Thomas Kokoraleis walked out of the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton, Illinois, on March 29, 2019. He was 58. He had pleaded guilty in 1987 to the murder of Lorraine Borowski, a 21-year-old secretary who was seized on her way to work in Elmhurst, a western suburb of Chicago, on May 15, 1982. His sentence was 70 years, and under the Illinois sentencing law in force at the time he had to serve only half of it.
He was one of four men police linked in November 1982 to a series of abductions and killings of women in Chicago and its suburbs. The others were his brother Andrew Kokoraleis, Edward Spreitzer and Robin Gecht. Chicago news outlets called the group the Ripper Crew, and later reports attributed to it anywhere from more than 15 to as many as 20 deaths. Those figures are attributions. Thomas Kokoraleis was convicted of one killing only, and the guilty plea that settled his case also ended a second murder charge against him.
His case turned on what he told police in the two days after he walked into a suburban police station in November 1982, and on what the courts made of those statements. A jury convicted him in 1984 and he was sentenced to natural life without parole. Two years later an appeals court reversed both of his convictions. He then pleaded guilty, and he spent the rest of his time in prison saying that his confession had been coerced and that he had never raped or killed anyone.
Little is on the public record about his life before 1982. He was 22 when he was taken into custody in November 1982, according to Department of Corrections information reported by Shaw Local in 2017, and 24 when he was sentenced in September 1984, according to the Illinois Appellate Court. Court documents placed his home in Villa Park, a DuPage County suburb west of Chicago, and his brother Andrew was arrested at the family home there.
The appellate court's 1986 opinion gives the only detailed account of his background. He had been a special education student and left an occupational school three years after finishing grade school. When a psychologist tested him in June 1983 his full-scale score on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale was 75. A psychiatrist, Dr. Albert Stipes, testified that he was of borderline intelligence but not retarded, in the clinical language of the time, and that he was easily led and easily intimidated by people in authority. Stipes said he doubted that Kokoraleis could knowingly give up his right to remain silent, although he agreed on cross-examination that there was no question about his sanity. The same opinion noted that, unlike defendants in some earlier cases the court cited, he had no prior experience with the criminal justice system.
His brother Andrew was charged with the same killing and tried separately. Reports differ on which brother was older. A third brother testified for Andrew at one of his trials.
Lorraine Ann Borowski, known to her family and friends as Lorry, grew up in Elmhurst and went to York Community High School. She was 21 in May 1982 and worked as a secretary at a real estate office in Elmhurst, a few blocks from the apartment where she lived, according to the Illinois Supreme Court; a 2019 CBS Chicago report described her job as receptionist. She usually walked to work.
In 2017, when her family learned that Thomas Kokoraleis might soon be freed, friends and relatives spoke to Shaw Local about the young woman they remembered. They described her as very funny, with a dry and sarcastic humor and a habit of teasing the people she liked. A friend she had known since eighth grade said she would give you the shirt off her back and never seemed to complain about her own problems. Another friend remembered that Lorry had stood up for her, and called her a really good person who always had a positive outlook. A childhood neighbor said she was always smiling and had no enemies. Her younger brother said she had been a protector of the family, hardheaded and really ambitious, and that she used to give him advice on what to wear. Her yearbook was full of notes from friends and teachers. Decades later, one of those friends started a memorial group for her online.
May 15, 1982, was a Saturday. Lorraine Borowski was due to open the real estate office that morning. Her employer arrived at about 8:45 or 9 a.m. and found her shoes, keys, cosmetics, coins and a small tool lying on the pavement outside the office, according to the Illinois Supreme Court's account of the evidence at Andrew Kokoraleis's trial. He reported her missing to the Elmhurst police later that morning. Witnesses told police they had seen a struggle near a gray or silver car in the parking lot of the shopping center where the office stood, at about 8:30 a.m., and a gray car leaving the lot.
She was missing for five months. On October 10, 1982, her remains were found in Darien. She was identified from dental records and X-rays. Her parents identified her jewelry. The cause of death, according to the evidence later heard by the courts and reported in the press, was stabbing.
When Lorraine Borowski disappeared, police in DuPage County were already working on the death of another young woman. Linda Sutton was 26. She was last seen alive in Chicago at about 11 p.m. on May 23, 1981, and her body was found on June 1, 1981, in a field near a motel on the edge of Villa Park, according to the Illinois Supreme Court. Two more women vanished in the spring of 1982. Shui Mak, 30, disappeared in the early hours of May 29 or 30, 1982, after leaving her brother's car in the northwest suburbs; her remains were found in September 1982 in a wooded construction area in South Barrington. Rose Beck Davis, 30, was found dead in Chicago on September 8, 1982.
The break in the case came from a woman who survived. In early October 1982 a woman who had been attacked was found in a Chicago alley, and a DuPage County detective who heard about the attack saw a link to the Sutton case. The survivor described the van in which she had been attacked. On October 20, 1982, Chicago police stopped a van matching her description. It was being driven by Edward Spreitzer, who said it belonged to Robin Gecht, and Gecht produced the registration. Police found three knives in the van. Both men were taken to Chicago police Area Five headquarters and then released.
A DuPage County detective questioned Spreitzer at his home on October 26. On November 5, Spreitzer came to Area Five for questioning and admitted taking part in the Sutton killing and other cases. On November 7 he led police to the Kokoraleis family home in Villa Park, where Andrew Kokoraleis was taken into custody, and on November 8 Spreitzer gave a second statement that named Andrew Kokoraleis. Andrew was questioned for the next two days. On November 9 he told two DuPage County detectives, Warren Wilkosz and John Sam, that he and Spreitzer had killed Lorraine Borowski. According to the 1986 appellate opinion, the statements Andrew and Spreitzer gave by that date did not mention Thomas.
On the afternoon of November 10, 1982, at about 2 p.m., Thomas Kokoraleis went up to Detectives Sam and Wilkosz in Villa Park, told them he was Andrew's brother and said he wanted to talk about Andrew. He went with them to the Villa Park police station, where he was told he was free to leave and could use the telephone. At about 5:15 p.m. he was given a polygraph examination at the Elmhurst police station, which lasted one and a half to two hours. The examiner, Commander Millner, reported the results as inconclusive, though he could not later say whether he had told Kokoraleis that he had failed. In the account the appellate court gave in 1990, a commander told him after the polygraph that he was not being truthful, and he then admitted that he had been present at some of the killings.
Detective Wilkosz then showed him a paper that he said was Spreitzer's statement implicating him. It was not. The State later conceded that the document was untrue. From 8:40 to 9:40 that evening he gave a statement about Lorraine Borowski, which was typed and signed at 2:50 the next morning. From 10:30 to 10:50 p.m. he gave a statement about Linda Sutton, and from 10:50 to 11:10 p.m. he gave a third statement about another death.
In the Borowski statement, as the appellate court summarized it, he said that he, Spreitzer and Andrew had grabbed a woman at a shopping mall, driven her to a motel and held her there. He said the other two men had sexually assaulted her and that he had not. He said she was killed at the motel and her body was left in a cemetery. The weapon he named did not match the testimony of the anthropologist who later examined her remains, a discrepancy the appeals court treated as significant.
Over the next two days detectives took him to several sites, and he slept, ate and gave more statements, including one at a hotel in West Chicago. He was questioned about several unrelated cases. On November 11 he named Carole Pappas, a woman who had been missing since September 1982, as another victim and described what he said was her abduction and killing. At 12:30 p.m. on November 12 he said he recognized one of the cemeteries he had been taken to the day before, after earlier saying he did not. The same day, according to the 1990 opinion, he told a Cook County prosecutor that he had been present at only two killings.
He was handcuffed while he slept. He was given Miranda warnings several times. By the time of his November 12 statement he had been with the police for about 46 hours.
Thomas Kokoraleis was charged in DuPage County with the murder and rape of Lorraine Borowski. Before trial his lawyers asked the court to throw out his statements as involuntary. Judge John J. Nelligan denied the motion, and parts of the statements were put before the jury. The State's case rested on accountability, the Illinois rule that makes a person legally responsible for crimes others commit when he joins in the plan, as Shaw Local later described the basis of his conviction.
The defense wanted the jury to hear the statements that Andrew Kokoraleis and Edward Spreitzer had given police. Both men had described the Borowski abduction and killing, and neither statement placed Thomas there. The trial judge refused to admit them. The defense called two employees of the motel where, according to Thomas's statement, Lorraine Borowski had been held. They testified that they had seen no unusual disorder in May 1982, no missing bedding and no handcuffs, and nothing else out of place.
After a nine-day trial the jury found him guilty of murder and rape. On September 7, 1984, the judge found that the crimes had been exceptionally brutal under the state's sentencing law and imposed natural life in prison without parole for the murder, plus an extended term of 60 years for the rape. He entered the Department of Corrections on September 13, 1984, according to the department, and filed his notice of appeal the next day.
On November 13, 1986, the Appellate Court of Illinois reversed both convictions in an opinion by Justice Lindberg (People v. Kokoraleis, 149 Ill. App. 3d 1000).
The court first upheld the use of his statements. It held that about 13 hours of questioning before his first written statement was not coercive, and that the 46 hours that had passed by the time of his November 12 statement were not too long given the number of killings under investigation. His low intelligence did not make the statements involuntary, the court said, because officers had seen nothing unusual and he appeared to understand his rights. The false document did not make the confession involuntary either, because he had already incriminated himself before he was shown it. The court found no physical mistreatment, and it called the handcuffing during sleep a reasonable protective step that came after the key statements.
The court then held that the trial judge had made a reversible error by keeping out Andrew Kokoraleis's and Spreitzer's statements. The judge had treated the four factors from the United States Supreme Court's decision in Chambers v. Mississippi as a strict checklist, which the appellate court said was too demanding under recent Illinois law. The two statements had been made in custody, to police, against the speakers' own interests, and were partly corroborated by other evidence; the court found them "more likely than not to be trustworthy." It pointed out that the defendant's own confession was the main evidence against him and was at odds with some of the physical evidence, and it quoted an older Illinois decision: "justice requires that the jury consider every circumstance which reflects upon the reliability of that confession." The error was not harmless, so the murder conviction was reversed and the case sent back for a new trial.
The rape conviction was reversed outright. Under Illinois law the State had to present some evidence, apart from the confession, tending to show that the crime had happened, and it had not done so. With both convictions gone, the court did not need to rule on the natural-life sentence or the 60-year term. The Illinois Supreme Court denied leave to appeal in 1987.
While the Borowski case was still on appeal, DuPage County prosecutors indicted Thomas Kokoraleis, with his brother and Spreitzer, for the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton, and told him they would seek the death penalty. Spreitzer had been found guilty of the Sutton murder in a bench trial on March 4, 1986, and sentenced to death.
Faced with a retrial in the Borowski case and a capital case in the Sutton case, Kokoraleis negotiated. On July 16, 1987, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Lorraine Borowski before Judge Nelligan. In return the State agreed to drop the Sutton indictment and to ask for a sentence of 70 years. The judge found that the plea was knowing and voluntary and had a factual basis, and imposed the agreed term. The plea did not cover the Pappas case.
In August 1987, the month after the plea, Carole Pappas was found dead in Wheaton. The coroner ruled her death an accidental drowning, and the State conceded that Thomas Kokoraleis had nothing to do with it. Yet in November 1982 he had told detectives that she was one of the group's victims and had described her abduction and killing.
Within 30 days of his plea he asked to withdraw it. His lawyers argued that the Pappas discovery showed his statements to the police had been invented, and that if one account was fabricated the others could not be trusted. Judge Nelligan held a hearing on January 15, 1988, and denied the motion, finding that the Pappas information was collateral to the plea.
The Appellate Court affirmed on January 25, 1990, in an opinion by Justice Dunn with Justices McLaren and Reinhard concurring (People v. Kokoraleis, 193 Ill. App. 3d 684). "It is axiomatic that a defendant has no absolute right to withdraw a guilty plea," the court wrote. It said that neither the State nor the court had caused his ignorance about Pappas, that his lawyer could not be faulted for failing to foresee that her body would be found, and that his defense, that police had coached him, was one he had known about when he chose to plead. A statement that is inaccurate is not necessarily false, the court said, and even if the Pappas account had been made up, that would not necessarily undermine the Borowski and Sutton statements, which he had given a day earlier to different officers. The court found no abuse of discretion and no manifest injustice. The guilty plea stood, and with it his only conviction.
He served his sentence in the Illinois Department of Corrections and was held at the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton, about 30 miles west of Peoria, by 2017. Time he had spent in the DuPage County jail before sentencing counted toward his term, a department spokesperson told Shaw Local.
Under the law that applied to his sentence he was required to serve only half of it. Reports describe the halving in slightly different terms: the Associated Press and ABC7 Chicago said it came through good-behavior credit, the Daily Herald called it day-for-day credit, and CBS Chicago and Shaw Local said the sentencing rules of the time required him to serve only 50 percent. The Daily Herald reported in 2019 that Illinois has since changed its law so that sentences for first-degree murder must be served in full.
In the summer of 2017 the Borowski family learned that he was due to leave prison on September 29, 2017, after serving half his term. The DuPage County State's Attorney's office confirmed the date. Shaw Local reported that he was to serve three years of mandatory supervised release afterward and that his sentence would end on September 30, 2020.
The family set out to stop it. One of Lorraine Borowski's brothers started an online petition asking that her killer not be paroled; by mid-August it had more than 18,300 of the 25,000 signatures needed to send it to Governor Bruce Rauner, NBC Chicago reported. Her younger brother told ABC7 Chicago that the family was seeking justice for her and feared for the safety of other women. Her mother said she had believed he would die in prison and prayed that he would not be freed. The family hired the lawyer Gloria Allred, who said she had spoken to the DuPage County State's Attorney and that his office and the Illinois Attorney General were examining whether there was enough evidence to file a civil commitment petition. Elmhurst's police chief, Michael Ruth, told Shaw Local that Kokoraleis "will be roaming our streets again."
Only one legal route could keep him in custody past his release date: a court finding, under the Illinois Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act, that he was a sexually violent person. ABC7 Chicago explained that prosecutors would have to prove that he had committed a sexual offense and that he had a mental disorder, first at a probable-cause hearing and then at a full hearing, beyond a reasonable doubt.
September 29, 2017, came and went with Kokoraleis still in prison. The Associated Press reported that day that he had been refused release because he had no approved host site, an address where parole officers could find him regularly. The AP said one of his brothers had told the Chicago Tribune that Kokoraleis would not be living with him or with anyone else in the family. Dede Short, a corrections spokeswoman, said the department had no say over where released prisoners went once they were discharged: "When they are discharged we don't oversee them." A spokeswoman for Attorney General Lisa Madigan said only that the office was "still looking at the case."
His release was delayed by 18 months, ABC7 Chicago reported. On March 5, 2019, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board told Elmhurst police that he would be released on March 29, CBS Chicago reported. DuPage County State's Attorney Robert Berlin said his office and the Attorney General had worked "to prevent Thomas Kokoraleis from being permitted to re-enter society." Experienced psychologists and a psychiatrist had evaluated him, Berlin said, and found that he did not meet the criteria for commitment as a sexually violent person, so no petition could be filed. Prosecutors told CBS Chicago they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had a mental disorder that would let the state hold him. Jason Sweat, a spokesman for the Prisoner Review Board, said the state was legally required to release him because he had served the maximum time possible on his sentence.
He left the Illinois River Correctional Center on Friday, March 29, 2019. That day the Borowski family appeared with Gloria Allred at a news conference in Rosemont. Her brother, who was 14 when she was taken, said the family had "exhausted everything" and that there was nothing more they could do. He said he did not know what Kokoraleis would do with his life but that he should be miserable every day of it, and that he and his mother felt they would always have to watch their backs. Her mother, then 83, said: "I thought he was going to be in prison until I died." Her best friend said that letting him out with no ankle monitor and no parole officer was a terrible outcome. Allred called for a state law that would bar convicted sex offenders from contact with their victims and the victims' families, and the family said they were willing to testify in Springfield for it.
Berlin had said Kokoraleis was expected to stay at a Christian shelter in Wheaton. By late Friday he had not contacted the Wheaton police. On Sunday, March 31, he walked into the Aurora Police Department and registered as a sex offender, giving as his address a Christian recovery program in Aurora. The program said it had not sought him out and that he had come to it for help. He was required to stay at the facility for the first 30 days of a seven-month program, ABC7 Chicago reported, and an Aurora police sergeant, Bill Rowley, said: "We have to know where he is at all times."
The registration requirement had an unusual basis. Kokoraleis had not been convicted of a sex crime, since his rape conviction had been reversed in 1986. Berlin explained that state law required him to register because the murder had been found to be "sexually motivated." CBS Chicago reported in June 2019 that he would have to register for life and would also be listed on the Illinois State Police registry of people convicted of murder. The Daily Herald reported that he was not on parole and that registering his address was his only restriction; the Associated Press had reported in 2017 that his parole period could be shortened and that the Department of Corrections' responsibility for him would end on September 30, 2020.
His arrival caused an uproar in Aurora. Mayor Richard Irvin said he had been "blindsided" and that "the citizens of Aurora don't want this individual living in our city." Protesters gathered outside the facility on April 5, 2019. The program added a full-time monitor for him and more safety staff. Irvin met the program's board twice, called the measures temporary, and asked it to move him out of Aurora; this was, he said, "a risk the people of Aurora shouldn't have to take."
At a special meeting on April 22, 2019, the board voted to keep him. Its executive director, James Lukose, said the decision was "to stay put until we find a better place for him to choose." The board said that turning people away because of their backgrounds, or because their histories were high-profile, would violate its mission, and that it had a moral obligation to take him in.
Kokoraleis spoke publicly for the first time in early April 2019, to The Beacon-News in Aurora, as NBC Chicago reported. "I just want to be left alone and do my thing here," he said. He said he wanted no contact with the families of the victims. "I want to be a better Christian. And I will do my best to become a productive member of society," he said. "I will not be a threat to Aurora and their citizens. I swear to that." In June 2019 he gave an interview to Irika Sargent of CBS 2 Chicago in which he rejected the way the public saw him and said, in effect, that he was not the kind of person people believed him to be. He had maintained for years that his confession in the Borowski case was coerced and that, although he had been present during some attacks, he had never raped or killed anyone.
In June 2019 Thomas Kokoraleis was living at the church-run recovery program in Aurora and was registered with the Illinois State Police as a sex offender.
Andrew Kokoraleis was convicted of two murders. He was convicted in Cook County of the murder of Rose Beck Davis, and a DuPage County jury convicted him of the murder of Lorraine Borowski, the same killing to which his brother later pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to death for the Borowski murder, and the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on October 25, 1989. At his trials he took back all of his confessions, testified that he had been framed and said officers had fed him the facts and struck him. The federal appeals court in Chicago wrote in 1997 that he had confessed to killing as many as 18 women. He was executed in March 1999, the last execution in Illinois, which later abolished the death penalty.
Edward Spreitzer pleaded guilty in April 1984 to four murders in Cook County: those of Shui Mak, Rose Davis, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado. After a bench trial in DuPage County he was found guilty on March 4, 1986, of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton and sentenced to death, with a 60-year term for the kidnapping that the Illinois Supreme Court cut to 30 years in 1988. His federal challenges failed, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal of his habeas petition on July 11, 2000. Shaw Local reported in 2017 that he was held at Stateville Correctional Center and was not eligible for release.
Robin Gecht, described in news reports as the group's ringleader, was the only one of the four who did not confess, according to the Seventh Circuit. He was convicted of attempted murder on the testimony of a surviving victim, the court noted; CBS Chicago reported that he was found guilty of attacking a teenager who survived. News reports give his sentence as 120 years; the Seventh Circuit, citing the State, described it as a natural-life term. Shaw Local reported in 2017 that he was held at Menard Correctional Center with a projected parole date of October 13, 2042. No murder conviction against him was reported.
ABC7 Chicago observed in 2019 that Thomas Kokoraleis was likely the only one of the four men who would ever have a chance to rejoin society.
The numbers attached to the group are not findings of any court. News reports have credited it with more than 15 deaths (ABC7 Chicago, 2017), the abduction of at least 17 women (NBC, 2019), as many as 20 (CBS Chicago and ABC7 Chicago, 2019) and nearly two dozen (NBC Chicago, 2017). The Seventh Circuit's figure of as many as 18 refers to what Andrew Kokoraleis confessed, not to what was proved, and he later recanted. The convictions on the record for the four men cover the deaths of Lorraine Borowski, Linda Sutton, Rose Beck Davis, Shui Mak, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado, and the attempted murder of the woman who survived.
Thomas Kokoraleis's own role is the most disputed part of his case. His statements to police were the main evidence against him, and the appellate court in 1986 noted that they were at variance with some of the physical evidence, including the forensic testimony about the weapon. Two motel employees testified that they had seen nothing out of the ordinary at the place where he said Lorraine Borowski was held. The statements of the two men who admitted taking part in her abduction did not place him there. His account of Carole Pappas's death proved to be false when her body was found in 1987. He has said that his confession was coerced, and the courts acknowledged that a detective lied to him about Spreitzer's statement, although they held that the lie did not make his confession involuntary.
Against that, the courts upheld the statements as voluntary at every stage, and he pleaded guilty to the Borowski murder in open court in 1987, in a plea the trial judge found knowing and voluntary and that the Appellate Court refused to set aside. That plea is his conviction. Whatever he said in 1982 about Linda Sutton or other women was never tested at a trial: the Sutton charge was dropped under the plea agreement, and he was never charged in any other death. He is not, on the legal record, responsible for any killing other than Lorraine Borowski's.
The Ripper Crew name is a news-media label. It does not appear in the federal appeals court's 1997 opinion, and accounts of the group's beliefs and practices rest largely on the men's statements to police, two of which, Andrew's and Thomas's, were later repudiated by the men who gave them.
May 23, 1981: Linda Sutton, 26, is last seen alive in Chicago. Her body is found near Villa Park on June 1.
May 15, 1982: Lorraine Borowski, 21, is abducted on her way to open the Elmhurst real estate office where she works.
May 29 or 30, 1982: Shui Mak, 30, disappears in the northwest suburbs.
September 8, 1982: Rose Beck Davis, 30, is found dead in Chicago.
Early October 1982: A woman survives an attack in Chicago and describes the van.
October 10, 1982: Lorraine Borowski's remains are found in Darien (one opinion gives October 20).
October 20, 1982: Chicago police stop the van, driven by Edward Spreitzer and owned by Robin Gecht; both men are released.
November 5, 1982: Spreitzer admits involvement in the Sutton killing and other cases.
November 7 to 9, 1982: Andrew Kokoraleis is taken into custody in Villa Park and confesses to the Borowski killing.
November 10, 1982: Thomas Kokoraleis goes to detectives, takes a polygraph and gives statements about the Borowski and Sutton killings; he is taken into custody by DuPage County deputies.
November 11 and 12, 1982: He names Carole Pappas as a victim and gives further statements.
April 1984: Spreitzer pleads guilty to four Cook County murders.
September 7, 1984: After a jury convicts him of murder and rape, Thomas Kokoraleis is sentenced to natural life without parole plus 60 years.
March 4, 1986: Spreitzer is found guilty of the Sutton murder in DuPage County and later sentenced to death.
November 13, 1986: The Appellate Court reverses Thomas Kokoraleis's rape conviction outright and his murder conviction for a new trial.
July 16, 1987: Thomas Kokoraleis pleads guilty to the Borowski murder; the Sutton indictment is dropped; he receives 70 years.
August 1987: Carole Pappas is found dead in Wheaton; her death is ruled an accidental drowning.
January 15, 1988: His motion to withdraw the plea is heard and denied.
October 25, 1989: The Illinois Supreme Court affirms Andrew Kokoraleis's conviction and death sentence for the Borowski murder.
January 25, 1990: The Appellate Court affirms the denial.
March 1999: Andrew Kokoraleis is executed.
August 2017: Lorraine Borowski's family campaigns against his scheduled release.
September 29, 2017: His release is blocked because he has no approved place to live.
March 29, 2019: He is released from the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton.
March 31, 2019: He registers as a sex offender in Aurora.
April 22, 2019: The Aurora recovery program's board votes to keep housing him.
June 12, 2019: CBS 2 Chicago airs his interview; this is the latest report found.