I never saw combat when I was in Korea with the US Army, so I never had to pull the trigger with someone at the other end of the barrel of my rifle. That must be a tough thing to do. For men who have fought in combat, I imagine that most of the time, the act of shooting is a split-second decision. It’s a matter of kill or be killed. This is my conjecture. Most of the men I know who were in combat and pointed a rifle in fear or anger prefer not to talk about it.
I learned that being the last person to decide whether someone is executed is a more drawn out process. It’s not a split-second decision about someone living or dying. There’s more time to think when you’re faced with that decision; more time to question yourself and the reasons you’re doing what you’re doing. From a cynical perspective, it’s a matter of a file on my desk and little more. And that would have been the easy way to approach it, since, as governor, I was removed from the actual event, both physically and, for the most part, emotionally. But that’s not the way I did it.
And so, the case of Andrew Kokoraleis was tough for me.
Kokoraleis was convicted, along with his brother and two friends, for a series of sadistic murders in Chicago and its suburbs. Young women, total strangers to them, were abducted off the street, tortured, raped, mutilated, and eventually killed in an imagined satanic ritual. Their crimes were characterized in the media as the “Chicago Ripper” killings. The convicted killers were known as the “Ripper Crew.”
Although the Anthony Porter exoneration was troubling me, and I was still at a bit of a loss about what I could—or should—do about the death penalty, I had to set that to the side to focus on Kokoraleis, who was scheduled to be executed shortly after midnight on March 17—St. Patrick’s Day.
Kokoraleis had spent much of his adult life confined in the Pontiac Correctional Center, a grim place snug against a pleasant Central Illinois community of the same name that prefers to be known for its antique shops along the fabled Route 66. The prison opened in 1871 and now housed all death row prisoners.
As I began to study the case, I painstakingly read the detailed descriptions of the crimes. The decomposed body of the first victim, twenty-six-year-old Linda Sutton, a prostitute, was discovered in June of 1981 along a stream bank in Villa Park, a small bedroom community in Chicago’s western suburbs. Sutton, a mother of two from the West Side of Chicago had been abducted on May 23, 1981, as she walked near Wrigley Field. She had been assaulted and raped. Investigators were puzzled at first because the body was in such an advanced state of decomposition. The ultimate answer to this puzzle became the source for the nickname applied to this murder as well as the subsequent killings: a legion of parasites had invaded her body through two huge wounds in her chest, causing the rapid decay. Both of Sutton’s breasts had been sliced off.
“Ripper”—as in Jack—was the appropriate adjective.
On May 15, 1982, twenty-one-year-old Lorraine Borowski was abducted as she arrived to open the realtor’s office where she worked in Elmhurst, a Chicago suburb. Her body would not be found until five months later. On May 28, 1982, thirty-year-old Shui Mak was abducted from suburban Hanover Park. Like Borowski, her body would remain undiscovered for several months.
On June 13, 1982, police thought they had a break in the case when twenty-three-year-old Angel York reported that she had been abducted by a gang of men in a red van. They had beaten and raped her, then forced her to cut her own breasts with a knife. She had been dumped from the van on a road and left for dead. Although she had survived, police were unable to capitalize on her description of the vehicle and her attackers.
Two months later, in August, eighteen-year-old Sandra Delaware was raped and strangled in Chicago. Her body was found on the banks of the Chicago River. Her left breast had been cut off.
On September 8, thirty-year-old Rose Beck Davis, who lived in suburban Broadview, was found beaten to death behind the wooden stairs of an apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.
On September 30, a truck driver spotted a body in a field near the suburb of South Barrington, about a mile from where Shui Mak was last seen. Her family identified her body, which had a fractured skull.
On October 6, a twenty-year-old prostitute named Beverly Washington was abducted, beaten, raped, mutilated, and left for dead. An elderly man collecting aluminum cans had found her alive, but unconscious, and summoned police. Like York, she survived and gave a detailed description of the van she got into and where the attack occurred.
Four days later, on October 10, a young man stumbled across the skeletal remains of Lorraine Borowski. Her body was in an unused area of Clarendon Hills Cemetery near suburban Westmont.
On October 20, Chicago police officers stopped a reddish-orange van that matched a description given by Beverly Washington. The van was being driven by twenty-one-year-old Edward Spreitzer and belonged to Robin Gecht, a twenty-eight-year-old married contractor from Chicago. Three knives were found in the back of the van. The inside handle on the back door was missing and could only be opened by inserting a tool where the lock should have been. A sedative was found in the van that Washington identified as being similar to the one she was forced to take. Police showed Washington a photographic array and she identified Gecht as her attacker.
Spreitzer and Gecht were arrested and on the evening of November 7, 1982, Spreitzer led police officers to the suburban Villa Park home of nineteen-year-old Andrew Kokoraleis. The officers took Kokoraleis to a detective station where they questioned him that night and for the next two days. During the interrogation, Kokoraleis said, “I know you talked to Robin (Gecht). Did he tell you about all of them? All eighteen murders?”
Three days later, police arrested Thomas Kokoraleis. During questioning, he was shown a photograph of Lorraine Borowski and asked if he knew who it was. “That is the girl that Eddie Spreitzer and I killed in the cemetery,” he replied.
During their interrogations, the Kokoraleis brothers and Spreitzer all told the same story—a story that seemed almost too incredible to be true: Gecht had a powerful psychological grip on them and had planned and led the murder spree in a ritualistic fashion to honor Satan and to satisfy a perverse sexual gratification.
Ultimately, Gecht would be convicted only of the attack on Beverly Washington. In 1983, at Gecht’s trial in Cook County Circuit Court, Washington described how Gecht drugged, raped, and then forced her to cut her own breasts. She said he then cut a hole in one of her breasts and stuck his penis in it. One of her breasts had been completely cut off and the other was severely slashed. Gecht was convicted and sentenced to 120 years in prison.
In 1984, Thomas Kokoraleis was convicted in DuPage County Circuit Court of the murder of Lorraine Borowski and was sentenced to seventy years in prison. In 1985, Andrew Kokoraleis also was convicted of the Borowski murder. The prosecution also presented evidence that he had participated in the murders of Linda Sutton in 1981 and the murder of Shui Mak in 1982. Andrew Kokoraleis was sentenced to death.
A year later, in March 1986, Spreitzer was convicted in DuPage County Circuit Court of the murder of Sutton—the first victim in the gruesome spree. By the time of his trial, he had already pled guilty to the murders of Shui Mak; eighteen-year-old Sandra Delaware in August 1982; thirty-year-old Rose Beck Davis in September 1982; and the random murder of twenty-eight-year-old Raphael Torado, gunned down on a street in Chicago’s North Side in October 1982. Spreitzer also confessed to, but was not charged with, participating in the Borowski murder. Like Andrew Kokoraleis, Spreitzer also was sentenced to death.
By March 1999, fifteen years after his conviction and following more than a dozen failed court appeals, Andrew Kokoraleis was running out of legal challenges. His lawyers tried every avenue available to him to try to delay or prevent his execution. None of them worked. He had confessed to the crimes and although he had recanted, those statements were not believed.
I threw myself into all the grizzly details of the “Chicago Ripper”' murders. It was disgusting and horrifying. I personally reviewed the case file and talked to experts on both sides of the capital punishment debate as well as the prosecutors who had convicted him. I checked and double-checked and triple-checked the facts. It became obvious throughout my office that I was deeply unsettled and unsure about a case that, to many people, was open-and-shut.
Meanwhile, I was inundated by people urging me to commute Kokoraleis’s sentence. Letters were arriving daily from all over the world—Norway, Denmark, and Australia, to name a few—asking me, imploring me, to stop the execution. The letters, nearly five hundred, came handwritten in French, Japanese, German, and an array of other languages, apparently the result of the urgings of antideath penalty advocates such as the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and Amnesty International. Since January, I had received 492 letters on the death penalty—480 asking me to consider a moratorium on executions. Just twelve letters opposed a moratorium.
But no matter how hard I tried to focus just on Kokoraleis’s case, I kept thinking over and over how Anthony Porter, a mentally-challenged man, came within two days of execution, and if not for those journalism students, would have been dead and buried—an innocent man. I had been jolted into reexamining everything I believed in.
Although Kokoraleis had been convicted of committing horrible crimes against women and I was the father of five daughters, I kept thinking about the mistakes the system had made with Porter. The more time I devoted to the case, the more unsure I became about what to do.
I agonized and felt unmoored.