On the morning of October 5, 2010, a gunman opened fire on three men at a farmhouse in the flat country south of Chicago, and before the day was out he had crossed into Indiana and shot a farmer on a country road outside Lowell. One man was dead and two were wounded; a fourth had escaped unhurt. Because the gunman had talked about honeybees, the press gave him a name before anyone knew who he was. For more than two months, no one did.
In those two months, Will County charged the wrong man with murder, released him within days, and watched the trail go quiet. The case broke only on a Saturday night in December, in a tanning salon in Orland Park, when a car salesman who had stopped in for an appointment shot and killed an armed robber. The dead man was Gary Amaya, a 48-year-old former trucker and lodge caretaker from a village of a few hundred people downstate. His gun, investigators soon announced, was the gun from October 5.
Amaya never faced a judge. Everything known about the "honeybee" shootings comes from the men who survived them, from police and prosecutors, and from the people who knew a quiet, guarded man who kept bees, grew mushrooms, and lived for years in a trailer on the grounds of a hunting and fishing lodge.
The first shooting happened in Washington Township, in rural Will County, near the town of Beecher and close to the Indiana line. Three men were working on a burned-out farmhouse that was being rehabilitated. ABC7 Chicago placed the attack at about 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 5.
One of the three was Rolando Alonso, 45, of Hammond, Indiana. He had been on the job only two days. His wife told CBS 2 that he had wanted a new job and was excited about this one. Between them the couple had ten children: each had four from an earlier relationship, and they had two together. She described him as a devoted husband and father. About an hour and fifteen minutes before the shooting, he called her. "I just called you to tell you I love you," he said. It was the last time she heard his voice.
Working with Alonso were a 19-year-old from Hammond and a third man. A stranger in a pickup truck talked with the workers about the property and about building materials, and then opened fire.
Alonso was shot and killed; he was pronounced dead that afternoon. The 19-year-old co-worker was wounded and survived. The third worker escaped into a cornfield and called 911. When officers arrived he was slow to believe that they were really police; Will County Sheriff Paul Kaupas said later that officers "had to coax him out of the cornfield."
Lowell, Indiana, lies about ten miles east of Beecher, according to the Associated Press. Less than an hour after the farmhouse shooting, by the account the Sun-Times Media Wire later gave, a man matching the same description stopped beside a farmer on a rural road outside Lowell.
The farmer’s age was reported as 62, 63 and 64 in different accounts that fall. The stranger mentioned honeybees in the area. Then he shot the farmer and robbed him, and drove off. The farmer survived.
He was expected to recover. "It’s a sick world that we live in," his older brother told ABC7 Chicago, adding that it took something like this to make a person understand that no one was immune.
The conversation about bees gave the case its name. Before long the unknown gunman was the "honeybee killer" in Chicago newspapers and broadcasts, or, less often, the "state line" shooter.
Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff Roy Dominguez held a news conference in Crown Point that Tuesday evening. "We have a very dangerous situation," he said, and urged residents to call 911 about anything suspicious. All five schools of the Tri-Creek School Corporation in Lowell were locked down that afternoon and closed the next day. "It was extremely scary for everyone around here," one parent told ABC7, "so we really worried about our kids yesterday."
The first description was thin. Witnesses described a white, heavyset man in his thirties or forties, roughly five feet ten to six feet tall and 220 to 260 pounds, disheveled, in a light green or greenish-blue windbreaker, light jeans, work boots and possibly a ball cap. He had been driving a light-colored pickup from the 1990s, a Chevrolet or a Ford, with a noisy muffler. The Will County Sheriff’s Office released a composite sketch on the first evening.
Tips poured in. On the first night, Sauk Village police stopped a light-colored pickup with Wisconsin plates; it was a false alarm. Detectives began contacting beekeepers and hobbyists in the region and going through records of violent psychiatric patients in the area. A beekeeper in Calumet Township, Indiana, who taught classes and kept as many as 800,000 bees on three acres, told CBS 2 that he did not recognize the sketch as anyone he had taught. His grandchildren had texted him a warning not to talk to strangers about beekeeping. "I keep looking over my shoulder," he said.
By Thursday, October 7, the Will County Sheriff’s Office and the Lake County Sheriff’s Department were forming a joint task force. Bullets recovered at the farmhouse and on the Lowell road had similar characteristics, and both sets were sent on for further analysis. The Indiana State Police prepared a second composite sketch. "We’re using all of our resources every day, 24/7, to make sure that we apprehend the suspect," Dominguez said. Speaking to the Associated Press the same day, he described the shootings as apparently random. "We don’t know what might have precipitated this rampage," he said.
Alonso’s family, meanwhile, was making arrangements to bury him in Guadalajara, Mexico, after services in Schererville, Indiana. "I just can’t imagine my life without him, and my kids," his wife said.
The task force moved fast. A warrant was issued late on Thursday, October 7, and executed shortly after midnight. In the early hours of Friday, October 8, a Will County Sheriff’s SWAT team took a 37-year-old Lynwood police officer, B.D., into custody at his home. Sheriff Kaupas said the officer was alone in the house with four pit bulls and was arrested without incident.
B.D. had been on medical leave for about a year with a shoulder injury. Lynwood police had found his truck after a tip. By the end of the day he had been charged with one count of first-degree murder in Alonso’s death and was being held on $2.5 million bail. Lake County Sheriff Dominguez said Indiana charges were pending. Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow told reporters that the investigation was continuing and that the agencies had "shared information openly and quickly." Glasgow also called it every police officer’s worst fear when a member of their own community chose to break the law.
The arrest did not satisfy everyone. The officer’s father told ABC7: "My son would never do that. They don’t have the shooter. The shooter is still out there." Lynwood’s mayor described the officer as polite and respectful. Neighbors held back judgment.
The case against him rested on very little. As later reports and his own lawsuit described it, he had been picked out by the worker who escaped into the cornfield, and the identification depended in part on an eight-year-old driver’s license photograph. His lawsuit would later argue that the witness’s original description of the gunman and of the truck did not match him, and that sheriff’s officers and prosecutors had steered the witness toward him. He had also, CBS 2 reported, matched the gunman’s general description and drove a white truck, which at that point was the color police were looking for.
He told detectives he had been at home, on his computer, when the shootings happened. The computer bore him out. Forensic examination of its internet history placed him at home at the time of both attacks. He spent the Columbus Day weekend in the Will County jail. On the Tuesday after the holiday he appeared in court; the murder charge was dropped, and he walked out that evening. His lawsuit gives October 13, 2010, as the date of the dismissal and his release from the Will County Detention Center.
The officer had been in custody four days, as CBS 2 counted it, or five by Patch’s count. In December he told CBS 2 that every night he had been locked up he had lain awake "thinking these victims had a false sense of security," knowing the real gunman was still free. His attorneys said he received hate mail after his release, and Lynwood’s police chief, Russell Pearson, advised him to sue the county.
With the officer cleared, the investigation was back where it had started. On October 13, Dominguez told CBS 2 that tips were still arriving every day. "I get them, our chief gets them, our detective bureau gets them," he said. Evidence from the scenes had gone to the Indiana State Police crime lab.
Two days later, investigators changed a crucial detail. The pickup, they now said, had not been white. Witnesses described it as light blue, with a passenger-side door lighter than the rest of the body, and identified it as a Chevrolet Cheyenne from the 1990s. Police took video from a camera at Lowell Middle School in the hope that it had caught the truck, but said afterward that the footage had not helped.
By October 28, CBS 2 was asking whether the trail had gone cold. Will County officials insisted it had not, but three weeks in, the only public lead was the sketch. Investigators had narrowed the truck to a light blue Chevrolet Cheyenne built between 1991 and 1998. That was as far as they had come. On December 9, a CBS 2 report put it plainly: the case had gone cold.
On the night of Friday, December 10, a woman in Chicago reported that a man in a pickup truck had tried to abduct her at gunpoint, and that she had escaped on foot. She later gave her account to police and to the Chicago Sun-Times. Her purse was left behind in his truck.
The next evening, Saturday, December 11, a man attempted an armed robbery at a tanning salon in Orland Park, a southwest suburb of Chicago. A young woman was working the front counter. A customer who walked in during the robbery, Jason McDaniel, a 29-year-old car salesman with a baby daughter at home, struggled with the robber, gained control of the gun and shot and killed him. While the men fought, the employee called police. The salon’s security camera recorded the encounter, and police released the video three days later.
McDaniel spoke to reporters within days. He said he had offered the man cash and told him he was a new father. "He basically looked me right in my face and said 'I don’t care,'" McDaniel told CBS 2. "He wasn’t there for money, I don’t think," he told ABC7, "and that’s what scared me." Orland Park Police Chief Tim McCarthy later said that neither of the two people in the salon believed robbery was the real aim: "Both feared for their life that this was going to be more than a robbery."
"It’s me or him, absolutely, 100-percent," McDaniel told ABC7. "I thought I would never see my family again."
Outside the salon, police found the dead man’s pickup: a 1992 light blue Chevrolet Cheyenne. In it was the purse of the woman who had reported the attempted abduction in Chicago the night before.
The dead man was identified as Gary Amaya, 48, of Rankin, Illinois, a farming village about 100 miles south of Chicago and, by the Associated Press’s measure, about 60 miles south of the border-area shootings. By Monday, December 13, police sources were linking him to the October shootings through the truck and through a preliminary ballistics match on the revolver. That night, investigators from Will County and Lake County, Indiana, searched his house in Rankin.
The video was made public on Tuesday, December 14. "People will get to see what really happened," McDaniel told CBS News. The salon chain’s chairman said he would rather have erased the memory than watch it, "but the world wants to see it." Orland Park police described McDaniel as a hero who had shown "extreme bravery and courage." He was not charged.
On Thursday, December 16, the Will County Sheriff’s Office, the Lake County Sheriff’s Department and Orland Park police appeared together before reporters. Ballistics tests, they said, had confirmed that the Colt .38 Special taken from the robber in Orland Park was the weapon fired on October 5 at the farmhouse and on the road outside Lowell.
Sheriff Kaupas would not go further than the gun. Forensic evidence was still being examined, he said, and he did not confirm that Amaya had been the October gunman. Amaya’s DNA had been sent to a crime lab, partly to learn whether he could be tied to other unsolved crimes. Asked about a motive, Kaupas said there was "no motive at all" that investigators could yet see. Detectives were interviewing Amaya’s relatives, friends and former employers.
Lake County’s sheriff was less guarded. The wounded Indiana farmer, Dominguez said, had "unequivocally identified" Amaya as the man who shot him. The farmer had seen Amaya’s photograph on his wife’s computer and recognized him. He had also described a light blue Cheyenne with Illinois plates, which matched the truck found in the salon parking lot.
Speaking to the Sun-Times Media Wire before the formal announcement, the farmer said that an answer would help, "not just for me but for everybody." He was recovering. "I’m thrilled to death I’m alive," he said. Days earlier, a relative of the wounded construction worker had told ABC7 that she was already leaning toward the view that the same man had been behind the gun.
The man at the center of the case had left a faint mark on the world. Most of what is known about him came from neighbors, a former co-worker and a tradesman who had known him for years, and from the small number of official records he generated.
For a long stretch of his adult life he was a caretaker at Lake Tandem Lodge, a hunting and fishing resort near Morris, in Grundy County, Illinois. His parents had been at the lodge before him, which was how he came to the job. A Morris plumbing and heating contractor who was called out to the lodge several times a year remembered Amaya there from the late 1980s, through the 1990s, and possibly into the early 2000s. Amaya lived alone in a run-down trailer on the property, north of the picnic grounds, and drove an old truck. "It was like he was living in poverty," the contractor told CBS 2, though he added that he did not know whether that was true.
Amaya hunted, target-shot at the lodge’s range, owned guns, and was involved in ham radio. He grew mushrooms and tended honeybees. Sheriff Kaupas later said that Amaya had managed a Grundy County property where honeybees were kept. The contractor described a man who seemed different, who was unhappy with some of the work, and who became very upset when visitors turned up unexpectedly, but who did a fair job of looking after the place. "I never saw him smile, never saw him laugh," he said. He had a couple of hunting friends and no known girlfriend. "He seemed to be a little bit different," he told the Shaw Local newspapers, "but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought he’d done something like this."
A man who lived and worked with Amaya as a caretaker at the lodge in the 1990s told the SouthtownStar that he had considered Amaya a friend but had seen his temper often. He called him a "Jekyll and Hyde type character." Twice, he said, Amaya pulled a gun on him, and both times he talked him down.
Amaya’s file with the Grundy County Sheriff’s Office, as Sheriff Terry Marketti described it to Shaw Local, was thin and minor: a verbal warning in a traffic stop in 1988; guilty pleas and fines for speeding in 1990 and 1993; a civil case brought by Sears, Roebuck and Company and dismissed in 1995; three complaints of criminal trespass he filed himself in 1998; and, the same year, an arrest by a state conservation officer for hunting violations, which ended in guilty pleas and fines. The sheriff’s last contact with him came in 2002, when the Coal City Fire Department asked deputies to check on him because no one had seen him for some time. In December 2010, police sources told the Sun-Times Media Wire that he had no police record.
Before moving downstate he worked at the railyard in Elwood. Then he went to Rankin, a village north of Champaign with fewer than 600 residents, "including cats and dogs," as its mayor put it. Accounts differ on the timing. Rankin residents told reporters he had arrived about a decade earlier to care for his ailing mother and had stayed on after she died of cancer a couple of years before 2010; the contractor recalled that he moved into her house after her death. Either way, by 2010 he was living alone in his late mother’s home.
Rankin barely knew him. Some neighbors had taken the house for abandoned until police arrived. "Quiet and kept to himself all the time," said one. Another recalled that he mowed the lawn on Sundays. The village’s only police officer had never been called to the house. Amaya’s last known job was as a driver for a trucking company in nearby Milford, for a few months the previous winter. Investigators said later that his trucking work meant he knew Will and Cook counties well. At his death he was unemployed and, in the words of Will County Deputy Chief Ken Kaupas, appeared to be in need of financial help.
The DNA results, when they came, settled nothing. Lake County’s DNA tests were inconclusive, though they did not rule Amaya out. A handwriting comparison with samples seized from the Rankin house was also inconclusive: there was too little writing for a comparison that would stand up in court.
In the spring of 2011, Will County investigators met with the Will County State’s Attorney’s Office and with Lake County, Indiana, police to close the books. On April 5, 2011, Will County sheriff’s police announced that both cases were closed and that Gary Amaya had been named as the shooter. Deputy Chief Ken Kaupas said he believed Amaya had meant to rob the men at the farmhouse as well.
No court ever heard the evidence. Amaya was never charged with the death of Rolando Alonso or the wounding of the two other men, and the case against him was never tested by a defense. The attribution rests on the ballistics match, on the truck, on the farmer’s identification, and on what was found in the Rankin house.
Jason McDaniel was honored more than once that winter. On December 18 the salon chain’s owner gave him a $5,000 reward at the company’s Christmas party in Rolling Meadows, along with free tanning for life for him and his wife. McDaniel said the money would go to his daughter. He insisted that the real hero was the young employee, who had borne the worst of the ordeal, while he had only done what he had to do. On January 2, 2011, the pastor of Ashburn Baptist Church in Orland Park presented him with a plaque and an engraved Bible. McDaniel said he had acted because he was thinking about his family. "I want to give my daughter the world," he had said in December, "and I can’t do that if I’m not here."
The officer who had been charged with Alonso’s murder took a different road out of the case. In October 2011 he filed a six-count federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging false arrest, false imprisonment, conspiracy and malicious prosecution, and seeking more than $10 million. It named former Sheriff Paul Kaupas, State’s Attorney James Glasgow and a sheriff’s detective, and accused them of fabricating evidence and feeding defamatory information to the press. It described a SWAT unit "armed with automatic weapons" descending on his house, and a press conference at which he was branded the "Honey Bee Killer." The sheriff’s office and the state’s attorney answered in a joint statement that the investigation "was conducted according to the letter of the law." A federal judge dismissed Glasgow from the suit.
In January 2015, Patch reported that Will County had paid the officer $126,500 under a settlement in exchange for dropping the suit. He was 42 and still a Lynwood police officer.
Why it happened is the question no proceeding answered. Sheriff Paul Kaupas said in December 2010 that investigators could see no motive. By April 2011 the official account pointed toward money: an unemployed man in need, a robbery near Lowell, a robbery attempt in Orland Park. Yet the people who faced Amaya did not think money was what he was after. Neither McDaniel nor the salon employee, Orland Park’s police chief said, believed that robbery was what the gunman really wanted.
The talk of bees and of the house was never explained. The one person who could have explained it died on a Saturday night in December, shot with the same revolver that investigators matched to the farmhouse and the Lowell road.
• Late 1980s to early 2000s: Gary Amaya works as caretaker at Lake Tandem Lodge near Morris, Grundy County, Illinois.
• 1998: Amaya is arrested by a conservation officer for hunting violations and pleads guilty, paying fines.
• 2002: Grundy County deputies check on his welfare at the request of the Coal City Fire Department.
• October 5, 2010, about 10:30 a.m.: Three men rehabbing a farmhouse near Beecher, Will County, are fired on. Rolando Alonso, 45, is killed; a 19-year-old co-worker is wounded and survives; a third worker escapes into a cornfield.
• October 5, 2010, within the hour: A farmer near Lowell, Indiana, is shot and robbed after a conversation about honeybees. Tri-Creek schools are locked down.
• October 7, 2010: Will County and Lake County, Indiana, form a joint task force; a second composite sketch is prepared.
• October 8, 2010: A Lynwood police officer is arrested by a Will County SWAT team and charged with first-degree murder; bail is set at $2.5 million.
• October 2010, after Columbus Day weekend: The murder charge is dropped after his home computer places him at home during the shootings; he is released.
• October 15, 2010: Investigators announce that the pickup was light blue, not white, and identify it as a 1990s Chevrolet Cheyenne.
• October 28, 2010: The truck is narrowed to a Chevrolet Cheyenne built between 1991 and 1998.
• December 10 to 11, 2010: A woman in Chicago reports an attempted abduction at gunpoint by a man in a pickup; she escapes.
• December 11, 2010: Gary Amaya is shot and killed by a customer, Jason McDaniel, during an armed robbery attempt at an Orland Park tanning salon.
• December 13, 2010: Investigators from Will County and Lake County search Amaya’s house in Rankin.
• December 14, 2010: The salon’s surveillance video is made public.
• December 16, 2010: Authorities announce that ballistics tests matched Amaya’s Colt .38 Special to the October 5 shootings; the Indiana farmer identifies Amaya from a photograph.
• December 18, 2010: McDaniel receives a $5,000 reward from the salon chain.
• January 2, 2011: McDaniel is honored at Ashburn Baptist Church in Orland Park.
• April 5, 2011: Will County announces that both cases are closed and names Amaya as the shooter; DNA and handwriting tests were inconclusive.
• October 13, 2011: The officer who had been wrongly charged files a federal lawsuit seeking more than $10 million.
• January 2015: Will County is reported to have settled the suit for $126,500.