Brown's Chicken massacre

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The Brown's Chicken massacre is the popular name for a mass murder which occurred at a Brown's Chicken restaurant in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago in the United States in 1993.

On January 8, 1993, seven people were murdered at the Brown's Chicken and Pasta in Palatine. The victims included the owners, Richard E. Ehlenfeldt, 50, and his wife, Lynn W Ehlenfeldt., 49, of Arlington Heights, Illinois. Also killed were five employees: Guadalupe Maldonado, 46, of Palatine, the cook; Michael C. Castro, 16, and Rico L. Solis, 17, both Palatine High School students working there part-time; and Palatine residents Thomas Mennes, 32, and Marcus Nellsen, 31.

When Palatine police (PPD) found the bodies, it was more than 5 1/2 hours after the 9 p.m. closing. Guadalupe Maldonado's wife had called police, concerned that her husband had not returned home from work and that his car was still in the apparently-closed Brown's Chicken parking lot. Police dismissed several initial calls from family members.

When officers arrived at the building, at 168 W. Northwest Highway, they spotted the rear, employees' door open. Inside, they found the seven bodies, some face down, in a cooler and in a walk-in refrigerator.

The building no longer exists. It was razed in April, 2001, after housing a dry cleaning establishment, then standing vacant for several years with its dark windows marked with Xs. The site is currently a parking lot for Eurofresh, a store specializing in imported groceries.

[edit] Current suspects

In March of 2002, more than nine years after the murders, Anne Lockett implicated her former boyfriend, James Degorski, and his associate, Juan Luna, in the crime. In April of 2002, PPD obtained a DNA sample from one suspect and matched it to a sample of saliva from a piece of partially-eaten chicken found in the garbage two days after the night of the shooting and kept in a freezer for most of the time since the crime -- testimony at trial indicated it was not frozen for several days after discovery, and was allowed to thaw several times for examination and testing -- in the hope of an eventual match via increasingly sophisticated testing methods not available in 1993. Some of the chicken was destroyed in testing, and photographs, swabs, and DNA extract related to the testing vanished before Degorski and Luna were charged.

The PPD took the two suspects, one of them a former employee of the restaurant, into custody on May 16, 2002. The pair, who met at Palatine's Fremd High School, subsequently went to trial.

The trial had been delayed to allow defense attorneys to find the computers used to establish the DNA match between Luna and the chicken, and then reconstruct test data which had been deleted.

On March 30, 2007, the Chicago Tribune reported that jury selection in the trial had begun.[1]

On May 10, 2007, Juan Luna was found guilty of all seven counts of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison on May 17. All but one juror had voted for the death penalty for Luna, but in Illinois the vote must be unanimous, so Luna was spared the death penalty. Jim Degorski's trial has yet to be set, but might begin in June 2008.