Edward Spreitzer was a young man in Chicago, often at his mother's house, when, in November 1982, he told detectives and a Cook County prosecutor that he had helped abduct and kill women over the previous year and a half. He named his employer, Robin Gecht, as the man who led those outings, and he named Andrew Kokoraleis as a partner in several of them. Over three statements he described a series of crimes that began with Linda Sutton, a 26-year-old mother of two taken in Chicago in May 1981, and ended with a street shooting in October 1982 that killed a man named Rafael Tirado.
Newspapers and broadcasters came to call the four men linked in these cases, Spreitzer, Gecht and the brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis, the Ripper Crew or the Chicago Rippers. Police and press later attributed as many as 18 to 20 deaths of women to the group. The courts found far less. Spreitzer pleaded guilty in April 1984 to four murders in Cook County and was found guilty in March 1986, in DuPage County, of murdering and kidnapping Linda Sutton. A jury sentenced him to death for her murder. He spent nearly two decades under that sentence, through state and federal appeals, until Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in Illinois in January 2003. He has been serving life in prison since then.
What the record says about Spreitzer's early life comes from the witnesses his lawyers called at his 1986 sentencing hearing, as summarized by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1988. His mother testified that she gave birth to him when she was 16. She said his father paid him little attention because the boy was "slow," and she described her son as shy, withdrawn and without friends.
A family friend called him a shy, backward child. A classmate remembered him as slow and uncoordinated, a boy who was often beaten up. A priest who taught him in seventh grade described him as docile, cooperative and extremely slow. His sister said he struggled in school and that she tutored him through the eighth grade. He repeated kindergarten. A former assistant principal testified that he failed all of his classes in high school and did not go back for a third year. A neighbor called him slow but courteous.
A clinical psychologist, Kent Mohr, tested him for the defense and put his IQ at 76, in the range the psychologist called borderline defective. Mohr diagnosed a schizoid personality and said that beneath the surface there was anger and a potential for explosiveness. On cross-examination, a federal appeals court later noted, the psychologist agreed that Spreitzer was resentful of authority, had some potential for dangerousness and could still be dangerous.
As a young man Spreitzer worked in fast-food and doughnut shops and then for Robin Gecht, according to the 1988 opinion. By October 1982 he was driving a van that Gecht owned. A woman who had known him for six or seven years testified for the prosecution in 1986 that she once watched him fill a gasoline can and teased him that he would run away if anything happened. He answered, she said, that he had killed somebody before.
Linda Sutton was 26 years old. She was last seen alive at 11 p.m. on May 23, 1981, in Chicago. About a week later her body was found in Villa Park, a suburb in DuPage County west of the city. The coroner testified at Spreitzer's trial that she had probably been stabbed to death.
The case stayed open for more than a year. It was a DuPage County sheriff's detective, Warren Wilkosz, who would later link it to a survivor's account in Chicago. In his statements of November 1982, Spreitzer said that Gecht had picked Sutton up and that he had helped with the attack. He later testified that he had not known in advance that Gecht meant to kill her, and he admitted that he never tried to stop it. Spreitzer told investigators that Linda Sutton was the first of the killings.
In his statements Spreitzer described two more killings from the summer of 1981. One was a Black woman who had been hitchhiking in July 1981. The other was a woman Gecht picked up in the van in August 1981. The Illinois Supreme Court recorded in 1988 that the identity of each woman was unknown. Neither death was ever charged against him, and neither woman was reported as later identified.
Lorraine Borowski, known to her family as Lorry, was 21 and worked at a real estate office in Elmhurst, in DuPage County. Court records describe her as a secretary there, and broadcasters later described her as a receptionist. On the morning of Saturday, May 15, 1982, she walked a few blocks from her apartment to work and never arrived. Her employer found her shoes and belongings outside the office, Shaw Local reported in 2017, and a witness saw a struggle beside a gray or silver car at about 8:30 that morning.
Her remains were found that October in Darien and identified. The Illinois Supreme Court gave the date of the discovery as October 20 in Spreitzer's case and as October 10 in Andrew Kokoraleis's case; local press reports give October 10.
Spreitzer was never charged with her death. In his statements he said that he had been present when Gecht attacked her. Andrew Kokoraleis, in his own confession, told a detective that she was "the girl that Eddie Spreitzer and I killed," according to the court's account of the testimony. Thomas Kokoraleis later admitted taking part in her abduction while denying that he took part in the killing; he said that his brother and Spreitzer had committed it, Shaw Local reported in 2019. A DuPage County jury convicted Andrew Kokoraleis of her murder.
Her family described her as independent and full of life. Her mother told NBC Chicago in 2017 that she did not want anyone else to suffer as her daughter and the other young women had.
Shui Mak was last seen alive at 1 a.m. on May 29, 1982, when she got out of her brother's car on a road in the northwest suburbs. Her body was found months later in South Barrington. In his first statement Spreitzer said he had been present when Gecht attacked her; in his second, he said Andrew Kokoraleis had been there too. Andrew Kokoraleis also gave a statement implicating himself and Spreitzer in her death. Spreitzer later pleaded guilty to her murder in Cook County. Nothing more was reported about her life.
Sandra Delaware's body was found in Chicago on August 27, 1982. She had been strangled and stabbed, the Illinois Supreme Court recorded. Spreitzer told investigators that he stabbed her after Gecht asked him what he would do. He pleaded guilty to her murder in 1984. The reports say nothing more about who she was.
Rose Beck Davis was found on September 8, 1982, in Chicago. She had been strangled. In his third statement, given on November 8, 1982, Spreitzer admitted that he and Andrew Kokoraleis had brought her to the van and that he had helped strangle her. Andrew Kokoraleis was convicted in Cook County in 1985 of her murder, and Spreitzer pleaded guilty to it in 1984.
On October 6, 1982, two men, Rafael Tirado and a companion, were standing on a street corner in Chicago when shots were fired at them. Tirado died of his wounds. His companion was taken to a hospital and survived.
Spreitzer's accounts of the shooting changed. In his first statement he said Gecht had fired the shots. In his second, two days later, he said Andrew Kokoraleis had fired them. He also told the prosecutor that the purpose of the shooting was to attack Black people, using a racial slur, and the prosecutor later relied on that admission at his sentencing hearing. Spreitzer pleaded guilty to Tirado's murder in 1984. The court records spell his first name both Rafael and Raphael, and one record spells his surname Tiradao.
The case broke in October 1982. A young Black woman was found alive in a Chicago alley with severe injuries. She told police she had gotten into a van, been given pills and lost consciousness. She described the vehicle in detail: a red Dodge van with blue and white feathers hanging from the mirror and a wooden partition inside.
She survived the attack.
In DuPage County, Detective Wilkosz saw a connection between her account and the Linda Sutton case and got in touch with the Chicago police. On October 20, 1982, a Chicago detective, Thomas Flynn, stopped a van that matched her description. Spreitzer was driving. He told Flynn the van belonged to his employer, Robin Gecht. Gecht came forward with the registration, and both men were taken to the Area Five police headquarters and then released.
Wilkosz interviewed Spreitzer at home on October 26 and again on November 5, 1982. According to the detective's testimony as recorded by the Illinois Supreme Court, Spreitzer admitted that he had been to the field in Villa Park where Linda Sutton's body was found, and that on May 23, 1981, he had been riding with Gecht when Gecht picked up a woman working the street. Shown Sutton's photograph, he did not identify her.
Spreitzer was scheduled to take a polygraph examination on November 5. When he did not appear, Flynn and his partner went looking for him and found him, at about 7:45 p.m. by Flynn's account, at his mother's house. Flynn testified that Spreitzer said he had been tied up working on his car, that he still agreed to take the test, and that he went with the detectives voluntarily, neither handcuffed nor under arrest, first to one station for an 8 p.m. polygraph and then to Area Five for questioning. Flynn said he was arrested only after he admitted taking part in the killings.
Spreitzer told a different story when he later asked a judge to quash his arrest. He testified that at about 10:30 p.m. he parked behind his mother's house, that the two detectives pushed him against the car, patted him down and handcuffed him behind his back, and that he was then held for five days and questioned again and again. The trial judge denied the motion, finding that Spreitzer had made incriminating statements before he was arrested. He was the only witness for the motion; Flynn and Wilkosz testified against it.
At Area Five on November 5, Spreitzer admitted his part in the Sutton case and in the attack on the woman who survived. He then gave a statement to Flynn and to Richard Beuke, an assistant Cook County state's attorney, admitting involvement in other killings. In that statement Gecht was the central figure.
On the evening of November 7, Spreitzer led officers to Andrew Kokoraleis's home in Villa Park, according to the Illinois Supreme Court's opinion in Kokoraleis's own case. Kokoraleis was taken to Chicago and questioned over the next two days, and he gave oral and written confessions.
On November 8, Spreitzer gave Beuke a second statement. This time he added Andrew Kokoraleis as a participant in several of the crimes and said that Kokoraleis, not Gecht, had fired the shots that killed Rafael Tirado. Later the same day he gave a third statement, admitting that he had taken part in the killing of Rose Beck Davis.
At his DuPage trial in 1986, Spreitzer accepted his November 5 statement as his own and took back the November 8 statements.
The press accounts of the case rest heavily on what the four men said, or were said to have said, to police in November 1982. Some of those claims were never tested in court.
Andrew Kokoraleis also recanted at his trial, telling the jury he had been framed by investigators who fed him facts.
Officers testified at Andrew Kokoraleis's trial that Spreitzer and Gecht had implicated him. Andrew Kokoraleis said he had been questioned about some 16 killings. In Spreitzer's case, a federal appeals court summarized the record in 1997 as five murder convictions and admitted involvement in four other killings.
Broadcasters and newspapers have since described the four as a satanic gang or cult responsible for as many as 18 or 20 deaths. Those totals are attributions by police and the press. No court found any of the four men responsible for that many deaths, and the claims of ritual acts come from statements that two of the men later disavowed. The 1988 opinion records that prosecutors at Spreitzer's sentencing hearing had agreed not to raise devil worship, and that the court found a question on that subject during cross-examination to be misconduct.
In April 1984 Spreitzer pleaded guilty in Cook County to four murders: those of Shui Mak, Rose Beck Davis, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado. The Illinois Supreme Court and the federal courts later treated those four convictions as the basis for the multiple-murder factor that made him eligible for the death penalty in DuPage County. The sentences imposed in Cook County, and any other counts in the plea, were not reported.
DuPage County indicted Spreitzer, together with Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis, for the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton. The court granted a severance, so each man was tried separately. Spreitzer waived a jury and was tried by a judge alone.
Before trial there was a dispute over his lawyers. Spreitzer was represented by the DuPage County public defender's office, first with Edward Ward among his lawyers and then by Assistant Public Defender Carol Anfinson. The office then hired Peter Dockery, a former DuPage assistant state's attorney. The prosecutor, Brian Telander, told the court that Dockery had been closely involved in the decision to charge Spreitzer, and the judge said he would have Dockery withdraw from the case in any event. Dockery later became the public defender. Spreitzer argued on appeal that this created a conflict of interest for his defense. The Illinois Supreme Court disagreed, calling the possible conflict "extremely speculative and remote," and the federal appeals court found that Dockery had no role in the defense beyond a titular one.
The state's evidence included the coroner's findings and Spreitzer's statements. Spreitzer testified. He accepted the November 5 statement, retracted the November 8 statements, and admitted acts against Linda Sutton's body that he said he had carried out on Gecht's orders. On March 4, 1986, the judge found him guilty of murder and aggravated kidnapping.
The state asked a jury to sentence him to death. It relied on the multiple-murder factor, based on the four Cook County convictions. Spreitzer was 20 when Linda Sutton was killed, the court noted. The jury found him eligible.
For aggravation, prosecutors presented the evidence of his statements and the testimony of the woman who said he had told her he had killed before. For mitigation, the defense called his mother, his sister, a family friend, a classmate, his former teacher, the former assistant principal, a neighbor and the psychologist. The defense also showed that he had had no disciplinary problems during his time at Stateville prison.
Spreitzer testified at the hearing too. He said he had not known beforehand that Gecht planned to kill Linda Sutton, that he felt very guilty about his part, and that he knew he was in deep trouble. He admitted he had never tried to stop any of the killings. A federal court later recorded that he also told the jury he knew what he had done was wrong, that he would have reported it eventually, and that he felt at peace in prison.
In closing, the prosecution asked the jurors to put themselves in Linda Sutton's shoes. The prosecutor told them that the people in their community had a right to live free from the fear of men like Spreitzer, and said that Spreitzer, even by the account of his own psychologist, was a very dangerous person, and that he should not be considered human. The prosecution also argued that Spreitzer was biased against Black, Asian and Hispanic people. The defense had wanted the jury to know that if it did not impose death, Spreitzer would be sentenced to natural life without parole; the trial judge did not allow testimony on that point and did not instruct the jury on it.
The jury found no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude a death sentence. The court sentenced him to death for the murder and to 60 years for the aggravated kidnapping.
The Illinois Supreme Court heard his direct appeal and decided it on March 23, 1988, in an opinion by Justice Clark. It rejected the conflict-of-interest claim and affirmed the conviction.
On the sentencing hearing, the court found several of the prosecutor's arguments improper. The invitation to stand in the victim's shoes was "highly improper," the justices wrote, because the state was not free to invite jurors into an empathetic identification with the victims. The remark that Spreitzer should not be considered human was the kind of remark the court had repeatedly disapproved. References to the victims and their families were improper under Booth v. Maryland, though the court noted that no family member had actually testified. The question about devil worship broke the state's own agreement. But the court held that none of these errors, alone or together, had denied Spreitzer a fair hearing, and it found the argument about racial bias fairly based on his own admission about the shooting.
The court also rejected his challenges to the jury instructions, including his claim that the jury should have been told about the natural-life alternative, and his attacks on the Illinois death penalty statute, among them a claim of racial disparity that the court answered by citing McCleskey v. Kemp. It found one error in his favor: the 60-year term for aggravated kidnapping was longer than the law allowed, and the court reduced it to 30 years. The death sentence was affirmed, and the court directed that an execution date be set for September 13, 1988. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case on October 17, 1988.
Spreitzer then filed his own petition for post-conviction relief, and the court appointed a lawyer for him. The amended petition argued that his trial lawyers had been ineffective, both in the hearing on the motion to quash his arrest and at the sentencing hearing, where, he said, they had not presented evidence of psychiatric and neurological problems or of mental retardation. It also argued that his post-conviction lawyer had failed to support those claims with evidence.
One new piece of evidence was a written statement from a neighbor who lived two houses from his mother. Taken by an investigator in 1989, nearly seven years after the arrest, it said she had seen Spreitzer standing in the street handcuffed to a police car. The courts found that it did not support his own testimony: it put the scene in the early afternoon rather than late at night, in the street rather than behind the house, and described several minutes of waiting rather than an immediate departure.
The trial court denied the petition without a hearing on October 24, 1989. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on March 28, 1991, in an opinion by Justice Thomas J. Moran. It said it would not allow the natural-life instruction issue to be relitigated "under a different guise," and it set a new execution date of September 18, 1991. The Supreme Court of the United States again declined review.
That date also passed without an execution. On March 31, 1992, Spreitzer filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the federal district court for the Northern District of Illinois, and he amended it in November 1994. On January 31, 1996, the district court granted relief on the death sentence alone and ordered a new sentencing hearing. It reasoned that the jury should have been told he could never be paroled if it chose life, the principle the Supreme Court of the United States had announced in Simmons v. South Carolina.
The state appealed. On May 23, 1997, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Bauer, reversed. Simmons, it held, announced a new rule that could not be applied to a case that had become final in 1988. The panel also rejected his conflict-of-interest claim and his request for a hearing on the motion to quash, and it said the death sentence should be reinstated.
The case went back to the district court on his remaining claims about his sentencing lawyers. That court found them waived, considered them anyway, found no prejudice and dismissed the petition. On July 11, 2000, the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Kanne, affirmed. Spreitzer's lawyers in the Illinois Supreme Court had argued only that his post-conviction lawyer was ineffective, not that his sentencing lawyers were, so the claims had never been fairly presented to the state courts. He had shown no cause for that default and made no showing of actual innocence. The court also noted that the jury had already heard the psychologist's evidence and Spreitzer's own account of his conduct in prison.
By then the politics of the death penalty in Illinois had changed. In January 2000 Governor George Ryan placed a moratorium on executions, The Southern Illinoisan reported. In January 2003, as he left office, Ryan commuted the sentences of all 167 people on the state's death row, most of them to life in prison; ABC7 Chicago gives the date as January 11, 2003. The list of commutations compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center includes Edward Spreitzer.
With that, his death sentence for the murder of Linda Sutton became a life sentence. Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011, when Governor Pat Quinn signed the repeal into law.
The four men's paths diverged. Andrew Kokoraleis was tried in DuPage County for the murder of Lorraine Borowski. The trial court let the jury hear evidence of the Sutton and Mak killings, finding a common method and that the evidence bore on the reliability of his confession. The jury convicted him of murder and aggravated kidnapping and sentenced him to death, and the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on October 25, 1989. He had already been convicted in Cook County in 1985 on four counts of murder in the death of Rose Beck Davis.
He was executed by lethal injection early on March 17, 1999, at the new prison at Tamms, after the Illinois Supreme Court refused a stay and Governor Ryan denied clemency the evening before. He was 35. Amnesty International said he had been executed despite doubts about his guilt. He was the first person executed at Tamms and the last person executed by the state of Illinois.
Thomas Kokoraleis was also convicted of Lorraine Borowski's murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1984; the judge rejected the death penalty. A state appeals court reversed the conviction in 1986 and ordered a new trial because of legal errors. Instead of a second trial, he pleaded guilty in exchange for a 70-year sentence, and charges in Linda Sutton's death were dropped under the agreement. He was convicted on a theory of accountability, Shaw Local reported, meaning he was held responsible for the acts of others.
Under the sentencing law in force at the time of the crime, he had to serve only half of that term. His release was first scheduled for September 29, 2017. Lorraine Borowski's family, with the lawyer Gloria Allred, campaigned against it, her brother started an online petition, and the Elmhurst police chief opposed it. The release was delayed because he had no approved place to live. DuPage County prosecutors and the Illinois attorney general sought to have him committed as a sexually violent person, but several psychologists and a psychiatrist concluded that he did not meet the criteria, and the effort was dropped.
He was released from the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton on March 29, 2019, at 58, after serving his maximum sentence, and he registered as a sex offender. Officials said the state was legally required to release him. In a CBS 2 Chicago interview in June 2019 he rejected the way the public saw him.
Robin Gecht was convicted of the attempted murder, rape, aggravated kidnapping and deviate sexual assault of the woman who survived in October 1982, and sentenced to 120 years in prison. No murder conviction against him was reported. In 2017 he was held at Menard Correctional Center with a projected parole date in 2042. In Spreitzer's statements Gecht was the central figure, and a 2017 Fox News report called him the crew's ringleader.
The victims' families have spoken mostly when one of the men came up for release. Lorraine Borowski's brother, who was 14 when she was killed, said in 2017 that the men had been proven guilty and deserved no leniency, and in 2019 that he had hoped the day of Thomas Kokoraleis's release would never come. Her mother said in 2019 that the family would spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders. A close friend of Lorry Borowski said the thought of Kokoraleis living nearby frightened all of them. Allred called for an Illinois law that would require released sex offenders to keep away from their victims' families, and the family said it was willing to testify in Springfield for it. Linda Sutton's son said in 2017 that he and his sister had been cheated out of a life with their mother.
None of the families was reported as having spoken about Spreitzer's commutation.
Shaw Local reported in August 2017 that Spreitzer was held at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill and was not eligible for discharge. Patch reported in September 2017 that he was not eligible for parole. Shaw Local reported on April 1, 2019, that he was serving a natural life sentence with no possibility of parole, and an Associated Press report the same day said that he and Gecht had exhausted all of their eligible appeals.
In April 2019 he was serving life in the Illinois prison system.
The number of victims. The figures most often repeated, as many as 18 or as many as 20 women, are attributions by police and the press to the group as a whole. Spreitzer was convicted of five murders, one of them of a man, and admitted involvement in four other killings, by the federal court's summary. Two of those were women whose identities were never established.
Who did what. Spreitzer's own statements changed on central points. He first said Gecht fired the shots that killed Rafael Tirado and later said Andrew Kokoraleis did. At trial he accepted the first statement and retracted the later ones. Andrew Kokoraleis said Spreitzer took part in Lorraine Borowski's killing; Spreitzer said he only saw it; Thomas Kokoraleis said it was his brother and Spreitzer. None of these accounts was tested against Spreitzer in a trial for her death.
Ritual and cannibalism claims. The accounts of an attic chapel and of ritual acts come from police reports of what Thomas Kokoraleis said in 1982. He later said that confession was coerced and that he invented much of it. Andrew Kokoraleis said at his trial that investigators had fed him facts. No court found the ritual claims proved, and the Illinois Supreme Court held that cross-examining Spreitzer about devil worship at his sentencing was misconduct.
The confessions. Spreitzer argued that he was arrested without probable cause and held for five days; the courts accepted the detectives' account that he went with them voluntarily. Questions about Andrew Kokoraleis's guilt were raised by Amnesty International before his execution. Thomas Kokoraleis's first conviction was reversed. Spreitzer's convictions have been upheld at every stage.
Gecht's role. Gecht was named as the leader in Spreitzer's statements and in later press accounts, but the only convictions against him that were reported are for the attack on the woman who survived.
May 23, 1981: Linda Sutton, 26, is last seen alive in Chicago; her body is found about a week later in Villa Park.
July and August 1981: the months in which, by Spreitzer's later statements, two women never identified were killed.
May 15, 1982: Lorraine Borowski, 21, disappears on her way to work in Elmhurst.
May 29, 1982: Shui Mak is last seen alive in the northwest suburbs; her body is found months later in South Barrington.
August 27, 1982: Sandra Delaware's body is found in Chicago.
September 8, 1982: Rose Beck Davis is found in Chicago.
October 6, 1982: Rafael Tirado is shot and killed in Chicago; his companion survives.
October 1982: a woman is found alive in a Chicago alley and describes a red van.
October 10 or 20, 1982: Lorraine Borowski's remains are found in Darien.
October 20, 1982: Detective Thomas Flynn stops the van; Spreitzer is driving; he and Gecht are questioned and released.
October 26 and November 5, 1982: Detective Warren Wilkosz interviews Spreitzer at home.
November 5, 1982: Spreitzer goes with detectives for a polygraph and questioning, and gives his first statement.
November 7, 1982: Spreitzer leads officers to Andrew Kokoraleis's home in Villa Park.
November 8, 1982: Spreitzer gives his second and third statements.
1984: Thomas Kokoraleis is convicted of Lorraine Borowski's murder and sentenced to life.
April 1984: Spreitzer pleads guilty in Cook County to the murders of Shui Mak, Rose Beck Davis, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado.
1985: Andrew Kokoraleis is convicted in Cook County in the death of Rose Beck Davis.
March 4, 1986: a DuPage County judge finds Spreitzer guilty of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton; a jury later sentences him to death.
1986: an appeals court reverses Thomas Kokoraleis's conviction; he later pleads guilty for a 70-year term.
March 23, 1988: the Illinois Supreme Court affirms Spreitzer's death sentence and cuts the kidnapping term to 30 years.
October 17, 1988: the Supreme Court of the United States declines review.
October 25, 1989: the Illinois Supreme Court affirms Andrew Kokoraleis's death sentence.
March 28, 1991: the Illinois Supreme Court affirms the denial of post-conviction relief and sets an execution date of September 18, 1991.
March 31, 1992: Spreitzer files a federal habeas petition.
January 31, 1996: the federal district court orders a new sentencing hearing.
May 23, 1997: the Seventh Circuit reverses and says the death sentence should be reinstated.
March 17, 1999: Andrew Kokoraleis is executed at Tamms.
January 2000: Governor Ryan imposes a moratorium on executions.
July 11, 2000: the Seventh Circuit affirms dismissal of Spreitzer's remaining habeas claims.
January 2003: Governor Ryan commutes all 167 Illinois death sentences, including Spreitzer's.
2011: Illinois abolishes the death penalty.
2017: Spreitzer is reported at Stateville Correctional Center, ineligible for parole.
March 29, 2019: Thomas Kokoraleis is released after serving his maximum sentence.
April 2019: news reports say Spreitzer is serving natural life with his appeals exhausted.