On August 20, 1983, four women were killed at the Greenware by Merry ceramics shop in the Joliet area of Will County, Illinois: Marilyn Baers, forty-five; Barbara Dunbar, thirty-eight; Anna Ryan, seventy-five; and Pamela Ryan, twenty-five. It was the worst single day in a summer of killings that had begun in June and that local people came to call the weekend murders, because they came on weekends.
The dead that summer, as the police later linked them to one man, were Zita Blum, sixty-six, and her sister Honora Lahmann, sixty-seven, on June 25; Kenneth Chancellor, thirty-four, and Terri Lynn Johnson, nineteen, on July 2; George Kiehl, twenty-four, Cathleen Norwood, twenty-five, Richard Paulin, thirty-two, Denis Foley, fifty, and Steven Mayer, twenty-two, on July 16; Anthony Hackett, eighteen, on July 17; and the four women at the ceramics shop on August 20. Two of the dead were police officers.
The man they were laid to was Milton Johnson, born in Joliet on May 15, 1950. He had spent 1970 to 1983 in prison for aggravated battery, burglary and rape, and was on parole when the killings began. He was arrested on March 9, 1984.
He was convicted of five of the murders, those of Anthony Hackett and the four women at the ceramics shop, along with attempted murder, two rapes, deviate sexual assault, burglary and aggravated battery, and sentenced to death. The death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. The other nine killings were never brought to a conviction. He spent about four decades in prison and died at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois, on May 16, 2025, the day after his seventy-fifth birthday.