On October 6, 1982, Robin Gecht offered Beverly Washington, a young woman working as a prostitute in Chicago, more money than she had asked for, and she got into his van. She was found later beside a railroad track. Her left breast had been cut off and her right breast badly slashed, and she had been left for dead. She lived, and she described the man and the van. That was the end of the group the Chicago press called the Ripper Crew, and it is the only crime for which Gecht has ever been convicted.
Gecht, born on November 30, 1953, was a construction worker with a wife and children, and in the 1970s he had worked as a subcontractor for John Wayne Gacy's contracting business. Investigators found no connection between the two men's crimes. His associates were Edward Spreitzer and the brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis, all younger. The first victim attributed to them was Linda Sutton, twenty-eight, abducted on May 23, 1981; her mutilated body, the left breast amputated, was found ten days later in a field behind the Moonlit Motel. Lorraine Borowski was taken on May 15, 1982, as she was about to open the realty office where she worked, and was found five months later in a cemetery in Clarendon Hills. On May 29, Shui Mak, thirty, a recent immigrant from China, was abandoned by her brother at the side of the road in Hanover Park after an argument and was taken by the group; her body was not found for four months. Two weeks later they picked up Angel York, handcuffed her, slashed her breast and threw her out of the van alive.
On August 28, 1982, the body of Sandra Delaware was found on the bank of the Chicago River, stabbed and strangled, with her left breast amputated. On September 8, Rose Davis, thirty-one, was found in an alley with almost identical injuries. On October 6, the day of the attack on Beverly Washington, Rafael Tirado, twenty-eight, and Alberto Rosario, eighteen, were shot at a phone booth in a random drive-by. By Spreitzer's account Gecht told him to slow down and stop, took two guns from the back and opened fire. Rosario survived; Tirado died in hospital.
Police arrested Gecht on October 20, 1982, after police connected his van to the Washington attack. He posted bond and was released, and was rearrested on November 5. Andrew Kokoraleis was arrested on November 7, and he and Spreitzer confessed to up to seventeen murders. Thomas Kokoraleis was arrested on November 12 and described taking women to what Gecht called a satanic chapel at his home, where they were raped and tortured and their breasts cut off with a wire garrote, parts of which, he said, they ate as a kind of sacrament. The group was also suspected in the 1982 disappearance of Carole Pappas, wife of the Chicago Cubs pitcher Milt Pappas, whose death was ruled an accident when her body was recovered five years later. A detective on the case said Gecht made Manson look like a Boy Scout.
Gecht was the only one of the four who denied everything, and he was never tried for any of the killings for lack of evidence. He was convicted of attempted murder, aggravated kidnapping, deviate sexual assault and rape for the attack on Beverly Washington; most accounts date the conviction to 1983, one to February 17, 1984. Sentencing him to 120 years, Judge Francis J. Mahon told him, "Only a devil would do these things. An animal would not do these things. A monster would," and said he was lucky not to be on trial for murder.
The others were convicted of murder. Spreitzer pleaded guilty in 1984 to the murders of Shui Mak, Rose Davis, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado and got life, and in 1986 he was sentenced to death for Linda Sutton; his lawyer called him a follower of Gecht's orders. His sentence was commuted to life in 2003 when Governor George Ryan cleared Illinois's death row. Andrew Kokoraleis got life in 1985 for Rose Davis and death in 1987 for Lorraine Borowski, and on March 17, 1999, he became the last person executed in Illinois. Thomas Kokoraleis was convicted of Borowski's murder and sentenced to life, won a new trial on appeal, pleaded guilty for seventy years, and was released on March 29, 2019. He says he is innocent.
He is held at Danville Correctional Center. Under the sentencing rules of his time, his 120 years carries a projected parole date of October 10, 2042, when he would be eighty-eight. His son David was one of dozens wrongly convicted through the misconduct of the Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara; convicted of a 1999 murder and sentenced to forty-five years, he was exonerated on July 18, 2022, and Cook County settled his lawsuit for $3.1 million in October 2024.