On the evening of March 17, 1999, at the Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois, Andrew Kokoraleis, thirty-five, declined a last meal and addressed the family of the woman he had been sentenced to die for killing. "To the Borowski family, I am truly sorry for your loss," he said. "I mean this sincerely." He quoted Exodus and Proverbs and told the witnesses to repent, for the kingdom of heaven was at hand, and then he was killed by lethal injection. He was the only man executed under Governor George Ryan, who two months into his term let the execution proceed, and he was the last person the State of Illinois ever put to death.
He was born in Villa Park, Illinois, on July 18, 1963, and raised in the Greek Orthodox Church with his older brother Thomas. Through Robin Gecht, the older man at the center of the group, the brothers and Edward Spreitzer became what the Chicago press called the Ripper Crew, suspected in the abduction, rape, mutilation and murder of as many as seventeen women around Chicago and its western suburbs between May 1981 and October 1982, beginning with Linda Sutton, twenty-eight, whose body was found behind a motel in June 1981.
On May 15, 1982, Lorraine Borowski, a twenty-one-year-old secretary known as Lorry, was seized as she went to open the Elmhurst real-estate office where she worked; her shoes and keys lay scattered on the sidewalk. Her body was found five months later in a cemetery in Clarendon Hills. On September 8, 1982, Rose Beck Davis, thirty-one, was found in a Chicago alley with injuries almost identical to those of Sandra Delaware, whose body had been found on the bank of the Chicago River in August: she had been stabbed and strangled, and a breast had been cut away.
The case broke with a survivor. On October 6, 1982, Beverley Washington was found beside railroad tracks, mutilated and alive, and gave police a description of the man and his van. Gecht was arrested on October 20, released on bond, and rearrested on November 5, and detectives tracked down the other three. Andrew Kokoraleis was arrested on November 7 and, with Spreitzer, confessed to involvement in as many as seventeen killings. His brother's statement a few days later described a "satanic chapel" in Gecht's home, breasts cut off with a wire garrote, and a box in which they were kept. Andrew later said his confession had been coerced.
He was tried twice. In 1985 a Cook County jury convicted him of the murder, aggravated kidnapping and rape of Rose Davis; his lawyer called him "a follower, not an organizer, not the prime mover," and after ninety minutes' deliberation the jury spared him, and he was sentenced to life without parole. On March 18, 1987, a DuPage County jury convicted him of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Lorraine Borowski, and on April 30 he was sentenced to death, the Davis conviction serving as the second murder that made him eligible. His appeals failed, including a federal habeas petition rejected by the Seventh Circuit in 1997, which recorded that he had confessed to as many as eighteen killings, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case.
The Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago fought to stop the execution, and its chancellor, Demetrios Kantzavelos, later a bishop, became an opponent of capital punishment and lobbied to end it in the state. Within a year Ryan imposed a moratorium, in January 2003 he commuted every death sentence in Illinois, Spreitzer's among them, and on March 9, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn signed the law abolishing the death penalty. The four men in the case ended four different ways: Andrew executed, Spreitzer's death sentence commuted to life, Thomas released in 2019 after serving his sentence, and Gecht, who never confessed, serving 120 years for the attack on Beverley Washington without ever being tried for a murder.