Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  Dave was watching football on TV when he got back. The Oakland Raiders were playing the Miami Dolphins. Tony put the vodka in the freezer and popped a couple cold beers while they watched the game.

  There, on the couch during the game, Dave leaned over and tried to kiss Tony on the cheek. Tony pushed him away and told him in blunt terms he wasn’t gay.

  “If you do it again,” Tony said gravely, “I’ll kill ya.”

  Dave apologized and swore it would never happen again.

  After the game, Dave stood up.

  “Okay, let’s get this contest going,” he said.

  Tony sat at the kitchen table. Dave handed him a personal check for $450,000, with Tony’s name already typed in. Only the signature line was blank.

  “It could be yours, man, if you beat the record,” he teased.

  “If this check doesn’t clear,” Tony joked, “I’m coming back here to kill you.”

  Dave started to pour the chilled vodka into a shot glass, but Tony waved him off.

  “Not that way,” he said. “Put it all in one glass.”

  Dave smiled. “One glass? You sure?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  Dave measured fifteen shots into a water glass and slid it across the table to Tony. They both glanced at the cheap clock on the kitchen wall as Tony took a big swallow. He didn’t need fifteen minutes. He gulped the entire glass in less than three minutes.

  “Okay, now no puking or passing out for another fifteen minutes,” Maust said ominously, rising from the table and going back to the sofa behind Tony, who kept his eyes on the ticking clock. His mind, not yet clouded by the vodka, was all tangled up in his dream nightclub, the passing seconds, Wyoming, the money …

  Six minutes passed, then seven. Tony exhaled a sweet metal tang, and his belly started to burn. Eight minutes. He looked at the check and tried to envision his club in the dark, all decked out in neon and women and music … nine minutes … and he just wanted to be gone already, on the way to Wyoming, where he could live high and rich and be a kid again …

  Tony really didn’t feel the first blow to the back of his head.

  Nor the second.

  But before a third vicious jolt cracked his head, he pivoted to see David land one across his forehead with a foot-long steel rod, possibly a weight-lifting bar.

  “What the fuck?” Tony hollered as he crumpled to the floor. Blood dribbled down his face, drenching his white cardigan and seeping into the carpet. He was dazed but conscious.

  Looking insane, Dave continued to whale on Tony, who curled into a ball to try to fend off the blows and screamed, “Wait, we’re friends! We’re friends!”

  Suddenly, Dave stopped his fierce assault as if he’d snapped out of a brutal trance. He threw the bar on the kitchen table and slumped into a chair.

  But Tony wasn’t waiting for whatever came next. Woozy from the beating and the booze, he summoned the focus to kick Dave’s chair, sending him sprawling on the floor. In a second, he pounced on Dave and whipped a knife from his pocket—a knife Dave had just bought him.

  “Motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you!” he seethed, pressing his blade against Dave’s throat. He had lost too much blood and wobbled on his feet.

  Dave admitted there was no money, no farm, no house … no Wyoming. It was all a lie.

  No money? Tony felt faint and cold.

  “I need to warm up,” Tony said, still holding the knife on Dave. “Put some hot water in the tub.”

  Dave drew a hot bath and Tony locked himself in the steamy bathroom with his knife and the telephone. His blood trickled into the water as he slipped into the tub, trying to warm up from the shock. He dipped his index finger in his seeping wounds and wrote his name and address on the tub’s tile, then rinsed it away. If I die and they search for old blood stains, he thought, they’ll find it.

  Then he dialed the phone. His father answered. Tony told him he’d been jumped by some gangbangers and was in bad shape.

  “I don’t know if I’ll make it,” he said, comforted by his father’s voice. “But I love you.”

  He dried off, dressed, and then went back out to the living room. Dave was waiting, scared. He had no place to run. In a flicker of clarity, Tony realized he needed to get to a hospital, and Dave would have to take him.

  “You’re taking me to the hospital,” Tony said, holding the knife on Dave again.

  “Please don’t tell anybody what happened,” Dave begged. “Please.”

  Tony prodded Dave to get going, forcing him into the car through the passenger side and holding the knife against his neck all the way to Gottlieb Memorial on North Avenue.

  In the emergency room, Tony underwent several CT scans and X-rays of his skull. The tight skin across his skull was shredded, exposing the bone beneath. He was suddenly half-deaf in one ear and would soon develop a lazy eye and migraines. While doctors sewed up his gashes with forty-eight staples and twenty-eight stitches, Dave went to coffee with Tony’s distraught parents, playing the role of hero and embellishing the cover story even more.

  The medical staff wanted Tony to spend the night for observation, but he refused. He didn’t trust hospitals or cops, and he was due back at his Wisconsin halfway house in the morning; the Wyoming trip was clearly not the escape plan he had hoped. Still unwelcome at his parents’ home—even after a ruthless bludgeoning—Tony made a decision that cast some doubt on his survival instincts: He went home with David Maust.

  Not to a hotel.

  Not to a homeless shelter.

  Not to a real friend’s house.

  Not to a bench at the bus terminal.

  Not even to the secluded back booth of an all-night diner.

  He was returning to his would-be killer’s turf to spend the rest of the night. His only hope was to make the morning bus going back to the halfway house.

  They left the hospital sometime after midnight. Dave drove while a woozy, aching Tony held the knife. Dave apologized profusely on the way home, and Tony wasn’t sure what to think. Confusion was already screwing with his damaged head. Dave was his friend, he thought. Maybe it was a brain tumor or a flashback, Tony thought. Maybe he just snapped. Maybe it was temporary insanity. Maybe … Tony wanted desperately to believe something went terribly haywire with his friend and that whatever it was had passed as abruptly as it had surfaced. He didn’t want to think he had been so totally duped by a friend.

  Back at the apartment, a still-wary Tony helped clean up his own blood, which had pooled in a great circle on the floor and was spattered on everything.

  Even more baffling than his decision to go home with Dave was his decision to share his bed that night, but he wanted to keep a close eye on the man who tried to kill him. That night, he didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time, aware of Dave’s slightest movement.

  Even more baffling than Tony’s decision to go

  home with Dave was his decision to share his

  bed that night, but he wanted to keep a close

  eye on the man who tried to kill him.

  The next morning, Dave dropped him off at his parents’ home in Schiller Park, and they never saw each other again. Coach drove Tony to Wisconsin. On the way, the son told the father what had really happened.

  “You’re not making this up?” Coach asked, incredulous.

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

  “He was right there.”

  Embarrassed, confused, and afraid, Tony begged his dad to stay away from David Maust and not tell the cops anything. Dave was dangerous and unpredictable, he warned. Besides, in Tony’s world, you stayed away from cops and took care of your own business in your own way. More than once, he thought about sending some old gang buddies to pay a visit to the Oak Park apartment.

  In the coming weeks, when Tony called to try to convince Dave to pay his $8,000 hospital bill, Dave always hung up. One time when he called Dave’s apartment, a kid answered.

  “Get away from Dav
id,” Tony warned him. “He will kill you.”

  The boy scoffed. Dave was a good guy and would never hurt him, he said. He wouldn’t listen. He, too, thought he knew the real Dave.

  Two months after the attack, Tony finally reported it to the Oak Park Police Department, but Dave denied everything. With no other witnesses or evidence, the cops chalked it up to a gay lover’s quarrel between two worthless ex-cons and walked away.

  Once again, astoundingly, David Maust had eluded any responsibility for his crimes.

  And once again, a world of new friends lay before him.

  PAYING FOR HIS SINS

  David Maust stayed in his Oak Park apartment for a couple more years. A neighbor once asked him about a strange blood trail leading from one of his broken windows and a foul odor outside his apartment, but David had a ready explanation about a fistfight with his son—who didn’t exist.

  In February 2003, Maust moved to a rented house on Ash Street in Hammond, Indiana, a gray and gritty steel town just across the state line from Chicago. He went straight to his grisly work.

  On May 2, 2003, Maust killed nineteen-year-old Nicholas James, a coworker he had befriended at the trophy shop where he worked.

  “I just went after him,” Maust wrote in his journal later. “I don’t know why, I just did. I planned to kill him three times but talked myself out of it.

  “I came up behind him. I hit him in the head. I hit him with a baseball bat. Not a real bat. It was a souvenir. It had lead in it. I hit him once. After the first blow he was out of it, but he was still moving, so I hit him again. He was still moving. I hit him again and again.”

  Maust tore up a concrete floor in the rented house’s dank basement. He covered Nicholas James’s naked corpse with blue house paint, wrapped him in plastic, and buried him in the hole, which he covered in concrete.

  Later that summer, Maust met thirteen-year-old Michael Dennis and sixteen-year-old James Raganyi, a couple of runaways. He gave them pot, money, and booze. He took them bike riding and to ballgames. He wanted badly to be their father and their friend.

  On September 10, both boys came to Maust’s house for liquor, which he supplied happily. And when the two boys passed out on David Maust’s couch, he strangled them both, duct-taped their naked bodies in black plastic sheeting and buried them in a basement hole he had dug five days earlier beside Nicholas James’s hidden tomb. And, again, he concealed their graves with a new concrete slab.

  “They didn’t feel nothing,” he wrote in his journal.

  When the boys were reported missing, their trail led cops to Maust’s Ash Street house, where they had been seen hanging around. When questioned, Maust was friendly and cooperative. He let investigators wander around the place, but they found nothing.

  But Detective Ron Johnson, a missing-persons investigator for the Hammond police, got a cold feeling from Maust. The ex-con’s odd smile haunted the veteran cop, but more important cases demanded his attention.

  Months later, Maust’s land-lord mentioned some new concrete work in the basement, and Johnson had a bad feeling. With the owner’s permission, Johnson and two cops drilled a hole in the floor.

  Coffin flies flew out.

  Almost thirty years after he killed Jimmy McClister in Germany, more than twenty years after he killed Donald Jones in Elgin, Illinois, and more than three years since he tried to kill Anthony Majzer, David Maust’s luck finally ran out.

  His case never went to trial. In a November 2005 plea bargain, Maust avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. He received three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

  SERIAL KILLER DAVID MAUST’S PIPE-WIELDING SURPRISE ATTACK ON TONY MAJZER LEFT A WEB OF UGLY SCARS—AND A DEEPER MISTRUST OF FRIENDS AND STRANGERS ALIKE.

  Ron Franscell

  Maust was extraordinarily candid about his life and crimes, as if by finally saying things out loud, he might unburden himself.

  He told investigators that he had planned to hide Anthony Majzer’s body in the wall of a closet in the Oak Park apartment. He’d even bought hundreds of pounds of cement to do the job in Oak Park, but when he couldn’t kill Anthony, he ended up hauling the cement to the new house in Hammond—and used it instead to bury the three boys he killed there.

  AFTER HIS FAILED ATTACK ON TONY MAJZER, DAVID MAUST MOVED TO A RENTED HOUSE IN HAMMOND, INDIANA, WHERE HE BURIED THE CORPSES OF THREE TEENAGE BOYS. THEIR GRAVES WERE DISCOVERED BY LOCAL POLICE IN 2003.

  Hammond, Indiana, Police Department

  And in neat, meticulous script, he started handwriting a voluminous journal about his childhood, his sins, his demons, and his perverse psychology. It eventually spanned more than 1,200 pages.

  At Maust’s sentencing, his own brother told the judge that David had tried to kill him twice.

  “I think anyone who does such crimes should pay with their life,” David’s brother said.

  A clinical and forensic psychologist who examined Maust found him to be a unique specimen. “In fact, one would be hard-pressed to design a developmental sequence more likely to produce a profoundly disturbed, relationship-ambivalent, and aggression-vulnerable individual than the childhood experienced by David Maust,” he told the court.

  Later, David’s defense lawyer added his own perspective.

  “There is a stereotypical vision of serial killers—a person without a shred of conscience,” he told a reporter. “David had one. He was capable of horrific violence, obviously, but he was also capable of genuine contrition. He was genuinely sorry right up until the time he did it again.”

  This son of a psychotic, narcissistic mother and an abusive, often absent father, this child who had been dumped in a “snake pit” asylum at age nine, this pathetic man who desperately wanted to mean something to someone was certainly going to pay for his sins.

  But on his own terms.

  In county jail while awaiting transfer to the prison system, he twice tried suicide by stabbing himself with a pencil, although he recovered both times.

  On January 19, 2006—the day he was to be transferred to prison—he finally succeeded. Barely two months after his sentencing, David Edward Maust was found hanging in his Lake County Jail cell. He had braided a bed sheet into a noose. He died at fifty-one.

  Maust left a seven-page suicide note that again expressed his deep remorse for killing five young men and said he had considered writing a letter to his latest victims’ parents, telling them where to find the bodies, but decided against it.

  “Dying is not my first choice,” the note said, “but it is the right thing to do. For when I look in the eyes of the mother’s [sic], I can feel the pain of their sorrow and I’m so very sorry for the pain they feel.”

  He also longed, as always, for his mother.

  “I wish my mother would come and get me,” he said. “But I know she won’t. I wish she would come and take me home.”

  His self-loathing was on full display when his thick journal became public.

  “I am the evilest person to live on this earth and to save the taxpayer’s money, I should’ve been destroyed long ago,” he wrote.

  If there were other dead boys out there, Maust didn’t say. When police searched the Oak Park apartment, they saw no evidence of any burials, even though some people remain convinced Maust likely killed more than the five boys he admitted to.

  But among Maust’s many handwritten admissions was this:

  “On January 6, 2001 (Saturday—late in the afternoon), I tried to kill Anthony Majzer, a 25-year-old I met in prison.

  “I wanted to build a life with Anthony as his friend and be there for him and hope he would be there for me but Anthony was not going to let that happen because he was never going to change his ways. You see, I wanted to care about him and help him in life because he had all kinds of problems and so I was hoping he would come live with me so I would also have someone to do things with but he only wanted to use me for what he could get and go awa
y.

  “An [sic] it’s true that I only met Anthony because I lied to him and told him ‘I had lots of money from selling drugs.’ I was hoping in time I could turn that lie into the truth as we became better friends but Anthony wanted me to support him. So that Saturday night or should I say late afternoon I tried to get him drunk and then I beat his head in with a pipe but then I diceded [sic] not to kill him and took him to the hospital.

  “That night when we got back I told him the truth about how there was no money. After that he started blackmailing me for money or he tried to, but I changed my phone number so he would think I moved and I never heard from him again.

  “That night we came back from the hospital we slept together with are [sic] clothes on, but I did have naked pictures of both him and Kenneth [another of Maust’s earlier infatuations]. I had about 20 pictures each of Anthony and Kenneth, but only half were naked pictures and I wanted the pictures because they were friends of mine and every once in a great while I would look at them. …

  “I was a very lonely person at times and would pray that God would send someone to be my friend and live with me.…”

  FLEETING FORGIVENESS

  Today, Anthony Majzer blames himself for three dead boys, maybe more. He’s convinced the young kid he warned on David Maust’s phone is dead, too.

  He wonders why he didn’t kill David Maust when he had the chance.

  Tony was watching television in a federal prison in Minnesota when the news of Maust’s arrest first broke. He felt ill, then he cried.

  AFTER A LIFETIME OF ABANDONMENT, CRIME, AND VIOLENCE, EX-CHICAGO GANG-BANGER TONY MAJZER SAYS HIS GREATEST MOTIVATION FOR STAYING STRAIGHT IS HIS SON ETHAN AND SOON-TO-BE-WIFE CARA.

  Ron Franscell

  After Maust was sentenced, Tony even plotted how he might be able to commit a crime and be sent to the same prison, where he would kill his tormenter. He tried to tell the cops about Maust again, but he was a convict, and they simply didn’t trust anything he had to say, so he gave up.