SERIAL KILLER, DAVID MAUST

Article BY Chris Mortensen - Art by Carina Hellman

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After countless interviews with his mother, David Maust’s defense team had decided that he looked too much like his father. In fact, he was the only sibling that bore any resemblance.  

When he was 7 in 1961, David’s mother (Eva) and father (George) divorced and he and his brother and 2 sisters were left with Eva, a single mother, to fend for themselves in the rough and tumble area of Mozart Street in Logan Square Chicago, Illinois.

Eva claims David showed early signs of violence and general animosity towards anyone in his line of sight, throwing heavy objects at his 1 year old sister when he was 2, while his brother Jeffrey later claimed as an older child that he had killed a squirrel at the park with a baseball bat in his presence.

When he was 9 years of age Eva made the decision to take David to court, describing a pattern of behavior that could only be controlled with state involvement as a youth with mental illness. David was committed to a sanitarium in Cook County for the next 4 years.

By the early 1960s, institutions as these were in essence “catch alls” for adults and children alike.  People with developmental disabilities, schizophrenia, troubled youth, violent offenders, and all manner of garden variety criminals all living and sleeping in common quarters feeding latent confusion and anger within David and everyone else trapped by these circumstances.  

Here, the doctors all agreed that David was a bright, articulate boy with a penchant for remembering historical sports statistics with almost savant like talent. Like many young men from Chicago, David was transfixed with the rich history of sports in Illinois with teams like The Chicago Bulls, The bears, and the many regional hockey teams (i.e. Detroit Redwings). Unlike many however, with instant recall David would recount facts with an uncanny accuracy usually associated with someone who has savant like abilities.  

Strangely, during this time cases like David’s were quietly handled as such to provide sanctuary from shaky home lives. Although many parents at this time used the court system to control their miscreant youth, in this case it was unspoken that Eva was in fact the one with mental illness. The idea was that David would return to the family home when she was ready to accept him.

According to David’s long time defense attorney Thomas Vanes, (Phone interview with author August, 2017) “whenever the hospital tried to facilitate any sort of mother and child reunion, they were met with rebuff from Eva, who had no interest in welcoming him back into the family home.” (Phone interview with author, August 2017)
David would speak to Vanes of another boy whose parents would have him committed into the sanitarium so that they “could have a vacation, and then he would be cured when they were finished, returning to collect him.” (Phone interview with author August 2017)

Because of his lengthy stay at the Cook County sanitarium, all doctors and staff were in agreement with one fact: David himself was not mentally ill.

When he was 13 he was transferred to the Children’s Home at 3737 N. Mozart St, a few blocks from where his mother and siblings were living without him. Now with boys his own age reaching sexual maturity, they began turning to each other for physical contact, David soon approached by another wanting sex. Although he only kissed the other youth, it left him feeling strange, angry and empty. Despite these confusing emotions, David himself admits he began having homosexual longings during this time at the home. Combined with his early sexual encounters being only with those that he may have not been organically interested in and an atmosphere of violence, his worldview and social skills were being shaped during this sentient, youthful period.  

The rage that David must have felt by the time he reached adolescence in 1969 must have been palpable.

David wrote in 1983 that when he was 15 he choked another boy named Eddie while they were playing, almost killing him. In his madness he stopped abruptly, apologizing profusely to the boy in the hopes of avoiding detection. Getting “In Trouble” was partly the reason for his regaining control, but in context with his 87 page diary written in jail in 1983, an underlying anxiety driven feeling of remorse was increasingly apparent.

On another occasion during this time, he used a rope to strangle a boy while they were watching TV in the commons area of his ward, quitting suddenly, telling himself that Daniel had done nothing wrong and stopping before it was too late. Daniel fell to the floor, and David couldn’t help but feel as though there was someone else inside of him controlling him at that moment, forcing him to do it.

Defense Attorney Thomas Vanes was later quoted as saying, although David was indeed a serial killer, he was not born one, and that ”If someone was looking for a recipe for making a serial killer, this was the way you would do it.” (Phone interview with author August 2017)
In 1971 at the age of 17, David escaped and returned to the home of his mother to find that she had been remarried (Surname now Reyes) and absolutely had no time or room for him in her new life.

From his mother’s view, David had become a family embarrassment that was creating resentment and shame for Eva who would rather pretend that he was never born. Although later after his suicide, Eva did admit that she loved him, she refused to foster him during these critical years of development, choosing to lock David in the back of her mind where he could not disturb her peaceful existence with her not quite utopian chosen family.

Hoping to rid herself of her problem once and for all while she still had some amount of parental control left, she insisted that he access a local army recruiter. The army soon sent the teen off to Frankfort, Germany to live on a US military base. The US Army was maintaining a presence in Europe and David was serving as a cook on the base shared by civilian engineers when he met 13 year old James McClister living with his expatriate parents. David befriended the boy and describes on one occasion awaking with the boy naked in his bunk (suggesting that the boy had brought himself there by his own accord), and becoming increasingly angry with the boy over time. David would later detail in his diary (written while incarcerated in 1987) that he eventually enticed the young Jimmy to accompany him on a ride on a moped into the forest for miles. Maust writes (giving the reader insight about his thought patterns)  “I thought to myself at that moment, that when Jimmy gets long hair, I am going to kill him.. When I killed him on that day, Jimmy had long hair.” David tied Jimmy to a tree and beat him to death with a 5 foot board, leaving him in a WWII bomb crater to lie undiscovered for more than a month after he returned to the base.

Jimmy was the first of 5.

David would be court marshalled in the boy’s death, and although there were no witnesses, he was sentenced to 3 years in the federal prison at Leavenworth in Kansas until his release in
1977.  

He knew that being free was a bad idea for everyone and he certainly would have loathed himself exponentially by now. Early in his imprisonment at Leavenworth, he knew that he would kill again and was filled with self-hate as his own behavior sickened him to the quick. The disgust that he felt would soon begin to manifest itself with violence, rape and ultimately in at least 5 cases of murder.

After his release, David was living again in Chicago and by 1979 was on trial for attempted murder of a teen male friend that would hang out with him at his apartment regularly during late nights drinking and smoking pot. David had waited until the teen fell asleep on his apartment couch after drinking all night with him, then after repeatedly talking himself out of it, stabbed him in the stomach nearly eviscerating him in the process. The boy survived. Although the evidence was overwhelming, he later wrote that he lied blatantly on the witness stand, and was found “Not Guilty”.

By 1981, David went hunting for a young man that he had had sex with before, angered and clearly disturbed by the experience. When the boy could not be found where he thought he might, he lured 15 year old Donald Jones into his car who supposedly had been walking by on the street. Following a drive with him to a remote quarry near Elgin, Illinois, Maust stabbed him in the stomach before drowning him in the black, sedentary water.

Soon David was on the run. He fled to Galveston Texas where he lived with an uncle, working as a roofer. David quickly found himself in a Texas jail for stabbing a teenager that he had lured to a motel room with drugs and alcohol. After police made the connection, Maust was extradited to Cook County to stand trial for the murder of Donald Jones, when a clerk scribbled on the request to Galveston, “Bad Guy, Gacy Type.”

David was repeatedly found to be unfit for trial, and spent 17 years within the Cook County corrections system mainly with supervised mental health facilities before finally released in 1999. Originally he was sentenced to 35 years in 1994, but was given his 12 years as” time served” then the 5 years until 1999. After, David was on the streets having built a negative personal history that would be useless except for dooming him as a violent sex offender and murderer. If he is to be believed, David indeed was aware of who he was and despised his own character. More and more he believed that he had no place in this world.

David wrote a letter to the Illinois Department of Corrections that he wanted to stay in prison, and that if let out he would kill again. He was aware that he could not control himself and would unquestionably destroy more lives. His letter was either ignored or unseen, despite his earnest.
After his forced release, Maust moved to Oak Park Illinois, south of Chicago living in an apartment building from May 2000-December 2002.

In hindsight, it would make sense that Oak Park police would be interested in Maust’s residence as a caretaker and tenant of an apartment building, but Maust insisted that he did not kill anyone during this time. However, as expected stories and drama did indeed appear where there was none.

A neighbor, Michael Shields, claims that he saw Maust tear up a section of the basement in this building and pour fresh concrete. However testimony from a building janitor states that no such activity ever took place, and that there were old heating coils that ran through the concrete floor making such construction impossible.  Reinforcing this, Oak Park P.D. admitted that it appeared undisturbed and “old”. Cadaver dogs revealed nothing, and although the public demanded that this case be “reopened”, Oak Park PD refused, claiming that there was no reason to believe that any crime had been committed here.

Most would agree that a symptom of the human condition illustrates that we as a species love creating drama and urban mythology. With the lack of evidence found by police the neighbors in Oak Park were no different bent on creating a story for local children to embellish for many generations to come.

Maust soon found work at a small business called Trophys Are Us after moving to Hammond Indiana in the fall of 2002. As small town shops like this are often manned by teenagers it begs the question: A) Could Maust have chosen the work knowing that he would work with young men, or, B) was this the only position he could find with his job experience and background? If so, it is clear that he was not properly vetted on hiring, or the owner simply hired him in spite of his background. His two early releases from Leavenworth and the Cook County legal system and unchecked criminal history is incredible when looked at carefully from the perspective of law enforcement or otherwise.

19 year old Nick James works at the trophy shop with Maust and is reported missing on May 2nd 2003.

The last day that Michael Dennis and James Raganyi are reported seen is September 10th, 2003.

Attorney Thomas Vanes recalls of the three missing teens:

“Some of the kids were of the rebellious wild streak, kind of thing ok? And when they disappeared, it was like, well, they will surface at some point, and who know where they ran off too, and maybe they are just runaways and they will come back kind of thing. But one of the 3 was not that kind at all, and his family was pushing the police. One of the police officers (Ronald Johnson) had a decent nose for this sort of investigation and began asking around, soon realizing that he had been hanging around with Maust. They run Maust’s record and sure enough he’s got a history of killing two teenage boys, ok? So that piqued their interest and they began circling around him, you know, narrowing things and building a case. Then they got the search warrant to go in the basement and you know, boom. Then they brought the dogs in and jackhammers. One of the kid’s absence provoked more than the normal interest.”
(Phone interview with author, August 2017)

On December 5th, 2003 Commander Dale Bock of the Hammond, Indiana PD K9 unit recalls that he was called in to search the basement with his cadaver dog:

“I was working a Giant Schnauzer dog by the name of Ammo, and he was crossed trained to be a cadaver dog. I was contacted by the Hammond PD, and they took me to a house and they said they had a suspect and they had several missing children, you know, missing boys in the area, and they wanted to know if my dog could go into the basement of this house and conduct a search for them. So I put the dog in the basement of the house and gave him the command to search, and he immediately ran into the back corner and he was trained to do what was called an aggressive response, which was a scratch? You know like he was digging? And he didn’t do that, he just went to the far corner of the house and barked. So I pulled him back and redirected him to do a search and he went back to that corner and did nothing but bark. So I uh, told a Hammond detective he’s not trained to do that he is trained to do the aggressive response? However, prudence would dictate that we better bust up some concrete, because there is a reason that the dog won’t leave the spot. So, I cleared the area and about a week later I was called by the Hammond police to come back again. Went back to the exact same residence and what they had done was taken a drill, started try to drill through the concrete, and they discovered that they went down about 10 inches and there was absolutely still solid concrete. So uh, they went back to the other side of the basement, and did the same thing, started a bore hole there, went down about 6-8 inches, and gave up. So they asked me to send the dog again, so I did. And this time the dog went to the hole in what would have been the south west corner, and he started scratchin very aggressively, so the detective told me he didn’t get that on video tape, so I pulled him back and the dog went to the other hole about half down the wall and started scratchin there.. So then I told them they need to break up the concrete now. You know we have an aggressive response here.. I don’t know about 3 days later, 4 days later, I was contacted again, and they sent me back to the same house. This time when I got there, they had a concrete expert that had determined that this guy, whoever this guy who had put the concrete in the basement had used bags, and this was David Maust. And he had used, he had to have used some phenomenal amount like 80 bags of concrete.. They also brought in a forensic Entomologist, who found evidence of Coffin Flies in the spider webs in the basement. Coffin flies are a species of fly that are indicative of rotting flesh but it doesn’t have to be human, it can be chickens, pig, and beef. They also brought in a pathologist out of Indianapolis, and what they had done is that they had determined that all the concrete in the back of the basement was 16-18 inches thick. So they moved out to where the concrete was a little bit older and thinner, and was only several inches. So they broke a hole and was probably a circle about the size of a garbage can. They had me send the dog in, and as soon as I did, the dog dove into the hole and started throwing dirt like crazy, digging very aggressively, and once I got him out, the pathologist knelt and started feeling underneath into the dirt and said he felt what he though was a human leg joint, knee joint encased in a plastic bag.. They broke up the concrete on the southwest end and they discovered two bodies there. They were wrapped in plastic and buried under 16-18 inches of concrete. They then went to the north end of the west wall, where the dog had made the 2nd alert on the different hole. They broke that one up and discovered a 3rd body. The 3rd body was uh, this guy apparently had to fill a bathtub full of a blue lead based paint, and he just had to have continually dunked this body in this blue leadj based paint because it was completely encased in paint about a half inch thick. And then it was wrapped in plastic as well. Maybe that was something to try and keep the smell down, I don’t know. And I do remember that when they did x-rays that they found things inserted in the bodies through the rectums like bottles or coat hangers or something. Up in the room they did discover a map with Xs on it where, well we don’t know but we assume that he had gone to various places across the country on his way up from Texas. These Xs, we don’t know what they meant.” (Phone interview with author, September 2017)

Maust was soon arrested as a result of the search of the basement and remained in custody in Crown Point, Indiana at the county jail until his judgement.

May 14th 2004, an episode of the Montel Williams show airs, entitled, “Animal Cruelty”, the subject of which describes how serial killers begin with torture of pets and small animals. Eva Reyes and David’s brother Jeffrey appear on the show to speak about his childhood behavior. Attorney Thomas Vanes, describes Jeffrey as going on the show as a panel guest to describe his brother with “Half-truth and half bullshit.” Jeffrey later told Vanes that “Eva got all excited about going to New York, being in the show (from the audience), dressing up for the occasion, and all that sort of thing. The brother (Jeffrey) was certainly not the sharpest tool in the shed, and was clearly angling for money and a book.” (Phone interview with author, August 2017)

November, 2005, Maust with appeals exhausted, (that he was pressured into by his defense team in the first place) was handed down his final judgement of 3 consecutive life in prison sentences for the 3 Hammond teens found in his basement.

January 19th, 2006, Maust was found hanging in his cell with a makeshift noose at the Indiana State prison in Crown Point, Indiana.

January 20th,  St. Anthony Medical Center in Crown Point, Indiana: With no family present, only correctional institution officers and a long night on life support, David stopped breathing at 7:24 am.

In a five page suicide note found in his cell, David blames himself for everything that went wrong for him and damage he created. To his dying day he states that he loved his family, although when gathering all the evidence, it would seem the sentiment was not reciprocated.

“There is a long line of people who would like to see me die, but the families have a right to be in line first, then my mother and then the taxpayer. Dying is not my first choice, but it is the right thing to do.”