The Lost and the Found

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2010-10-12-ct-met-serial-killer-bodies-20101011-story.html

Indiana coroners press to identify 3 young men slain by 1980s Chicago serial killer

Steve Schmadeke, Tribune reporter

October 12, 2010

n a cool October day in 1983, Henry Hansen and his wife, Gladys, returned to an Indiana farm where for years they'd had luck finding mushrooms sprouting under the old oak trees.

But this time they found something else entirely — two skulls lying together north of a dilapidated barn off U.S. Highway 41 just across the Illinois state line in Newton County, records show.

Police soon found the remains of four young men — all with their pants around their ankles, one with hands and head severed — and eventually determined that the barn had been used as a torture chamber by serial killer Larry Eyler.

Eyler, a Chicago house painter, confessed to 21 slayings before dying in prison in 1994 of AIDS-related complications. He was on death row in Illinois for the 1984 murder of Danny Bridges, a 15-year-old Uptown prostitute whose dismembered body was discovered when a suspicious janitor cut open a trash bag outside Eyler's Rogers Park apartment building.

Three decades later, at least four young men Eyler confessed to slaying in Illinois and Indiana remain unidentified. Two Indiana coroners working near the Illinois border hope to change that, recently launching efforts to identify three of them using DNA.

The Cook County medical examiner's office, which the Tribune has reported had one unidentified victim, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Indiana coroners plan to submit the DNA samples to a national criminal database and to missing-person databases and also use the DNA to compare with samples from families who believe the victims might be their missing loved ones.

Eyler was primarily a "rage killer" who murdered hitchhikers or young men he picked up in bars after quarreling with his married boyfriend, said Kathleen Zellner, the Oak Brook attorney who handled his appellate case and then found herself, over hundreds of hours, coaxing him to give details of all the murders. A Hollywood film on the story is reportedly being developed.

Zellner met this year with the Jasper and Newton County coroners, answering their questions for about four hours. "I was impressed with these Indiana investigators, that they were pursuing it," she said.

It hadn't always been that way.

In Newton County, the remains of two of Eyler's victims from the farm property were placed inside battered bankers boxes and apparently forgotten about for decades. Scott McCord, a full-time paramedic, found the two boxes labeled "Victim A" and "Victim B" after being elected county coroner two years ago and made identifying them "my personal mission."

McCord began referring to the remains as "my kids" and named them "Adam" and "Brad," hoping that by giving them an informal identify, it would be tougher to forget about them. He sent bones for analysis at a state lab and plans to send smaller samples to a Texas lab for DNA testing. He plans to submit the samples to the national database and also check them against samples from a family who believes Victim B may be a relative.

"I want to get them home," McCord said. "They don't belong here. They don't belong in my office. Somewhere out there is a mother or a father or a sister or a brother. They have to be missing these kids."

He doesn't have much to work with. The investigative reports from the time number only a dozen or so pages, all the evidence they refer to — the Hush Puppies boots with side buckle, the red-and-white belt with the word "Devil" sown in — is missing, and the original investigator is dead, McCord said.

What remains in the records paints a horrific picture of the last moments of the four who were slain at the abandoned farmhouse. Two of the victims were identified — Michael Bauer, a 23-year-old pizza deliverer last seen taking out the trash at his parent's Portage Park home, and John Bartlett, 19, who was staying with his sister in Chicago after being discharged from the Army. A crime scene photo shows a green garden hose Eyler used to bind his victims looped over what appears to be a rafter inside the now-demolished barn where four men were stabbed to death.

In his three-page handwritten confession to the murder of Victim A, who Eyler described as "an unidentified black male in his late teens or early 20s," Eyler lays out what was a typical murderous pattern that began with a fight with his boyfriend.

Angry after the fight, Eyler drove to Terre Haute and encountered a hitchhiker. He offered the man $75 to tie him up and perform a sex act on him, then gave him vodka and a sedative as they drove to the farm. Eyler tied up the man in the barn and put a bandage over his eyes.

"I said, 'OK (expletive) make your peace with God,'" Eyler wrote. "After waiting 4-5 minutes, I stabbed him repeatedly in the stomach and chest. He slumped forward, and I knew he was dead."

In a strange addendum, Eyler writes that "when I made a grave for this individual I separated him from the other three bodies because I did not think it was proper to bury this person next to the three Caucasian men."

"Not only was he a psycho killer, but he was a racist as well," McCord said.

Three days before mushroom hunters found the four bodies in 1983, a farmer found human remains in a field in neighboring Jasper County, the partial skeleton of a man Eyler later confessed to slaying. County Coroner Andrew Boersma has spent the last four years trying to identify the man, who is thought to have been in his early 20s with a slight build and reddish-brown, shoulder-length hair.

He was wearing jeans and a gray hooded jacket, Boersma said, and investigators found a Zippo cigarette lighter with a female name written on it. Boersma is not releasing the name, hoping that family members will be able to identify it.

"I believe this young man needs to find his family and his remains be returned," said Boersma, who also operates a funeral home. "We set out on this adventure to try and gather all the information we can."

Boersma has also struggled with finding records. "That's the way it was back then," he said. "It was the good old fellas — everybody knew everybody. Now we have to take better records. I know I spent days fishing through microfilm looking for (old records,) and I was glad for what little I've got."

DNA evidence has been gathered on the man's remains. Boersma, after several false hits, is somewhat hopeful that DNA supplied by a family will yield a match. He is now waiting for tests to be completed. And unlike in Newton County, where the remains now rest in two taped-shut-and-sealed blue plastic containers, most of the unidentified man's remains are buried at McKeever Cemetery, where a cemetery plot was donated.

Paul David Ricker, the officer who took the call of human remains being found, raised money with some other police officers to buy a cemetery headstone, Boersma said. It is inscribed with the date the bones were found — Oct. 15, 1983.

There is no name, just "John Doe," he said.

sschmadeke@tribune.com