When he was sentenced to death for the murder of an Uptown boy prostitute, police and prosecutors thought they had brought an end to a long series of gruesome homosexual murders. But the killing hasn’t stopped, and now Eyler is returning to court with a s
In a Rogers Park alley on August 21, 1984, Joe Balla, a building janitor, made a horrible discovery. Balla, a native of Hungary, arrived at his building at 6 AM intending to take the garbage out to the alley in time for the usual Tuesday morning pickup. As he approached his dumpsters, however, he saw that they had been filled with gray Hefty bags. Balla knew his tenants well–they used cheaper bags–so it was immediately clear to him that this was garbage left by a stranger.
But it was thanks to Joe Balla that one of the most notorious figures in local criminal history was taken off the streets. Janitors from neighboring buildings had seen the man who threw the bags into the dumpster, and one of them led police to the apartment of Larry Eyler. Eyler, then 31, was a housepainter who worked intermittently, a weight lifter who was fond of Marine Corps T-shirts (though he had never served in the military), a man of normal appearance who did not seem to have much of a plan for the future. In certain circles he was already well-known, a suspect in the murders of 23 young men whose bodies had turned up in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Many of the victims had links to gay communities in Indiana and Illinois.
There were some significant differences between this string of murders and the ones that Larry Eyler had been suspected of. Eyler’s alleged victims were stabbed, and as many as 16 of them may have been murdered within 12 months’ time. The other victims were strangled, and their killer seemed less driven, sometimes waiting more than a year between one murder and the next. Still, the similarities were also striking. Both killers concentrated on gay victims and both dumped bodies off Interstate 70 and U.S. 40, two highways that run roughly parallel from Terre Haute to Indianapolis and east to Ohio. Several of the strangler’s victims were found not far from Richmond, Indiana, where Larry Eyler’s mother had lived. These facts gave rise to the theory that the murders were all connected; perhaps the stabber and the strangler were part of a team that did not retire after Larry Eyler went off to death row.
At the time of Zellner’s offer, Jack O’Malley had been Cook County state’s attorney for only a few weeks. Andy Knott, O’Malley’s press secretary, says that his boss sought input from family members of suspected Eyler victims and a variety of law enforcement officials, and that the decision the state’s attorney reached was “Screw it. Larry Eyler can sit and rot. He can manipulate everybody else but he is not manipulating us. . . . A bird in the hand is better than 20 in the bush. We put him on death row. Nobody else did. We’re not walkin’ away from that.” O’Malley called a press conference, denounced the proposal, and called Eyler a butcher.
Rossiter goes on to say that there was a strong history of alcoholism in the family and that Eyler was “the victim of extreme physical and mental abuse” at the hands of his natural father (who died when Eyler was 18) and his three stepfathers. In his affidavit, Rossiter does not spell out what precisely was done to Eyler, but in a recent interview he said it was one of the worst cases of child abuse he had seen in 20 years in the field. Zellner is bound by an agreement with her client not to divulge the precise details of the abuse until such time as they are required in court. Eyler has said that one of the stepfathers repeatedly punished him by running hot water over his head, but his lawyer says that is just a small example of what went on in the Eyler household.
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Perhaps because of his strange home life, Eyler failed to graduate from high school. He eventually got a GED certificate. Not long after leaving high school, he joined a monastery, but he left after a brief time. He then began living a life of low-paying jobs.
Much evidence was gathered, however, as a result of the arrest. A bloody knife was found in Eyler’s truck; laboratory tests later revealed that the enzymes in the blood matched those of Ralph Calise, whose body had been found four weeks earlier in Lake Forest, Illinois. The soles of the boots Eyler was wearing matched plaster casts taken of footprints at the site where Calise’s body had been found. Plaster casts of tire tracks at the same site matched the tires on Eyler’s pickup.
