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.
LAST HURRAH
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.
HOMICIDAL URGES
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.
“I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE THE DEATH SENTENCE”
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.
AN UNSUSPECTING WORLD
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.
Delivered from Evil Page 21