1984 to the murders of Shui Mak, Rose Beck Davis, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado. On March 4, 1986, a DuPage County judge found him guilty of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton, and he was sentenced to death. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed in 1988, reducing his kidnapping term to 30 years, and federal courts later rejected his challenges. Ryan commuted his death sentence in 2003. In 2017 and 2019 news reports, he was serving natural life without parole at Stateville Correctional Center.
Thomas Kokoraleis was convicted in the Borowski case on a theory of accountability, which holds a person legally responsible for crimes others commit. He admitted taking part in her abduction but denied any role in her rape and killing. He was first sentenced to life; an appeals court ordered a new trial, and prosecutors then let him plead guilty in exchange for a 70-year sentence. NBC Chicago reported that the plea deal, in 1987, dropped charges in a second murder. Under the sentencing law of the time he had to serve half the term. His planned release in September 2017 drew protests from the Borowski family and the Elmhurst police chief, and was delayed because he had no approved place to live and because DuPage County prosecutors sought to have him held as a sexually violent person. Prosecutors later said they could not prove that he had a qualifying mental disorder. He was released in late March 2019 and registered as a sex offender, because the murder had been found to be sexually motivated even though he was not convicted of a sex crime.
Robin Gecht did not confess. He was convicted of the attempted murder, rape, aggravated kidnapping and deviate sexual assault of the woman who survived in 1982, whose testimony helped convict him. No conviction of Gecht for any killing has been reported. News reports in 2017 and 2019 gave his sentence as 120 years and his projected parole date as 2042; the Seventh Circuit's 1997 opinion described it as a natural life term. In 2017 he was held at Menard Correctional Center.
The number of victims. The totals attached to the case, from more than 15 to about 20 women, come from police and press accounts and from confessions that the men later disowned. The courts convicted Andrew Kokoraleis of two murders. News reports list five murders for which Spreitzer is serving his sentence. No court has found that the group killed 17, 18 or 20 people.
His confessions. From his trials until his death, Kokoraleis said that his statements were the product of coaching and beatings. Two juries, a trial judge ruling on suppression, and the state and federal appeals courts rejected that claim. In March 1999 his lawyers said they had new evidence that he had not killed Lorraine Borowski; the Illinois Supreme Court refused to delay the execution to examine it, over the dissent of Justice Harrison, and the content of that evidence was not reported.
Gecht's role. Gecht is often described in news accounts as the group's leader, and Kokoraleis's own statements put him at the center of the Davis killing. He has never been convicted of murder. The federal district court in 1997 noted that the crimes it was considering had been committed without Gecht present.
The ritual claims. Press accounts in 2017 and 2019 described the group in terms of satanic or cannibalistic rituals. Those claims rest on statements the men gave in 1982, which Andrew Kokoraleis later recanted, and on police and press accounts. His trial lawyers sought to keep evidence of cult rituals away from the DuPage County jury, as the Illinois Supreme Court noted in 1994.
July 18, 1963: Andrew Kokoraleis is born.
1978 or 1979: he meets Edward Spreitzer.
Mid-1981 to May 1982: he works for Robin Gecht, an electrician, and lives for a time in the Gecht household.
May 23, 1981: Linda Sutton, 26, disappears in Chicago; she is found June 1 near Villa Park.
May 15, 1982: Lorraine Borowski, 21, disappears on her way to work in Elmhurst; her shoes and keys are found outside the office.
May 30, 1982: Shui Mak, 30, is found missing as her family returns home.
September 7 to 8, 1982: Rose Beck Davis, 30, is killed in Chicago; she is found September 8.
September 30, 1982: Shui Mak's remains are found in northwest Cook County.
October 1982: a woman survives an attack and describes the van to Chicago police.
October 10, 1982: Lorraine Borowski's remains are found in Darien.
October 20, 1982: police stop Gecht's van with Spreitzer at the wheel; both men are released.
November 5, 1982: Spreitzer admits involvement in the Sutton case and the attack on the survivor.
November 7, 1982: Spreitzer leads police to Andrew Kokoraleis's home; he is taken to Area 5 headquarters.
November 9, 1982: he gives DuPage County detectives oral and handwritten statements about Lorraine Borowski.
November 10, 1982: Thomas Kokoraleis is taken into custody.
April 1984: Spreitzer pleads guilty to four Cook County murders.
March 18, 1985: a Cook County jury convicts Andrew Kokoraleis of the murder of Rose Beck Davis; the jury rejects a death sentence and he receives natural life.
March 4, 1986: Spreitzer is found guilty of the Sutton murder and sentenced to death.
April 2, 1987: the Illinois Appellate Court affirms the Davis conviction.
1987: a DuPage County jury convicts him of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Lorraine Borowski; the sentencing hearing begins March 19 and he is sentenced to death.
October 25, 1989: the Illinois Supreme Court affirms the death sentence.
1990: the U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
January 1991: he files for post-conviction relief.
March 31, 1994: the Illinois Supreme Court affirms the denial of post-conviction relief.
May 2, 1997: the federal district court denies habeas relief.
December 16, 1997: the Seventh Circuit affirms.
March 1, 1999: Amnesty International issues an urgent appeal.
March 12 to 16, 1999: the Illinois Supreme Court refuses a stay, Justice Harrison grants one, and the full court lifts it 4 to 3; the U.S. Supreme Court declines to intervene; Governor Ryan denies clemency.
March 17, 1999: Andrew Kokoraleis is executed at Tamms Correctional Center, the last execution in Illinois.
January 2000: Ryan declares a moratorium on executions.
January 2003: Ryan commutes 167 death sentences, including Spreitzer's.
March 9, 2011: Governor Pat Quinn signs the law abolishing the death penalty.
March 2019: Thomas Kokoraleis is released after serving half of a 70-year sentence.