Only here: Killer gives his side of 'Mansion Murders'

Criminal defense lawyers usually don't like their clients to testify. Sometimes the accused crooks win out, though, and end up in the witness chair.

Joey "The Clown" Lombardo and Frank "The Breeze" Calabrese tried to talk their way out of murders and mob mayhem during last summer's Family Secrets trial in federal court. Their performances drew thumbs-down reviews from critics in the jury box.

It might have been different for Peter Hommerson, who was convicted Friday night in the murders of Barrington Hills millionaires Marvin and Kay Lichtman. But the Lake County jury never got a chance to hear from Hommerson, and he had a pretty good story. Not much of an alibi but a good story to explain what happened 12 years ago this week, on Jan. 23, 1996.

Hommerson practiced the story in a letter he sent to me a couple of years ago. The droopy-eyed Hungarian native claimed he used to work for the CIA.

Considering some of the bungled and botched intelligence agency jobs the past few years, a jury might have bought Hommerson's CIA story. He might have told them he had to kill the Lichtmans because they were going to blow his cover and that he torched the house to stay covert. Of course, he would tell jurors, it was all in the name of American patriotism.

"I am not guilty," wrote Hommerson to me. He said the murder case was made of "startling insinuations, frightening judgments and splendidly imagined fiction."

Hommerson wrote the letter to me shortly after he was arrested in 2005 while working as a waiter in a Mexican resort town. It was in response to my request to interview him … an interview that hasn't happened yet.

In the two-page, hand-penned reply Hommerson wrote: "Peter Hommerson is not my real name." He claims it "changed after my involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency in Italy." His real name is a jumble of letters that sounds like Loyosh Ferenzee.

"I was a soldier at a top secret military base" near the Russian border, wrote Hommerson. "I worked with chemical, toxic, biological warheads."

He didn't explain how or why he and his then-wife, Ros, ended up in Northwest suburban Chicago. Hommerson was working on a glass-art project at the Lichtman estate in 1996 when police said he stole some of the couple's art collection and then killed them. While on the run for 10 years, Hommerson was named one of America's Most Wanted, and that led to his arrest.

"I was at a certain place at the wrong time," Hommerson wrote, whatever that meant. He didn't explain it.

After the Lichtmans were shot and then left to burn in their 22-room home in what became known as the "Mansion Murders," federal authorities suspected that Hommerson had made his way from Mexico to his native Europe or to the Far East to sell the stolen artwork.

But according to the letter, Hommerson never left south of the border. "I had survived three different countries," he writes, referring to his alleged time in the military, "so Mexico was a piece of cake."

It was "a long, unscheduled Mexican vacation," he wrote. Then he threw in the contention that "nobody has sent me money from the U.S. & I have survived on my own."

That statement seemed to be aimed at defending his now-ex-wife Ros, a prominent shoe designer who helped Hommerson flee the country.

After Ros took the witness stand against her ex-husband during last week's trial, Peter Hommerson probably wouldn't be so quick to ride to her rescue. Her testimony pinned the murders, the cover-up and the escape to Mexico solely on him. Considering that she helped him evade authorities and was never charged as an accomplice, Ms. Hommerson's vital testimony might be considered her public penance.

Peter Hommerson's lawyer, David Weinstein, never allowed the accused killer to defend himself on the witness stand. The closest that Weinstein himself came to a tale of espionage and intrigue was when he argued that Hommerson was terrified of authority, having been tortured by police in his native Hungary for not being a member of the Communist party.

In his letter to me, almost two years before the trial, Hommerson predicted that he would win his case. "I will not be exonerated easily" he forecast, "but I will not write myself off as a (sic) obliterated man."

In the cold reality of justice, Peter Hommerson was convicted easily. It took the jury less time to reach a verdict on Friday than most people spend commuting home and catching a dinner and movie.

Hommerson, 62, shouldn't write himself off as an "obliterated man." Considering that he faces mandatory life in prison, maybe he'll live as long as the man who's life he abruptly ended. Marvin Lichtman was 78 when Hommerson put a bullet in his head after murdering his wife. Then he set the place ablaze.

If Hommerson does manage to survive a decade or so in the penitentiary, we can only hope that he puts all that CIA training and experience to good use.

I hear most prison libraries have a full collection of Tom Clancy paperbacks.