On March 29, 2019, Illinois' victim notification system sent out an alert that Thomas Kokoraleis, fifty-eight, had been discharged from the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton. The state had no choice. He had served half of a seventy-year sentence for the 1982 murder of Lorraine Borowski, and under the law in force when he was sentenced that was the whole of it. "In the early 1980s a prison sentence of 70 years seemed like a long time," a Prisoner Review Board spokesman said, "but that time has now arrived." Lorry Borowski's brother Mark, her siblings and her mother, Lorraine, had fought his release for years.
He was born in Villa Park, Illinois, on July 10, 1960, and raised in the Greek Orthodox Church with his younger brother Andrew. At the time of his arrest he was a house painter with no criminal record, described in court records as of borderline intelligence, with an IQ of 75. Through Robin Gecht, the brothers and Edward Spreitzer became the group the Chicago press called the Ripper Crew, suspected in the abduction, mutilation and murder of as many as seventeen women around Chicago in 1981 and 1982.
Lorraine Borowski was twenty-one, a secretary who was seized on May 15, 1982, as she went to open the Elmhurst real-estate office where she worked. Her body was found in a Clarendon Hills cemetery five months later. The case against the group opened after Beverley Washington survived an attack on October 6, 1982, and described Gecht and his van. Thomas Kokoraleis was arrested on November 12, the last of the four. His statement to police is the source of the most detailed account of the group that exists: women taken to what Gecht called a "satanic chapel" in his home, raped and tortured there, their breasts removed with a wire garrote and eaten as a sacrament, and a box in which he said he once saw fifteen of them. In his own account he had taken part in Borowski's abduction and was present while his brother and Spreitzer raped and killed her, but he denied taking part in either.
A DuPage County jury convicted him of her murder and rape, on the theory that he was accountable for the acts of the others, and he was sentenced to life without parole. On appeal the rape conviction was reversed and he won a new trial on the murder. Rather than face it, he pleaded guilty to Borowski's murder in exchange for seventy years, and charges over the murder of Linda Sutton were dismissed as part of the agreement. His confession did not reach Gecht, whom all three confessors named as the leader, because a confession is evidence against the man who makes it; Gecht was never tried for a murder.
His mandatory supervised release was set for September 29, 2017, and then held up for eighteen months because he could not find housing that met Illinois' residency rules for sex offenders. DuPage prosecutors said they had no legal way to keep him. After his release he told WBBM-TV, "Everybody thinks I'm a monster. I'm not a monster," and maintained he was innocent. As of August 2024 he was living in Peoria, where a local ministry director described him to the Peoria Journal Star as a kind man. His brother Andrew was executed in 1999; Spreitzer's death sentence was commuted to life in 2003; Gecht is serving 120 years for the attack on Beverley Washington.