‘You don’t want to go in there’: 25 years ago, the Lemak murders left Naperville and its officers reeling

The call from dispatch came in on perhaps the worst day possible.

Still reeling from the news a colleague had killed himself the day before, the officers in Naperville's tactical unit were in for another shock: A woman named Marilyn Lemak was on the phone, admitting to killing her three young children.

Ray McGury, the now-retired sergeant in charge of the unit, quickly arrived at the scene.

“There was a guy holding the clipboard, and he was just shaking, saying, 'You don’t want to go in there,'” recalled McGury, who retired from law enforcement after serving as chief of the Bolingbrook Police Department. “I said, 'I’ve got no choice, sign me in.'”

What he and others saw 25 years ago this week stays with him to this day. But so did the department's response in mandating counseling for the officers involved. It marked a turning point in the way the department responded to the trauma their officers endure.

The case, which became national news, was the first for the newly formed DuPage County Major Crimes Task Force and the beginning of one of Naperville police’s darkest chapters.

The crime

Naperville had murders before. Naperville has had murders since. But the 1999 Lemak killings were different.

Marilyn, a registered nurse, and her husband, Dr. David Lemak, married in 1985 and were raising their children in a Victorian-era house near downtown Naperville.

But the marriage was crumbling. Marilyn Lemak filed for divorce in April 1997, then dropped it four months later. She refiled in June 1998.

By March 1999, David Lemak had moved out of the house and had a girlfriend, authorities said.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon on March 4, 1999, Lemak gave her daughter Emily, 6, and youngest son Thomas, 3, tabs of the tranquilizer Ativan and the antidepressant Zoloft, according to the testimony of Naperville police investigator Michael Cross.

She then went downstairs and gave 7-year-old Nicholas a snack of Ativan-laced peanut butter on a bagel.

When the children became unconscious, Lemak suffocated them, pinching their noses closed and putting a hand over their mouths, Cross said. A coroner’s report said the drugs alone would not have killed them. Some of the children had bruising from their mother sitting on them to suffocate them, investigators said.

Lemak cut her wrists and arms and bled onto her wedding gown, which she had brought down from the attic. She stabbed a knife through her wedding picture.

The next day, she called 911 and told the operator she had killed her children and attempted to kill herself.

Her husband was to pick them up that weekend for a visit, investigators said.

The scene

The call from dispatch came in a day after Naperville police officers learned about the suicide death of Sgt. Mark Carlson. McGury had scheduled a “must appear” lunch for the investigations division after Carlson’s death.

“We were going to go out and get out of the building, and we were going to do our own debriefing,” McGury said.

But before they could get to their lunch, the call for the Lemak case came in.

“I’m sitting in my office when I hear that radio dispatch go out,” McGury recalled. “It was a male dispatcher, and his voice was cracking. He says. ‘I’m speaking to a woman named Marilyn Lemak, and she says she’s murdered her three children, and she’s trying to kill herself, but it didn’t work’ … or something to that effect.

“I literally walked out of my office, and heads just started popping up above cubicles,” McGury said. “They all just turn to look at me, and they go, ‘Did we just hear this correctly?’”

Bob Guerrieri, a retired officer who now works for the Will County Forest Preserve police and lives in Plainfield, was the sergeant in charge of processing the crime scene.

In all, he would spend three days there.

“It appeared to be a normal house at first glance,” he said, adding they found hand-drawn pictures from the children on the refrigerator and other typical items.

But there were bagels with peanut butter, topped by crushed-up medicine, and bottles of medicine she hid in a wall. In the bathroom, police found Lemak’s bloodstained wedding dress.

And then there were the children. Both boys were on their beds. Emily was discovered in Lemak’s bed, covered by a blanket with just her hair sticking out.

That image sticks with Guerrieri. Emily’s hair was the same color as his daughter’s.

Guerrieri knew processing the scene would be difficult for his investigators. So, he touched base with them regularly.

“I checked in with people,” he said, adding he’d bring coffee or have people get out of the house to get lunch and talk. “It was important for people doing the work to know someone cared about them and was checking on them.”

“We got through it together.”

Officers called in through the newly formed DuPage County Major Crimes Task Force stuck around on that initial day even after they were off the clock. Their reason? To make sure the children were given dignity when they were removed from the house.

Jim Glennon, who headed the Lombard Police Department’s investigations division and was commander of investigations for the task force at the time, remembers telling officers they could go home and being surprised that they were staying.

“Why?” he remembered asking. “And they said, you see those TV cameras out there? They’re waiting for a shot of the bodies to come out and they’re not going to get it.”

As the coroner removed the children’s bodies from the house, officers stood shoulder to shoulder to keep them from view.

The aftermath

After the Lemak call, about a dozen officers who were most involved with the case were ordered to a debriefing, led by a psychologist who talked to them about the case, their colleague’s suicide and how they were doing.

McGury did not want to go.

“I said, 'You know what, this is a bunch of BS. I don’t have time for this. I’ve got an investigation to run, and you’re making me sit in here and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ I can work out my demons in the weight room. I’m fine,'” McGury said.

“Interestingly enough, we all walked in with the same attitude, and 2½ hours later, we all walked out together,” he said. “We all stayed.”

When McGury started out as a police officer in 1980, there was little to no mental health awareness for police officers, he said.

Officers didn’t talk about not being able to sleep at night, kept awake by the horrors they had witnessed. Admitting to that was viewed as a sign of weakness.

“We would say, ‘Man up or woman up. Keep that stuff to yourself,’” McGury recalled.

Being ordered to sit through a debriefing, he said, was not the norm at the time.

“Naperville kind of set the tone … it’s OK not to be OK,” McGury said. “It’s not a sign of weakness. You’ve got to get your mind right.”

The verdict

At Lemak’s trial in 2001, attorney Jack Donohue argued that she was insane at the time she killed her children. He noted she had been diagnosed with postpartum depression and was prescribed Zoloft and Ativan.

Prosecutors argued that she killed her children to spite her husband.

In a 2022 interview with journalist Eric Zorn, Lemak said she did so because she thought her husband didn’t want his family.

“I was thinking, ‘He doesn't want me. He doesn't want (the children),’” she said. “This is a good thing. We're going to be in a better place, and he can move on. Everybody's going to be happy.’”

The jury convicted her of first-degree murder, and Judge George Bakalis sentenced Lemak to natural life without the possibility of parole. He told Lemak he hoped she thought of her children every day for the rest of her life.

She told Zorn she still does.

Lemak is now serving her sentence at the Logan Correctional Center. She is seeking clemency.

When asked if Marilyn Lemak has been punished enough, McGury does not hesitate.

“Define ‘enough,’” he said. “She took the lives of three children who trusted their mother.”

“There’s still a portion of me that is angry,” McGury said. “Marilyn played judge, jury and executioner that day. She made the decision that she was going to cheat David out of the love of his life … his three children.”

On the 25th anniversary of the Lemak murders, McGury remembers his former colleague Mark Carlson. He pictures Lemak’s children in happy times. He does the math and notes Nicholas Lemak would be 32 now, Emily 31 and Thomas 28.

“What could have been for them?” he wonders. “Could they have been a doctor like their father? A nurse like their mother? Who knows. She cheated them of that.”

When revisiting his memories of that time, McGury borrows a quote from a friend:

“It’s OK to look back,” he said. “You just don’t stare.”

Monday: Marilyn Lemak seeks clemency.