Fourth 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 nearly 10 years of moving back and forth between Mexico and Palatine, Guadalupe Maldonado's two oldest sons have lost touch with Palatine police investigators. So when the phone call finally comes, it's from a cousin.

"Turn on the TV! They caught the guys who did the murders!" the cousin tells Javier and Juan Pablo Maldonado.

It's May 2002. The sons, just children when someone killed their father and six others at Brown's Chicken & Pasta in Palatine, live a half block from where they did on that night, Jan. 8, 1993. Photos of their father hang throughout the Palatine apartment.

Javier and Juan immediately call their mother in Mexico with news that police have charged two suspects.

"I was so happy that they would be brought to justice," said Beatriz Maldonado, who has never remarried and lives near Celaya, Mexico, where Guadalupe is buried.

After nearly a decade when news reports of investigative dead ends faded into near silence about the notorious case, Guadalupe's sons find the sudden news of the arrests difficult to fathom.

"I thought it was never going to happen," Juan said. "It's a long time."

After Palatine Police Chief John Koziol announces the arrests on May 18, it doesn't take long for the families of Richard and Lynn Ehlenfeldt, Tom Mennes, Marcus Nellsen, Guadalupe Maldonado, Rico Solis and Michael Castro to realize a different kind of agonizing waiting has begun.

Months of court hearings and horrible new revelations are sure to come, dragging the victims' families back to the night they learned of the deaths. Even the welcomed arrests force the families to revise the pictures they hold in their minds.

"For nine years, you think it's a hardened criminal," said Mary Jane Crow, Michael Castro's older sister. "But then when you think about kids a little older than Michael doing this to other kids, it brings up a whole new anger. It just started dawning on me how angry I got. It's an emotional roller coaster happening all over again."

Some of the victims' loved ones aren't sure how to approach the lengthy limbo.

"I feel like a rubber band that is being stretched in all different directions," Tom Mennes' twin, Jerry Mennes, said after the arrests. "You don't know what side to get on because you don't know where it's going to break."

Jade Solis can never forget. "You still remember," she said. "It's not done yet."

A lot has changed since that night, exactly 10 years ago today. And while time hasn't minimized the pain, the families have moved forward along with the years.

There was time for all three of the Ehlenfeldts' daughters and Maldonado's oldest son, Juan, to marry. Time for Dana Sampson, the Ehlenfeldts' middle child, to give birth to three children who never will know their grandparents. Time for Michael Castro's sister to marry, for Rico Solis' oldest sister to get engaged and for Marcus Nellsen's daughter, Jessica, to blossom into a 15-year-old sophomore at Robinson High School in eastern Illinois.

Time for a tree to take root a few blocks from Michael Castro's Palatine home, flowering in white every spring and towering over the heads of all who come to visit it and the plaque at its base memorializing Michael.

Time, in April 2001, to bulldoze the white-brick Brown's building with the green roof and nearly erase all traces of it from the landscape. Last month, a vender sold Christmas trees from the site.

Thousands of people who have moved to the Northwest suburbs since the razing can drive by the corner of Northwest Highway and Smith Street and never know a Brown's restaurant existed.

As if the wound ever could heal, a newer layer of dark asphalt now covers the ground where the building once stood. All around it the pavement is faded, cracked, worn down.

Jim Degorski, 30, and Juan Luna, 28, the two men charged with the Brown's murders, sit in separate cells at Cook County jail.

Degorski has recovered from facial surgery for a cracked cheekbone from a beating by a sheriff's deputy. (The deputy is suspended without pay as termination hearings and a criminal case proceed against him.)

Both Degorski and Luna have time to ponder the upcoming years of courtroom motions, trials, possible appeals and the chance of death sentences. Teams of lawyers have an evidence room full of boxes to explore as they begin their arduous pre-trial work.

Degorski and Luna are innocent, defense attorneys say. The lawyers are beginning to pick away at the key evidence police and prosecutors say they have against the men: a DNA match to a piece of chicken that authorities say places Luna at Brown's that night; statements by Degorski's former girlfriend, Anne Lockett, and by another friend of the suspects, Eileen Bakalla; and statements by the suspects themselves.

The chicken piece, with one bite missing, was in an otherwise clean Brown's garbage can, showing that the person who ate it was at the restaurant late, authorities said. Under their scenario, the killers were the last customers, ordering food at 9:08 p.m. before unleashing mayhem.

In 44 minutes, the murders were done and the killers gone, police theorized. A clock stopped at 9:52 p.m. showed when the killers cut the power and presumably left.

One of Luna's defense lawyers, Clarence Burch, plans to ask Cook County Judge Vincent M. Gaughan to let him get his own DNA test on that long-frozen piece of chicken.

Burch also will take a new sample of Luna's DNA with the hope of raising doubt about a match with the chicken - a match prosecutors said is so conclusive that only 1 in 2.8 trillion people could fit the profile. There are only 6 billion people living on Earth.

Defense lawyers are certain to question Lockett's and Bakalla's accounts. Prosecutors said Degorski and Luna described the murders to both women within days of the crime.

The lawyers will make every effort to prevent Luna's videotaped confession and Degorski's talk with police from being allowed as evidence at their trials.

Degorski's lawyers said their client did not admit anything to police. Law enforcement sources close to the case say Degorski readily acknowledged his role in the mass murder but didn't repeat it in front of a video camera.

Even after Degorski and Luna were in custody, authorities didn't stop collecting evidence against them. They called a friend and former co-worker of Degorski's, Walter Hanger of Indianapolis, to testify before a grand jury. When Hanger, after testifying, paid a visit to Degorski in jail, authorities called him back to the grand jury to recount that conversation.

Hanger told grand jurors of a conversation he and Degorski once had while they were working together, he said. Degorski asked him whether murderers can go to heaven, Hanger said. And in their visit in jail, Hanger said, Degorski seemed remorseful and said he will not battle a death sentence if he receives one. But Degorski never acknowledged involvement in the Brown's mass murders, Hanger said.

"He bowed his head, prayed and asked God to forgive him of his sins and let God let him lead a Christian life," Hanger said. "He was crying and everything."

Degorski's lead defense attorney, Mark L. Levitt, promises to contest in court every bit of evidence brought against Degorski. And perhaps previewing one piece of his strategy to discredit witnesses, Levitt suggests jail visits by Hanger, a born-again Christian, were orchestrated by authorities.

"I'm not afraid of the defense," said Jack McGregor, Palatine's deputy police chief at the time of the murders and later chief.

"Let them attack us. We've been attacked since day one. But we got DNA. There's other evidence there, too. And we have their own confessions. So let them attack. That's their job. And those are our killers."

Prosecutors have told relatives they will need cooperation and testimony from Lockett, Bakalla and perhaps from Lockett's friend, known only as "Melissa," who convinced Lockett to talk to authorities. It was Melissa who made that one phone call police spent nearly a decade hoping they'd receive.

Lockett and Bakalla kept the secret for so long because they feared Degorski and Luna, authorities said. They will face no charges.

After nine years of attacks from relatives of some of the victims, the media, and the Better Government Association, Palatine police are singled out for praise.

"Today is a great day for the Palatine Police Department," Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan says during the press conference to announce the arrests. "The police never gave up. They never, they never forgot the victims, and that's the key here. That's why it's such a great day."

Manny Castro, Michael's father raises huge banners around town. "Thank you Palatine police," they say.

Mindful of the court case still to unfold, Palatine police are careful to publicly say little about the case.

Koziol, in the May press conference, admits some answers might never come.

"I cannot explain their motivation for doing this killing," Koziol says. "We still cannot give that answer to the families. They never really gave us one. They just did it to do something big. They are people without a soul and that's all we know about them."

"Maybe later someone will try to get into the heads of these two people," McGregor later said. "But if you're normal, none of this is going to make any sense."

McGregor, former deputy chief and police chief, addressed one of the questions that came up early in the investigation and hung over it: why did it take so long for police to find the victims?

Officer Dan Bonneville, who went to Brown's at about 1 a.m. in response to Manny Castro's call about his missing son, told his supervisors he'd checked the doors, said McGregor, now retired and living in Wisconsin.

But it wasn't until 3 a.m. that Palatine officer Ron Conley discovered the bodies when he pulled open an unlocked employee entrance.

The delay provoked criticism by some victims' relatives who wondered if some of those who died might have been saved if they were found earlier.

McGregor said he doubts the first officer checked the doors at all. Bonneville's claim was investigated but he never was disciplined for any failings that night. He left the department last year and did not respond to requests for comment.

"If he would have checked the doors properly, he would have found the crime… It would have been a lot less heartburn for us, a lot more peace of mind for the victims' families," McGregor said.

He said the families gradually came to understand that the victims died quickly.

"Whether they were found at 1 a.m. or 3 a.m., they were dead," McGregor said. "It was all over by 10 o'clock. We overcame that with the families. They were satisfied that it wouldn't have changed anything."

Martin E. Blake said he's worked to forgive. With the arrests of Degorski and Luna, he finally might be able to forget.

Taken into custody the day after the murders, he was released two days later. He moved out of state in 1994 to escape the shadow of that initial accusation. He settled a lawsuit with the village of Palatine in 1997 for $8,000.

Now living in Texas, Blake said he is keeping a deal he made with a higher power in that Palatine jail cell so long ago.

He's now a Roman Catholic who speaks out against abortion and the death penalty, he said. He plays keyboard at church services, volunteers on mission trips and is a foster parent to an 11-year-old girl with disabilities.

"I'm doing everything I can," he said, "to live a good life."

"We're finally able to exhale," Wisconsin state Rep. Jennifer Shilling - the Ehlenfendts' oldest daughter - says on the day when police announce the arrests.

The three daughters, the youngest then 18, were thrust into financial as well as emotional turmoil after they were orphaned by their parents' murders.

In 1995, the daughters agreed to pay $57,000 to settle their parents' estate with the building's owner. John Gregornik sued the daughters seven months after the slayings, accusing them of breaching the parents' lease by not reopening the restaurant after the murders.

The three sisters initially had intended to keep the store as a tribute to their parents. They soon realized the job would take too much of a toll.

Gregornik had sought $655,581 in back rent and other costs from the estate. The Ehlenfeldts countersued, asking the courts to terminate the lease, which was set to expire this year.

The family argued reopening the restaurant would have been in vain because the specter of the mass murders would have kept customers away.

The legal bills and outstanding debts left the daughters with little inheritance. Their parents' life savings - the $300,000 they pumped into the franchise - never was recovered.

"They lost everything," Richard's sister, Ann Ehlenfeldt, said. "It hasn't been easy, but they're very strong girls."

Even now, Dana Sampson knows living with the murders always will be hard for her and her sisters.

"I actually hate the word closure, because to me, there will never be closure for something like this," said Sampson, a physical therapist in St. Charles, Mo.

She welcomed the arrests last spring, but peace remains elusive. "They're not coming back, my parents or any of the other victims."

Crow has faced the same emptiness.

"No one's ever going to imagine what we've been through. Ever. No one's ever going to be in our shoes, ever, unless they've been there themselves," she said. "Only other victims can."

Crow avoids newspapers and television and might skip the trial.

"I don't think it's a good idea to go to the trial, especially when you hear about them not having any remorse," Crow said. "A person like that who's so cold and calculating, you don't want to give them any satisfaction."

Now, after a decade, she isn't sure she wants to sit in a courtroom and hear answers to all of her questions.

"I've always had pictures in my head of what could have happened," Crow said. "Was my brother the first one? Was he the last one? Did he suffer?

"You don't want to hear about the last moments of your loved ones' lives because it'll haunt you."

Next: A look at the lives lost.