The women Paul Runge killed had all done the same thing: they had placed an advertisement in a newspaper.
Household items, sports equipment, a house for sale. A classified ad is an invitation for a stranger to come to your door by arrangement, and between January 1995 and March 1997 he answered them across the Chicago suburbs.
Seven people died. He has been convicted of killing two of them.
Stacy Frobel was twenty-five, from Carol Stream, and an acquaintance of his wife's; on January 3 or 4, 1995 she went to visit Charlene at the couple's home in Streamwood and was not seen again. He hit her with a dumbbell and she died where she stood. Then he dismembered her in the bathtub with a saw to get rid of the body, and her severed legs were found five days apart in fields near the Wisconsin border, the first of them carried to its owner by a German shepherd.
On January 16 a German shepherd named Friendly brought a severed leg home to its owner from a field near the Wisconsin border, and five days later found the other. DNA identified her. Runge called in sick for days afterward, then quit his job.
She died eight months after Illinois let him out of prison.
Paul Frederick Runge was born in Oak Forest, Illinois, on January 28, 1970. At seventeen, in the same year his mother died, Runge had kidnapped, raped and tortured a fourteen-year-old girl in Oak Forest, and then walked into a police station and turned himself in. He was sentenced to fourteen years. He was paroled in May 1994 after serving seven, and he was still on parole for that offense through every one of the killings that followed. He was given fourteen years and paroled in May 1994. He married a woman named Charlene, sold shoes at Foot Locker, drove a truck, worked at a Honey Baked Ham store, and moved house three times.
Dzeneta Pasanbegovic was twenty-two and her sister Amela was twenty. They were Bosnian refugees who had arrived six months earlier and were living with their uncle in Hanover Park, and they were last seen on July 11, 1995. In July 1995 Runge offered them housekeeping work to get them to his house, and he later confessed to handcuffing, bludgeoning, raping, torturing and strangling them both.
Dorota Dziubak was thirty. Kazimiera Paruch was forty-three.
Yolanda Gutierrez was thirty-five and her daughter Jessica Muniz was ten. They died in February 1997 and their bodies were found badly burned, their throats cut, with signs of sexual assault.
He was married throughout. Between 1995 and 1996 the FBI in Chicago tried to build a case connecting him to three disappearances, recording telephone calls, going through his rubbish, following him and his wife, and could not make it stand up.
What put him in prison in May 1997 was not a killing at all. He was arrested for keeping weapons in breach of his parole and sent back to finish the seven years outstanding on his old sentence.
He was already inside when the science caught up. In 2000, with better technique and a larger database, DNA recovered from Jessica Muniz's body was reprocessed and matched a thirty-year-old man from DuPage County who was in custody a few counties away.
Detectives went to see him at the Will County jail and told him what they had. He said: "You got me."
He then confessed on videotape to at least seven murders, including the Pasanbegovic sisters, and described dismembering three of the bodies. He was charged in June 2001.
Cook County tried him in January 2006 before Judge Joseph Kazmierski, for Gutierrez and Muniz, because that was the case where the DNA was strongest. He ran an insanity defense and the jury rejected it. He was convicted in February of two counts of first-degree murder with aggravated kidnapping and aggravated criminal sexual assault, and sentenced to death.
The Illinois Supreme Court upheld it on May 20, 2009, but the decision was split, and the dissent was about the jury rather than the evidence.
Justice Anne M. Burke would have ordered a new trial. Jurors had discussed the case privately before deliberations began, in breach of the judge's express order, and the conduct of one juror who had made inappropriate comments was argued over. Burke wrote: "I recognize that the crimes at issue here were horrific. But it is precisely these types of cases that test our commitment to the principle of law. We must not allow ourselves to be swayed by emotion. Given Illinois' history with capital cases, the majority's opinion sends the wrong message about how these cases will be treated in Illinois."
Two years later the argument became academic. Governor Pat Quinn abolished the death penalty in Illinois in March 2011 and commuted every sentence on the state's death row, Runge's included, to life without parole.
And that is when the other five cases quietly ended.
With Runge already serving life, DuPage County dropped the outstanding murder charges. State's Attorney Robert Berlin said he did it reluctantly, because there was no greater penalty left to impose, and added that he understood it might look as though Runge was getting away with those crimes.
Dzeneta and Amela Pasanbegovic came out of a war and were offered housekeeping work by a man who handcuffed and strangled them. What their families got was a videotaped confession and a dismissal.
Runge is held at the Pontiac Correctional Center. He has never given a face-to-face interview. In 2006 he sent written answers to a reporter at the Daily Herald, passed out through his father, and they are the only thing he has said publicly about any of it.
"I don't let myself accept I'm guilty of these crimes. I feel bad about the pain I've caused but the self-defense part of my brain doesn't let me identify the crimes with me. Without truly accepting my actions, there will never be an equal amount of guilt and remorse. To fully accept and realize my actions would kill me."