Andrew Kokoraleis was born in 1961. He and his older brother Thomas worked with Edward Spreitzer for a Chicago roofing contractor, Robin Gecht, and the four men became the group the Chicago press called the Ripper Crew.
Between May 1981 and October 1982 women were taken from the streets of Chicago and its western suburbs in a van, sexually assaulted, mutilated and killed. At least eighteen are attributed to the group. In each case a breast was removed with a wire garrotte.
The case broke in October 1982 when a young woman was attacked, mutilated, thrown from a van and survived to describe what had happened to her. Andrew Kokoraleis, his brother and Spreitzer confessed. Gecht did not, and has never been convicted of any of the killings.
Andrew Kokoraleis was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection on March 17, 1999. No one has been executed in Illinois since: Governor George Ryan imposed a moratorium in 2000, commuted every death sentence in the state in January 2003, and the death penalty was abolished there in 2011.
The four defendants in the case received four different outcomes - execution, a commuted death sentence, a completed sentence and release, and no murder conviction at all - and what separated them was which of them talked. The three who confessed are the three convicted of murder.