Milton Johnson was convicted of five murders committed in Will County, Illinois, in the summer of 1983. On July 17 of that year, Anthony Hackett, 18, was shot dead as he slept in his car on Interstate 55 near Wilmington, and his companion was abducted and attacked. She survived and identified Johnson. On August 20, four women were killed in a ceramics shop in Joliet. Juries convicted him in both cases and he was sentenced to death twice.
Police and prosecutors linked him to nine more killings that summer, among them five people shot on a rural road in Homer Township, two of whom were auxiliary deputies of the Will County Sheriff's Department. He was never charged with any of them. He spent the rest of his life in prison and died at Menard Correctional Center in May 2025, the day after his 75th birthday. Retired investigators said he never admitted guilt.
Johnson was a native of Joliet, in Will County. His birthday was May 15; Patch reported that he turned 71 on that date in 2021. When he died, the Joliet funeral home handling his arrangements listed him as Milton Johnson Jr.
Little has been reported about his childhood. What sent him to prison as a young man was a 1970 attack in Joliet's Pilcher Park, committed when he was 20, according to Patch. Joliet police solved that case. He received a sentence of 25 to 35 years, and he served about half of it, much of it at Pontiac, before he was paroled in early 1983. Patch has given the month of his release as February in some reports and March in others, and the Herald-News reported March. Detectives later described him to Patch as a man who had prowled isolated roads and parks to watch young couples.
After his release he lived with his mother and his stepfather in the Forest Park area of Joliet. Police in the area did not know he had come home. The family owned a dark pickup truck with a cap over the bed. His stepfather was the registered owner, but Johnson drove it, investigators said, especially on weekends.
The killings that police later linked to Johnson began in late June and continued, at intervals, into August. Patch has reported that he became known as the Weekend Murderer. The victims were chosen at random, and Johnson knew none of them, Patch reported.
On June 25, 1983, two sisters, Zita Blum, 66, and Honora "Nora" Lahmann, 67, were found shot to death in rural Joliet Township. Investigators later said the copper bullets used there matched those in other Joliet-area killings that summer and that a cigarette brand found at the scene was the one Johnson smoked. No witness placed him there, and he was never charged.
On July 2, Kenneth Chancellor, 34, a Lockport businessman, and Terri Lynn Johnson, 19, a Joliet housewife, were found shot to death. No one was charged with their deaths.
In the early hours of July 16, between about 3 and 4 a.m., six people were shot on a remote road in Homer Township. Five died: George Kiehl, 24; Cathleen Norwood, 25; Richard Paulin, 32; and two Will County Sheriff's auxiliary deputies, Denis Foley, 50, and Steven Mayer, 22. A sixth person was wounded and survived. At the scene investigators found a receipt for the repair of a fishing reel made out to his stepfather. When police questioned the stepfather, he had an alibi: he had been in Mississippi that weekend. Johnson, investigators said, had been using the truck.
Less than a day later came the killing for which Johnson would first be tried.
Anthony Hackett was 18, a downstate teenager from Emden, Illinois. On Saturday, July 16, 1983, he and his girlfriend spent the day at the Great America amusement park in Gurnee. Hackett bought a stuffed Tasmanian Devil doll there and kept the receipt in his wallet, according to the Illinois Supreme Court's 2002 summary of the trial evidence.
They left the park around 10 p.m. and headed home, and on Interstate 55 in Will County they pulled over to sleep. At about 1:30 a.m. on July 17 Hackett was shot dead, and his companion was taken away in a pickup truck.
She was found alive later that morning near Elwood and survived.
That morning Special Agent John Meduga of the Illinois Department of Law Enforcement spoke with her. She described her attacker as a Black man with no facial hair that she could see. Eight days later she went through about 1,500 police photographs and set aside 42; the court noted that 34 of those men had facial hair. More than a month after that she was shown 137 photographs, one of them of Johnson. She chose four, and his was not among them.
On Saturday, August 20, 1983, four women were found dead shortly after noon in a ceramics shop on Joliet's east side. Marilyn Baers, 45, owned the shop. The other three were customers who had driven there together that morning: Barbara Dunbar, 38; Anna Ryan, 75; and Pamela Ryan, 29, Anna Ryan's daughter-in-law. (The Herald-News, in a 2015 report, gave the older Mrs. Ryan's first name as Agnes.) All four had been stabbed, and Anna Ryan had also been shot. The women's purses were taken.
Nick Ficarello, then a young Will County sheriff's detective and later police chief of Braidwood, was called to the scene. Decades later he told Patch that the case showed him what pure evil looked like. Investigators collected fingerprints and shoe impressions from Converse All-Star sneakers, evidence that would later be tied to Johnson.
The shop killings were the last in the series. By then the area was afraid. Joliet police doubled their patrols, the Guardian Angels set up tents and ran foot patrols downtown, a presence that strained relations with local officers, and Time magazine covered the wave of killings, Patch reported in 2023.
Within weeks of the ceramics shop killings, Illinois State Police investigators questioned Johnson, then 33, at his parents' home about the family pickup, his whereabouts and the summer's killings. Afterward, Patch reported, he and his stepfather moved the truck to a friend's garage in the Fairmont area, where it stayed until police seized it the following March.
Months passed with no arrest. The investigation was shared by the Will County Sheriff's Department and the Illinois State Police; the Cook County Sheriff's Office was among the agencies that later linked the killings to Johnson. Most of the killings happened outside Joliet's city limits, so the Joliet police had little direct role. Dave Simpson, a Will County investigator, became one of the central figures in the case and believed from early on that the Blum sisters' deaths were connected to the others.
The break came in February 1984. A woman called the Will County sheriff's office about something that had happened the previous July. A dark pickup truck, she said, had passed her again and again as she walked one night. She and a friend had followed it and written down its license plate. Patch reported in 2018 that Charles Malinowski, a veteran of the sheriff's department, found the report in the files, and that the two women had described being harassed by a man in a black pickup on the outskirts of Joliet over a July weekend.
The plate traced to his stepfather's truck. After the stepfather gave his consent, police searched it and found physical evidence linked to the attack, including the sales receipt for the Tasmanian Devil doll that Hackett had bought at Great America. A search warrant for the family home, where Johnson lived, turned up three .357 Magnum cartridges in a dresser in his stepfather's bedroom.
On March 6, 1984, the surviving witness was shown five photographs. Johnson's was the only one she had seen before, among the 137 shown to her in September 1983, and this time she tentatively identified him. On March 9 she viewed a lineup of six men, each of whom repeated the commands her attacker had given her. She identified Johnson without hesitation, the Illinois Supreme Court later wrote.
He was arrested that day at the parole office in Romeoville, the Herald-News reported. Simpson and Marty McCarthy, an Illinois State Police investigator, were the last officers to interview him that March, according to Patch.
Johnson was charged in the Hackett case. The Will County public defender was first appointed to represent him, but on June 1, 1984, the day before the trial was scheduled to begin, a privately retained lawyer, William Swano, entered the case. The court granted three continuances totaling 55 days and set the trial for July 26, 1984. Because of the publicity in Will County, the court moved the trial to Iroquois County.
The jury convicted Johnson of the first-degree murder of Anthony Hackett and of other charges involving the woman who survived. She testified against him. Johnson waived a jury for sentencing. The judge found him eligible for the death penalty, found no mitigating circumstances sufficient to prevent it, and sentenced him to death for Hackett's murder, with concurrent 40-year terms for the crimes against the survivor.
Among the prosecution's evidence was the testimony of Roger Peele, an FBI special agent, about the bullets taken from Hackett's body and the cartridges found in the family home. In 1986 the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in People v. Johnson, 114 Ill. 2d 170.
Johnson was then tried for the killings at the ceramics shop, this time in Will County, and he represented himself. The prosecution's evidence included fingerprints and the Converse shoe impressions, Patch reported. The year of this trial has been reported differently: Patch's 2018 account described a 1986 jury trial, while its 2021 account said Johnson faced two Will County murder trials, in 1984 and 1985.
During the trial an assistant state's attorney, Steven White, told the jury that the four women had been killed by an animal who was sitting in the courtroom. The jury convicted Johnson of four counts of murder and four counts of felony murder, and he was again sentenced to death. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed in People v. Johnson, 119 Ill. 2d 119 (1987), and the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case in 1988.
With those two verdicts, Johnson stood convicted of five murders and one attempted murder.
Edward Petka, the Will County state's attorney during the summer of the killings, chose the Interstate 55 case and the ceramics shop case to prosecute because they were the strongest. He decided not to try the Homer Township killings unless the convictions already won were overturned, the Herald-News reported in 2015. Prosecutors said they had overwhelming evidence that Johnson was responsible for those five deaths; that evidence was never tested before a jury. By the late 1980s Petka had decided against further murder trials.
In all, authorities tied Johnson to 14 killings in the summer of 1983, Patch reported, along with three attacks on women who survived. Nine of those deaths were never charged. Fred Hayes, a Joliet officer at the time and later police chief of Elwood, told Patch in 2023 that he wished the Homer Township case had gone forward. Simpson said that the families of the other victims had never received justice.
Johnson's lawyers spent decades challenging the convictions. A first petition for post-conviction relief in the Hackett case was dismissed; in People v. Johnson, 154 Ill. 2d 227 (1993), the Illinois Supreme Court upheld part of that ruling and sent the rest back to the trial court. Johnson then filed a nine-count amended petition, which was dismissed without a hearing.
In the ceramics shop case, the post-conviction appeal reached the Illinois Supreme Court in 2000. On August 10 of that year, in an opinion by Justice Rathje, the court found that the brief filed for Johnson was so deficient that it could not review the case. It kept jurisdiction, ordered the appeal rebriefed and directed the Capital Litigation Division of the State Appellate Defender to assign a staff attorney. Justice Freeman agreed with the rebriefing but would have left the choice of lawyer to the appellate defender.
On April 18, 2002, the court ruled on the Hackett petition. Writing for the majority, Justice Fitzgerald held that the trial court had erred in refusing DNA testing of evidence collected in the case, and that Johnson had made a substantial enough showing that Swano had been ineffective to require an evidentiary hearing. The opinion recounted Swano's own later history: he was indicted on federal racketeering charges in June 1991, was later charged again over the corruption of judges between 1980 and 1990, pleaded guilty, and testified at the trial of Judge Thomas Maloney about his illegal and unethical conduct, including drug use and bankruptcy during the years he represented Johnson. Johnson's petition said his family had paid Swano $15,000.
The court rejected Johnson's other claims. It found no due process violation in a hypnosis session the survivor had undergone, because the session concerned the truck, not the identity of the attacker, and her testimony was admissible. Chief Justice Harrison would have ordered a new trial outright, arguing that the Illinois death penalty law was unconstitutional; Justice Kilbride would also have ordered a new trial, under the court's new rules for capital cases.
The DNA testing did not clear Johnson, the Herald-News reported.
The Swano hearing ordered in 2002 took years to arrive. In June 2015, at 65, Johnson returned to the Will County courthouse in Joliet. He argued that Swano had been incompetent and should have moved to suppress his 1984 arrest. Three retired state police officers testified about the arrest at the Romeoville parole office; none could recall how long the interview had lasted or other specifics, the Herald-News reported.
The litigation, which traced back to a petition filed on November 23, 1987, ended in April 2019, when the Illinois Appellate Court for the Third District rejected his latest post-conviction appeal in an 11-page ruling. Johnson had argued that his trial lawyer should have challenged Peele's testimony about the bullets and cartridges. The court found no prejudice. It called the evidence of his guilt overwhelming and said a defense expert could have shown only that it was impossible to say for certain that the bullets and the cartridges came from the same box, not that they came from different ones.
Johnson spent his last decades at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, a maximum-security prison. Prison records in 2018 listed him at five feet nine and 240 pounds, with a projected discharge date of "ineligible." The journalist John Ferak, who wrote a 2021 book about the case, wrote to him several times at Menard to ask for an interview; Johnson did not reply.
He died at Menard on May 16, 2025. The Illinois Department of Corrections confirmed the date and place but not the cause. Relatives contacted a Joliet funeral home, and a funeral was planned in the city.
Simpson, by then retired, told Patch that he was sorry Johnson had not lived through several more decades of torment. Ficarello said Johnson never admitted guilt or showed remorse, for the 1983 killings or for his earlier crimes. Simpson had told Patch in 2023 that Johnson would never confess.
The total. Investigators and Patch put the number of killings linked to Johnson at 14. He was convicted of five. The Herald-News described him in 2015 as convicted of six murders; the court records show five murder victims across the two cases, together with one attempted murder.
The untried killings. The Homer Township deaths, the Blum and Lahmann deaths and the Chancellor and Johnson deaths were attributed to him by investigators and prosecutors, who cited the receipt bearing his stepfather's name, matching bullets and his access to the truck. None of that evidence was heard by a jury, and no court ruled on it.
Names and ages. Patch and the Herald-News give Pamela Ryan's age as 29. Patch calls her mother-in-law Anna Ryan; the Herald-News called her Agnes.
Dates. His parole has been reported as February 1983 and as March 1983, and the ceramics shop trial as 1985 and as 1986.
1970: Johnson, then 20, commits an attack in Pilcher Park, Joliet; he is sentenced to 25 to 35 years.
Early 1983 (February or March): Paroled after serving about half the sentence; returns to Joliet.
June 25, 1983: Zita Blum and Honora Lahmann are killed in Joliet Township (attributed; never charged).
July 2, 1983: Kenneth Chancellor and Terri Lynn Johnson are killed (attributed; never charged).
July 16, 1983: Five people, including two auxiliary deputies, are killed in Homer Township; one person survives (attributed; never charged).
July 17, 1983: Anthony Hackett is killed on Interstate 55 near Wilmington; his companion is abducted and survives.
August 20, 1983: Marilyn Baers, Barbara Dunbar, Anna Ryan and Pamela Ryan are killed in a ceramics shop in Joliet.
Late summer or fall 1983: State police question Johnson about the family truck.
February 1984: A woman reports the license number of a pickup that followed her in July 1983; it traces to his stepfather.
March 6, 1984: The survivor tentatively identifies Johnson from five photographs.
March 9, 1984: She identifies him in a lineup; he is arrested at the Romeoville parole office.
1984: Convicted in Iroquois County of Hackett's murder, with other charges; sentenced to death.
1986: Illinois Supreme Court affirms (114 Ill. 2d 170).
1985 or 1986: Convicted in Will County of the four ceramics shop murders; sentenced to death.
1987: Illinois Supreme Court affirms the second death sentence (119 Ill. 2d 119); the U.S. Supreme Court denies review in 1988.
November 23, 1987: Post-conviction litigation begins.
1993: Illinois Supreme Court partly reverses the dismissal of his first petition (154 Ill. 2d 227).
August 10, 2000: Illinois Supreme Court orders his ceramics shop appeal rebriefed.
April 18, 2002: Illinois Supreme Court orders DNA testing and a hearing on his trial lawyer's performance.
June 2015: Hearing in Will County on his claim against his trial lawyer.
April 2019: Third District Appellate Court rejects his latest post-conviction appeal.
May 16, 2025: Dies at Menard Correctional Center, Chester, Illinois, the day after his 75th birthday.