Third in a five-part series

A note about attribution Editor's note: The accounts in this series implicating Jim Degorski and Juan Luna in the Brown's Chicken & Pasta murders have been provided by Palatine police and by Cook County prosecutors. It is based, they say, on statements by the accused killers and by two of their friends who say they were told about the crimes, as well as on other evidence. Degorski and Luna have not yet had their days in court. Defense attorneys say they are innocent and the evidence against them will be discredited.

In a private psychiatric and substance abuse hospital on a wooded campus in Des Plaines, a phone rings.

It's January 1993, and the caller asks for Anne Lockett, who recently checked into Forest Hospital.

It's her boyfriend, 20-year-old Jim Degorski, she later told authorities.

"Watch the news tonight," she said he told her. "I did something."

The murder of seven people at a Brown's Chicken & Pasta in Palatine eclipses all else on the news that night. Lockett calls her mom and asks her to save newspaper stories about the Jan. 8, 1993, crime.

A few days later, Lockett finds out far more than the news reports can tell her. Nearly a decade will pass before she'll give Palatine police and Cook County prosecutors this account of what happened next:

Lockett, discharged from Forest, is hanging out in Degorski's basement bedroom in his mother's Hoffman Estates home. Degorski's buddy, Juan Luna, 18, is there, too.

Degorski protects his space. He lets no one into his room without permission. The friends who are allowed in spend hours pounding a heavy punching bag and listening to music by groups like Metallica.

DAILY HERALD FILE PHOTOS A phone call last spring put police on the trail of Jim Degorski, left, and Juan Luna, both charged in the Brown's murders.

Lockett has been here before. She knows Degorski keeps weapons. She has seen two knives and a gun in previous visits.

Once, Degorski told her the gun was a .38. He showed her how it worked; showed her a chamber that held six bullets.

On this night, Degorski asks Lockett a question: Does she want to know what he and Luna did at Brown's?

Yes, she replies.

Lockett's lawyer, Ken Goff, said she's been regretting that answer ever since.

The phone never stops.

Any one of the callers to the Palatine Police Department could bring the answer: Who shot Brown's owners Richard and Lynn Ehlenfeldt and five of their employees?

Women try to turn in ex-lovers. Reporters call with interesting tidbits. People want to talk about their "visions," recalled Jack McGregor, deputy chief of Palatine police at the time of the murders and later chief before he retired in 2001.

Countless others in prisons or bars brag they know something.

"Then when detectives came to the door, they'd say, 'Oh, Jesus, I'd been drinking,'" McGregor remembered.

The village installs more phones.

In the first hours of the murder investigation, officers scrawl new leads on yellow legal pads. Then they list them on a blackboard in a police station conference room. Detectives from nearby towns, Cook County, Illinois State Police and the FBI help Palatine in the frantic search for the killer.

They are drowning in information.

Palatine Police Chief Jerry Bratcher asks for more help.

On the evening of Jan. 12, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Phillip Buvia arrives with nine other agents, 10 laptop computers and a software prototype called "Rapid Start."

They begin entering leads into the computers so they can be analyzed and retrieved quickly. It is the first live test of Rapid Start. At 5:30 p.m. Jan. 13, Buvia hands Bratcher a report detailing each lead and its status.

It's a big help. But police are no nearer to solving the murders. So far, virtually anyone could be the killer.

FBI profiler Bob Scigalski tries to narrow that down. There must have been two to four killers, he says. It appears more than 20 bullets were fired from one gun that repeatedly had to be reloaded; that lack of planning points to killers between ages 18 and 25.

Other experts in criminal behavior put the killers in their 30s or 40s. They suggest former workers are likely suspects.

Former employees are everywhere. Only one - Elgin resident Martin E. Blake, whom police took into custody within hours of the murders but released after two days - has been thoroughly investigated. Officers trace former workers all over the country, eventually interviewing about 300 of them.

"There was a list. Then you'd talk to other people and they'd say, 'This guy worked there, too,'" McGregor said later.

Casey Sander, Jason Georgi, Celso Morales, Mike John, Juan Luna, Bill Valente, Brian Busse, Ken Pittenger, Peter Delpage, Mike Nicketta, Doug Hook. All those and many more are questioned.

Some garner more attention than others. Casey Sander gets called in to talk to authorities nearly every year. They're interested in her former boyfriend, she said. They press her for stories in the hope she knows something and will talk.

The boy she once dated has AIDS and confessed to the crimes to clear his conscience, she said detectives told her. She has no idea if it's true. The boyfriend named her as an accomplice who unlocked the door and helped with the crime, she said they told her.

"One night, they had me there from like 7 o'clock to like 5 in the morning," Sander said. "I'm like, 'I had nothing to do with this.'" She hired a lawyer two years ago, and the calls from police ended. The case against her boyfriend never panned out.

Juan Luna's single meeting with police goes a lot smoother. Lockett is with Degorski when Luna phones a few days after the murders to say he's been called in to talk to police, she recently told authorities.

Degorski tells Lockett to go with Luna to the police station "to make Luna appear more legitimate," Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Linas Kelecius said. The two dress up. Luna wears black pants and a nice trench coat.

Police photograph Luna and question him for less than a half hour, Lockett told prosecutors. No one asks Lockett anything.

"It was easy," she said Luna tells her as they leave.

Luna's name never comes up again, McGregor said. Not for nearly 10 years.

The Castros' split-level house in Palatine looks different - darker - without Michael, Kurt Lewis thinks.

Michael's mom, Epifania, falls into his arms, sobbing. "Why? Why did this happen?" she asks him.

"I kept looking up the stairs, waiting, wanting him to come down," Lewis recalled.

For the victims' families and friends, these first days are just the beginning of lifetimes of grief.

Kurt and Michael became friends in fifth grade at St. Theresa's school in Palatine. Although Kurt went to St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights and Michael went to Palatine High School, they still found time to talk.

On that last Friday, Kurt meant to stop by Brown's to say hi to Michael, 16, a cashier. But an afternoon of errands with his mom stretched too long. He could see Michael tomorrow.

"The next day, I found out there wasn't going to be a tomorrow," he said later.

Soon, Michael's friends become his pallbearers.

The days right after Michael's death are a blur for Mary Jane Crow, his older sister. It almost doesn't seem real until she sees her kid brother lying in a coffin.

"I remember screaming and my sister-in-law grabbing and just holding me," she said later.

That first spring, Michael's family and friends dedicate a tree in a park just down the street from the Castro house. Beneath it, a plaque embedded in the ground bears his name, his birth date and the date of his death.

The tree has grown and changed a lot in a decade. At home, Michael's things are as he left them. His white truck still sits in the driveway.

Police find another body.

It's 10 days after the Brown's murders. The frozen, headless victim is in a field near the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway tracks in southwestern Barrington, five miles from Brown's. Its left arm and right hand are missing.

The person - medical examiners can't immediately tell if it's a man or woman - must have died before the Brown's victims did, police say.

At first, they're careful not to link the two crimes. But Palatine Chief Bratcher says a few months later that it's hard to imagine two such vicious killers are on the loose.

"(It) seems to defy logic that you could have two maniacs committing these types of crimes in that compressed time frame in that small geographic region," Bratcher tells reporters. Palatine and Barrington police work the case, but there is no suspect here, either.

The Brown's investigators settle in for the long haul.

A task force forms within the first weeks after the murders, led by Palatine but including 102 investigators from 21 police forces. They set up headquarters in a former Palatine Township Elementary District 15 administration building on Quentin Road.

They survive at first on chicken and mostaccioli sent by Brown's. They rarely sleep. Some officers grab pillows and blankets to nap in empty classrooms. McGregor orders investigators to leave for eight hours; they trickle back in after four.

He goes 50 sleepless hours at one point. There is so much to do. When he does lie down, he wakes up from time to time and scrawls ideas on a notepad beside his bed.

Police pull clues from the Brown's crime scene: a cash register tape shows the last meal was sold at 9:08 p.m. Forty-four minutes later, someone - presumably the killers on their way out - switched off most of the lights as well as a clock, which stopped at 9:52 p.m.

About $1,800 is missing, police calculate from the register tapes. They scour the area for recent armed robberies. They learn of a five-man robbery ring that hit a Taco Bell in Des Plaines and Mexican grocery stores in Arlington Heights and Mundelein.

Two men are in custody. The other three are thought to have fled to Mexico, but investigators think they left before the Brown's murders. Palatine task force members head to Nogales, Mexico, to talk to them.

On Feb. 21, robbers corral employees, unharmed, into a cooler at a Crystal Lake Arby's restaurant. The crime mimics Brown's, where five people were killed in a walk-in freezer, two in a separate cooler. Palatine officers help nab two Woodstock men in the Crystal Lake case, but they find no connection to Brown's. It's the first of countless similar crimes around the United States that catch Palatine's attention.

Then, on April 17, three months into the Brown's case, a Park Ridge private investigator calls Barrington police to say a man named Robert Faraci is admitting his involvement in the Barrington murder. The man's wife, Rose Faraci, also implicates her husband in Brown's.

Police arrest Faraci, 25, a former student at Barrington High School and at now-closed Forest View High School in Arlington Heights. They charge him with killing the man found in Barrington, finally identified as Dean Fawcett. A week later, police also charge Faraci's friend, Paul Modrowski, 18, of Mokena.

Modrowski eventually is convicted of Fawcett's murder. Faraci is acquitted but goes to prison in spring 2002 for cashing bad checks.

Any potential link to Brown's grows cold long before then.

Crime lab investigators fire any .38- or .357-caliber handguns that come their way, hoping they can match the microscopic etchings on the fired bullets to those from Brown's. Police feed fingerprints lifted from Brown's into a computerized system known as AFIS, for automated fingerprint identification system. It's designed to match unidentified prints to people who have been fingerprinted in the past.

Months after the murders, investigators learn that a partial fingerprint from Brown's matches a man named Terry McGee from Chicago's West Side. Police question McGee for three days.

Word later leaks out: There's no solid match, after all.

As the investigation goes on, pressure is mounting - from outside and from within.

"This was Palatine's case. It was real personal to the people of Palatine," McGregor said later. "Other people went home at night. But the Palatine people lived and breathed it. It affected our citizens. It was personal."

Rico Solis and Guadalupe Maldonado came from thousands of miles away before getting jobs at Brown's.

After they are murdered, their families cannot bear to stay.

Rico's family leaves its Arlington Heights apartment the day the Brown's victims are discovered. They return only to pack their things. At first, they live with Rico's stepfather's mother. Then they move to Chicago's Northwest side.

They rarely return to the suburbs. Every intersection seems to remind them of the boy who is gone. The only time they come back is to lay a red rose atop Rico's gravestone in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines.

"It's been nine years. Sometimes I can't believe it," Jade Solis, 24, said after police broke the case in May 2002. "But then I think about how old I am, that I'm engaged now. My sister and I are all grown up. That's when I realize it happened long ago."

Rico's relatives move on; after several years, they begin to come to terms with their loss. They do not keep in contact with the police, nor with the Castros, the parents of Rico's friend, Michael.

That part of the past is just too painful.

Beatriz Maldonado goes to her native Mexico to bury her husband. Then she returns to Palatine.

Her oldest son, Juan Pablo Maldonado, starts classes in fall 1993 at Fremd High School in Palatine. One of his classmates is Brenda Luna, Juan Luna's younger sister. Neither has any notion of the cruel connection between them. While Juan Pablo doesn't really know Brenda Luna, they have mutual high school friends, he remembered later. He always thought she was a nice girl.

Memories of the murders haunt Beatriz Maldonado. She begins to have nightmares. In them, the killers read her name in the newspaper, then hunt her and her children down to kill them, too. Eventually, she and Salvador, the youngest, head home to Mexico, leaving the older sons with relatives in Palatine.

Within a year after the murders, sons Juan Pablo and Javier go to Celaya in the Mexican state of Zacatecas to be with their mother.

It's 2,200 miles from Palatine, but the distance does little to end Beatriz's fear. She wonders why the American police, who she was told were so adept, can't find the killers. She wonders how the killers live.

"I would think, how could they be leading their lives when ours were destroyed?" she said.

Beatriz's fears turn out to be not so far-fetched. Their lives already are loosely intertwined with one of the eventual suspects, though none of them knows it.

When the Maldonados arrived from Mexico on Dec. 23, 1992, they moved in with Guadalupe's brother, Pedro, and his family. Just a few months before that, teen Juan Luna and his family had moved out of Pedro's apartment complex, one building over. Pedro didn't know the Lunas.

Like Beatriz, Luna moved to Mexico shortly after the murders. Beatriz returned to Palatine in 1996, and Luna left Mexico at about the same time, moving to Crystal Lake.

Now, a decade after the murders, Juan Pablo Maldonado, 23, lives with his wife and brother Javier, 20, in Palatine. He strongly resembles his father, Guadalupe, who smiles from photos throughout the home.

When Juan Pablo and his cousin, Pedro Maldonado Jr., started work at Jake's Pizza in Hoffman Estates in 1999, Beatriz - by then back in Mexico - worried. All restaurants are dangerous, she believed.

It turned out to be the same Jake's where Degorski, Luna and their high school friend Eileen Bakalla all worked at various times, and where police say Bakalla took a call from Degorski hours after the Brown's murders.

"I'm ready to ask my (people) one by one," Jake's owner Reggie Kroll Sr. said after Degorski's and Luna's arrests last May, "Have you ever mass murdered anyone?"

DAILY HERALD FILE PHOTOS Three months after his twin brother, Tom, was slain, Jerry Mennes returns to Palatine Brown's Chicken & Pasta in 1993 to mark their 33rd birthday. Nearly a decade later, Martin E. Blake, below, has distanced himself from the crime that briefly put him in the spotlight. He lives in Texas.

One year passes. Without Michael Castro and Rico Solis. Without Tom Mennes, Marcus Nellsen and Guadalupe Maldonado. Without Richard and Lynn Ehlenfeldt.

"A day doesn't go by that I don't think maybe something will turn up," the Ehlenfeldts' daughter Jennifer says at the anniversary. "They haven't gotten that one clue or one piece of information that blows it wide open. Every day you think you're one day further from knowing the truth or you're one day closer, depending on how you look at it."

In that year, the village of Palatine spent $130,000 on the case. The community raised $120,000 as a reward for a tip that would lead to the killers' conviction.

The numbers tell the story: 200 fingerprints collected, 240 pieces of evidence examined, 3,000 phone tips taken, 1,000 leads investigated, 1,600 hours of crime lab time used.

Two dozen full-time investigators continue to work the case.

Artifacts from the building - potential evidence - fill a former classroom at the police department. It holds counter tops, exterior and interior doors, and much more. The Northern Illinois Police Crime Laboratory stores other evidence. Among the items is a frozen piece of chicken with one bite taken out of it.

At the three-year mark, seven investigators spend each day investigating the seven deaths.

Police call a press conference to reveal for the first time they believe a lone killer, between 6 feet and 6-foot-6, committed the murders using a .38- or .357-caliber revolver.

The killer wore Nike Air Force gym shoes - shoes that authorities now believe belonged to Degorski, who is 6 feet tall.

At the time, the information generates new leads but nothing to break the case.

"All it takes," Bratcher says in an interview to mark the three-year anniversary, "is one phone call, one bit of information to solve this."

Everyone wants the same thing, and wants it badly. That doesn't mean everyone agrees how the crime should be solved.

Manny Castro, Michael's father, criticizes police immediately after the murders for not finding the victims sooner.

He and Rico's mother, Evelyn Urgena, sue Brown's and president Frank Portillo, saying the company did not properly protect employees. Later, the lawsuit is dismissed.

Blake sues Palatine, charging police damaged his Elgin house and violated his civil rights. He settles for $8,000.

From the beginning, relations between Palatine police and reporters are tense. Chief Bratcher and Cook County State's Attorney Jack O'Malley keep a tight lid on information released to the public and clamp down hard on leaks.

Reporters stake out police headquarters and follow investigators as they head out each day. Detectives send decoy police cars to lead reporters astray so they can smuggle people to be questioned into the task force building.

Days into the case, one task force member breaks ranks. Chicago detective Rich Zuley has information he believes implicates Chicago street gang leader Jose Morales Cruz.

A jail informant initially points to Cruz. A Brown's customer identifies Cruz associate Miguel Sanchez as being at the restaurant the night of the murders. A woman claims she overheard men at a West suburban car wash. "Why'd you have to do them all?" she says she heard. The men at the car wash talk about returning for a meeting at Irving Park, she says. Cruz's gang meets on Irving Park Road.

Zuley becomes angry when he's left out of questioning Cruz. Bratcher sends Zuley packing. The task force investigates the Cruz lead, which once was so tantalizing, and discounts it.

It isn't over, though. Renaldo Aviles, the informant who pointed to Cruz, dies in Cook County jail in May 1993, his death ruled a suicide. Others suggest it was retribution for snitching.

Cruz eventually is convicted for a 1992 armed robbery in Skokie. Police never link him to Brown's.

But Cruz and "Lead 80," as it comes to be known, return again and again.

Portillo is frustrated. Motivated by the Brown's workers' deaths, he's become vice president of the Chicago Crime Commission. That group joins with the Better Government Association and in 1997 issues a report critical of the Palatine murder task force, hung largely on Lead 80.

In reply, the Illinois State Crime Commission writes a report praising Palatine's investigation.

"Lead 80 was like the lead that wouldn't die," McGregor said later. "We'd have leads come in, they'd be investigated and it would come full circle - it would come back to that lead."

The criticism stings.

"It hurt all of us. Our name was being dragged around in the mud," McGregor said. "They tried to portray us as some little suburb that wanted to do everything ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth."

Degorski and Luna remain nearly under investigators' noses for much of the decade after the murders.

Luna lives in Hoffman Estates awhile, then meets and marries his wife, Imelda, and has a son during a two-year stay in Mexico.

They move back to the United States, first living with Luna's parents in Crystal Lake, then moving in 1998 to the Meadowdale apartments in Carpentersville, a subsidized complex. It's three blocks from the Carpentersville Jewel/Osco where his friend, Bakalla, said she rendezvoused with Degorski and Luna just after the killings.

Luna works at a factory before taking a job in 2001 as an installer for Gulgren Appliance in Crystal Lake. He works six days a week and saves to buy a house.

"There was never anything here that led us to believe he was not a good person," said Mike Gulgren, one of the business owners.

He and co-owner Greg Danielson called Luna a family man whose eyes lit up any time he talked about his wife or son.

"I never saw him lose his temper. I never even heard him swear," Danielson said.

Others remember incidents: Luna bragged to his friend David Johnson of Rockford that he owned a handgun. Luna fought with friend Joe Wilson over a coat Wilson believed Luna took from him.

"You'll never guess what I can do," Wilson said Luna warned him.

But police records show just one black mark - a 1999 arrest for writing a $100 bad check to an Algonquin business.

Degorski moves from job to job - working at a Mount Prospect auto detail business and a Hoffman Estates country club, cleaning office buildings in Hoffman Estates and Arlington Heights, and starting his own handyman business called "Jim of All Trades."

He lives at his mother's Dover Court home in Hoffman Estates, then moves to Wauconda, then to the Indianapolis area in 2001.

A year after Brown's, police arrest him in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., for marijuana possession. He pays a fine and receives probation, police say.

In May 1998, Barrington Hills police pull over Degorski's Dodge truck on Route 62. They charge him with driving under the influence, speeding and possessing a small quantity of marijuana, records show.

He pleads guilty to the marijuana charge, loses his driver's license and is sentenced to a year of supervision and a $500 fine.

In a letter to the court he writes to try to get a conditional driver's license, Degorski pleads, "I am a single man trying to save money and improve my position in society."

"If he's got a black side, I never hooked up with it," said Mark Mogilinski, 42, Degorski's former neighbor and a fellow employee at the Mount Prospect auto detailing shop.

He sent Degorski once to pick up his sick daughter at school. He credited Degorski with keeping his young son from being hit by a car. He confided to Degorski that he was carrying $12,000 in cash one day when he was going to buy a motorcycle.

"He could have whacked me many times," Mogilinski said.

Living in Indianapolis for a year before his arrest, Degorski is one of the top men on the job to repair condominiums, his former boss, James Blazek said. Early in 2002, Degorski begins to ask co-worker Walter Hanger about his religious convictions, Hanger said.

One day, while the two men are picking up trash outside a condo complex, Hanger said, Degorski asks an unforgettable question:

"He said, 'If somebody killed somebody, will God let them into heaven?'"

In 1994, Lockett breaks up with Degorski. She moves with her mother to Oregon for three months after her father's death. She returns to Illinois, eventually enrolling at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston. She majors in psychology and works with developmentally disabled adults.

But the Brown's story moves with her wherever she goes.

She can't completely shake Degorski. He calls her mom looking for her every so often, sending messages he is never too far away, she later told police.

Through a glass door, up a narrow, wooden staircase and across a short hall, Lockett lives in an apartment with her boyfriend and another friend on the Charleston courthouse square. Every day, on the way to class or to work, she walks down the stairs and out the door and faces the tan-stone courthouse. The clock atop the building announces the passing hours. She can't keep the secret a second longer.

Late in 2001, she tells her boyfriend. They talk about her safety and debate sending police an anonymous letter. They tell their other roommate and, prosecutors said, the three of them register for firearm owner's identification cards, a step toward protecting themselves.

Lockett also tells her sister. The secret keeps escaping. It's a burden that's better off shared, she finds. She tells her mother, wanting to emphasize the need to hide her whereabouts.

Bakalla, who said Degorski also told her about the murders, tells her husband, from whom she later is divorced. Before anyone tells police, authorities said, at least 10 people would know the story.

In March 2002, Lockett calls an old high school pal, identified only as Melissa. Lockett asks Melissa to forward a letter to police so it can't be traced back to her. But she won't say what the letter contains. Melissa coaxes and learns Lockett's secret. She persuades Lockett to let her phone a friend on the Palatine police force.

Police finally get the phone call that makes all the difference. It's Lead 4,842 in the murder investigation.

On March 25, 2002, Lockett tells her tale to Palatine Police Chief John Koziol, Cook County sheriff's Cmdr. John Robertson and Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Scott Cassidy, head of the county's cold case unit. It is the story they have waited nearly a decade to hear.

"I cannot live with this anymore," prosecutors said Lockett told them.

Palatine police Sgt. Bob Haas - the man who was in charge the night the bodies were found in Brown's - recognizes the names Lockett gives to authorities. Assigned to Fremd High School until 1990, Haas, now a deputy chief, knew both Degorski and Luna when they were students.

Police come looking for the two men in April 2002. Both agree to have the insides of their mouths swabbed. The swabs dislodge minute amounts of tissue to be tested for genetic characteristics.

Police, it turns out, have a powerful bit of evidence. The chicken collected from a Brown's garbage can in January 1993 was kept frozen until 1999. Then, crime lab scientists decided techniques to test DNA had advanced enough to try them on the chicken.

It worked. The scientists extracted DNA of the person - potentially one of the killers - who ate that last meal at Brown's.

Now, they have two suspects to compare it against.

On May 9, 2002, Palatine police Sgt. Bill King gets a phone call from the Illinois State Police crime laboratory: "Are you sitting down? We've got a DNA match."

It's Luna's, authorities said.

Lockett leads police to Bakalla, and on May 15, she backs up Lockett's story of what she was told about the murders.

On May 16, police arrest Luna at the Shell station at Hazard Road and Route 25 in Carpentersville. They arrest Degorski at his job site near Indianapolis. They charge each of them with the murders. Prosecutors said each of them confesses, Luna on videotape.

Now Palatine police officers get a chance to make long-awaited telephone calls.

The phone rings about 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 16 at the home of Jerry and Diane Mennes, the twin and sister-in-law of Brown's victim Tom Mennes. There's been a big break, Palatine investigator Bryan Opitz says.

Like the other families, the Mennes family has lived the roller coaster of promising leads that turned bad. They've had years of phone calls and frustration.

This time, though, Opitz uses a phrase Diane Mennes hasn't heard from police before. His voice is confident.

"This one," he tells her, "is legit."

Next: An epilogue.