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Good Evening, Something Big tells the story of the infamous Brown's Chicken massacre, a brutal case that captivated Chicago land after remaining unsolved for nearly a decade. Customers know Brown's Chicken for its crispy, buttermilk fried chicken and flaky biscuits. The Illinois based franchise as a reputation for delicious but simple comfort food, but through no fault of its own, the words Brown's Chicken are also synonymous with One Faithful
Night in January of nineteen ninety three. A real hometown is the trite but apt motto of Palatine, Illinois, a quaint, middle class suburb west of Chicago. On a snowy Friday evening, the staff and owners of the city's local Brown's Chicken franchise were closing up when two final customers arrived just past nine p m. As the night drew on and the employees hadn't returned home. The family of the owners
and workers began to worry, prompting police to investigate. When they entered the dark building, police were shocked to find seven bodies stacked in the restaurant's freezer and fridge. The killers of corps were long gone. In the months that followed, the horrendous story rock Chicago Land, and the case remained unsolved for nine years. The Brown's Chicken Massacre is one of the most infamous cases in Illinois history, yet it
is often misremembered. In Something Big, Patrick Wall gives a new account of the story, taking readers behind the scenes and sharing the perspective of the people who lived it. The book they were featuring this evening is Something Big, The true story of the Browns Chicken Massacre, a decade long manhunt, and the trials that followed, with my special guest author, Patrick Wall. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Patrick Wall, Dan, thanks
for having me. Congratulations on this book Thing Big, Well.
I appreciate it, and I I appreciate you reading and the response so far from people, which has been very positive. So I'm happy to see people or it's resonating with people, so I'm excited to talk to you about it today.
Thank you. Let's talk about your preface in this book, and you talk about that. In nineteen ninety five, the Brown's Chicken massacre made national headlines and it was followed by people in Chicago Land for years. You did as you got older as well followed this case. And you were raised not far from where it occurred, and you, in fact had been at this restaurant or ate food
from this restaurant chain. The case always stuck with you, but the story was distant, something you had read about in the papers and followed on the news as a child. Tell us nearly thirty years later, what the empethus were where this book was. Why did you choose to write this book? Tell us a little bit about the origins of something big well.
As you mentioned, Dan, my connection to this story is similar to that of a lot of Chicagoans in that I have always known about it. It's always stuck with me, and I followed it very closely over the years. I was actually born the year after this took place. I
was born in ninety four. This took place in ninety three, but it was around for so long, with various ups and downs, with suspects, potential suspects being arrested and then let go because they weren't the person, or eventually the arrests in two thousand and two, the trials and seven and nine, and then it's been in the news for various reasons even after that, So it's always stuck with me.
And I grew up not too far from where this took place in sort of a similar suburban setting in the northwest side of Chicago, and I also ate at the restaurants like a lot of people in Chicago. Brown's Chicken used to be a huge chain in the nineties and two thousands and many decades before that as well, with many many locations, And that's part of the story here too, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But I was surprised in looking at this how little had been
written about this case. It's a very very well known case in Chicago. There's lots of murders unfortunately that are well known. In Chicago, you've got Gacy and Leopolden Lobe, and you know in Milwaukee you've got Dall murders. These kinds of names that are very prominent in true crime circles, and I would say this is a case that people talk about too, although for whatever reason, it's maybe just
not talked about as much nationally. When I started looking at this book and looking at podcasts that had been done on the case, and there had been a previous book or two, actually, I was struck that there was not much written about the people involved in this case, whether it was the police who investigated it, the defense attorneys and prosecutors who worked on these cases which took years, or people in the community, and most importantly, the stories
of the victims and what others had to go through after this tragedy had really been left out of the story. They were just sort of footnotes in other retellings of this. So I tried to really focus on the more human element of this tragic tale by giving people a picture of what the lives of these people before they were killed, and tried to portray them as people rather than just victims, as I think some true crime books or podcasts tend
to do. So each chapter in the book is based on a different individual, and roughly the first third is focused on a couple of people, but mostly the victims.
You achieved this by saying that these people you convinced them to share some incredibly intimate stories about you, about this awful event that profoundly impacted their lives. So, like I say, congratulations on being able to get that kind of incredible access to write this complete story.
Well, it was certainly a challenge and I had. This is my second book. My first book was about a political campaign in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, also in the nineties, that got a lot of attention, and it was a very different tale. It's obviously not life and death. So I had to really learn how to gain people's trust, and I certainly didn't. There were so many people I could have spoken to for this book. I interviewed more
than forty people. Unfortunately, some of the family members. Some of the victims had family members who were no longer around, and so I had to rely on certain other things
for their stories. But for those who I spoke to, what I really tried to convey to them was that I was going to write this in a different way, focusing on their stories, and of course I talk about the crime because you can't tell this story without saying what happened on January eighth, nineteen ninety three in Palatine, Illinois. But the focus is less on the gore of the
crime and more on telling that narrative. And it has certainly been an interesting process and interesting balance to strike because on the one hand, you want people to read the book and you want it to be, for lack of a better word, entertaining.
But you also when you're meeting these.
People, when you're talking to them on the phone or getting coffee with them or getting lunch with them, you want to be honest with yourself and them and make sure that you're not offending them in some way either. So I hope I achieved that balance, because that was certainly what I was trying to do with this story.
Yes, let's get to Belva and John Brown and the origins of Brown's Chicken, and you take us to Chicago or outside Chicago and Bridgeview. He comes to Chicago from Indiana in nineteen thirty eight, John Brown and purchase a small lot of farmland, and then his girlfriend at that time seemed to be his wife, Belva. She had to prove her usefulness on the farm by ringing a chicken's neck.
So just tell us briefly about the origins of this business, Brown's Chicken, but also I ate pivotal an important character in this story and to the business, Frank Portillo Junior. How they met and teamed up together.
And the Portillo name is named that a lot of people will recognize, even who are not from Chicago. But the story of Brown's Chicken as a business is an interesting book in itself, I think, And so nobody had really written about the story of the business how it came to be, and I wanted to include that because or people who maybe don't know the chain or haven't heard of it. It was really, I mean huge in Chicago. Their advertising was all over the place. They had a
very well known slogan. He's better is the was the slogan, and people knew it because they had TV ads on constantly and radio. They had franchises all across Illinois and the greater Midwest. But it's the business started from very
humble beginnings. The Browns, John and Velvet Round were farmers just outside of Chicago, and they put together a trailer that they took their chickens from the farm and plucked them and fried them up and served that to people in the area, and it became very popular, and they decided to try to open up a restaurant in suburban Bridgeview, Illinois, and so they took the trailer set up, moved into a restaurant, and they had sort of a chance encounter with a man named Frank Ortillo, who was then a
young man, a draftsman, who worked on one of the early restaurants, helping make some renovations. And it was a fortuitist moment because they eventually became business partners, and John Brown and Frank Ortillo Junior basically took the restaurant from just two locations to over one hundred and fifty and grew it into a huge corporation at that time. And there's some interesting elements here of different inflection points in the business. And I think the story of Belva Brown
is interesting too. She was certainly one of the founders, but it's not always spoken about that way. So I talked to her son, who told me about what it was like there in those early days building this quite essentially Chicago business.
It coincides this the.
Story of the business with as you mentioned, a very sad and tragic event. Just a couple of days before the massacre at Browns Chicken and Palatine in nineteen ninety three, John Brown himself committed suicide just before the massacre in Palatine, and so it was just a very tough time for the business he had, at least as his son explained it to me, felt very distant from it and was,
I'm sure struggling with other issues. But it was a horrible event, because you know, the death of anyone is tragic, but the founder of the business was gone, and they thought it was a horrible moment. But just a few days later they would experience something that was even more
tragic than the death of seven individuals. In case people have maybe recognized the name Portillo, it is because Frank Portillo is brothers of the founder of Portillo's restaurant Portillo's Hot Dogs in Chicago, and they started off with an investment. Frank Portillo gave his brother Dick Portello, some money to open up a dog excuse me, a hot dog stand.
It's called the Doghouse.
It was in Villa Park, Illinois, outside Chicago, and eventually that business far exceeded expectations. And the success of Brown's Chicken. Now it's a publicly serated company, there's some all across the country, but it is the same family. So it speaks to just how central of a business and a name this was to Chicago in that time and still today.
You introduced a couple of people that decided to take a chance research franchises, Dick ellen Feld and his wife Lynn, and they he had always had Dick had always had some interest in a restaurants, so they finally researched franchises that were available, and one was in Palatin, and so Lenn and Dick ellen Felt had one of these franchises. Tell us a little bit about this couple.
Well, Lenn and Dick Youngfeld were really an incredible couple. They were very, very charitable. They had worked in all different areas of the country, and Lynn was dedicated to social services and raising the kids. Dick had been in the seminary and then worked in politics for it time, and he was out of work in nineteen ninety three.
In nineteen ninety two, when he was searching for something else to do, he had moved the whole family to Arlington Heights, Illinois from Madison Wisconsin, where they were from for a previous job, and so they were looking for something to do while their kids finished high school and
to take them in a new direction. So they found this franchise opportunity in Palatine and it was a good move for them because they had thought about opening a restaurant as something that had always interest interested Dicky Elenfeld, and they decided a franchise would be great because it's a more safe kind of avenue business. There's proof of concept,
and so they went at it. They bought the franchise with basically all the money to their name and money from friends and family, and they purchased it and made changes. They implemented program and made renovations to the restaurant and really poured their heart into it. They were really two people who were very dedicated to their community. I'll give
you one example. There was a story that one of his daughters told me that when they were closing up one night, none came in and justsed in bowl habit and she asked She presented them with thirty It was thirty coupons of for free chicken meals and they had been given out by the previous owners and they were very apologetic, but Dick said, you know, I can't. We can't give away thirty free meals. This was from the
previous owner. But maybe maybe we can work something out where we can give you all our leftover chicken at the end of the night.
And so they did, and each.
Night they would take the chicken from the restaurant and bring it to the convent, which they would use to feed others.
So they were just just a small example of and how charitable and kind they were.
But they purchased a restaurant in nineteen ninety two and by June had had it I think for only about nine months, so that not even not even a year at that point.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now they were running this restaurant and they were very benevolent and helpful. Couple. Tell us about Rico Solis and Michael Castro.
Yes.
So one of the most unfortunate aspects of this crime is that there were seven victims, and two of them were young high schoolers. Rico Solis was a seventeen year old. He was a recent immigrant from the Philippines. He had moved from the Philippines after his father was murdered actually in Manila, and his mother had moved out to the United States before that.
They had been.
Separated, so he was with his grandfather and his two sisters in the Philippines when his mother said, why don't you come join us in Chicago.
So the three kids immigrated.
He was the older brother of two sisters, and they adjusted to life in America, which I'm sure was difficult as someone moving into a new school in kind of the middle of the year, learning a new language. But he was fortunate in that Chicago has a very vibrant Filipino community, both in the city and in the suburbs. And when Rico was at Palatine High School, where he was a sophomore, he met a young man named Michael Castro. And Michael Castro was his parents had immigrated from the Philippines.
He spoke language, she was. Their family was very involved in, you know, other cultural events, and they got to know each other. They were in classes together, and Michael worked at a restaurant that was Brown's Chicken. He was saving up for a car he loved, was trying to soup up his car rather with new speakers, and was enjoying the work and having the freedom that comes with, you know, a young being a young person and finally getting a paycheck.
And so he suggested to his friend Rico that he did a job at Brown's Chicken, and so he.
Set him up with the opportunity.
We goo met with the owners and with Lynn, who typically handled those those those interviews and the process and work with employees. He got to work as eventually a cashier at the restaurant, but started off doing other things, baking biscuits, washing dishes, the typical things you'd expect in a restaurant. And so the Tube became very close friends.
They had a lot in common, and Michael certainly helped we go just to the United States, certainly he by the time nineteen ninety three rolled around, had only been in the United States a couple months really, so it was of course a tragic and short lived time in America.
You introduce a character named Christian Lenstrom, happens to be the boyfriend of Jim Degorski. They both went to Fremd High School. You just introduce Jim de Gorski. He's a six foot guy, chubby, lives in Hoffman estates tell Us a little bit about Jim Degorski and this little story that involves Christian Lenstrom and just the demonstration of maybe future behavior.
Well, one of the things that's unique about this book is that sometimes the suspense of a true book is figuring out who the killer is.
And this is a story.
That I knew a lot of people in Chicago would read, and it's resolved. People know the names if they followed us, and so I had to write this a little differently, and so Jim de Gorski and Wan Luna, the killers are introduced early, and then the third chapter there was a story about Kristen, as you mentioned, who was a girlfriend of James tu Gorski and who he was incredibly
abusive towards. He would punch her and hit her, and there was an incident where he basically abducted her and took her to another town and threatened her.
So he displayed this very violent behavior. Jim came from a very rough house. He had a tough upgriming.
I would certainly say his father had mental illness and other issues, and that's built out into obviously dysfunction with the family. So he certainly had a tragic upbringing and That's one of the things I talk about in the chapters that weave in his story.
One of the things that was really fascinating to me in writing this book is.
When I spoke to the particularly the daughters of the founders. One of the things they said to the franchise owners, the unfls.
One of the things they expressed to me was they.
Asked her, are you going to write the story of Jim and One? And I was sort of hesitating, saying, yeah, well, I'm gonna talk about them, so you obviously have to to tell his story.
And I thought they were.
Suggesting they didn't, you know, maybe they didn't want me to or something like that, And what they were actually getting at was they wanted me to tell it. They wanted me to explain who the men were in a fair way, honest but fair. It really came from view that One and James were trouble kids, and they were exactly the kind of youth who their parents would have helped out through their work in the community, through Lynn's.
Social service work.
And so that I found to be just very incredible because it was not necessarily the way that I would have reacted if someone had had murdered my parents, and so I was just very astonished by their grace in that manner, and that's something a lot of the families displayed even at the trials, which I am sure will
get to a sort of preview of it. When the decision the question of the death penalty came up, there were a number of families who opposed it and even attended rallies with the families of Juan Luna's family to jointly oppose posing a death sentence, which again was something that I found very astonishing, just because I don't know how my reaction would be in that instant, but I found there's to be just incredible.
You're right that one Luna originally from Mexico, and Jim Degorski met at the frem High School and they became close buddies. Tell us a little bit about one Luna and his background.
Well, one, as you mentioned, immigrated from Mexico. He family originally came into the moved to the city, then the suburbs.
And they were a pretty normal family.
He you know, would work the or or do the signs of things that kids in the suburbs do, hanging out with friends, working jobs, just getting drunk, hanging out in basements doing no good, but for the most part, was not necessarily someone who got in a lot of trouble. He was someone who was one of the only non white people in his school Palatine, was not necessarily at least friend high school where they went, wasn't the most diverse place, and he was a little shy, I would say,
more so than Jim. Definitely, of the two, Jim was sort of the one who was more aggressive and more in charge. They're obviously both responsible for the eventual killings, but just gives you a sense of sort of his demeanor in all of this as well.
That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, you take us to January ninth and just the working arrangement at Brown's Chicken, and you introduced some workers and characters in this story. Marcus Nelson and also Guadaloupe and also Tom Menez introduced these three characters and the arrangements for working that weekend at Brown's Chicken.
Sure, so there were three other individuals who were working that night to have passed. Guadalamube Maldonado was a father of three. He was forty seven and slave forties. Had lived in the United States a couple times before that, but had moved back and forth between the northwest suburbs of Chicago and Mexico, and he had moved about a
month before the killings. This was his third time back in the United States, and he came with his now wife and their three sons, and so it was really a classic immigrant story of someone coming to the country in search of a different opportunity for their children. And he was a very hard working man. He had worked at several restaurants before this, and one of the restaurants he went to was kind of an old It was called the Old Town in it's exactly.
How you would imagine.
There were, you know, old timey vibes and music there sometimes, and it was kind of a classic American restaurant that he'd worked at. And when he went back to see if his job from his last stay in the United States was available, it was nuts, so he had to look for other works. So he eventually applied for a job at Brown's Chicken. The Elon Feltz took a liking
to him. He was older than most people. They wanted someone who was mature and reliable and he had cooking experience, so it was a good good fit for him.
There were other individuals working that night.
Guatela Pemo Nana was the cook. Tom Ennis was a thirty two year old man. He was sort of quiet, not necessarily shy, but just more discerning about who he would speak to. Some people might call him a little quirky, but a nice guy. He rode his bike around Palatine. He didn't like to drive because he'd been in an accident. He took his brother's car out once and crashed into the garage and decided he wasn't going to drive anymore, so he wrote he would ride his bike around Valatine.
He was a twin too. He was working that night, helping with breading the chicken and baking biscuits and doing all the other tasks in the restaurant. And then there was Marcus Nelson, who was a veteran. He was a Navy veteran. He had been on the management track at the restaurant, and he was someone who had gone through
a divorce that certainly impacted him. He was sort of blamed himself for it and was trying to make right getting a job working on himself and his struggle with alcoholism, and he was making very very good progress on things. He was doing well at Brown's Chicken, and they were sending him to training classes and things so he could learn more about how to manage the business and was certainly enjoying that that new experience in a new work
environment that was definitely working for him. So he was the last of the seven individuals working that night.
Now the owner Lynn Eldenfeldt, she was not scheduled to work that night, but her daughter was Dana, but she wanted to be with her boyfriend and her parents to meet their parents or her parents' pardon me, and so Lynn took over the shift from her daughter Dana. There's closing time and two men arrive at the doors. What is the policy even though they were closed at the Brown's Chicken regarding closing and the sale of chicken.
Well, they were not one to turn down customers, and so if someone came to the restaurant and they were closed technically it was after nine o'clock, they would still let people in the front. Owners had a policy that if there was still chicken under the the heat lamps in the restaurant behind the counters that they would they would serve that to anyone who showed up just passed close.
So on January eighth, nineteen eighty three, two men showed up at the restaurant and they were let in and they ordered a four piece chicken meal, then sat in a booth and ate it while the people around them.
Mopped up the floors.
They counted the money, They cleaned the grease friars, and continued their morning excuse me, their closing routine that night. That is when eventually Juan Luna and Jim do Gorski, the two men who showed up, decided to go about killing seven people in the restaurant. It was essentially a robbery. It looked like a robbery gone wrong to people. They held people up and stacked them excuse me a force them into the cooler in the freezer, five in one,
two in the other, and shot them in there. Then they proceeded to pick up the bullets shells so there would be no trace of them at the restaurant kind of sloppily, took a took a mop and clean up the blood. They shut off the lights to the to the restaurant and then then left left them there, which left. As time went by, of course, people wondering where their loved ones were and why they hadn't come home.
You say that a patrolling officer checks Brown's chicken later on and notices that the door is open and goes in and sees blood on a mop handle and then calls for backup when also, though this story continues, when Michael Castro is supposed to come home right after work, there's some plans with his family and also another one of the employees as well, the brother I believe, goes out. So tell us what happens when a couple of these employees don't come back home when they're supposed to.
Well, this is the first sign for a lot of people, and the families all start wondering right away why their loved ones hadn't come home. The mother of Rico is worried waiting for her son, feeling uneasy, wondering why isn't there. The family of Manny Castro goes to the restaurant to check on him. His brother goes and is told that he's probably out drinking, which they knew immediately wasn't the case because he wasn't a drinker.
So they begin to worry more.
Even even by that others arrive at the restaurant or call trying to figure it out. The family of Michael Castro, his parents go to the restaurant to look a number of times that night because they know something's wrong, and eventually his father is there that that night, just falling close behind one of the officers as they enter and figure out almost immediately that this is a crime scene.
It's a sad scene because of the fact that there's they kind of know what has happened, but they won't know until many hours later when police tell them more. They announce officially the deaths and who is passed, and so the chaos of the investigation begins. Almost immediately the police close down the crime scene, they start putting together
a log of who's going in and out. They unferral police tape around the scene as crowd begins to grow, and it's at this point in the early morning of now Sunday, excuse me, Saturday, January ninth, nineteen ninety three. The media is there almost instantly as well, from the very beginning filming taking pictures. They're very present on the scene.
This was interesting for me, just realizing how present. They had been, because there's a video of this story almost from the very beginning, like I said, of police on the scene and a point when they still don't even know what's going on, So they were very present throughout this entire entire case.
You introduce a pivotal character in this story. This Jane Homeyer, North Illinois's police crime lab analyst where they examine toxology, zerology and handling biological evidence. This is her first murder investigation, only her second crime scene, but she understands the developments in DNA and bags some evidence that someone at the crime scene. Other police technicians question why she's even doing it.
Yes, this is one of the most pivotal moments in the case, although people don't realize it until much later.
When the killers were at.
The restaurant, they decided to eat a meal. It was not part of the plan, and one Luna takes a bite, they throw it in the garbage can before they decide to kill everyone. And when crime scene investigators and crime scene technicians and law enforcement are combing through the crime scene and processing evidence, they noticed almost immediately that the restaurant was very clean and that the garbage cans were mostly empty except for one where there was this four piece chicken dinner.
So it sort of sits there for.
A little while, and eventually Jane homer Are, the crime scene technician at the scene, decides she's going to freeze it, and people kind of look askance at her, not sure what the value is. And that's because in nineteen ninety three, distracting DNA from a saliva sample that small just simply wasn't a thing.
So I think common sense today you would, of course.
You would save it, maybe you can get DNA, but at that point that simply was not technology did not exist, and so she was very shrewd and knew that this was the DNA technology was advancing rapidly, and so she decided to freeze the chicken bone, and eventually, later in nineteen ninety eight, when the technology was more advanced, she was able to extract They were able to extract DNA from it and eventually connected to one whatever.
Even in nineteen ninety eight, they didn't have a.
DNA profile to connect it, so it was just a sample without a match, which took years to connect, which we'll talk about.
You're right that this case becomes a huge media story nationally media frenzy, and there was a rest of a couple suspects, one being someone named Martin Blake. And Martin Blake had been in a form employee and police thought he might be a disgruntled employee because he had been
fired not that previous to these to this massacre. But for the sake of this story, Martin Blake is cleared eventually, and this case with the police, Cook County and Palatine police have no answers and the perpetrators go free.
One of the things I really wanted to do with this book is share all sorts of unique perspectives on it, not just from the view of police investigating, or the views of the families or the attorneys in the cases, but even people who are suspects. And so Martin Blake was the first one. His name was completely run through the ringer. They had his face plastered on the front pages of all the Chicago newspapers, which was a big deal back then, still would be, but much bigger deal then.
His face was the broadcast in Chicago.
His home video of him was obtained saying all sorts of silly things, and he was made out to be basically convicted in the court of public opinion even before they could say otherwise. So within forty eight hours his name is completely destroyed. And he talked to me about how eventually he had to leave the state as a result of this, because of how intense the the stigma of being.
That first person was.
You also write about Frank Portillo's fate. He offers up a big reward and wants to and thinks the police are are lax in their investigation, and so he's very active, but also he's trying to rescue his business from rune as well. And you talk about Frank Portillo again, a major character in this story. Tell us a little bit about Brown's Chicken and its fate during all of this.
In the immediate aftermath of this, the business suffered because people were afraid to eat at the restaurants. They don't know if it's connected in some way to Brown specifically. And this is both an emotional quandary for Frank Potilla because he actually knew the owners, he had helped train them and tried to get to know all the new franchises.
But it's also a huge business problem, and so he becomes someone who is very helpful to the police in the beginning, giving them information where he can, records of employees, past employees, things like that he sent Chicken to the pass force that had been set up to investigate the crime.
And eventually, as things drag on, he sort of loses fate with all time.
Police and eventually he pushes an outside group, a nonprofit called the Better Government Association, to publish a report on this, to invest the from the outside. It becomes a whole thorn in the side of the Palatine.
Police because BGA is.
A credible organization. They do a lot of great work and investigated corruption and other things in the city of Chicago, and so when they decide to look into this, it becomes a problem for the police.
But they can't share information with an.
Outside group because it's an ongoing investigation, and so the police are sort of sort of forced with this difficult decision of whether or not to respond to the criticism they have and maybe potentially give out some evidence that might be helpful, nots giving out or just kind of taking it. And that becomes a theme throughout this.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now you take us to episode ten of the nineteen ninety seven season of America's Most Wanted, aired on Sunday in May. By that time, the show had helped to put an end to nearly five hundred cases You write viewers in all fifty states, and Anne Lockett was one of those viewers. Tell us what she saw and what it stirred in her that airing of America's Most Wanted.
Well, Anne had been paying attention to this story. An Lockett was told in the immediate aftermath of the crime by her boyfriend Jim de Gorski and Jan Luna, and she worries for her life because she had been threatened by Jim de Gorski that if she came forward that
they would kill her. And so he calls in to check up with her over the years and kind of keeps tabs and she knows she said should come forward, but doesn't obviously, but she tries to drop a little hints for friends and sort of create a space for her to maybe come forward. She talks about the case with friends, will take walks around the Browns Chicken restaurant or around Palatine and always end up there and she sort of asks you know, what do you think people
wonder about this case? Or do you think the families think about it? And nobody thinks anything of her asking those questions, she writes a letter to America's Most Wanted, as you mentioned, laying out the everything she knows, and then sort of the needle in the haystack. Obviously she should have went forward directly to the police. That would have been a much cleaner way to do it. It was one sign that she had sort of sent to people.
And of course the police had to be very unique in their approach, and so they actually worked with the producers to put on this show to hopefully shake up some new tips. But this unfortunately is lost. I'm sure for a variety of reasons. It was probably anonymous and and they've probably got thousands of tips. This is one of the biggest case files in the history of Illinois, and so the amount of information was just incredibly overwhelming at that time.
You're right about this formation of a task force to address this, this multiple crime, multiple murders. Tell us a little bit about who are members of this task force.
Well, the Palatine Police is their suburban police department, kind of a medium sized suburb not a ton of crime, but there certainly had been murders in the past.
They bring in.
Experts, They bring in everyone you can think of in the immediate aftermath, from.
The FBI and profilers.
And some of Chicago's most experienced homicide detectives to assist with the case, as.
Well as other people in the suburbs.
And so the pass force is set up, run by the Palatine Police and with the assistance of these groups, and it balloons to over one hundred people working on the case in the weeks following the crime.
And I think it's important to.
Understand that one of the criticisms that the police faced for a long time was that they were very protective of the order the investigation. They somehow botched it because they didn't they didn't have the resources or they know how to do it. But the reality is they brought in immediately everyone who could possibly be helpful, and nobody was able to help because of the simple fact that this case was only going to be broken by someone coming forward, and eventually.
That is that is how it solved.
You read about Melissa Ben's and her pivotal role in all of this. When Anne Leckett gives her a call, and you write that Melissa sort of prize information out of her that and wanted to express.
And yes, and this is one of the pivotal moments.
Melissa Benz is a high school friend of Anne Lockett and she decides.
To working one night late.
She runs a landscaping business with her husband, and she gets a call from Anne, which is normal, they catch up once in a while. They're old friends, and Anne starts talking about the Browns Stricken murderers, and she asks her do you remember that? And she's very sort of nondescript about it, and eventually she tells Melissa, well, I know who did it. And it leads to a whole saga with the police and Melissa convincing Anne that she has to come forward and convey this information.
To the Palatine Police, and so she does.
Her friends, her friend convinced her finally to come forward, and they connect with Bill King, a detective who'd worked on the case for a long long time in Palatine, and initially he's sort of not skeptical is the right word, but he had seen it all about that point. And as I mentioned, this is one of the largest cases in the history of the state, and so they've gotten calls from all sorts of people, so he approaches it
with a healthy amount of skepticism. But when he speaks with in Lockett, he gets a detail that is unique, and that is that one of the victims threw up French fries at the scene after they were killed. It's a gruesome detail, but it's one that the police had never released publicly, and there's no way that anyone else could have known about it. So they know that ant Lockett is telling the truth and that busts the case
wide open. The police eventually are able to get a DNA sample from Wan Luna because he had worked at the restaurant before. They just kind of play it off as, oh, we're just going back to everyone again who worked there.
They get a sample from Jim do Gorski, asking him to come to the police station when he's in town from Indianapolis, where he lived at that point, and they're able to connect the DNA from the chicken bones that they rose in nineteen ninety three, extracted a sample from the nineteen ninety eight and then in two thousand and two gotten a match between the chicken and o Wan Luna, which eventually leads to their arrests. One of the biggest stories resolved in Chicago of that last decade, and.
It really all come down to that preservation of the chicken bones by Jane han Eire and her having the foresight of DNA advancements in the future.
Absolutely otherwise it would not have been solved.
And one of the interesting things that one of the sisters of the victims told me was a Locket was criticized for not coming forward earlier, and we all hoped that we would have, in a similar situation come forward earlier. But she said to me, you know, it probably worked out the way it was supposed to because had she come forward earlier, they would not have had DNA evidence to support her claim, right, and they also could just
completely assassinate her character her. She was a very imperfect witness, I think, a good person who did the right thing in the end, but at that time had had been in a mental facility, had struggled with drugs and alcohol and.
The sort of things that at a trial don't necessarily look good or speak well. So she was talmage.
So in the end it sort of worked out the way it should because there was support for the story that she told police in the form of DNA evidence.
Now, when you introduced another crucial character as Sergeant Bill King, when these two one Luna and Jim de Gorski, are interviewed, are interrogated. When they're interrogated, it isn't too hard to get those people, these two killers, to admit their involvement. It's a different story at the trial once they get lawyers, and of course they plead not guilty. But initially these people think that the gig is up and are willing to talk to police, aren't they?
Yes, and both wan Laya confesses on tape, and it's an extensive tape. Illinois at that point had required confessions
to be taped. Jim de Gorski confesses immediately when he's arrested in the says something I'm paraphrasing along lines says, well you finally finally, or it took I'm surprised it took you this long, essentially, and then he talks about it in the car with with the police on the ride home from Indianapolis, where he lived at that point, back to a police station in Illinois to be interrogated, and he openly said that that they did it and confesses.
So obviously the story has changed later on and as you can expect, but he does somewhat confess on tape as well. He convinces to police in the station and then when they want to record it, he sort of have heartedly does it, which becomes an issue at trial later. But they both did admit to it almost immediately after being arrested.
Because it's a capital punishment case, of course, there are excellent lawyers that vibe for to be able to represent these two characters, these two defendants. Joy ellen Felt, though, said that the parents had taught them that they would be firmly opposed to the death penalty. The death penalty was able to be had in Chicago at that time. Tell us what the jurors had in terms of their decision.
You write about unanimity being essential for this three phases of a trial in this capital punishment case.
Yes, so there are three phases in the death penalty cases in Illinois. There's guilt and innocence.
There's the.
Eligibility phase where someone is ruled eligible or eligible for the death penalty, and then there is sentencing, which in the third phase is essentially deciding whether to sentence someone for a murder like this to life in prison or.
To death to give them capital punishment.
So this was a very closely watched case because Illinois had at the turn of the century put a moratorium on the practice, and a number of governors in Illinois, Republican and Democratic, had commuted sentences and at that time rob Igoivitch, who was governor who I'm sure people know, had kept a moratorium in place, but it was still a sentence that could be imposed, and if a different governor was an employee a launch, then it was possible
for the death penalty being posed. So this was very closely watched, and it was also a case that was unique in that some people in Illinois attorneys viewed it as an opportunity to potentially outlaw the death penalty in Illinois. So that becomes a flashpoint in this case. But as I mentioned, and you allude to, one of the unique aspects of this is that some of the family as now ultimate jurors don't see that because it's outside the courthouse and they're sequestered.
But I think it's.
A unique aspect of this, and so at trial, Juan Luna and mc gorski are put on trial in two thousand and seven and two thousand and nine, respectively, and it becomes a very closely watched event. They're both ruled eligible for the death penalty and guilty of the murder of these seven individuals, but it becomes a question of whether or not to sentence them to death, and this is something that obviously jurors agonized over. I spoke to a jur who talked to me about what it was
like to be in that room and make that decision. Ultimately, with the first trial with Wanna, there was one woman who was a holdout to very emotional decision, but she stuck to her ground with that, and the same with de Gorski. There were a couple more jurors who disagreed, but without a unanimous decision on that, they're sentenced to life and sent to a stateful prison. But it's a unique case in number of ways because some of the witnesses.
You obviously have the police. You've got people like doctor Henry Lee, who is a very well known forensics expert. People might know Hi from the oj trial and the staircase case, and I talked to him about it and what it was like to testify and be a part of this, and he was certainly a character in this and provided some moments of levity in an otherwise very tense trial. One of the I think most intense portions of this trial comes after their sentenced exees me after
their found guilty. In the eligible there's the mitigation phase where statements are read by ones both the victims families and then of course the killers themselves too, to sort.
Of sympathy if you will.
I'm kind of boiling it down, but from jurors to not sentenced them to death or to you know, to give them a lighter sentence. And it's very emotional to hear the stories of the people who who passed and the courage they have standing up there and.
Having to do that. So it was a Sometimes.
Trials are hard to write about and make interesting, so I try to weave in the most interesting parts and keep it, keep it flowing well. But it was certainly very helpful for understanding the stories of people as well. Through that testimony, You're.
Right about and locket, and what we didn't mention was that she had been contacted when she was at this at a hospital, a psychiatric hospital and given the news that Jim de Gorski, her boyfriend, had done something big him and Wan and then she was later in on the details of something Big. City officials decide that Anne Lockett and Melissa Bens would split the almost one hundred thousand dollar reward. You write in the very end that really the only thing something big, something big would really
apply to Michael Castro's goal of joining the military. Something big was the story of Rico Solis and his transition to life in America. Something big was Marcus Nelson's deep love for his daughter. Something big was Tom Menne's gentleness and adoration for his family. And something big was the dedication Lynn Ellenfeld had for helping others, and Dick ellen felt the chance he took at opening a restaurant in
hopes of providing financial stability for his family. And something big was Loupe Maldonado's dream of a better life for his children in Chicago. You also say that in acknowledgements that you want to thank authors Dennis Sheer The Last Meal and Morris Posley's The Brown's Chicken Massacre and the series forty four Minutes just give us a little bit about that initial goal to present this book as an honor to these victims and their families. Just tell us something insummation, please.
Well, the headle of the book is something big, and that is the excuse or the motive that the killers give for their actions that day. They said that they decided to kill seven people because they wanted to do something big, and to this day, no one really understands exactly what that means, and it's sort of a very
unsettling end to this. So I tried to sort of turn that on its head in the end of the book and talk about what was really big, like you said, and that was the dreams and aspirations of people who were just seven hardworking, very decent individuals past for no reason other than just a very heinous and selfish, horrendous act. So I hope that it ties the focus back and the end nicely to others involved in this case, and a focus that is different than how the story has been told in the past.
Absolutely, I want to thank you Patrick Woolf for coming on and talking about your extraordinary something Big, the true story of the Browns Chicken massacre, a decade long manhunt, and the trials that followed. Thank you so much. For this interview. For those people that might want to find out more information about this story in this book, and do you have a website or social media that you could refer us to.
I do. You can find more information on Patrickwall dot com and my social media is there as well, so check it out.
Thank you so much, Patrick Wool. Something Big the true story of the Browns Chicken massacre, a decade long manhunt, and the trials that followed. Thank you so much for this interview, Patrick Wool, have a great evening and good night, good night,