Larry Eyler was a house painter from Indiana who, by his lawyer's account, killed 21 young men and teenage boys in Indiana and Illinois between 1982 and 1984. He was convicted of two of those deaths. A Cook County jury found him guilty in July 1986 of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Danny Bridges, a 15-year-old who sold sex on the streets of Chicago's North Side, and a judge sentenced him to death. In December 1990 he pleaded guilty in Indiana to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan, a 23-year-old car-wash worker from Terre Haute, and received 60 years. The rest of the killings attributed to him were never tried. They rest on his own written account, which his lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, released in March 1994, two days after he died of complications from AIDS on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center, aged 41.
His case is remembered for the months between his two arrests. In September 1983 Indiana state troopers detained him beside Interstate 65 while a multi-agency task force was hunting the killer of young men whose bodies had been found along highways in both states. Evidence taken from him and his pickup led to his indictment in Lake County, Illinois, for the murder of Ralph Calise, 28. Illinois courts then ruled that the troopers had held him without probable cause and threw out the evidence, and the Calise case never reached trial. Danny Bridges died in Eyler's Chicago apartment the following August. The one murder that put Eyler on death row is the one he never admitted.
Eyler was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, according to the Banner Graphic of Greencastle, which reported in 2012 that he had lived in the Greencastle area as a young man and dropped out of South Putnam High School in 1970. Through the years when the killings later attributed to him took place, he worked for several years as a clerk in a liquor store in Greencastle.
He was a house painter. In late 1983 United Press International described him as a housepainter who kept homes in both Chicago and Terre Haute and said he had lived in the Terre Haute apartment for five years. The Illinois Supreme Court later recorded that he had lived rent-free for a number of years in Terre Haute with an older man, R.D.L., who was a professor at Indiana State University. R.D.L. was later charged with taking part in one of the killings and was acquitted.
Eyler was gay. He had a lover in Chicago, a married man who was 25 at the time of the 1986 trial and who testified that their relationship of about three years was close but full of arguments and jealousy. That man was arrested with Eyler in 1984 and was never charged. He told the jury that Eyler engaged in bondage during sex and was the dominant partner, and that he occasionally consented to it because that was what Eyler wanted. Kathleen Zellner said in 1994 that Eyler blamed abuse in his childhood for his impulses, and that he went looking for victims after fights with his lover.
The first known violence took place in Terre Haute on August 3, 1978. Reveal, the publication of the Center for Investigative Reporting, reported in 2015 that a young man who had been hitchhiking appeared that day at a house in Terre Haute with a knife wound in his chest. The driver who picked him up had bound him, sexually assaulted him and stabbed him. That young man survived.
Eyler turned himself in at the scene. Reveal reported that police found knives, handcuffs and tear gas in his truck, and that Eyler and his attorney offered the young man a check for 2,500 dollars to drop the matter. He accepted it, and Eyler was not charged. The writer Gera-Lind Kolarik, a former Chicago-area television journalist who wrote a 1990 book about the case, told Reveal that Eyler "learned to kill them" from that experience.
The killings that police later connected to Eyler began in 1982. None of the 1982 deaths, apart from that of Steven Agan, was ever tried in court, and what is known of them comes from police statements, newspaper chronologies and the confession his lawyer released after his death.
In 2012 the Banner Graphic published a chronology of the killings attributed to him. It listed Steven Crockett, 19, found on October 23, 1982, and placed the discovery near Lowell, Indiana; Robert Foley, left in a field northwest of Joliet, Illinois, on November 6, 1982; and John Johnson, 25, found on Christmas Day 1982 in Lake County, Indiana, near Belshaw. In 1994 a spokesman for the Kankakee County Sheriff's Department in Illinois, Tim Bukowski, said Eyler had been "our prime suspect" in a 1982 death there.
Three days after Christmas, two more young men were found dead in western Indiana. John Lee Roach, 21, was found southeast of Putnamville in Putnam County, near the Interstate 70 exit for State Road 243. The Banner Graphic noted that his trousers had been pulled down, a detail investigators came to see as a signature of the killings. The same day, the body of Steven Agan was found in Vermillion County.
Steven Agan was 23. He came from Terre Haute and worked at a car wash, Newsweek reported in 1991. The Republic, of Columbus, Indiana, reported that his stabbed body was found on December 28, 1982, in a field near an abandoned house in Newport, Indiana. His was the only Indiana death for which Eyler was ever convicted.
Daniel Scott McNeive was 21 and lived in Indianapolis. His body was found on May 9, 1983, along State Road 39 near the line between Hendricks and Morgan counties, the Banner Graphic reported. His sister, Mary Himmel of Indianapolis, came to Eyler's Chicago trial in 1986 and told UPI she believed her brother had been killed after accepting a ride from Eyler near Terre Haute. When the confession was released in 1994, his brother, Charles McNeive, told the Associated Press that the family had long believed Eyler was responsible and that the confession brought them a sense of closure.
Ralph Calise was 28 and lived in Chicago. His body was found on August 31, 1983, in a cornfield near Lake Forest, in Lake County, Illinois, UPI reported. It was his death for which Eyler would be indicted that autumn.
In October 1983 four young men were found buried in shallow graves on an abandoned farm in Lake Village, Newton County, Indiana, about 60 miles southeast of Chicago, west of U.S. 41. The Associated Press gave the date of the discovery as October 18, 1983, and a WRTV caption said mushroom hunters had found them. Two were identified early in the investigation: Michael Bauer, 22, and John Bartlett, 19. The other two went unnamed for almost 40 years. The Newton County coroner, Scott McCord, called them Adam and Brad. Reveal reported that Eyler's confession letters described handcuffing, blindfolding and stabbing them. The Associated Press reported that in 1990 he confessed to killing a young Black man, whom he described as in his late teens or early 20s, at a Newton County farm in July 1983, and that by his confessions all four men at the farm were drugged and killed by him.
Also in October 1983, a hunter found the remains of a young man in a field in rural Jasper County, Indiana, near Rensselaer. He, too, would go unnamed until 2021. Eyler told his lawyer that in 1982 he had picked up a young man along U.S. 41 near Vincennes, killed him and left his body in a field near Rensselaer, the Jasper County coroner, Andy Boersma, told the Associated Press.
On December 7, 1983, two more bodies were found along U.S. 40 west of Belleville, in Hendricks County, Indiana. The Banner Graphic reported in 2012 that only one had been identified: Richard Wayne, 21, of Indianapolis. The other young man has never been named.
By spring 1983, under pressure from local news reports and from the victims' families, police in several jurisdictions had begun to connect the bodies through the wounds and the places they were left, Reveal reported, and a task force drawing on several communities was formed that spring. It became the Central Indiana Multi-Agency Investigative Team. When its officers questioned Eyler in September 1983, an Illinois appellate court later recorded, the team was reviewing eight murders in central Indiana and assisting with three murders in Lake County, Illinois.
The book reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote in 1990 that Gera-Lind Kolarik, then an assignment editor at a Chicago television station, had played a central part in the case because she saw a link between the Indiana and Illinois killings. The criminologist Steven A. Egger, reviewing her book in Illinois Issues in 1991, disputed her claim to have been the first to connect them, and wrote that it was the Indiana task force that first brought Eyler to the attention of Illinois law enforcement.
The record of what happened next comes from the Illinois Appellate Court's 1985 opinion in the Calise case.
Close to 7 a.m. on September 30, 1983, Indiana State Trooper Kenneth Buehrle was driving an unmarked car on Interstate 65 in northwestern Indiana when he saw two men climbing out of a ditch on the southbound side. One was carrying a bag. A silver pickup was parked on the shoulder, where parking was not allowed. Buehrle crossed the median and stopped the truck as it pulled away. The driver was Eyler. His passenger was a young hitchhiker he had picked up.
Eyler said he had gone into the ditch to relieve himself. The passenger said the bag held toilet paper, but the trooper saw only personal belongings in it, and the nearest restrooms were six miles to the south and two miles to the north. Both men produced identification, and the truck's registration was in order. Eyler sat in the squad car while Buehrle ran a warrant check and wrote him a warning ticket for illegal parking. The dispatcher replied with a code that signaled a problem.
Sergeant Peter Popplewell, at the State Police post in Lowell, was told that Eyler matched the description of a murder suspect, and on his way to the scene he learned that Eyler was to be brought in for questioning and his truck impounded. Popplewell and Sergeant William Cothran arrived. Eyler was taken out of the squad car, patted down, handcuffed and locked into Buehrle's car with his seat belt fastened. Buehrle read him the Miranda warnings. The passenger was also handcuffed and put in Popplewell's car.
Cothran searched the inside of the pickup and took a bag from under the seat that held rope and white tape, then put it back. Troopers searched the ditch for about 10 minutes and found no toilet paper. On the way to Lowell, Cothran stopped at the spot with Eyler, who pointed to where he said he had relieved himself; a second search found nothing. Eyler reached the Lowell post at about 7:30 a.m. His belt and boots were taken, he emptied his pockets, and he was put in a holding cell.
While the truck was waiting for a tow, Popplewell told the passenger that Eyler was a suspect in a series of killings of gay men and that he himself might be considered an accomplice. After a Miranda warning, the passenger said he had only just met Eyler. He told the sergeant that Eyler had repeatedly offered him 100 dollars to be tied up for sex, that he had refused, and that Eyler had shown him a 100-dollar bill near the ditch. He later gave a recorded statement and a written one.
At Lowell, Eyler later testified, he asked again and again what was happening and was not told. He was eventually told that he was a suspect in a "major felony case", then in the killings, and that if he asked to leave he could be held for an offense connected with prostitution, which was a crime in Indiana. The police said he was not under arrest; Eyler said he believed he was. There was no arrest warrant, and one officer conceded that there was no probable cause for the murders, only for the prostitution offense. Three officers from the task force questioned him. He waived his rights, gave a statement and agreed to a search of his truck. At about 5 p.m. he asked to leave and was told he could, but that the truck would still be searched. He left at about 7 p.m., uncharged. The police said he had agreed to be photographed and fingerprinted; he said he had no choice.
The items connected to that day were a bag with rope and white tape, a hunting knife with blood on it, tire prints taken from the truck, and his boots, which the police kept because their soles looked like boot prints at a Lake County, Illinois, murder scene.
On October 3, 1983, police seized his pickup truck and other belongings in a search, UPI reported. Eyler's lawyer at the time, Kenneth Ditkowski, sued, claiming that the police had violated Eyler's civil rights by drawing him into the investigation and by refusing to return his truck and the other items, and asking for 250,000 dollars in damages.
Before that suit could be heard, Eyler was arrested on a Friday in late October and jailed in Lake County, Illinois, on a bond of 1 million dollars. A Lake County grand jury then returned a three-count indictment charging him with the murder of Ralph Calise, UPI reported from Waukegan on November 2, 1983. He was 30. On the day of the indictment, Indiana authorities searched his Terre Haute residence, and a source on the task force told UPI that investigators took rope, shoes, clothing and pornographic material from the apartment. UPI described him as a suspect in a series of 19 similar killings in central and northern Indiana and the Chicago area, with bodies found in Lake, Kankakee and Cook counties in Illinois and in Marion and Lake counties in Indiana.
At a news conference, Lake County Sheriff Ralph Babcox compared Eyler to John Wayne Gacy and said he fit the FBI's description of a mass murderer. "He has a macho image, a beer-drinking homosexual with a hate for himself for being a homosexual," the sheriff said. "He puts on a fatigue uniform, boots and a square cap, then he's a different person."
Eyler pleaded not guilty and, with a new lawyer, David Schippers, filed nine motions to suppress evidence. The Lake County Circuit Court granted five of them. The judge found that the original traffic stop in Indiana was proper, but that the roughly 12-hour detention at the Lowell post had not been supported by probable cause. The judge found Eyler's statement and his consent to the truck search voluntary, but tainted by the illegal seizure, and so suppressed what came from them.
The Lake County State's Attorney, Fred L. Foreman, appealed, certifying that the ruling crippled the prosecution. On April 26, 1985, the Appellate Court of Illinois, Second District, affirmed in People v. Eyler, No. 84-126, in an opinion by Justice Unverzagt, with Justice Schnake concurring. "Although a Terry stop was justified, the bounds were exceeded, and the defendant was under arrest without probable cause," the court held. Eyler had been removed from the scene for custodial questioning about the murders, not for the prostitution offense. The court also refused to let the passenger's statement supply probable cause after the fact: it was "not sufficiently the product of free will to have dissipated the taint from the defendant's illegal arrest," and a "tainted statement cannot be used to establish probable cause to arrest the defendant on a separate crime." The court did not reach the State's arguments that the truck evidence would inevitably have been discovered and that a later search warrant was valid, because both depended on a lawful arrest.
Justice Lindberg dissented. He agreed that Eyler had been arrested without probable cause, but would have reversed. In his view the passenger's statements were voluntary, Eyler had no standing to object to the passenger's own illegal arrest, those statements supplied probable cause for the solicitation offense, and the bag found in the truck would inevitably have been discovered through a later lawful search.
Eyler was released. Publishers Weekly, reviewing Kolarik's book in 1990, wrote that a judge had dismissed the Waukegan murder case because the evidence was inadmissible under the exclusionary rule. Reveal reported that the suppressed evidence included bloodstained boots linking him to a young man stabbed in Illinois, and that he "walked free again". The Associated Press reported in 1994 that blood from the boots had reportedly matched a victim. Eyler was never tried for the death of Ralph Calise.
In March 1984 Eyler moved into a 42-unit apartment building at 1628 West Sherwin Avenue, in the Rogers Park neighborhood on Chicago's North Side. He had no regular work and sometimes painted houses. R.D.L. cosigned the lease and paid the rent, the Illinois Supreme Court recorded, and estimated that he visited the apartment five or six times between March and August 1984, usually from Friday evening to Sunday evening. Eyler's Chicago lover was not welcome while R.D.L. was in town. He was told not to come to the apartment and not to call, and called anyway.
Danny Bridges was 15. The Illinois Supreme Court described him as a prostitute who worked the streets around Clark Street and Montrose Avenue, in Uptown. A family friend, Joyce Bunch, testified that he often stayed at her house and babysat for her, and that she knew how he made his money. His mother was Austine Bridges. Some reports, including UPI's, gave his first name as Daniel; a 2010 CBS Chicago report gave his age as 16, but the court record says 15.
On Sunday, August 19, 1984, Danny spent the day at Joyce Bunch's house, and she gave him clothing, including a Duke University T-shirt. That evening he was at his family's home, and between 10:30 and 11 p.m. he went out. His sister, Sharon Faught, was the last member of his family to see him alive.
R.D.L. had arrived at the apartment on Friday, August 17. He testified that he left shortly after 10 p.m. on Sunday and reached Indiana at about 2:30 a.m., and that at about noon on Monday, August 20, he paid his real estate taxes at the county courthouse in person. The receipt, dated August 20, went into evidence. The defense pointed out that the taxes were not due for another three months.
Eyler called his lover at 11 p.m. on Sunday, and they argued. Between about 11:45 p.m. and midnight, the lover saw Eyler driving south on Western Avenue in his pickup, apparently alone. Some time between 11:45 p.m. and 1 a.m., Eyler bought gasoline at Clark and Ontario streets, about 40 blocks south of the corner where Danny usually worked.
The two men argued on the telephone until about 3:30 a.m. Eyler agreed to come over at 4 a.m. and arrived about an hour and a half late. His lover testified that he looked exhausted, wore no underwear or socks, had wet hair, and was unresponsive. He left at about 5:30 a.m. and called again at 6:15 a.m. The prosecution and the defense agreed at trial that Danny Bridges was killed in the early morning of Monday, August 20, 1984.
Al Burdicki was the janitor at 1628 West Sherwin. On Monday morning he watched Eyler make 8 to 12 trips down to his storage locker. Asked what he was doing, Eyler said he was getting tools for a job.
At about 3 p.m., Burdicki was out with his German shepherd when Eyler made three more trips carrying silver garbage bags. The plastic was "stretched real tight," and Eyler carried the bags as if they were heavy. The dog growled, barked and snapped at the bags, but paid no attention to Eyler when his hands were empty. On the first two trips Eyler carried two bags each time and came back without them. On the third he carried a heavy bundle clutched to his chest, turned all the way around and threw it into the dumpster behind the building next door, 1640 West Sherwin. Then he saw Burdicki watching, and looked startled. Burdicki had already warned him not to use other buildings' dumpsters.
At about 3:30 p.m., Nicholas Fritz, the janitor at 1648-50 West Sherwin, saw a man carry two heavy bags out of 1628 and throw them into the same dumpster. He later identified the man as Eyler.
At about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, August 21, Joe Balla, the janitor at 1640, found heavy gray bags in his dumpster that did not belong to his tenants. He tore one open, saw part of a leg and called the police. When officers arrived, Burdicki recognized the bags and the dumpster as the ones Eyler had used. Fritz described the man he had seen, and Burdicki identified him from the description as Eyler. Fritz later saw Eyler in handcuffs and picked him out of a lineup.
Eyler and his lover were arrested in the apartment. Police guarded it until officers returned at 1:30 p.m. with a search warrant. The apartment was clean, and the bedroom had been freshly painted and smelled of paint. There was human blood on one of the painted walls.
The Cook County medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, found that the body had been cut apart and placed in garbage bags. He testified that wounds to Danny's back caused his death, that marks on his wrists were consistent with a ligature, and that the width of a clothesline found with the body matched them. He also found a recent black eye and other wounds, and cocaine and alcohol in the boy's blood. A hacksaw blade from the apartment cut bone in the same manner as the dismemberment. A hacksaw frame and a Stanley awl from the apartment carried human blood.
Blood matching Danny's enzyme pattern was found on the mattress, a bedroom chair and the sofa, a belt, a plastic bag, a sock and surfaces in the bathroom. A pair of blue jeans was soaked with what the State's expert called "rivulets of blood" matching the boy's, and the State argued they had been stained when the body was carried over someone's shoulder; other evidence suggested the jeans were Eyler's. The bloodstained Duke University T-shirt was in a hamper, and Joyce Bunch identified it as the one she had given him. Eyler's blood was type O; Danny's was type A. The lover testified that when he cleared the kitchen sink with a plunger he brought up material that looked like flesh.
Two of Eyler's fingerprints were found on one of the bags, one inside and one outside. They had been raised with cyanoacrylate, or superglue, fumes. Of 51 prints identified as his in the apartment and the truck, 47 were developed that way, and he did not challenge those 47.
The search warrant rested on a detective's affidavit that described what the three janitors had seen. It also told the judge that Eyler had been indicted for a murder in Lake County, that his truck had been used in that murder, that the Lake County victim's last known address was near the apartment, and that an appeal on suppression was pending in that case.
Eyler was tried in Cook County Circuit Court in July 1986 before Judge Joseph Urso. The prosecutors included Assistant State's Attorney Mark Rakoczy. The defense called two witnesses. An investigator from the public defender's office testified that he had visited the apartment on August 24, 1984, for about half an hour, and a woman testified that she had been with Eyler from 7:15 to 8:40 p.m. on Sunday, August 19. Eyler did not testify. The State called no rebuttal witnesses.
The defense theory was that R.D.L., not Eyler, had killed Danny Bridges. R.D.L. testified for the State, and his alibi rested on the courthouse tax receipt. The jury heard from Burdicki that over the summer he had seen young males go up to Eyler's apartment with him, testimony the defense said was unfairly prejudicial. Jurors also saw photographs of the body and heard testimony from Eyler's former lovers about his sexual habits, UPI reported.
The jury deliberated for about three hours and returned its verdict at night, UPI reported on July 10, 1986. It found Eyler, then 33, guilty of murder, kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint and concealment of a homicidal death. He showed little emotion. Austine Bridges wept. "I'm so happy. I've never been so happy," she said. "I hope he gets the death penalty." There was scattered applause in the courtroom. Rakoczy called Eyler one of the most dangerous people ever to come into the building. Mary Himmel, Daniel McNeive's sister, cried at the verdict. Detective Sergeant Ted Knorr of the Indiana State Police told UPI that Indiana police had linked Eyler to the deaths of four young men in 1983, two of whom had never been identified, and that he hoped the conviction would lead Eyler to say what he knew about them.
The aggravated kidnapping conviction was what made Eyler eligible for death. It was, the Illinois Supreme Court later wrote, "the sole statutory aggravating factor supporting the sentence of death." The State's theory was that Eyler had lured the boy to the apartment with a false promise of money for sex and then bound him and hurt him before killing him.
Eyler waived a jury for the sentencing hearing. Judge Urso found no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude a death sentence. "There's no doubt in my mind that you committed the aggravated kidnapping and murder of Danny Bridges," the judge told him. "I think the evidence is overwhelming." He added: "You are an evil person. You truly deserve to die for your acts." Eyler was also sentenced to 15 years for aggravated kidnapping and 5 years for concealment of a homicidal death. The kidnapping and unlawful restraint convictions merged into the aggravated kidnapping count. Eyler was held on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center from 1986, UPI later reported.
The appeal went directly to the Illinois Supreme Court, where Eyler was represented by Charles M. Schiedel and Steven Clark of the State Appellate Defender's office. On October 25, 1989, in People v. Eyler, 133 Ill. 2d 173, an opinion by Justice Stamos, the court affirmed every conviction and the death sentence. Rehearing was denied on January 29, 1990.
On the evidence, the court rejected the argument that R.D.L. had been the killer. The jury had believed R.D.L., the court said, and "it is the jury's function, not this court's, to resolve contradictions." Relying on the janitors, R.D.L.'s departure on Sunday night, Eyler's behavior that night and the physical evidence, it held that "a rational fact finder could reasonably have found that defendant committed the aggravated kidnapping and murder."
On the kidnapping, the court held that the ligature marks and other injuries supported an inference that the boy had been held against his will, since there was no evidence that he had a history of consenting to bondage, and that these injuries were separate from the stab wounds that killed him. "The confinement necessary to accomplish this cannot be said to be incidental to the crime of murder," the court wrote.
On the search warrant, Eyler argued that the affidavit's account of the Lake County case was misleading. The affidavit said the Lake County victim had lived near "this incident", when the address was some 25 blocks away and Eyler had not lived there at the time. The court found that the affidavit did not say or suggest that Eyler had been convicted, that he had shown no deliberate falsehood, and that the janitors' accounts alone supplied probable cause in any case.
The court upheld the superglue fingerprint evidence, finding the technique generally accepted, and treated the doubts raised about it as going to the weight of the evidence rather than whether it could be admitted. It held that electrophoresis "is generally accepted by forensic scientists as a reliable method of detecting genetic markers in blood." It ruled that Burdicki's testimony about young males visiting the apartment was relevant to who had brought Danny there, and rejected the remaining claims about the trial judge's remarks, a discovery dispute and the constitutionality of the Illinois death penalty statute. It set an execution date of March 14, 1990. That sentence was never carried out.
In January 1991 Newsweek reported that Eyler, then 37, had offered to admit committing, or knowing about, the killings of as many as 20 young men in Illinois and Indiana in the early 1980s, in return for a sentence of life without parole that would take him off death row. He still said someone else had killed Danny Bridges. Law enforcement officials told the magazine that he was trying to escape execution and that a deal would reward a man on death row for multiple murders. He gave the state until the end of January 1991 to accept, or, he said, he would take his secrets "to the grave."
The Cook County State's Attorney, Jack O'Malley, rejected the offer, UPI reported in 1994. CBS Chicago reported in 2010 that the approach to O'Malley had been made by Kathleen Zellner, Eyler's lawyer, and that the deal she sought would have exchanged death row for a life sentence in return for information solving more than 20 killings.
To strengthen his credibility and to avoid a second death sentence, Newsweek reported, Eyler pleaded guilty in December 1990 to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan. The Republic reported that he pleaded guilty to murdering Agan and told the court that R.D.L. had taken part in the killing and photographed it. The Associated Press reported in 1994 that he received a 60-year sentence for the Agan case in 1990.
The Agan case was heard in Vermillion County Circuit Court in Newport, Indiana. It is the second of Eyler's two convictions, and the only one he admitted.
On December 18, 1990, R.D.L., then 53 and a suspended Indiana State University professor, was charged in the Agan killing and held without bond, The Republic reported. In January 1991 Vermillion Circuit Judge Doni Darnell denied his lawyers' request to move the trial out of the county because of publicity. Newsweek reported that Eyler claimed R.D.L. had a Manson-like influence over him and had pushed him to find victims, and that the trial was set for April 1991.
Eyler was the prosecution's main witness. In 1991 a jury unanimously acquitted R.D.L., Reveal reported, and the case was weakened because it depended on Eyler. R.D.L. was never charged with any other death connected to Eyler. He has not been convicted of any crime in connection with these deaths, and Eyler's accusations against him were never proved in any court.
Eyler was diagnosed with AIDS in 1990, UPI reported. He died of complications from AIDS on a Sunday in early March 1994 at Pontiac Correctional Center, where he had been on death row since 1986. He was 41. The Banner Graphic, the Associated Press and CBS Chicago also reported that he died of AIDS in prison in March 1994. At his death an appeal of his conviction was pending before the Illinois Supreme Court, and Zellner said she planned to ask the court to let the case continue.
On March 8, 1994, at the Holiday Inn in Naperville, Illinois, Zellner announced that Eyler had admitted killing 21 people over two years in the early 1980s. She said he had told her about the killings over the previous three years, that attorney-client privilege had kept her from revealing them while he was alive, and that she had persuaded him to let her release them after his death. "And I think the only right thing he ever did with his life was giving me permission to come here today," she said.
She released a list of the 21 killings, giving the places and dates where the victims were found, from 1982 to 1984. Seven of the victims had no names on the list. Eleven bodies had been found in Indiana and nine in Illinois, and one had never been found, according to the Associated Press. UPI reported that she read out the names of 15 victims.
Zellner said Eyler had lured his victims with liquor, drugs and money, driven them to remote places, and bound, gagged and blindfolded them. She said not all of them were gay, and that he had not had sex with them during the abductions. She said that someone had helped him in four of the killings, that she knew who it was, and that she would give the name to the authorities; she believed the person still lived in Indiana, and urged anyone else who had helped move evidence to come forward. Eyler still denied killing Danny Bridges.
She also released a letter in which Eyler had offered to confess to former Governor James R. Thompson. The Associated Press described it as a 1990 letter that was never mailed; UPI described a 1991 letter. "Nothing excuses what Larry Eyler did and I'm not here to offer any excuses," Zellner said. "I found him to be a superficially charming, a very manipulative and extraordinarily difficult individual to deal with." Turning to the families, she said, "he did confess to the murders of your sons."
Prosecutors and police were careful. Andy Knott, a spokesman for the Cook County State's Attorney, said no one had come closer to proving that Eyler committed the crimes, but prosecutors said his confessions alone were not enough to prove he was responsible. Lieutenant Steven Garner of the Indianapolis police said the confessions were "not for the police" but for the families. The Associated Press noted that clues had pointed to Eyler for more than a decade, among them a hospital visit for a knife wound the day after a body was found, and the purchase of handcuffs and a knife later that same day.
Investigators who worked the case said later that Eyler knew the cases but not the names. "He knew the cases, but he didn't know the names," Dan Colin, a former Lake County, Illinois, sheriff's investigator on the Eyler task force, told Reveal; the victims were "street kids or hitchhikers" he picked up. Scott McCord, the Newton County coroner, told WRTV in 2023 that Eyler had confessed to the Newton County killings but did not remember the victims' names.
The unnamed victims became the work of coroners. In 2010 CBS Chicago reported a new effort to identify three young men whose remains had been kept for nearly 30 years by coroners in Newton and Jasper counties, Indiana: two found in 1983 near the barn in Newton County that Eyler admitted using, and one found by a farmer in Jasper County. In 2012 McCord worked with a volunteer group on flyers describing Adam Doe, a young Black man of 15 to 20 with cropped hair, and Brad Doe, a young white man of 17 to 22 with red hair and a homemade cross tattoo on his right forearm, the Banner Graphic reported. "There has to be a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, somebody out there looking for these kids," McCord told Reveal in 2015. Reveal reported then that as many as six of Eyler's victims were unidentified, four of them in Indiana, and that DNA from the Newton County remains had been sent to a University of North Texas laboratory and to the national CODIS database.
Genetic genealogy changed that. In April 2021 the Newton County Coroner's Office, working with the DNA Doe Project, identified Brad Doe as John Ingram Brandenburg Jr. of Chicago, according to the Associated Press. WRTV gave his age as 19. His mother had called him Johnny. "While my heart breaks for this family," said Rebecca Goddard, a Newton County prosecutor, "I hope this brings them peace."
In December 2021 the remains found in the Jasper County field were identified as William Joseph Lewis, 19, of Peru, Indiana. His family had last seen him in 1982 at a friend's funeral in Houston, Texas, from where he planned to hitchhike home. His nephew, Joshua Shuck, told the Associated Press that Lewis's grandmother had never stopped hoping he was alive until she died, the year before the identification.
Adam Doe was the last of the four men from the Lake Village farm to be named. His DNA was "highly degraded," the DNA Doe Project said, and the work took more than two years. The coroner had brought the case to the project in 2020. A volunteer genealogist found a living cousin, and a swab from a man who might be his brother matched. On July 21, 2023, Adam Doe was officially identified as Keith Lavell Bibbs, a 16-year-old from Chicago, WRTV reported. Elias Chan, the project's team leader, said the family tree was complicated by many name changes, and the project said identifications of Black victims had been hampered because Black people have long been underrepresented in DNA databases. "In African-American research, you've got to get into the weeds," said Janel Daniels, the researcher who found the key lead.
McCord and his wife took Keith Bibbs home to Chicago and went to his funeral. "Literally everything he told us about him just matched," McCord said of Eyler's account. "It's unbelievably satisfying, knowing that they're home." Earlier he had said: "It's been a long road getting all those kids identified." The second young man found along U.S. 40 in Hendricks County in 1983 had still not been publicly named in the reports.
The Eyler case became a text for the argument over the exclusionary rule, the principle that courts may not use evidence the police obtained illegally. Kolarik's 1990 book, written with Wayne Klatt and published by Chicago Review Press, was titled Freed to Kill. Publishers Weekly called it a "tense, judicious brief" on the legal complications that let a man who had been caught go free. The American Library Association's gay and lesbian book reviewer wrote in 1991 that 22 young men had been found along highways in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin before an Illinois judge, convinced that Eyler's rights had been violated, ordered him released, and that Danny Bridges died six months and two weeks later.
Steven Egger, reviewing the same book in Illinois Issues, said it placed the blame either on the judge who excluded the evidence or on the police who carried out an illegal search, and he wrote that it ignored what had shaped Eyler in childhood and later life. He quoted a law professor's afterword in the book as saying that the exclusionary rule "has had relatively little adverse effect on the criminal justice system." The appellate court's 1985 opinion is the record of what the troopers did: a lawful stop for illegal parking became, in the court's words, an arrest "without probable cause".
Proven by final judgment: the murder, kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint and concealment of the death of Danny Bridges (Cook County jury, July 1986; affirmed 1989); and the murder of Steven Agan (guilty plea, Vermillion County, Indiana, December 1990).
Charged but never tried: the murder of Ralph Calise, after the Lake County court suppressed the evidence from the September 1983 detention and the appellate court affirmed. Eyler was never convicted of that death, and whether it was on his lawyer's 1994 list was not reported.
Confessed but never tried: the other killings on the list of 21 released by Kathleen Zellner in March 1994. The deaths of Michael Bauer, John Bartlett, John Ingram Brandenburg Jr., Keith Lavell Bibbs and William Joseph Lewis are attributed to him by coroners and police on the strength of his confessions. Others named in the Banner Graphic's 2012 chronology, including Delvoyd Baker, 14, found strangled on Indianapolis's north side on October 3, 1982, and Robert Foley, were listed by that newspaper; it was not reported that they were on Zellner's list. Prosecutors said in 1994 that his confessions alone did not prove responsibility.
The accomplice: Eyler blamed R.D.L. for the death of Danny Bridges and named him as his partner in the Agan killing. A jury acquitted R.D.L. in 1991. Zellner said in 1994 that Eyler had an accomplice in four killings. No one else has been charged.
Details that vary between sources: Danny Bridges's age (15 in the court record and most reports; 16 in CBS Chicago, 2010); the date of Eyler's conviction (July 1986 in UPI and the court record; Publishers Weekly gave 1988, which is wrong); the year of the letter to Governor Thompson (1990 in AP, 1991 in UPI); the number of killings (21 confessed, by Zellner's 1994 list; "at least 20" in AP reports from 2021 to 2023; "at least 22" by Reveal's 2015 account of authorities' belief; "some 25" in the 1990 Publishers Weekly review); and the place where Steven Crockett was found (near Lowell, Indiana, in the Banner Graphic chronology).
Birth: Larry William Eyler is born in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
1970: drops out of South Putnam High School, Putnam County, Indiana.
August 3, 1978: a young hitchhiker is bound, sexually assaulted and stabbed in Terre Haute; Eyler turns himself in, the young man accepts a 2,500-dollar check to drop the matter, and Eyler is not charged.
December 28, 1982: Steven Agan, 23, is found near Newport, Vermillion County, Indiana; John Lee Roach, 21, is found the same day in Putnam County.
Spring 1983: a multi-agency task force is formed in Indiana.
May 9, 1983: Daniel Scott McNeive, 21, is found beside State Road 39, Indiana.
August 31, 1983: Ralph Calise, 28, is found near Lake Forest, Illinois.
September 30, 1983: Eyler is stopped on Interstate 65 and held about 12 hours at the Lowell State Police post, then released uncharged.
October 3, 1983: his truck and belongings are seized.
October 1983: four young men are found at an abandoned farm in Lake Village, Newton County, Indiana (October 18, by AP); remains are found in a field in Jasper County.
Late October to November 1983: Eyler is arrested and indicted in Lake County, Illinois, for Calise's murder (reported November 2) and held on 1 million dollars bond.
December 7, 1983: two bodies are found along U.S. 40 in Hendricks County, Indiana, one of them Richard Wayne, 21.
1984: the Lake County court suppresses the evidence from the September 30 detention; Eyler is released.
March 1984: moves into 1628 West Sherwin Avenue, Chicago.
August 20, 1984: Danny Bridges, 15, is killed in the early morning.
August 21, 1984: a janitor finds the body; Eyler is arrested in his apartment.
April 26, 1985: the Illinois Appellate Court affirms the suppression in the Calise case.
July 1986: a Cook County jury convicts Eyler of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Danny Bridges (reported by UPI on July 10).
1986: Judge Joseph Urso sentences him to death.
October 25, 1989: the Illinois Supreme Court affirms; rehearing denied January 29, 1990; execution date set for March 14, 1990, and not carried out.
1990: diagnosed with AIDS.
December 1990: pleads guilty to the murder of Steven Agan and is sentenced to 60 years; R.D.L. is charged on December 18.
January 1991: Eyler's offer to confess to about 20 killings in return for life without parole is reported; Cook County prosecutors reject it.
1991: a Vermillion County jury acquits R.D.L.
March 1994: Eyler dies of AIDS complications at Pontiac Correctional Center, aged 41, with an appeal pending.
March 8, 1994: Kathleen Zellner releases his confession to 21 killings.
October 2010: Indiana coroners renew efforts to identify three unnamed victims.
April 2021: John Ingram Brandenburg Jr. is identified.
December 2021: William Joseph Lewis, 19, is identified.
July 21, 2023: Keith Lavell Bibbs, 16, is identified; the identification is announced on July 25.