Between May 1981 and October 1982 women were taken off the streets of Chicago and its western suburbs in a van, sexually assaulted, mutilated and killed. At least eighteen are attributed to the group the press called the Ripper Crew. Four men were charged. One was executed, one is dead in law but alive in a cell, one walked out of prison in 2019, and one has never been convicted of a single killing.
The archive is full of pieces that gather similar cases from different states and show the sentences coming out unlike each other. This is the same thing inside one case: the same deaths, the same city, the same prosecutors, the same eighteen months. What separated the four men was not what they did. It was what they said.
Andrew Kokoraleis was convicted of murder and executed by the state of Illinois on March 17, 1999. He is the last person Illinois has put to death.
Edward Spreitzer was convicted of four murders and sentenced to death on March 20, 1986. In January 2003 Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in the state and Spreitzer's became life without parole.
Thomas Kokoraleis was convicted of one murder, served his sentence, and was released in 2019 to considerable public objection.
Robin Gecht was convicted on February 17, 1984 of attempted murder, rape and aggravated battery, for the attack on Beverly Washington, who survived, and sentenced to 120 years. He has never been convicted of any murder. He has always denied all of it.
Execution, life, release, and no murder conviction at all. Four dispositions with nothing between them.
The case broke in October 1982 when Beverly Washington was attacked, mutilated, thrown from a van, and survived to describe what had happened to her. Her description of the van led police to stop it, and the driver took them to its owner. Spreitzer and both Kokoraleis brothers confessed. Gecht did not.
Read the four outcomes again against that single line and they stop looking arbitrary.
The three who talked are the three convicted of murder. Their accounts are also where almost everything known about the case comes from: the room in Gecht's flat fitted out as a chapel, the satanic text read aloud, the removal of a breast with a wire garrotte, the box. Thomas Kokoraleis described it to police. It is the most detailed account of the group's conduct in existence and it convicted the men who gave it.
Gecht said nothing, and the murders are, as against him, unproven. Not disproved: unproven. No murder charge against him was ever made out, so no court has ever tested the eighteen against him, and under the law that is the end of it.
This is the part that will not sit still. Every one of the three who confessed described Gecht as the man giving the orders, in the room, at his own address. The figure of eighteen or more comes from those same accounts and from the count of unsolved deaths of women in the area at the time.
So the accounts were good enough to send three men to prison, one of them to the execution chamber, and were not good enough to charge the fourth with anything at all. Both of those statements are about the same set of words. A confession is evidence against the man who makes it and hearsay about everybody else, and that distinction, which is a sound one and exists for good reasons, produced the outcome here: the state could reach every man who described the killings and could not reach the man they all described.
Gecht is serving 120 years for the crime that had a living witness, and it was that witness who put the police in front of him in the first place. He is parole-eligible under the rules in force at the time and has been refused repeatedly, most recently in 2022. He will die in prison either way, which is worth saying plainly, because it is the only reason the gap in his record has no practical consequence.
Six pairs of killers in this archive turned on one of the two talking first and getting the lighter sentence for it. That is the ordinary shape of the thing, and it is why prosecutors offer the deal.
Here the arithmetic ran backwards. Talking convicted all three who did it, and the one who kept quiet is the only one with no murder against his name. Nobody was rewarded for cooperating; they were convicted out of their own mouths, and the silence that looks like obstruction was in fact the most effective defence available in the case.
Thomas Kokoraleis's 2019 release belongs to a second file, the one about killers who came out. His is not a case of a system losing track of a man. He was convicted of one murder, he served the sentence for it, and he was let out on time, which is what a completed sentence means. The public objection was about the eighteen, and the eighteen were never his conviction.
Four men, one case, and the outcomes were set by the defendants' own decisions about whether to speak, taken in police stations in October 1982, before a charge was laid.
The archive's other pieces show sentences pulled apart by a state line, a legislative gap, a governor's pen. Those are all things done to a defendant from outside. This is the version where the defendants did it to themselves, and where the man that three of them identified as the one in charge has, on the record of the courts, killed nobody.