PONTIAC CORRECTIONAL FACILITY IS A HOLE where Illinois throws its trash. Founded as a reform school for “incorrigible boys” just after the Civil War, out on the edge of town, it devolved into a savage world apart. During the Depression, in the days before it became a maximum-security lockup, prisoners in solitary got only a daily slice of bread to eat.
Outside, its stone and red-brick buildings, encircled by miles of razor wire, are known as the Pontiac Correctional Center; inside, it is known as Thunderdome, a dark, deafening purgatory where no man, not even a monster, takes tomorrow for granted.
In a state where crime has always come easy, only the worst of the worst go to Pontiac. In the 1950s, an armed robber named James Earl Ray did time there, ten years before he killed Martin Luther King Jr. In 1978, a thousand rioting inmates killed three guards. By the 1990s, Chicago street gangs like the Latin Kings, the Black Gangster Disciples, and the Gaylords had more control over the place than the warden.
In Pontiac, getting shanked in the neck while you sleep or being sliced open with a razor blade just for wearing the wrong tattoo is considered fair play. By the time a guy gets to Pontiac, he damn well better know who to watch. Guards might look the other way; madmen might save your life.
Either way, friends and enemies aren’t always what they seem.
Tony and Dave’s plan was simple: After they did their time, these two jailbirds would blow Illinois for Wyoming, where they’d start a big marijuana farm, get rich, and live an untroubled life.
Dave owned 100 acres someplace out there in the Big Empty, where they would never be bothered by cops or squares or anybody else. He showed Tony pictures of the little farmhouse, and he had the deed in his cell. Dave had the money and Tony knew how to grow pot that they could then wholesale to his gang homeys in Chicago. It was a freakin’ sweet business plan, man. Dave was getting out of the joint first, but as soon as Tony strolled out of Pontiac with his gate money, they’d pack up Dave’s Mazda 929 and head to Wyoming, which Dave said was real beautiful, like fucking heaven. Miles and miles of nothing but your own law. Yeah, Wyoming would fill them up, these hollow guys in a hollow place with a hollow past. Tony believed him because his friend Dave was a smart guy. Damn straight. A generous guy who’d be a good partner.
Tony Majzer, already a career criminal at twenty-four, wanted it to be true in the worst way. He had never been to Wyoming, and he wasn’t even sure where the hell it was. But it sure couldn’t be as crappy as life had been for him so far.
Tony was born on July 1, 1976, in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital to an unwed, seventeen-year-old junkie. Not long after giving birth, she hung a chain with an Italian horn charm around his little neck and abandoned her child in a public park.
The baby was shoved into the bowels of the foster care system, but by some miracle, he was adopted at age four by a couple in Schiller Park, a middle-class suburb west of downtown. His adoptive dad was a shipping clerk for a local company and was known around the neighborhood as Coach, and his new mom was a good-hearted but strict office manager who had once worked for the Secret Service and came from a family of cops. They couldn’t have their own kids, so they fostered and adopted orphans and other discarded children like Tony.
Tony loved them both, especially Coach, as much as he hated the mother he never knew. His loathing for her festered in him. He blamed her for the worst parts of himself.
But Tony never really had a chance. Dyslexic, hyperactive, and angry, school was a death march. He despised anybody in authority. He started shoplifting before he could read, and the few times he got caught, he was let go.
Then at age six, he bashed another first grader in the head with a nail-studded two-by-four, just because the kid said something Tony didn’t like. At seven, he punched his second-grade teacher in the face for locking him out of the classroom.
Soon, Tony was shipped off to a special school for kids with behavior problems, kids just like him—and worse. Everything went downhill from there.
At eleven, when most kids were still collecting Care Bears and Pound Puppies, he hooked up with the Gaylords, a violent Chicago street gang. One of the oldest street gangs in the city, the Gaylords started after World War II as a mostly white, North Side softball club, but in the 1950s it grew into a greaser gang with little interest in games. In the ’60s, it evolved from a group of slicked-back-hair, bad-ass hot-rodders who rumbled over turf and girls into a full-fledged crime racket, selling drugs and guns while it protected its own invisible borders from encroaching black and Latino gangs—with murder, when necessary.
By the ’80s, the Gaylords had more than six thousand members and controlled large chunks of Chicago’s crime landscape. Kids like Tony Majzer were just what the gang needed to refresh the ranks and ensure their violent legacy. In return, they taught him to survive on the street.
At thirteen, Tony took up boxing, mostly because it was a free pass to hit somebody—or to be hit. He lost only one fight in sixteen bouts.
He was a good baseball player, too—so good, he dreamed of playing in college, or maybe even the Show, until he was shot in the knee during a drive-by.
He bounced around from one alternative school to another, almost never welcome for very long. Violence was a daily ritual for him. By the time school officials allowed him to go to a regular high school, he was a lost cause. Two months into the new school year, he pummeled a rival gang member in the hallway. He was sent to another tough alternative school that wasn’t tough enough. Finally, he was warehoused in a school for the worst thugs in the district, where he felt right at home. No proms, no student councils, no pep rallies. Just survival.
Tony grew up thin, sinewy, and tough. By the time he was seventeen, he’d been shot by rival gangsters from the Simon City Royals five times. Rather than arouse cops’ interest by going to a hospital, he plucked four bullets out of his own flesh. Six months later, when he saw his attackers on the street, he stalked them with two loaded .45s. He shot one in the head, one in the chest, and pumped three bullets into the third’s belly. He didn’t know if they died, and he didn’t care. That was just the law of his jungle.
At twenty, a drug-addicted Tony pulled his first hard time. He got eighteen months for helping a friend who burglarized a neighbor’s house. Tony looked a lot younger than he was, and, as a gangbanger, he certainly had plenty of enemies, so it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. But with an army of Gaylords in the house, he felt as safe as a skinny, white, gangster man-child could feel on his first day in prison.
One day, sitting in the weight yard at the Illinois River Correctional Center with some of his homeboys, Tony noticed an older white con, maybe in his forties, watching him. Eventually, the long-haired guy walked over and started talking small, the usual stuff between inmates.
KILLER DAVID MAUST WANTED SO BADLY TO BE NEEDED THAT HE KILLED ANYONE WHO REJECTED HIM.
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The guy said his name was David Maust. He said he was doing thirty-five years for murdering a trucker who had been screwing his wife. Killing his wife’s secret boyfriend made him a stand-up guy to most cons, but to Tony, he came off as soft and didn’t seem to know anything about the street. Dave was a big man, but Tony immediately pegged him as no threat. In fact, Tony presumed Dave needed his gang connections for protection.
A friendship sprouted. For the next year, Tony and Dave spent most days together. Dave was “a trusty,” an inmate who gains wider privileges and more freedom to wander around the prison doing certain jobs. He happily got Tony whatever he needed—soap, shampoo, smokes—and Tony liked the company. It was never sexual; Tony suspected Dave might be bent that way, but it didn’t come up. Dave just liked to fantasize out loud about resuming a normal life on the outside, or at least what passed for normal. He seemed to relish his role as the father figure to Tony and some of the other younger cons. He cast them all as players in his post-prison daydreams.
Like the Wyoming pot farm.
Eventually, Tony was paroled on his burglary beef but landed back in prison when he violated his parole. This time, they locked him up in Pontiac on another eighteen-month stretch while Dave finished his time at Illinois River and was paroled back to the world in the summer of 1999.
Back in the world, Dave traded handyman chores for a studio apartment on South Kenilworth in the sedate Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, and took other odd jobs, occasionally sending money to Tony in prison. They stayed in touch, embellishing the dream they shared and making plans for their getaway.
Just before Christmas 2000, they decided the time had come. Tony, who was now living in a halfway program and wearing an ankle bracelet, packed his bags and boarded a slow bus to Chicago. He drank a fifth of vodka on the ride, and he made himself giggle imagining what it would be like to have all the pot and money he could ever want. He was smashed when Dave picked him up at the bus depot and took him to a little diner on the down side of town, where Tony was too drunk to eat. That night, he passed out on the sofa in Dave’s tidy little apartment in Oak Park.
Because his strict mother refused to let him stay at her home, Tony stayed at Dave’s apartment. For a couple weeks, they lived like two drunken college roommates who just happened to be ex-cons.
While Dave waited for his cash to be wired—there was apparently some small hang-up with the bank, nothing serious—they partied and drove around the city on shopping sprees. Dave, who always carried a wad of cash, lavished gifts on Tony—a computer, clothes, expensive new sneakers, a television, a DVD player, and more. They went to strip clubs and taverns. Dave draped his pet boa constrictor around the shoulders of a bare-chested Tony and photographed him naked like a couple of frat boys goofing around. And they talked constantly about Wyoming, an imaginary landscape whose myth loomed larger for Tony as every day passed. As soon as Dave’s cash came through …
One night, Dave asked the veteran gangbanger Tony a macabre question: When gangsters wanted to get rid of a body, how did they do it? Tony was only too happy to share a little street secret: Paint the corpse to mask the stench of decomposition.
One night, Dave asked the veteran gangbanger
Tony a macabre question: When gangsters
wanted to get rid of a body, how did they do it?
Otherwise, Dave was usually easygoing, although he grew testy when Tony talked about his girlfriends. Once, when Tony brought an old flame with him to Dave’s apartment, Dave kicked them out. It almost seemed like he was jealous.
Finally, the grand getaway was at hand. Dave announced his money had finally arrived and decided they would leave early Sunday morning, January 7, for Wyoming.
Saturday would be the last they would see of Chicago, of the law, of their shitty old lives. Saturday would be their last hurrah.
They rose early that morning and went to breakfast at a Denny’s in Franklin Park. Over eggs and pancakes they made travel plans. Tony was ready to hit the road. No, Tony was past ready.
“Hey, we gotta do the contest before we go,” Dave told Tony.
“What contest?” Tony wondered.
Didn’t matter much. He liked a challenge.
“I promised to give $450,000 to the kid who can drink the most shots of hundred-proof booze in fifteen minutes without puking or passing out.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, man, I’m serious. Three kids tried it already. It’s your turn now.”
“Yeah? What’d they do?”
“The record stands at fourteen right now,” Dave said.
“Fourteen shots? Fifteen minutes?”
“And no puking or passing out.”
“I just have to drink more than fourteen shots and I get, what, about a half-mill?”
Maust smiled and nodded. “Hundred proof. Your choice.”
Tony didn’t have to think very long.
“I’m in,” he said.
David Edward Maust was nobody’s friend.
Not because he was unfriendly, diffident, or disagreeable—although he was, at times, all those things.
But because he always tried to kill them.
David Edward Maust was nobody’s friend.
Not because he was unfriendly, diffident,
or disagreeable—although he was,
at times, all those things.
But because he always tried to kill them.
He was born April 5, 1954, in the small town of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, to feuding, dysfunctional parents. His abusive father came and went from the household with every blustery fight. His mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital for a time. And David, one of four children, was never quite right, even before a horrible fall that many believe left him brain-damaged as a toddler.
Growing up, he was often forced to stay outside the house until suppertime—and would be brutally punished if he was five minutes late. He once tried to set fire to the sheets in his little brother’s crib and later tried to drown him in a pond.
As a young boy, his mother often called him into her bed, where she stroked his body, French-kissed him, and forced him into weird sex. Days after divorcing in 1963, David’s mother tried to send him away with his father, who refused his skinny, blond son. So she packed up her kids and moved to Chicago.
A few months later, she committed her nine-year-old son to the Chicago State Hospital, a dreary children’s asylum for violent, disturbed, and retarded kids. She told him she would return when there was enough food for him—but told doctors he was a murderous freak. For the next four years, she visited David only when the courts forced her, although he often sat day after day at the window during visiting hours, watching for her to come up the long walk to the asylum’s front door. When asked, he would make excuses for her—for himself—such as “her back is bothering her” or “she is sick today.”
He tried to escape several times, but he was always captured. The asylum’s staff described David as a reliable, sensitive, and appealing child with a profound fear of abandonment and rejection.
But the manias, delusions, and compulsions that would mark him for the rest of his life had already begun to harden inside him.
At thirteen, with barely two years of schooling, David was transferred to a children’s home not far from his mother’s house—and she promptly moved without giving a forwarding address. At fifteen, he used an electrical cord to nearly choke a friend at the home to death when the boy wouldn’t play a drinking game with him.
David was immediately sent back to the asylum, where a psychiatrist diagnosed him with a dangerous schizoid personality, but he didn’t stay long. A few weeks later, David escaped and never looked back.
He tracked down his mother, who wielded a knife and threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave her house. He drifted among odd jobs and lived with different relatives for a year until his mother convinced him to enlist in the U.S. Army at age seventeen—and made him promise to send her all his pay. Why not? he figured. I owe her for … well, she needs the money.
David got out of basic training on November 19, 1971, and shipped out to Fort Ord in California, to be trained as a cook’s helper. He hadn’t been there but a couple weeks when he saw two young brothers near the front gate, trying to make a buck by shining soldiers’ shiny black shoes. Promising them twenty dollars to help him deliver a message, he took them to a vacant field nearby and started to choke them. One escaped, screaming bloody murder, and David fled. For whatever reason, he was never questioned about the attack and a year later was shipped to an American base in Germany.
But the change of scenery didn’t lessen David’s homicidal urges. They worsened. In once incident, he stabbed a seventeen-year-old boy, who never reported the attack. David had dodged yet another bullet, but his luck wouldn’t hold much longer.
In 1974, twenty-year-old David met Jimmy McClister, the thirteen-year-old stepson of a U.S. Army sergeant on his base, at a bowling alley. They became fast friends, but for reasons David could never explain, four months later he tied the boy to a tree in a forest, beat him to death with a piece of lumber, and buried the body under some leaves and branches.
Police found the poorly hidden body. After witnesses linked David to Jimmy, he was court-martialed for murder. His defense? David claimed he had unintentionally caused Jimmy to wreck while riding a moped they had stolen. The resulting injuries killed him, and David panicked, burying his friend under some woodland debris.
If David’s story seemed preposterous, the witnesses against him—those familiar with the relationship—were even worse. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and larceny and sentenced to four years in Fort Leaven-worth.
In prison, David suddenly had to face some dark truths about himself, particularly his twisted sexuality. He didn’t consider himself gay, although deep down, he felt sex with a woman would make him unfaithful to his mother. David had dated women, but never had sex with them; he never initiated sexual contacts with men, although he’d sometimes been forced into sex with other inmates. Voices inside his head thrashed it out endlessly.
He was attracted to another inmate, Bert, and they grew close. David was paroled in 1977 after less than three years, and while he waited for Bert to get out, he visited his mother to get his Army pay. She had spent all but twenty-five bucks on herself. She enraged him all over again.
Bert eventually joined David on the outside, but the old demons came along. Before they parted ways forever, David tried to stab Bert—rushing him, nearly eviscerated, to the hospital afterward—and later attempted to shoot him with a misfiring gun. Both incidents went unreported, but even after Bert fled for his life, David tried in vain to win him back.
By 1979, David found he could make good money and satisfy his perverse jones in kiddie porn. He paid kids to pose nude or have sex with other boys, then sold the pictures. One night, David stabbed a companion in a frenzied sexual rush and was arrested for attempted murder. Although the man testified vividly against him, David was acquitted. Incredibly, after at least a half-dozen near-fatal attacks and a murder, he had paid almost nothing for his sins.
But his compulsions were catching up to him.
In 1981, while prowling the streets of Wood Dale, Illinois, in his Blazer, David spied a kid he knew, fifteen-year-old Donald Jones. He called Jones over to his truck and offered him a hundred and fifty bucks to sell some pot. Jones agreed.
As part of the ruse, David drove Donald to an abandoned quarry near Elgin, where the two took some beer down to a secluded spot on the water’s edge. There, David punched the kid several times, tied his wrists and ankles with shoelaces, and forced him to drink several beers. As it began to rain, David stripped Donald naked and stabbed him hard in the belly.
“I’m only fifteen years old,” Donald whimpered. “Please don’t kill me!”
He threw the bloodied boy into the water, still alive but unconscious. Donald thrashed around for a few moments before he drowned. David pushed his floating body out into deeper water, buried the knife, and went back to his Blazer, where he calmly loaded his gear under the curious eye of a local cop.
Two days later, Donald Jones’s corpse was fished out of the murky water at the bottom of the quarry. David was questioned, but investigators found no reason to hold him.
The heat was on, so David packed his bags and headed for Texas in December 1981.
He’d barely been on the island of Galveston a week when he picked up a teenager outside a 7-11 by promising him an oil-rig job. Instead, David took the boy back to his hotel, where he tied him up and blindfolded him with his own T-shirt.
But David was unable to subdue the kid, so he cracked his skull three times with a hefty steel pipe.
The boy wasn’t dead, but David left him tied up on the bed, puking and bleeding for almost three hours. A trickle of blood from the boy’s right ear scared David, who inexplicably decided to release the kid. He drove the boy to a local park, gave him five bucks, and drove away.
But David wouldn’t be able to dodge this bullet.
Police arrested him. After a year in jail awaiting trial, he was convicted of assault on a child and sentenced to five years in prison, but he had barely settled into his cell at the prison in Huntsville when his whole twisted world turned upside down: David Maust, now twenty-nine years old, was indicted for the murder of Donald Jones, the fifteen-year-old boy he had stabbed and drowned in an Illinois quarry.
David was extradited to Chicago in 1983, but there was found to be mentally unfit to stand trial. For eleven years, David was bounced through several different Illinois mental hospitals before he was finally judged competent to be put on trail.
“I have been thinking about Donald Jones a lot,” David wrote in a jailhouse diary. “And I have been thinking about the bad things I did in my life, and now I would like to have the death sentence. …
“I sometimes would think there was still hope for me; that I could have a family of my own to love. But now my hope is just about gone, and these things I cannot have. But I would still like to have had my own family, and if I would have had my own son I would never have put him in a State Mental Hospital. I would keep my son with me, and I would love him with all my heart, and I would help my son with his life, and I would be there when he needed me. …
“So on May 13, a Friday, in the year 1983, I thought it would be best if I told the truth for the first time in my life. For the murder of Donald Jones, I want the death penalty.”
Thus, it was easy for David Edward Maust to plead guilty to Jones’s murder. He didn’t get his death wish, though: He was sent to Illinois River Correctional Center to serve thirty-five years for a killing he readily admitted.
David’s demons were bigger than he was. Soon, he was pining for companionship, playing the father figure, best buddy, and surrogate dreamer with the troubled boys all around him. They became the family he never had … and could never keep alive.
He didn’t tell anybody the truth about murdering Donald Jones. It was too dangerous to admit to killing a child in the joint. Instead, he made himself a hero, a cuckolded husband who merely defended his marital property against an interloper. Yeah, that was better. He wrote in his journal:
“It’s true; I did play games in my mind—just lies I would tell younger inmates so that I could get to know them and have someone I could do things with and share my days with. …
“It’s true, I did like being around the younger inmates because I liked listening to the words they used and listening to what was important to them, like how they talked about their love for their families and the exciting cool things they did with their friends while growing up at home because I missed out on a lot of that and so it was cool to listen to.
“I enjoyed my days of caring about them, being there for them and helping them make it through prison with nobody causing them a bad time.”
One of those boys was Anthony Majzer, who quickly became David’s next best friend.
Worse, David—a man who’d already killed two young men and attacked several others—would only serve five of his thirty-five years before he was unleashed again on an unsuspecting world.
And he wasn’t finished.
After breakfast, Tony and Dave went back to the apartment where Dave peeled a hundred dollar bill off the roll in his pocket and gave it to Tony.
“Go get the stuff and bring it back,” he said.
Tony drove Dave’s Mazda to a package store in nearby Schiller Park and bought a fifth of Smirnoff and a case of Budweiser. He even drove past a building where he thought he might like to open a nightclub with the money he was going to win. He picked up an old flame and fucked her before he returned to the apartment, thinking the whole time how much he was going to love being rich.
Dave was watching football on TV when he got back. The Oakland Raiders were playing the Miami Dolphins. Tony put the vodka in the freezer and popped a couple cold beers while they watched the game.
There, on the couch during the game, Dave leaned over and tried to kiss Tony on the cheek. Tony pushed him away and told him in blunt terms he wasn’t gay.
“If you do it again,” Tony said gravely, “I’ll kill ya.”
Dave apologized and swore it would never happen again.
After the game, Dave stood up.
“Okay, let’s get this contest going,” he said.
Tony sat at the kitchen table. Dave handed him a personal check for $450,000, with Tony’s name already typed in. Only the signature line was blank.
“It could be yours, man, if you beat the record,” he teased.
“If this check doesn’t clear,” Tony joked, “I’m coming back here to kill you.”
Dave started to pour the chilled vodka into a shot glass, but Tony waved him off.
“Not that way,” he said. “Put it all in one glass.”
Dave smiled. “One glass? You sure?”
“Fuck yeah.”
Dave measured fifteen shots into a water glass and slid it across the table to Tony. They both glanced at the cheap clock on the kitchen wall as Tony took a big swallow. He didn’t need fifteen minutes. He gulped the entire glass in less than three minutes.
“Okay, now no puking or passing out for another fifteen minutes,” Maust said ominously, rising from the table and going back to the sofa behind Tony, who kept his eyes on the ticking clock. His mind, not yet clouded by the vodka, was all tangled up in his dream nightclub, the passing seconds, Wyoming, the money …
Six minutes passed, then seven. Tony exhaled a sweet metal tang, and his belly started to burn. Eight minutes. He looked at the check and tried to envision his club in the dark, all decked out in neon and women and music … nine minutes … and he just wanted to be gone already, on the way to Wyoming, where he could live high and rich and be a kid again …
Tony really didn’t feel the first blow to the back of his head.
Nor the second.
But before a third vicious jolt cracked his head, he pivoted to see David land one across his forehead with a foot-long steel rod, possibly a weight-lifting bar.
“What the fuck?” Tony hollered as he crumpled to the floor. Blood dribbled down his face, drenching his white cardigan and seeping into the carpet. He was dazed but conscious.
Looking insane, Dave continued to whale on Tony, who curled into a ball to try to fend off the blows and screamed, “Wait, we’re friends! We’re friends!”
Suddenly, Dave stopped his fierce assault as if he’d snapped out of a brutal trance. He threw the bar on the kitchen table and slumped into a chair.
But Tony wasn’t waiting for whatever came next. Woozy from the beating and the booze, he summoned the focus to kick Dave’s chair, sending him sprawling on the floor. In a second, he pounced on Dave and whipped a knife from his pocket—a knife Dave had just bought him.
“Motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you!” he seethed, pressing his blade against Dave’s throat. He had lost too much blood and wobbled on his feet.
Dave admitted there was no money, no farm, no house … no Wyoming. It was all a lie.
No money? Tony felt faint and cold.
“I need to warm up,” Tony said, still holding the knife on Dave. “Put some hot water in the tub.”
Dave drew a hot bath and Tony locked himself in the steamy bathroom with his knife and the telephone. His blood trickled into the water as he slipped into the tub, trying to warm up from the shock. He dipped his index finger in his seeping wounds and wrote his name and address on the tub’s tile, then rinsed it away. If I die and they search for old blood stains, he thought, they’ll find it.
Then he dialed the phone. His father answered. Tony told him he’d been jumped by some gangbangers and was in bad shape.
“I don’t know if I’ll make it,” he said, comforted by his father’s voice. “But I love you.”
He dried off, dressed, and then went back out to the living room. Dave was waiting, scared. He had no place to run. In a flicker of clarity, Tony realized he needed to get to a hospital, and Dave would have to take him.
“You’re taking me to the hospital,” Tony said, holding the knife on Dave again.
“Please don’t tell anybody what happened,” Dave begged. “Please.”
Tony prodded Dave to get going, forcing him into the car through the passenger side and holding the knife against his neck all the way to Gottlieb Memorial on North Avenue.
In the emergency room, Tony underwent several CT scans and X-rays of his skull. The tight skin across his skull was shredded, exposing the bone beneath. He was suddenly half-deaf in one ear and would soon develop a lazy eye and migraines. While doctors sewed up his gashes with forty-eight staples and twenty-eight stitches, Dave went to coffee with Tony’s distraught parents, playing the role of hero and embellishing the cover story even more.
The medical staff wanted Tony to spend the night for observation, but he refused. He didn’t trust hospitals or cops, and he was due back at his Wisconsin halfway house in the morning; the Wyoming trip was clearly not the escape plan he had hoped. Still unwelcome at his parents’ home—even after a ruthless bludgeoning—Tony made a decision that cast some doubt on his survival instincts: He went home with David Maust.
Not to a hotel.
Not to a homeless shelter.
Not to a real friend’s house.
Not to a bench at the bus terminal.
Not even to the secluded back booth of an all-night diner.
He was returning to his would-be killer’s turf to spend the rest of the night. His only hope was to make the morning bus going back to the halfway house.
They left the hospital sometime after midnight. Dave drove while a woozy, aching Tony held the knife. Dave apologized profusely on the way home, and Tony wasn’t sure what to think. Confusion was already screwing with his damaged head. Dave was his friend, he thought. Maybe it was a brain tumor or a flashback, Tony thought. Maybe he just snapped. Maybe it was temporary insanity. Maybe … Tony wanted desperately to believe something went terribly haywire with his friend and that whatever it was had passed as abruptly as it had surfaced. He didn’t want to think he had been so totally duped by a friend.
Back at the apartment, a still-wary Tony helped clean up his own blood, which had pooled in a great circle on the floor and was spattered on everything.
Even more baffling than his decision to go home with Dave was his decision to share his bed that night, but he wanted to keep a close eye on the man who tried to kill him. That night, he didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time, aware of Dave’s slightest movement.
Even more baffling than Tony’s decision to go
home with Dave was his decision to share his
bed that night, but he wanted to keep a close
eye on the man who tried to kill him.
The next morning, Dave dropped him off at his parents’ home in Schiller Park, and they never saw each other again. Coach drove Tony to Wisconsin. On the way, the son told the father what had really happened.
“You’re not making this up?” Coach asked, incredulous.
“No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“He was right there.”
Embarrassed, confused, and afraid, Tony begged his dad to stay away from David Maust and not tell the cops anything. Dave was dangerous and unpredictable, he warned. Besides, in Tony’s world, you stayed away from cops and took care of your own business in your own way. More than once, he thought about sending some old gang buddies to pay a visit to the Oak Park apartment.
In the coming weeks, when Tony called to try to convince Dave to pay his $8,000 hospital bill, Dave always hung up. One time when he called Dave’s apartment, a kid answered.
“Get away from David,” Tony warned him. “He will kill you.”
The boy scoffed. Dave was a good guy and would never hurt him, he said. He wouldn’t listen. He, too, thought he knew the real Dave.
Two months after the attack, Tony finally reported it to the Oak Park Police Department, but Dave denied everything. With no other witnesses or evidence, the cops chalked it up to a gay lover’s quarrel between two worthless ex-cons and walked away.
Once again, astoundingly, David Maust had eluded any responsibility for his crimes.
And once again, a world of new friends lay before him.
David Maust stayed in his Oak Park apartment for a couple more years. A neighbor once asked him about a strange blood trail leading from one of his broken windows and a foul odor outside his apartment, but David had a ready explanation about a fistfight with his son—who didn’t exist.
In February 2003, Maust moved to a rented house on Ash Street in Hammond, Indiana, a gray and gritty steel town just across the state line from Chicago. He went straight to his grisly work.
On May 2, 2003, Maust killed nineteen-year-old Nicholas James, a coworker he had befriended at the trophy shop where he worked.
“I just went after him,” Maust wrote in his journal later. “I don’t know why, I just did. I planned to kill him three times but talked myself out of it.
“I came up behind him. I hit him in the head. I hit him with a baseball bat. Not a real bat. It was a souvenir. It had lead in it. I hit him once. After the first blow he was out of it, but he was still moving, so I hit him again. He was still moving. I hit him again and again.”
Maust tore up a concrete floor in the rented house’s dank basement. He covered Nicholas James’s naked corpse with blue house paint, wrapped him in plastic, and buried him in the hole, which he covered in concrete.
Later that summer, Maust met thirteen-year-old Michael Dennis and sixteen-year-old James Raganyi, a couple of runaways. He gave them pot, money, and booze. He took them bike riding and to ballgames. He wanted badly to be their father and their friend.
On September 10, both boys came to Maust’s house for liquor, which he supplied happily. And when the two boys passed out on David Maust’s couch, he strangled them both, duct-taped their naked bodies in black plastic sheeting and buried them in a basement hole he had dug five days earlier beside Nicholas James’s hidden tomb. And, again, he concealed their graves with a new concrete slab.
“They didn’t feel nothing,” he wrote in his journal.
When the boys were reported missing, their trail led cops to Maust’s Ash Street house, where they had been seen hanging around. When questioned, Maust was friendly and cooperative. He let investigators wander around the place, but they found nothing.
But Detective Ron Johnson, a missing-persons investigator for the Hammond police, got a cold feeling from Maust. The ex-con’s odd smile haunted the veteran cop, but more important cases demanded his attention.
Months later, Maust’s land-lord mentioned some new concrete work in the basement, and Johnson had a bad feeling. With the owner’s permission, Johnson and two cops drilled a hole in the floor.
Coffin flies flew out.
Almost thirty years after he killed Jimmy McClister in Germany, more than twenty years after he killed Donald Jones in Elgin, Illinois, and more than three years since he tried to kill Anthony Majzer, David Maust’s luck finally ran out.
His case never went to trial. In a November 2005 plea bargain, Maust avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. He received three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
SERIAL KILLER DAVID MAUST’S PIPE-WIELDING SURPRISE ATTACK ON TONY MAJZER LEFT A WEB OF UGLY SCARS—AND A DEEPER MISTRUST OF FRIENDS AND STRANGERS ALIKE.
Ron Franscell
Maust was extraordinarily candid about his life and crimes, as if by finally saying things out loud, he might unburden himself.
He told investigators that he had planned to hide Anthony Majzer’s body in the wall of a closet in the Oak Park apartment. He’d even bought hundreds of pounds of cement to do the job in Oak Park, but when he couldn’t kill Anthony, he ended up hauling the cement to the new house in Hammond—and used it instead to bury the three boys he killed there.
AFTER HIS FAILED ATTACK ON TONY MAJZER, DAVID MAUST MOVED TO A RENTED HOUSE IN HAMMOND, INDIANA, WHERE HE BURIED THE CORPSES OF THREE TEENAGE BOYS. THEIR GRAVES WERE DISCOVERED BY LOCAL POLICE IN 2003.
Hammond, Indiana, Police Department
And in neat, meticulous script, he started handwriting a voluminous journal about his childhood, his sins, his demons, and his perverse psychology. It eventually spanned more than 1,200 pages.
At Maust’s sentencing, his own brother told the judge that David had tried to kill him twice.
“I think anyone who does such crimes should pay with their life,” David’s brother said.
A clinical and forensic psychologist who examined Maust found him to be a unique specimen. “In fact, one would be hard-pressed to design a developmental sequence more likely to produce a profoundly disturbed, relationship-ambivalent, and aggression-vulnerable individual than the childhood experienced by David Maust,” he told the court.
Later, David’s defense lawyer added his own perspective.
“There is a stereotypical vision of serial killers—a person without a shred of conscience,” he told a reporter. “David had one. He was capable of horrific violence, obviously, but he was also capable of genuine contrition. He was genuinely sorry right up until the time he did it again.”
This son of a psychotic, narcissistic mother and an abusive, often absent father, this child who had been dumped in a “snake pit” asylum at age nine, this pathetic man who desperately wanted to mean something to someone was certainly going to pay for his sins.
But on his own terms.
In county jail while awaiting transfer to the prison system, he twice tried suicide by stabbing himself with a pencil, although he recovered both times.
On January 19, 2006—the day he was to be transferred to prison—he finally succeeded. Barely two months after his sentencing, David Edward Maust was found hanging in his Lake County Jail cell. He had braided a bed sheet into a noose. He died at fifty-one.
Maust left a seven-page suicide note that again expressed his deep remorse for killing five young men and said he had considered writing a letter to his latest victims’ parents, telling them where to find the bodies, but decided against it.
“Dying is not my first choice,” the note said, “but it is the right thing to do. For when I look in the eyes of the mother’s [sic], I can feel the pain of their sorrow and I’m so very sorry for the pain they feel.”
He also longed, as always, for his mother.
“I wish my mother would come and get me,” he said. “But I know she won’t. I wish she would come and take me home.”
His self-loathing was on full display when his thick journal became public.
“I am the evilest person to live on this earth and to save the taxpayer’s money, I should’ve been destroyed long ago,” he wrote.
If there were other dead boys out there, Maust didn’t say. When police searched the Oak Park apartment, they saw no evidence of any burials, even though some people remain convinced Maust likely killed more than the five boys he admitted to.
But among Maust’s many handwritten admissions was this:
“On January 6, 2001 (Saturday—late in the afternoon), I tried to kill Anthony Majzer, a 25-year-old I met in prison.
“I wanted to build a life with Anthony as his friend and be there for him and hope he would be there for me but Anthony was not going to let that happen because he was never going to change his ways. You see, I wanted to care about him and help him in life because he had all kinds of problems and so I was hoping he would come live with me so I would also have someone to do things with but he only wanted to use me for what he could get and go away.
“An [sic] it’s true that I only met Anthony because I lied to him and told him ‘I had lots of money from selling drugs.’ I was hoping in time I could turn that lie into the truth as we became better friends but Anthony wanted me to support him. So that Saturday night or should I say late afternoon I tried to get him drunk and then I beat his head in with a pipe but then I diceded [sic] not to kill him and took him to the hospital.
“That night when we got back I told him the truth about how there was no money. After that he started blackmailing me for money or he tried to, but I changed my phone number so he would think I moved and I never heard from him again.
“That night we came back from the hospital we slept together with are [sic] clothes on, but I did have naked pictures of both him and Kenneth [another of Maust’s earlier infatuations]. I had about 20 pictures each of Anthony and Kenneth, but only half were naked pictures and I wanted the pictures because they were friends of mine and every once in a great while I would look at them. …
“I was a very lonely person at times and would pray that God would send someone to be my friend and live with me.…”
Today, Anthony Majzer blames himself for three dead boys, maybe more. He’s convinced the young kid he warned on David Maust’s phone is dead, too.
He wonders why he didn’t kill David Maust when he had the chance.
Tony was watching television in a federal prison in Minnesota when the news of Maust’s arrest first broke. He felt ill, then he cried.
AFTER A LIFETIME OF ABANDONMENT, CRIME, AND VIOLENCE, EX-CHICAGO GANG-BANGER TONY MAJZER SAYS HIS GREATEST MOTIVATION FOR STAYING STRAIGHT IS HIS SON ETHAN AND SOON-TO-BE-WIFE CARA.
Ron Franscell
After Maust was sentenced, Tony even plotted how he might be able to commit a crime and be sent to the same prison, where he would kill his tormenter. He tried to tell the cops about Maust again, but he was a convict, and they simply didn’t trust anything he had to say, so he gave up.
Then the nightmares about those faceless dead boys started. Tony began to fantasize about how Maust’s corpse might have looked.
Tony and Dave had been too similar for Tony’s comfort. Abandoned children with profoundly flawed mothers and absent fathers. An unbearable yearning for a real family. Violence. Poor education. Emotional issues galore. Prison experience. Contentment on the far edge of society.
In 2005, on parole for his federal charge of being a felon in possession of guns, Tony met his current girlfriend. They had a son, Ethan, two years later and are making plans to marry someday soon. He finally has his family, and they have become his sole reason for staying straight.
Tony’s been clean for two years, and for the sake of his son, he works hard to keep his criminal past—and his demons—from coming back. He got into a trade school for cabinet-making and now lives in a tidy apartment in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
David Maust still haunts him, but the dreams aren’t as frequent now. Tony’s shaved head bears a web of grotesque scars where Maust beat him nearly to death. And some nights, fewer than before, he allows himself to sink into bouts of self-blame.
He is agonizingly aware that his own choices in life make him a less sympathetic victim, and he can live with that.
While victims often sort through their anger and guilt by forgiving their attackers, Tony hasn’t forgiven David Maust. He hasn’t even forgiven himself. He’s now locked in a prison of his own making.
“It’s just hard now to know what’s true,” Tony says. “David Maust was the only guy who ever pulled the wool over my eyes. That’s what I live with every single day. My life sucked, but I have to believe these kids … these kids had a better shot than I ever did. It’s so unfair. I feel like I let them down, and they know it.”
