#486 Maggie Freleng with James Degorski

Hello, This is a free call from Jim, an incarcerated individual at they no correctional centers. This call is subject to recording and monitoring.

James de Gorski hates rudeness, especially when it comes to the police.

Please please, literally came up to me and said, what's your name? Just very arrogant and very rude.

It sounds like you're pretty big on respect.

You've mentioned that a few times, that they were really just disrespectful and inappropriate.

Sounds like you introduce yourself to so many. That's so we start off on the wrong path.

I spoke to James on the phone from prison, and he explained the saga of his relationship with the police officers who would end up arresting him in an Illinois town called Palatine.

Palatine Please didn't like me from high school because I wouldn't stitch On broke into all the lockers so well, I was being a janitor there. Somebody broke in the lockers and I didn't see who did it, and I didn't speculate. I already had a problem with these Peloton police from that. He's throw tiger parties and they didn't like that, so I just I had problem with Peloton.

Police and the way James responded to the police wouldn't exactly help him in the long run.

So James is one of those guys who's very sarcastic and he had a arrogance to him at that time.

This is Ashley Cohen. She's a partner at Bonjin Law Group.

He would probably be the type of person to make a joke that's not funny and that the police would maybe turn into fact of sorts. You know, someone who seems cold, but he's been through a lot and he deals with his trauma by you know, humorizing it, or he just thought they were crazy.

These police are crazy, I'm not exaggerating. Unprofessional from the get go, and they're consultational bullies and they escalated everything the police. These police, not police in general. I have nothing against the police. I have found with authority that abuses to think they're above the law and above our constitution. That's where I have a problem, and.

James thinks that's exactly what happened in his case.

My name is James de Gorski. I've been wrong. Sley inclcerated for the.

Last twenty two years from Lava for Good this is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today. James Degorski James de Gorski was born in Chicago, Illinois, on August twentieth, nineteen seventy two.

I've raised in off the Estates, Mon Prospect and Arlington Heights. We had a very, very tight family. At seven, I had an older fitter you knew, a younger brother and a younger fitter.

Jim, as he likes to be called, says his mom stayed home raising the kids, and his dad worked at motorola. So what was family life like?

Was it?

Loving? Fun, messy, lots of yelling. Tell me about it.

Thanks for asking, because the last twenty some years it's been about mitigation. But actually I have no complaints and no regrets. I had an awesome family. We didn't the normal things a family would do, go to church every Sunday. We'd have family game night with pizza and all my friends were welcome.

Jim remembers family vacations and camping trips and just hanging with his siblings.

We grew up at the edge of the urban sprawl, where with a cornerfield that started the meadows, the woods, the Kanton pounds and fourth much where we spent most of my time Bill Fifth in Bill Ramport, be on next bike, hang out with some older friends, motorcycles and a board ramp. Pretty independent. I was basically a free range.

Fit for so Jim says. His parents let him leave at sunrise and return when the street lights were coming on. He was independent, and because his dad worked so much, Jim says, he also stepped in as a father figure.

I was like, I don't know how I say it. I was like my brothers and my sister's dad, and I took them everywhere. I took my brothers and sisters. He just did everything. My older friends that I had even enjoyed them around. So we had a blast as a kid. I got no complaints about my dysfunctional family.

Jim says being free range, as he calls it, allowed him to explore his curiosity. You know those annoying little kids always asking why.

They just he's saying why, and then you answer, and they say why, and then they answer it, they say why.

That was him, He calls them why kids.

I was one of those irritating kids. But hindsight, I guess I wasn't irritating because my neighbor's always answered my why why questions.

And Jim learned things roaming around talking to the adults.

I just go to my neighbor's house and he does upholstery, so I could help him do a polstery, and the guy would throw me twenty dollars. His friend, his little kid, throw me twenty dollars just to hear his stories.

Jim says. Another neighbor built toy cars.

I didn't want to play with the RC cars, which he thought. I wanted to learn how to do electronics, so the guy was teaching me electronics. This is all in grammar school.

Growing up. His brothers delivered newspapers to help his parents out with money. But Jim, I.

Would go garbage picking while they delivered their newspapers. And then I'd get stuff by the trash and fix your name in VCRs, radios, turlie and irens, blow dryers I'd get. I'd get a pretty good money by selling stuff that I can garbage hick. When you find one hundred dollars VCR thrown in the trash, and all you need is a fourteenth cent hues and a pretty profitable I had

Jim says he learned how to fix car breaks in grammar school. He was a hustler for sure. In his freshman year, Jim worked as a janitor at his high school, cleaning the cafeteria and vacuuming hallways after class, and with the money he was able to keep for himself, he would buy tools.

So in high school I started doing things like fixing cars, their bikes, mini bikes.

He eventually rented out his mom's garage and had his own mechanic shop there.

I had a friend Reggie in high school that him and I were going to open a mechanic shop together. We're going to build race cars, and we started in my garage. We're popping motors in all the time we're taking out We're taking out three o sevens, popping in three fifties. So I was doing a lot of that stuff. And when I started making good money, maybe I had extra money to give away or charity for do whatever.

If it sounds like Jim de Gorski didn't have time for any more activities, he was still going to high school and church and volunteering. Jim de Gorski thought he had the perfect life until police came knocking on the morning of Friday, January eighth, nineteen ninety three. Jim remembers waking up to his mom asking him to move a car that was blocking the driveway.

So I had to get up and move his car.

The car belonged to Jim's high school friend, Juan Luna. He'd been in some sort of accident and Jan left the car at Jim's place to get fixed.

I don't really know what he'd needs done. He got tee boned or the side damage. So I fixed his car.

Jim says he waited for one to pick up the car and pay him for the repairs, and when he didn't I.

Took his car. I took it on a joy ride. I was so mad. I'm like, I just loaded up his car and went out and did what I did my rounds.

He drove the car about ten miles west to Carpentersville just to screw with Wan.

It's kind of like an impovertish area with like a high crime area out of Chicago Land, and it's far out, it's almost rural. Left his I left his car there being rude. It's it's a long distance away for him to go pick up his car. And if you want your car so bad, come pick it up. He paged me twenty times and literally cussing me out.

Jim says he left the car parked at Jewel Osco, the grocery store, and then his girlfriend at the time, Eileen Baccala, picked him.

Up so so she got off work early.

She came to meet me a Jewel and they hung out the rest of the night smoking weed and cat sitting.

It's a boring knife or whatever.

The next day, Jim and everyone in the Chicago suburbs woke up to big news. A massacre at a Brown's Chicken and Pasta in Palatine, Illinois. Palatine is about thirty miles north of downtown Chicago. At the time, it was a sleepy suburb where even one murder a year was rare, so the whole community was shaken when news spread that seven people were gunned down inside the fast food restaurant

The investigation went down as you would imagine a ninety three mass killing investigation went down where it was a mess.

This is Ashley Cohen again. Ashley says although the scene at the restaurant was chaotic.

There was a ton of forensic evidence pulled from the scene. There were like two hundred fingerprints, there was food still in the trash containers, there were bloody shoe prints. I mean, anything and everything you imagine in forensic science and analysis was present at this crime scene.

One key piece of evidence was a receipt.

So there was a cash register that appeared to have been closed and reopened to sell a meal at nine to eight pm. The receipt was consistent with the meal that was discovered in the trash can. That led investigators to believe that one of the offenders may have purchased the meal prior to the shooting.

Since it was closing time, the trash cans were empty except for one four piece chicken meal.

One of the female investigators had the foresight to freeze a eaten chicken bone that was in the trash and I just recall she was a female, because females are smart and have the future insight that there she saw significance and was like, maybe we could use this eventually, and so she froze it.

Jim was shook when he heard about the murders, not only because things like this didn't happen in Palatine, Illinois, but because Wan used to work there.

A few of his friends actually worked there too, so we were just shocked that it happened so close to home.

Do you remember talking to him about it at all?

Yeah, I'm more because it was a lot of time ago. I was at a party and it was one of his friends. So we were over at his friend's house and I saw an article they had on the wall, and that was pretty much the longest conversation I ever really had about it. How shocking that looking at my friends, like justin you could have this could have been you. So yeah, I think the longest conversation I ever had.

Jim didn't think much more about it until the police showed up at his door two years later asking about.

Juan Luna nineteen ninety five. The police came to my house and asked me about his alibi. They said they're just doing they're doing follow up with a former employees alibi, and then Jan Luna used me as an alibi. I'm like, wasn't that like three years ago?

Jim says he felt put on the spot. He'd forgotten all about that day he took one's car for a joy ride.

Of course I didn't remember what I was doing today, so they did kind of a rude question to sit there and asked me what I was doing three years earlier. So I didn't like that whole thing.

Apparently Wan Luna had told police that he'd been working with Jim that day at his career fixing cars.

I never employed Lula never. Wan never worked at my house, never worked in my shop never. So that was the first thing that I just laughed about. The guy doesn't even help me in my shop, so they'll have this whole story that he's working for me in my shop. I started lappened.

Jim says the interaction with police did not go well. He was sarcastic and arrogant because he says the police embarrassed him by coming to his house, and he was bothered by the fact that they expected him to remember on the spot something that happened almost three years prior. So he brushed them off.

When he left me in nineteen ninety five, said they were going to go reinvestigate him. And then I went to a party as a remodeling party were remodeling a friend's house, and it was kind of funny because their sister knew who Juan was, so it was funny for everybody at the remodeling party to hear that these police

The police had been investigating the Browns Chicken murders for more than two years. Ashley says they went through a lot of potential suspects. According to one report, the police would end up chasing down over four thousand leads.

There were a lot of investigations, There were a lot of different players. There was a whole task force assigned to investigating this mass murder, and it was It was one of those situations where people were just desperate to find answers.

And then the case went cold for seven more years. Shortly after the murders, a Palatine council member started a reward fund. It started with one thousand dollars, then the community chipped in, raising almost one hundred thousand dollars for any information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case. There was a lot of public pressure to solve this case. The media hounded law enforcement looking for answers, civil advocates

And it was the same sergeant that talked to me all the way back in nineteen ninety five, which was not good. I remember him from his lashes and the way he talked, so I was kind of sarcastic to him from the get go.

Jim sat down with law enforcement, including Police Commander William King, and then.

Was talking to me. He just asked me basic general questions about the same alibi. But before before I left, like he started asking me about he basically said, we have two suspects DNA, we have two suspects fingerprints, and we and we have an eyewitness. We have eyewitnesses of the murderers. So the guy who says everybody's a suspect, So would you give us your DNA or your or your fingerprints to clear your name? And you did so? I, oh, yeah, I guess. I gave my DNA, like ten slabs of DNA.

Did you have any problems with ex girlfriends at the time.

No, not at all. I didn't even I didn't even understand the line of questioning next time I'm being arrested at my work parking lot.

That ex girlfriend police were asking about was Anne Lockett. Jim and Anne had dated around the time of the murders, when he was twenty. They'd met through one in high school. Jim says Anne had demons, she'd been in rehab and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt, but she was also fun. She wanted to learn how to work on cars, and they both liked the outdoors.

We were great tree hugger, so we went hiking inside and all the trees hadible foods. Every day that we're going through eating herbs. It's fun to go camping, hiking with knocking out her life. Bucket left the whole entire time we dated. But a lot of my friends did not care for her.

Why didn't they like her?

Didn't trust her, didn't like her.

Ann was different than Jim's friends.

Some of my friends are yuppies. Some of my friends are gearheads. I have different groups of friends, and they liked me day nurse. A lot of people they voiced it, Jim says.

Back in high school, she was the type to hang out with the heavy partying crowd, the burnouts at the back of the school cafeteria, as Jim calls them.

She's like me. She goes a lot of concerts, so she goes like she likes that death metal stuff, like the Cannibal corpse stuff. Oh, and she wore the leather jacket heavy metal parties and tiger parties, and she got some wild stories of all her party lifestyle. So a lot of my friends didn't really care for that.

His relationship with Anne worked for about a year, he says, until they broke up seven years later. In two thousand and two, Anne Lockett came forward with a story. Anne said that Jim had called her while she was at the psychiatric hospital on January ninth, nineteen ninety three, the day after the murders. She said that she.

Received a call from James de Gorski at a payphone at the hospital and that he told her to watch the news because he had done something big. So she turns on the television and saw that the lead story on the news was the Browns Chicken murder.

Police said Anne had information only the killers would have known. She said she waited so long to come forward because she'd been afraid Jim would kill her. On May sixteenth, two thousand and two, Jim Degorski and Wan Luna were arrested for the Browns Chicken murders. Jim lived in Indianapolis at the time and was about to start work when two officers showed up, including police Commander William King. Again literally told me to.

Leave my inhaler, put your FN hands on the fing car. They started off all wrong, embarrassed front of my co workers, in front of my friends. The gas station the subway in front of my It was bad.

They got in the car and drove four hours to Palatine.

And it just went downhill from then because I literally had to go to the bathroom the whole time, and they made me hold it all the way to the Illinois border. I was in pain.

Jim says he also had a job interview.

After work, which is why my sister didn't put out an app for me. They wouldn't let me change my clothes from my work all day. I'm a blue collar I do a property management, property maintenance. I'm dirty. They wouldn't let me change my clothes. They wouldn't let me grab my inhaler, they wouldn't let me grab my I have a next cell slash cell phone. They wouldn't let me even chirp on that.

Jim was pissed, just like the other times he encountered Palatime police.

So by the time we got in the interrogation room, we started off the wrong way with them being confrontational bullies, escalating everything, and.

It only got worse from there. What were you thinking?

Honestly, these counts are so unprofessional. I didn't know what they were going to do next.

Were you scared, terrified, police said, Jim waved his Miranda rights, but he remembers it differently.

They wouldn't let me use their phone since they wouldn't let me take my phone to call my lawyer. So I have two attorney friends based family friends. I had no rights, what's one? I was terrified the whole time.

Eventually police told Jim why they were holding him. They said he and Wan Luna had robbed the Brown's Chicken restaurant and killed everyone inside, and they had the DNA to prove it from that chicken bone the investigator saved back in nineteen ninety three.

The case went cold. Then DNA starts vamping up. They test the chicken bone and Juan Luna's a match. I think once the DNA hit against Juan Luna, they built their case around that.

The police told Jim that after murdering the Browns Chicken employees in cold blood, he and Juan met Eileen Bacala, his girl friend, at the jewel oscar parking lot in Carpentersville, with a duffel bag full of cash. Then they all drove together to another town to meet a friend, and in that ride, one and Jim bragged about what they'd done.

Once they accused me and started putting me into the narrative, that's when I started saying out no, and I'm going to remain asilent.

Jim says police were using his alibi to actually implicate him in the murder.

They're putting words in my mouth and they mixed my truth with lies, and they're telling me what other people are saying, which I know are lies. And they wouldn't tell me after a while who was saying what, so that would get really confusing. And this this is this NonStop. This is going on like a tag team.

It was relentless until finally Jim allegedly confessed.

He allegedly made oral statements.

King brought in assistant state's attorney Michael McAll to take his statement on camera. So was there a statement that you made?

So what they were trying to do is tell me we will let you use the telephone right now. All you have to do is say that you did this. They will let you use the phone. Just say that you just did this, Say that Luna did this, say this. Say they're telling me what to say. And then if I say that on a video, And it was incriminating.

Police said. Jim admitted that he and Wan were involved in the crime, but then refused to further elaborate on camera.

I don't even know what the video said. I think I said yeah, right to their narrative m and then immediately said that now I get to talk to my Now I can talk to a judge.

So did you get to use the phone?

Never?

Jan Luna allegedly confessed as well, saying that he'd been with Jim all day working on cars, then they'd robbed the Browns Chicken and then met Eileen at the jewel Osco. Did you have a lot of support when this happened? Do people believe you did this? Oh?

My god, My friends thought I had absolutely no involvement in this whatsoever. Every time they tried to voice it, they were literally told to shut up, and as far as shut the fuck up, and then as far as the police literally threatening them telling them that they better lie, tell me you better say this, or basically threaten them with going to Cook County jail. They couldn't even have voice.

Jim says his family got the worst of it and were tormented for being related to a Brown's Chicken murderer.

They didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything wrong at all. But my family did absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever, and the least bit to be persecuting them and targeting with comments even it's wrong.

Jim sat in jail for years and finally went to trial in August two thousand and nine, sixteen years after the murders. The prosecution had painted one and Jim as quote people without a soul who went on a killing spree just for the thrill of it. It was all over the news and now Jim was facing the death penalty.

By the time trial came along, he just knew I'm toast. Nobody gives a shit about me. And I mean, if you read the trial, I would say like ten percent of it is actually is a defense and ninety percent of it is offense on the part of his public defender to try to not get him to get the death penalty. It was all mitigation, like everything was you are You're going to be convicted so let's just mitigate and let's not get you the death penalty.

The prosecution did not use the alleged tape confession by Jim.

They just use the testimony of the prosecutor and the officer who were present for the alleged oral statements, rather than the videotaped confession exactly.

Instead of using the video, the prosecution had King and McHale testify about the confession.

The videotape confession would be the best evidence. If it's a solid videotape confession, that would be the best evidence, But obviously they didn't think it would play well with the jury, so they didn't show it. It just was not even believable on its face.

Since the prosecution had no forensic evidence tying Jim to the murders, they relied heavily on their star witnesses. Jim's ex girlfriends An Lockett and Eileen Bacalla, repeated the stories they told police. Jim says, the whole experience was grueling.

I thought it was bad that I had to be forced, actually everybody, to be honest with you, was forced to watch that those videos and those photos, like just the crime scene that was one of the worst things for me. But it was bad to listen to hand Locket's testimony, but listening to those cops law enforcement officers under oath lion and the calla lion, which is supposed to be like a real good friend of mine, since for a long time, that was gut wrenching for me. Just those two were the worst.

On September nineteenth, two thousand and nine, thirty seven year old James de Gorski was convicted of all seven counts of murder. His defense attorney Mark Levitt addressed to the press, obviously.

Very disappointed in the verdict that we respect to that the jury is not a guilty. My focus now obviously turns to the setsunury and trying to convince this jury to the appropriate sense for mister Devarsky life in prison.

The jurors agreed to life in prison, though many told the press they wanted the death penalty and that Anne and Eileen's testimony had convinced them Jim was guilty.

I think that their testimony was very key decisions that we reached.

Wan Luna had gone to trial in two thousand and seven and was also convicted of the murders. Jim has been incarcerated over two decades, and he spent most of his time alone.

I just don't fit in. So I really just preferred just to walk around the yard by myself, do things by myself. If I can help out where it comes to a school work or I went to a college program and stuff like that, I don't mind helping people do stuff like that.

But Jim says he's a different person on the inside.

Kindness is considered a weakness and to me, to avoid fighting and whatever. I don't put myself out as charitable because you can't be charitable. I'm not in I only want to describe this environment.

Has your family supported you while you're in there.

Yeah, I got a great family. I got a great support network through them. They just I'm an embarrassment to them now. I was like that brother that was actually like a father. When I first got arrested. It was nice to get happy Father's Day cards for my sibling. Yeah, so they've been supportive. It just they don't know what to do, and I really don't know what to do either.

Jim met the Bojin Law group where Ashley is partner, when he was first arrested for the murders in the early two thousands.

One James was arrested. He went Cook County Jail and when a correction officer found out that he was the Brown's Chicken murderer, he punched him so hard in the face that it broke one of the plates in his face.

So Jim hired Jennifer Bonjin to file a civil case.

James felt very strongly about Jenny because she was the only one who would even consider his case. I mean, you have a guy who was accused of one of the biggest mass murders in Illinois at that time, and nobody wants to represent the Brown's Chicken murder. So she she did. She represented him, and she got a pretty favorable verdict for him.

She got him over five hundred thousand dollars in damages.

So once they got to know each other, he said, will you represent.

Me in his post conviction proceedings.

I think we started investigating his criminal case around two thousand, fifteen twenty fourteen. We just hit the ground running doing investigation for him.

What specifically were you interested in? Because there's a thousand cases you could take, you know, why look at this one?

What was it? I think that the fact that he was claiming actual innocence was appealing to Jenny. Also, the evidence is just really scarce. It's just not as it's not what they paint in the media.

Remember, police found no evidence tying Jim to the murder scene.

The fact that this was like a massacre of the scene with blood everywhere and fingerprints everywhere and hair and all of this analysis, all of his DNA and not a single stitch of evidence was found to implicate James was seem very problematic. When we started investigating James's case, a lot of there were a lot of holes in the story, in the investigation, everything seemed very confusing and

Their lives, Ashley says. Another thing that didn't make sense was how the prosecution painted Wan Luna as a disgruntled employee.

There wasn't really any testimony or anything that he was a disgruntled employee. I mean, the woman who owned the restaurant, her throat was slashed, and these are young kids who are all killed. Just because you don't like one person your prior employment doesn't mean you're murdering everybody who works there.

There were other leads the police pursued that seem much more plausible, like one about gangs committing similar crimes in the area.

That makes more sense to me, not just a senseless killing for no apparent reason from a disgruntled employee.

And Ashley says she thinks Swan's confession, similar to Jim's, was coerced.

The police really, you know, threatened to deport his wife, They refused to let him use his phone or see his son, and that they were screaming at him. He was an immigrant, so they were threatening to deport him, deport his family, take his kid away from him, typical tactics that we see with police interrogations, and he probably feared for his life and the safety of his family.

Ashley and the Bonjin team also looked at Ann Lockett, the star witness and Jim's ex girlfriend. They wound up tracking down her roommate at the psychiatric facil she was in at the time of the murder in nineteen ninety three, and.

We started talking to her about the protocols, because just when you're suicidal, you're not gonna be at a psychiatric facility that is going to give you access to anything and everything on the outside world that is probably causing you distress in the first place, right, so you are likely not able to get phone calls on a payphone. It just the face value of her testimony seemed very implausible.

Not only did they find it would be highly unlikely Jim was able to call a payphone at the psychiatric center to tell Anne about the murder, but on top of that.

She was dating somebody else. His name was Richard Billock. We found Richard Billock and he provided an affidavit and basically said that he was the one dating her at the time and that he had not been dating She had not been dating James at that time.

And dated months after the murders. So why would Anne lie.

An Lockett was going to receive the one hundred thousand dollars in reward money, and that was our biggest issue. The jury did not know that she would have received money for her testimony.

Ashley says this is a Brady violation the prosecution hiding exculpatory evidence. She says the jury could have been swayed differently had they known. As far as Eileen Bacala Ashley says, she had a partner who was in some trouble with the law at the time she came forward.

I think, if you're anybody you know about the brown chicken at the time you get arrested, You're like, what if I give you information about the brown chicken murder? Would that Would that get you to not look at me and look at somebody else? So, I mean, these are all theories. We had no idea, but that was our theory.

Are you resentful towards and Eileen for lying against you?

That's a good question to be resentful and that I won't talk to him. I'll go my own way and I never want to see these people ever again. And I can totally be happy content. I don't need to answer the why questions. I was a white kid growing up a free range why kids independent? Now, I don't need to know the whise. I don't want to know the whys. But I blame Pelotime Police because they were the filter that was supposed to stop this. Instead they did.

It right now. Jim has a habeas petition pending in front of the court. But Ashley worries about the charged politics of the Browns Chicken murder.

There's a lot of people involved in this particular situation that are now judges, you know Chicago, Illinois politics that they run real deep.

Michael McHale, who took the alleged confession from Jim and testified to it at trial, is now a circuit court judge in Cook County.

So there's probably a lot of people who want to keep this dead and buried and do not want to think that they got it wrong. I mean, it's hard to know, but I think it would take it a lot for the world to come to terms with the fact that they got the Browns Chicken murderer wrong.

Do you think about life like, what life will be like when you do get out.

I'm definitely not going to be free range. I'm definitely gonna be a hermit. I'll definitely live off the grid, and I'm maybe in this country hopefully, but if not, I'll be a hermit somewhere else. It's the stuff that the stuff I see here, the stuff I hear never really saw that part of this. I knew stuff was happening in society I just never really talked to somebody

Wow.

So you feel now that you've been in prison, your apprehensive about the outside world because of how terrible it is.

Is kind of what you're saying.

So before I was just like social of all my neighbors. They enjoyed me helping them with chores and taught me these trades and how to do all this stuff. I've learned all that from my neighbors and my community growing up. Now I just I just want to go away from everything. I just want to hopefully you can find something to fix and remodel and build, and just hope you just fix up from the friends I still have.

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in the episode description to see how you can help. Thank you to Maurice Poseley. We relied on his reporting about the Browns Chicken murders. We have a link to his book The Browns Chicken Massacre in the episode description. This episode was written by me Maggie Freeling, with story editing and sound designed by senior producer Rebecca Ibarra. Our