In December 2003 police in Hammond, Indiana, broke up fresh concrete in the basement of a rented house at 4933 Ash Avenue and found three bodies wrapped in plastic. Nicholas James, nineteen, had worked with the tenant; he had been beaten to death on May 2. James Raganyi, sixteen, and Michael Dennis, thirteen, had been strangled there on September 10 or 11. The tenant was David Edward Maust, and he had killed twice before. Each time he had been released.
He was born on April 5, 1954; most records place his birth in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, while some accounts say Chicago. His parents divorced when he was seven. Both had troubled pasts: his father had been orphaned at twelve and raised in foster homes, and his mother had been hospitalized in an asylum and was described in records as psychotic. When he was nine she took him to a mental institution and left him there. His lawyer, Thomas Vanes, said the institution kept trying to send him home and his mother kept refusing. He spent most of his life after that in institutions of one kind or another. In Hammond he was known as Crazy Dave.
He joined the Army and was stationed near Frankfurt, where he worked as a cook and bowled in the Army league, averaging as high as 297. On May 26, 1974, after meeting a thirteen-year-old American boy, Jimmy McClister, at a bowling alley, he beat him to death in a forest. He claimed the boy had died in an accident on a moped he had stolen. A court-martial convicted him of manslaughter and larceny, and he served about three years. On August 9, 1981, in Illinois, he stabbed Donald Jones, fifteen, of Chicago, and threw his body in a pond near Elgin. He was convicted of murder. In 1999 Illinois released him, despite his own plea to be kept in custody.
In 2001 he hit an acquaintance six times in the back of the head with a metal pipe; the man reported it but did not want to press charges. Nicholas James was killed less than four years after Maust's release. Maust had told him he belonged to a group that ran drugs and could cut him in. Four months later he killed the two younger boys. Hammond police arrested him that December.
He pleaded guilty on the day his death-penalty trial was to begin, in November 2005, before Lake Superior Court Judge Clarence Murray, under an agreement that took death off the table. As part of it he spent about five and a half hours with the lead investigator, Lieutenant Ron Johnson, going through the three Hammond killings and the two earlier ones in detail. Most of the families said they had agreed only after being promised he would never be free. "He took my brother away from us," said Raganyi's sister, Melody. Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter blamed the Illinois justice system for letting him go. In December 2005 Murray sentenced him to three consecutive life terms without parole.
About a month later, on January 20, 2006, Maust hanged himself in his cell at the Lake County jail in Crown Point. A city official later said he had heard that Maust spoke of more victims shortly before his death; Vanes said Maust never once claimed there were others, and that prosecutors and the defense had both come to believe his account. The city bought the house on Ash Avenue and demolished it in February 2009.