It was a dimly lit dive that reeked of malt, mildew, and cigarette smoke. My eyes took a moment to adjust. Along the dark old bar and at each one of the rickety tables was a tin bowl full of Wisconsin cheddar cheese spread and a plastic basket of Keebler crackers. I had walked into this watering hole on the side of the road to Waupun, Wisconsin, to meet with FBI Special Agent Louis Tomaselli, but he hadn’t yet arrived. Somewhat out of place in my gray-blue skirt and dark blue blazer, I ordered bourbon straight up and sat at a small table. As the jukebox played a Johnny Cash song, Tomaselli, dressed casually in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, requested a whiskey and sat down.
I gave him the update. “We’re making progress with Richard Macek. He’s beginning to open up. In addition, he’s sending letters almost every day. They’re single-spaced and handwritten, up to twenty pages each. Sometimes he sends letters three times a day. I’m not sure I believe it yet, but he says he trusts me.”
Tomaselli nodded, spread some cheese on a cracker, ate it in one bite, took a gulp of his drink, and informed me that Macek would likely be transferred to a prison in Illinois. “It’ll be sometime soon. They have enough to warrant extradition for the Lossman killings.”
“Do you know when?”
Tomaselli shook his head. He glanced around the place and stared at a neon beer sign. Then he tried to regale me with macho stories of his latest case, in which he was able to infiltrate a Wisconsin motorcyle gang, to ride with them and become accepted as an insider. A few minutes later, he boasted about his training exploits at the new FBI center in Quantico, Virginia.
He leaned forward and bragged, “It’s got three hundred and eighty-five acres. Huge. It’s completely wooded. Completely secure. It even has its own mock city to use for training purposes.”
It was obvious to me that Tomaselli had his own agenda—getting a conviction—and that he wasn’t interested in hearing much of a report on my progress with Richard Macek, let alone any details that didn’t serve his own needs. He really wasn’t listening to what I had to say about Macek. I felt most of the meeting was useless and was glad when it was over.
Still, I did learn that Macek was going to be extradited to a prison fifty miles northwest of Chicago in the McHenry County town of Woodstock, Illinois. While the timing was still up in the air, it was critical that I continue my sessions with Macek on an accelerated schedule. I wrote and phoned the prison hospital in Waupun and asked the superintendent to inform me of the date of the imminent transfer to Illinois for the killing of Nancy and Lisa Lossman.
But when it finally happened, I was the last to know.
Each day or so, Macek mailed letters to me. Once or twice they were typed—when he was angry with me and felt I somehow “didn’t deserve” the intimacy of a handwritten note. The letters themselves centered primarily around three things. He whined about recurring aches and pains, including chronic headaches, which were likely psychosomatic, perhaps due to overwhelming, disorganized feelings about his crimes or worry about his forthcoming trials. He didn’t regret his crimes; he just whined about his circumstance, writing, “I don’t see how I could do this” and “Why did this happen to me?” The letters were also filled with the trite details of everyday prison life. He told me when he woke, what he ate, when he went to sleep, the song that played on the radio, about decorating the prison Christmas tree for the holidays. Even though I felt we’d have a breakthrough soon, many of his letters were full of complaining and banalities:
Dear Dr. Morrison,
I have just arrived to my room after our visit. Right at this moment, I feel very confused and frustrated…. Right now I have a very cold and empty feeling inside. And I feel very scared! My heart is racing! I have the feeling that I am being cheeted or pushed along. NO! NOT by you or any of the other Doctors. But by Louis (Tomaselli). Don’t get excited or nervous but I feel at times I were dead. KEEP THAT TO YOURSELF, OK? But I’m so ashamed and fearful for what I have done, else where at other times. As I feel now I can say NO, I don’t know anything or did anything, but at the same time, I’m not sure If I did do anything else! To me it doesn’t sound good or so to say it sounds dumm…
I would like to help and please everybody. But what can I do. Now I feel like crying. And that is embarrassing. TO ME, IT IS EMBARRASSING! I just went into a black. And I feel like tearing up this letter. Becaues I feel dumm. Just like I did when I tried to write to (another doctor). I have to subsutute words becase of spelling, and then losing thought of what I want to say!! And the words or frases I want to use. I guess I’ll end my letter for now. I feel tired and uncomfortable. You see feeling like this I have to keep to myself. Because the Doctors here are quick to put a patient on heavy medication and I’m not about to be turned into a ZOMBI!…
Thank you for your time and interest in my case and or me.
Respectfully yours,
Richard O. Macek
When he felt he had gotten more comfortable with me and that he considered us to be friends, he became demanding, asking me to bring him such things as “Coast to Coast deodorant soap, Efferdent denture tablets, Alka-Seltzer and Alberto balsam shampoo.” The most telling characteristic of the letters was the fact that he did not really communicate in them: many of the sentences contained generalities mixed with clichés. The dispatches had little meaning, kind of like the babble you hear from a celebrity who doesn’t want to express anything to the press but knows something must be said. Macek wrote what he thought he was expected to write, what he felt a prison official would prefer him to write. The letters were not vetted by officials because of the privacy laws surrounding the doctor/patient relationship, but they were more often than not impulsive rants with little punctuation and words with misspellings like amagin for imagine. Gradually, it became evident to me that they were intentional and may have reflected a need to be in the limelight: “Please look at me. I am different.” Starved for attention for much of his life, Macek wanted more than to be known. He wanted to be famous. His dreams would include fantasies about riding in limousines and Cadillacs and living in mansions.
When he spoke to me, it was the same thing. Cognitively, he was disturbed when he attempted to communicate. He would use words in a somewhat awkward formal construction like “he had thought I was dumm.” They were also interspersed with gross errors in syntax and the use of slang. The structure of Macek’s sentences frequently disintegrated into annoying non sequiturs. If you asked Macek a question such as “How many days are there in a year?” he might say “Two hundred and five.” If you asked him why, he might say, “The thought just flashed through my mind.” It showed that Macek had very little internal self-control at times. He couldn’t take that second or two to think before answering. He was not dim-witted; he had an above-average intelligence. But snap judgments dominated his chatter, so much so that his awareness, insight, and ability to discern were whittled down to sudden declarations that were full of mistakes. It’s a kind of topsy-turvy way of being that stems from within, a chaos that eventually leads to the expression of uncontrollable fury. It’s not frustration. In fact, the cause for such rage is not specific. It is nothing that we can yet pinpoint or know with conviction.
Macek became obsessed with worry about his life and health in these letters, but the strange syntax and spelling remained when he wrote:
I woke up choking. My heart felt like it was jumping or trying to jump out of my chest. Cold sweat all over. But my body felt warm. My face felt like of Billions of pins were sticking me in the face. I had a dream, or nightmare if anything. I just seen my life pass my eyes. I’m dead. And I seen how it happened. I dreamed after all of everything was finished in court, ect. I got old fast; I started deteareating from within. Every hour, day, week, seem to be racing by me. I can’t keep up I’m alone. All alone now one to turn to, no one to hold and tell them I Love them! I look for help. But people walk past me and just look and keep on walking. My skin is just hanging on my bones. But my mind is still active. I see doctors coming at me with needles full of Drugs, liquid and pills poored down my throat. I see myself screaming, trying to tell them is is the wrong stuff.
Additionally in his letters, he began to flirt with me, doing things like calling me “Boops.” Since he was safely behind bars, I gave it little notice.
It was appropriate, though, that I learned from Macek himself about his transfer to Illinois. He wrote a short note that simply said he had been moved and his address had changed. “When are you coming to see me?” he asked. Due to my workload I hadn’t seen Macek for over a month, but Macek was right. It was now time to see him in Illinois. After calling and writing repeatedly, I received permission from the authorities in rural Woodstock, Illinois, to continue my meetings with Macek. The Woodstock in Illinois was part of McHenry County itself. Full of rolling, farm-filled countryside, it had 111,000 residents, and farmland there sold for $1.50 an acre—$1.80 if a farmer got lucky. Traveling down those old, empty roads, I rarely saw another car or another human. Though the sun shone, the lack of humanity for miles upon miles was, well, creepy. After making the trip from Madison, I slowed as I passed the bright, towering Woodstock Opera House, where a young Orson Welles and Paul Newman had once acted and which had just been renovated. Next to the courthouse in the pretty town square, I passed a run-down, shuttered jail next to the courthouse. Continuing on, I found the brand-new facility north of town.
While the county jail was just a few years old, it was minuscule, housing about thirty persons at the time Macek was a prisoner. In a nondescript meeting area, surrounded by thick, heavy, but not bulletproof glass, I sat waiting for Macek. I wished they hadn’t given him a job as a cook wielding a knife in the kitchen; after all, he had killed with a knife and made his ritualistic cuttings something of a hallmark of his murders. But that was the way the prison system worked in the town—it sometimes defied any semblance of logic or security. Macek walked in and seated himself at a small, gray metal table bolted to the wall. It took a moment to sink in, but I was stunned to see draped on his shoulder, almost as if it were a proud weapon of war, a white terrycloth towel. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me. Macek had strangled the maid at the Abbey with a white towel. And he had stuffed towels into the toilet…pushing them on top of three-year-old Lisa Lossman until her young life had ended, a crime for which he could receive an additional two hundred to four hundred years in jail. This gesture with the towel was a stratagem of power for him, as if to say, “I’m in charge here, no one else. I can take your life with a towel. At the very least, I can play with your mind whenever I want to.” I wasn’t afraid, but I was angry.
I went directly to the attending guard, who was relaxing and reading a newspaper. In no uncertain terms, I asked, “Can you please remove that towel?” Now, Macek was well known even in this rural area because of the many newspaper accounts about him, including those dubbing him “The Mad Biter,” as if he were a vampire. There had even been some Hollywood inquiry into doing a movie about Macek’s life and crimes. But I’m sure this guard was oblivious to the fine points of the particular murders, including the towel. He regarded me curiously, as if I were paranoid.
“You want what?”
“We have to get rid of the towel.”
Macek himself looked at me as though he didn’t understand why I would be upset by the towel. Yet he also knew games wouldn’t work with me, so he handed over the towel to the guard without so much as a peep.
For hours, I sat near Macek, digging into his psyche. On the surface, he talked about how he viewed himself as a “good father” who “loves all creatures.” He said he had “a lot of love for kids” and that he’d give his “right arm for them if there’s anything that they needed.” In reality, he never abused his kids or his wife, and he acted like a very caring husband and father. He made them presents, and he brought home a menagerie of pets for them. Most serial killers rarely abuse those very close to them because their family, the very idea of a wife and kids, is part of a structure that keeps serial killers “normal,” at least while they’re with them. Macek’s family life was, as far as I could tell from speaking with his quiet wife, Sandy, generally unremarkable, and he doted on his three children.
As a child himself, Macek hailed from the Chicago suburbs and enjoyed a middle-class upbringing. He went to parochial school, where he tried to impress the kids in gym class with feats of strength. He once told the Detroit News that his mother and father had “two homes and fours cars and three boats. And not a penny in the bank.” Macek did call his father abusive, saying his father hit him and didn’t want him to date, but he wasn’t much more protective and violent than a lot of fathers. According to Macek, his mother was never quite satisfied with him, but he did not harbor hate for either of them. He did indeed care for Sandy and the kids as best as he could, with jobs as a machinist, cook, and truck driver.
As we continued our talk, Macek appeared to be cooperative, helpful, and easygoing. But his charisma and seeming zest for life disintegrated once we got past the three-hour mark—especially when the interviews were uninterrupted. The breakdown was most apparent when I confronted him with his controlling manipulative behavior or his occasional lying. Macek’s personality then became this kaleidoscopic mix of belligerence and guile. To throw things off-kilter, he demanded I get him things like water or toiletries or that I talk to the guard so he wouldn’t stare at him. He would burst into a fit of rudeness or boorishness. It was vehement, and it came out of nowhere. “You’re full of shit!” he’d scream. It was after an outburst that he might say something important.
And then, hours into the session, he sat forward, almost expressionless, and cautiously admitted, “I—I can’t tell if people are alive or dead unless they stop fighting me.”
About a week later in early September 1977, I prepared to visit Macek again. I finished work late in the day and drove to Woodstock in the evening. Soon it was black all around, and I had turned onto a two-lane back road to find the local motel at which I’d made a reservation. Since there were no street lamps anywhere along the twisting route, I switched on my bright beams. Wisps of ground fog hung over the road, forming recognizable shapes as I drew near, only to vanish as I drove through them.
When I found the motel, it was clear, even at night, that the two-story place was in disrepair. I paid for the room and picked up my keys. With my luggage in hand, I walked up two flights of creaky stairs. The motel was practically deserted, and its manager was certainly in no danger of having to get up from his TV viewing to click on its red neon NO VACANCY sign. Just a half dozen cars were stopped in the parking spaces, and it seemed as though they’d been there forever.
The door to the room opened with a whine. From the rugs to the bed, the room was furnished in a dull brown decor. On the headboard was one of those ancient massaging machines that cost a quarter to operate. On inspection, the room was anything but secure. The door seemed cardboard thin, and the picture window almost welcomed thieves. I pulled the drapes tightly shut. As I readied for bed, I had the constant feeling that something was wrong. I checked the closets. I bent over to peek under the bed. It was on a platform. Nothing there, nothing at all, I assured myself. After inspecting the bathroom, including the shower, I pulled aside the drapes to look out onto the parking lot. Nothing. Nothing there.
Then the phone rang, blaring. I hesitated, resisting the impulse to pick up the receiver. No one I knew had an inkling that I was in rural Illinois. Finally I picked up the receiver, thinking it must be the motel manager with some message about checkout time.
“Hello?”
“How are you?”
“Who is this?” I may have recognized the voice, that flat, soft voice, but it couldn’t possibly be him.
“It’s Richie.”
“What—It can’t be.” I thought I would drop the phone. Instead, I sat down on the bed.
“Sure it is.”
“Where are you calling from?” How did Macek deduce I was here, at this particular place?
“Well, if you look out your window, you’ll see I’m down there…I’m right out there.” I tried to think logically. How could I get help? “I’m in the phone booth. All you have to do is go to your window and look to your left and I’m down there.”
We were both silent then. I didn’t want to look. I wondered how close my car was and whether I would need to make a break for it.
“Go look. I bet you can’t. Bet you won’t. Go look.” I was becoming really nervous, still struggling with my thoughts to believe that this couldn’t possibly be real. But at the same time it was real. Everything was completely blurred, that fine line between reality and nonreality. I moved to the window and pulled back the thick curtain.
It was there, a shiny metal phone booth with a fluorescent light, flitting moths, and spiderwebs. The phone booth was there. He, however, was not.
“But you’re not there.” I had fallen for the ruse and I was angry.
“I bet I got you going, didn’t I?”
“This really is not funny.”
“I know it’s not funny, but I decided to do it anyway.”
“Well, first of all, how did you get to a telephone?”
“The guards let me.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“I’m calling from the guard station.”
“How could you be doing that? You’re not supposed to have access to a phone.”
“I kind of have access. I can get access whenever I need it.”
“How did you find me?”
“Oh, I have my ways.” It was so unpleasant. But I didn’t get off the phone right away because I wanted to tell him his behavior was inappropriate.
“This is not comfortable for me. You know it’s not comfortable. You know I’m scheduled to see you tomorrow. We’re going to discuss this further tomorrow.”
His was kind of a nonreaction.
“Well, what do you mean, you didn’t like it? It’s me calling. You should like that.”
I got into bed and tried to work on my notes regarding the conversations we’d had recently. He had said that as a child he’d had horrible dreams of being attacked by a pink eraser. While trying to make sense of what this meant, I remained irritated with myself; I couldn’t believe I fell for Macek’s prank. Yet I was frightened because I’d never had that kind of experience before. Even after the phone call, I had to convince myself that he wasn’t there. “He’s not here,” I repeated to myself. “He’s not here.” It was a reality check I had to make. I felt the need to inspect the closets again, all of the corners and the shelves above, and to find out what was inside the platform beneath the bed. I really wanted to do this. And I really wanted to look out at the phone booth again. I finally told myself I didn’t have to.
“He’s not here.”
“Richard, we can’t have this happen again.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. He sounded a little hurt.
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess I do.”
“If something like that ever happens again, our sessions will end. I will stop trying to help you.”
Again, he had a kind of nonreaction, but it sunk in, and his scary games came to an end. Despite his shenanigans, I was making progress in coaxing him to recall the details of one of his more horrendous crimes. It was one for which another, probably innocent man was being blamed. Not only was Richard Milone accused of the murders, but he stood trial, was convicted, and sentenced to 90 to 175 years in prison at the Menard Penitentiary in Chester, Illinois.
It was a repulsive crime because young Sally Kandel, a popular freshman at Glenbard North High School in Carol Stream, Illinois, was only fourteen years old when her life was taken. According to the case file, the fresh-faced teen with pretty long hair and a captivating smile was a five-foot-six member of the track team, an athlete who had won a Presidential Fitness Award for two years straight. On the evening of September 12, 1972, at about 6 P.M., Sally ate a dinner of broiled round steak, french fries, and banana cake.
“I’m going out for a bike ride,” Sally said, after finishing her dessert. “But leave the dishes because I’ll be in to do them by seven o’clock.”
“You better be sure to be home by seven,” said Cynthia, her mother.
“Even earlier, Mom, because Bonanza starts at seven.”
The last time her parents saw Sally, she was wearing blue jeans, a white turtleneck body sweater, sneakers, and a blue windbreaker. At 5:50 A.M. the next morning, one of the DuPage County deputy sheriffs discovered the teen, lifeless, between the third and fourth rows of corn in a muddy, waterlogged field over two miles from her home—a distance she had never before traveled by bicycle. The muck there was so like quicksand that deputy Donald Schmitt complained he ruined his shoes as he surveyed the death scene. Next to the farm was a gravel road, wet, bumpy, hard to ride on a bike. Nearby, the bike itself was found, its front wheel bent and crooked.
Blood still seeped from the back of Sally’s head when the police found her. After examination, the coroner stated that she had died from severe head injuries, a skull fracture and a gash that made its way into the brain. In his report, the coroner counted over twenty lacerations to her head. It was determined that Sally Kandel was beaten with a sixteen-inch grocery cart handle found near the road and upon which were discovered several hairs and much blood. There was a tear measuring fourteen and a half inches in front of her jeans and into the left of the crotch area. On her right inner thigh was a jagged 3.5-by-4-centimeter bite that cut through the skin, determined to have been created after Sally had died. Part of Sally’s thumb had been cut off. And on her eyelids were two slits each about two centimeters long, also made after she died.
Richard Milone, a low-level warehouse worker scraping to get by, had never before been involved in any serious wrongdoing, although there had been some minor run-ins with the law. However, he had cleaned his car right after the murder, preparing to offer it for sale. He had indeed kept a grocery cart handle—the same one used in the murder—in his car for protection. He explained that he lost it while running in a cornfield. Nevertheless, the bulk of the case against him revolved around the testimony of dentists who felt that the bite mark on Sally Kandel’s thigh matched Milone’s cuspid tooth. However, Dr. Lowell J. Levine, a New York ondontologist, testified that the look of the teeth didn’t really match. In fact, he felt that they were closer to an abnormality found in Richard Macek’s teeth, an extremely long and sharp bicuspid tooth. Beyond this, the ritualistic cutting in the eyelids was the distinguishing symbol of Richard Macek, who had done the same thing to Paula J. Cupit, the maid at the Abbey resort. Macek had also hit women in the head before, such as twenty-four-year-old Sharon Kulisek, whom he jumped in a Laundromat. She remained in a coma for seven long days before reawakening to describe for police how she was beaten and to describe who attacked her.
Macek and I had traversed the varied planes of the Sally Kandel case as if it were a game of three-dimensional chess. Round and round, up and down, backward and forward, we went. Macek couldn’t remember. Macek remembered a detail. Then he wasn’t sure of the detail. Then he took back the detail he remembered. He hemmed, he hawed, he flirted, he changed the subject, he rambled. He whined about his wife, his case, his cell, the guards, the newspaper reporters, his lawyer, how he once struck fear into the Illinois state governor upon their meeting in the prison kitchen. He changed the subject constantly. At times he was adamant, inflexible, incorrigible. I plodded on during each four- to-six hour session, trying to stop his soliloquizing with questions of my own, then listening to him for long stretches, then trying to get him back on track. I would ask the tough questions, over and over again.
Through all this, he continued with his long letters, which had become increasingly, well, friendly. Once Macek wrote:
At different times, I’ve seen myself just pick you up and carry you into my cell. Put you on the bed, and we just layed there and talk…Yes, me laying on my back you laying on my chest just talking, anything that comes to mind. No kisses, not fondling nothing just good honest talking Why in bed? It’s one of those few places where you can actually relax in privacy and talk without being uncomfortable at all. At least it’s been one of my favorite places that and the couch also.
Overall, there were dozens of letters like this. I knew that Macek was not at all “falling in love” with me, not for one second. More, it was a combination of what he felt he was supposed to say. In his mind, a man should say these things to a woman. But he didn’t mean them within his self. It was more like a child reading words from a book in class, concentrating on pronunciation and the sound of his words rather than feeling or absorbing the true meaning of the words. But unlike a child, he had no self.
Forty-five minutes past midnight on June 9, 1977, Macek sat down in his cell and wrote me a two-page letter that was, to say the least, disconcerting. He began with the usual “I want to see you very badly. More than you can amagin.” He then went into a mixed-up rant that read: My headaches are increasing. My tempers blows ski [sky] high…My strength seems to increase 3 to 4 times.” Near the end of the page, after talking about his children and without a break to begin a new paragraph, he wrote, “Sandy I miss you so very much. I always love you always! I’m so very lonely without you…. Remember Daddy loves his little girl very much. Love Your Husband, Richard.
As I read his words, I don’t think I’ve felt anything eerier. No horror movie, no strange insect crawling over me in the night, no peculiar stranger at the door could have elicited a more visceral response from me. I seemed to have become his wife, and the two of us, the real wife and the doctor, were somehow indistinguishable to him. Sandy was a quiet, nondescript person with dark hair who doted on Richard, at least before he was put in jail. I was straightforward and had blond hair. We certainly didn’t look or act alike. How could he have mixed up the two of us? But as I thought about it, I told myself that Richard had just forgotten to whom he was writing. Thoughts somehow had melded two people into one. Lucky me.
Spring turned to summer, which turned to fall. In Madison in late October, there were little ghosts and jack-o’-lantern cutouts hung throughout the hospital. On Halloween, excited children donned their masks and costumes. In my building, witches and goblins, unable to contain their glee, paraded door to door for Halloween candy.
But Macek had his own Halloween horror story to relive. When he told me how he killed Sally Kandel, his recollection was so lucid and startling that I suggested to him that he write it down in the presence of a prison official.
So, late in the evening of November 3, 1977, with the chief jailer standing nearby as his witness, Richard Macek began to write from his cell on lined paper. With his penmanship full of careful loops making words that were perfectly legible, he wrote:
Late afternoon on the 12th of September, 1972. The weather was foggy and damp. I was driving and had to go to the bathroom. There was nothing close at the time and I stopped the car and got out and walked into the Woods to go.
There was a girl walking with her bike.
I began to talk to her. Then I hit her on the back of the head on the right side, with a black bar, like a grocery cart handle.
I took her into the field and beat her further in the head area…
She was wearing a wind breaker jacket and slacks.
She was laying on her back. Her right leg was raised higher than the other.
And I bit her on the right thigh…
I had at one time an extra pointed tooth in the right hand side of my mouth.
Along with the rest of my teeth, that extra pointed tooth was extracted with the others by Dr. Walsh an oral surgeon.
The small-town dentist himself explained that only a couple of Macek’s teeth needed pulling. But Macek exhibited one of the primary traits of a serial killer: the conniving ability to get his own way, even without violence. He convinced Dr. Walsh to yank out all of his teeth.
William J. Cowlin, the state’s attorney for McHenry County who was in charge of the Kandel case, refused to believe anything contained within the Macek confession. Unlike the small group of officials, including the FBI’s Tomaselli, who believed in Milone’s innocence, Cowlin was that tough-as-nails type who wouldn’t give credence to a murder unless it happened in front of his face. Admittedly, Macek had toyed with prison and police officials, often saying something and then denying it the next time he was interviewed. He had done this so many times that Cowlin was certain he was crying wolf. And Cowlin already had someone in jail, someone who was convicted by a jury. He didn’t want to spend any more of the state’s money on a case he saw as finished. But I believed Macek. In that confession were three salient facts that Macek could not have gathered from newspaper accounts he may have read about Sally Kandel’s murder. There was no way that Macek could have known she wore a windbreaker on the night of her death, or that she was lying on her back and her right leg was raised higher than her left leg, or that there were bite marks on her right thigh.
The sad reality is one that haunts me to this day: Milone languished in jail for decades, more than a quarter of his life wasted behind bars. I had done what law enforcement had asked me to do. I had gotten Richard Otto Macek to admit to the crime that those present in that first meeting at Waupun hospital so frantically wanted to pin on Macek. And they sat on the admission, acted as though it never happened. When my work was completed and I had logged over four hundred hours face-to-face with Richard Macek, I never received one acknowledgment for the information I’d gotten, not from Cowlin, not from Tomaselli, not from anyone. Once given the Kandel confession, they all darted away like cockroaches scattering when the light is flicked on. After years of thought upon the subject, I can conclude only that the real reason was pure ego, which pervaded everything from the prison system to the court system, ego that let an innocent man languish in a trap. It all seemed so iron-fisted to me. Milone was found guilty. Cowlin would not believe that what he had done with Milone’s case was wrong. So that was it. End of case, even if prosecutor, judge, and jury were wrong.
Fortunately, Milone had other methods with which to prove his innocence. Dental evidence presented in 1994 to the Seventh Circuit United States Court of Appeals suggested that it was Macek, not Milone, who had bitten Sally Kandel’s thigh and killed her. The evidence served up at Milone’s trial linking Milone’s dentition to the bite mark found on Sally’s thigh was sorely incorrect. The brand-new practice of forensic ondontology, what I view as the real basis of the original case against Milone, was not well refined in 1973, the date Milone first went to court. As Milone made his appeals, reliable, expert testimony in advanced forensic ondontology proved the mark on Sally’s thigh matched the teeth of Richard Macek (which Dr. Walsh, the dentist, had actually saved). Then there was nine-year-old Linda Sue Roseboom who “reaffirmed her trial testimony” that Milone’s Dodge Polara was not the car that she spied in her driveway the evening Sally Kandel was killed. In his confession, Macek wrote, “At the time, I was driving a 1964 Chevy Impala a cream color. It was a beated up on the right side. And the door outer panels were caved or pushed in.” This was the car that Linda Sue Roseboom saw. On the basis of this forensic evidence, Milone was eventually freed—after having served twenty years in jail for a crime he did not commit. He would try to reenter a life that was so mistakenly and unnecessarily interrupted and placed on hold. And though he would go on because there was nothing else to do, he would look upon that time long ago with occasional sadness…and much bitterness.
As wonderful as it was to hear that Milone was no longer stuck behind bars, it still bothers me that none of the courts ever saw Macek’s confession. Thinking back on the crimes of Richard Macek, I have come to the conclusion that his acts of homicide were not externally precipitated. No one had done anything to him to make him lash out. No one had abused him sexually as a child, nor had they taken away his house, nor had he been fired from his job. Nor had a small thing set him off—like a tax bill or the way someone looked askance at him. Nothing you might consider as having any meaning to him had gone particularly awry. As far as I could see, there was never a distinct motive to any of his crimes. Sure, there were manufactured motives. Lawyers and police speculated that Macek was a victim of severe parental abuse and that he was a sexual deviant or that he couldn’t deal with the idea of his father’s death, though these ideas were never proven.
But I have never discovered in Richard Macek a true motive, one that made sense, one that stood up to both legal and psychiatric scrutiny. I am still confounded by this killer’s chilling disregard for people, which provided me with so many occasions of uneasiness and discomfort during my examinations. A human was not human to him. In dreams and in stories, he would continue to debate whether someone was dead or alive. He really did not know the difference. Macek’s necrophilia, in fact, was not sexual, but appeared to be denial, an effort to resolve his confusion about the line between life and death. By treating the body as if it were alive, he could try, as he said, “to bring it back” by putting life into it. And even though Macek often protested that he didn’t recall his victims, it was never true amnesia or blanking out. It was an absolutely overwhelming erosion of whatever delicate psychological balance he had—from memory to thought to feelings to perception to the very muscles that controlled his portly physique.
As I went on to profile Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy, I heard less frequently from Richard Macek. His lengthy handwritten letters had slowed to a trickle of notes that eventually ceased altogether in 1980. Because serial killers respond well when institutions hold rein over them, it wasn’t surprising that the structure of incarceration was beneficial to Richard, who had become a model prisoner and was for the most part well liked by those around him. He was serving a life sentence for two murders and two attempted murders. In the middle of 1987, however, I received word by phone that Richard Macek had died. Only later when I called the prison for more information did I hear that Macek committed suicide in his jail cell. While I wondered what had precipitated the event, since Macek was comfortable in prison, I didn’t really react to his death. I had truly learned a lot. The patterns that Macek displayed, from his way of speaking to the way he killed to his thought processes, would show up in other serial killers I would encounter. Primarily, there was a pervasive hollowness to his character, one that I would see constantly in other serial murderers, one that regarded humans as worthless annoyances to be dealt with and to be forgotten. Perhaps it is best expressed in his own words:
It was death. Beating on somebody, smacked right in face, Person screamed, got hit, started to hit back. Got hit, got more infuriated. Picked up the person, slammed them into the wall, beating until death, lifeless or unconscious. Had no controllable power over me. Until seen no response, until weren’t fighting back. Person seems to change all the time. Small person, large person, huge and bulky-type person. Heads all cut up from teeth or buckle hitting person.
He wasn’t talking about himself, but he could have been when he said, “Person seems to change all the time.” That’s one of the primary things I learned about serial killers from my time with Richard Macek. They will be whatever you think they should be. So when they become violent and kill, it seems to come out of nowhere. That’s what intrigued me; that’s what made me want to learn much more. I hadn’t attached Macek to crimes other than the Kandel murder, but my original goal was really in the area of science, not in the police work of nailing a conviction. During my year with Macek, I had discovered scientific methods that I would use over and over again in speaking to a serial murderer. I had learned how to profile and interview a serial killer. I now knew how to break down his defenses to get to the heart of the matter. But where did the need to kill originate, exactly where deep inside? That’s where I knew I had to go next. Deeper and deeper inside is quite literally where my long journey would lead.