David Edward Maust was born in Chicago in 1954. His parents divorced when he was seven and his mother Eva took him to court at nine, describing a pattern of behaviour she said she could not control, and he spent the next four years in a Cook County institution that housed children and adults, the mentally ill and the criminal together. Doctors there recorded a bright, articulate boy with an almost savant recall for sports statistics. His lawyer, Thomas Vanes, said the hospital repeatedly tried to arrange a return home and Eva repeatedly refused. Maust told him about another boy whose parents had him committed so they could take a holiday and collected him afterwards. He was known as Crazy Dave.
He killed for the first time in 1974, while serving in the United States Army in Germany, drowning a thirteen-year-old German boy, James McClister, in a canal. He served four years in a military prison. In 1981 he killed fifteen-year-old Donald Jones in Illinois, was convicted of murder, and was paroled in 1999.
In 2003, living in Hammond, Indiana, he killed three teenagers over several months: James Raganyi, sixteen, Nicholas James, nineteen, and Michael Dennis, thirteen. He gave them drink, killed them, and encased the bodies in concrete in the basement of the house he rented. He then wrote to police himself, in effect asking to be stopped.
He pleaded guilty in 2005 and was sentenced to life without parole under an agreement that avoided the death penalty. He wrote to the victims' families apologising and said that he should never have been released. He hanged himself in his cell at the Lake County jail on January 20, 2006.
The case is a record of three separate opportunities to keep a man in custody, in 1974, in 1981 and in 1999, and of what happened after the third.