Edward Spreitzer was born in 1961 and worked for a Chicago roofing contractor named Robin Gecht, who had briefly been employed years earlier by John Wayne Gacy. Gecht, Spreitzer and the brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis became the group the press called the Chicago Rippers.
Between May 1981 and October 1982 they abducted women from the streets of Chicago and its western suburbs, most of them working as prostitutes, in a van. Linda Sutton was the first, taken in May 1981 and found in Villa Park. Lorraine Borowski, an office worker taken on her way to open the estate agency where she worked, and Shui Mak were both taken in May 1982. Sandra Delaware, Rose Beck Davis and others followed. At least eighteen women are attributed to the group. The Chicago press called the group the Ripper Crew.
What identified them was the mutilation. In each case a breast was removed, with a wire garrotte, and Thomas Kokoraleis described to police afterwards a room in Gecht's flat fitted out as a chapel where the group ate portions of it while Gecht read from a satanic text, and kept the remainder in a box.
The case broke in October 1982 when a young woman, Beverly Washington, was attacked, mutilated and thrown from a van and survived to describe it. Spreitzer and the Kokoraleis brothers confessed. Gecht did not.
Spreitzer was convicted of four murders and sentenced to death. In January 2003 Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in Illinois, and Spreitzer's became life without parole. Andrew Kokoraleis was executed on March 17, 1999, the last person put to death in Illinois. Thomas Kokoraleis served his sentence and was released in 2019, to considerable public objection. Robin Gecht, against whom no murder charge could be made out, was convicted of the attempted murder and rape of Beverly Washington and sentenced to 120 years.