The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  He had been more successful scholastically when he attended the Joseph Stockton Elementary School. Teachers there considered the quiet, brown-haired boy to be an excellent student who never got into trouble and had an outstanding attendance record.

  Randall's mother, Myrtle, did not immediately notify school officials at Senn that her son had vanished, and truant officers began searching the Uptown area for the mother and son after he missed several days of classes, but couldn't find either of them.

  Rick Johnston wasn't reported to police as missing until two months after he failed to return from the rock concert to his home in the far west suburban Bensenville. He was an admirer of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and members of his family at first suspected that he might have left home to join the controversial cult.

  No one, police included, thought to put together the amazing string of disappearances of young boys from the north side of Chicago and adjoining suburbs. No one wondered at a possible connection between the disappearances of Randall Reffett, Samuel Dodd Stapleton, Michael Bonnin, Richard Johnston and Billy Carroll, in the space of less than three months.

  Most of the boys, of course, were not promptly reported missing. Billy's parents didn't make an immediate report to police, although neither his brother nor his friends had turned up any trace of him.

  A girl he had been friendly with since they were both small children often wondered about him and said that she sometimes had disturbing dreams of Billy, of lights and of concrete. And when William Carroll, Sr. walked past the vacant lots, abandoned derelict cars and crumbling graffiti-covered graystones of Uptown, pulling his frayed gray overcoat closer about him to keep out the wind sweeping off the lake, he often found himself peering into the faces of young men he met or turning to stare at them after they passed. There was the merest chance that one of them might be the missing son he called "Sugar Pie—because he was such a sweet baby." William Carroll, Sr. is disabled and living on social security and a veteran's pension, so he had time for his walks. But the walks never turned up a trace of his missing son.

  Much later people also wondered what had happened to Dale Landingin. People like Mary-Jo Romero, the twenty-seven-year-old waitress he had charmed and moved in with after meeting her at a rock concert in the Aragon Ballroom— the same Aragon Ballroom where Rick Johnston had planned to attend a rock concert five months earlier. Before that Dale had lived in a succession of hotel rooms and apartments. And he had worked in a succession of jobs—busboy, shoe salesman, and waiter—before finally going on public aid.

  Mary-Jo insisted that Dale had wanted to work, but was frustrated by employers who for various reasons continued to fire him. His real ambition, however, was to become a singer. He had a good voice. His girl friend played guitar and he talked to her often about getting everything together some day and starting their own group.

  He also talked of getting married and having children with her. But they didn't get along as well as she might have hoped. He erupted into terrible fits of violence, at times becoming so agitated that his dark, longish hair swirled wildly around his head while he screamed and shook with anger. Like John Gacy, Dale would pick up household items when he was angry and slam them against the walls or the floor. He also beat his girlfriend.

  He was dealing in marijuana, PCP, and LSD, and it was when he was sampling too much of his own wares that he became mean and violent, Mary-Jo said.

  Eventually he would calm down and apologize, but the damage to the waitress's bruised feelings and body didn't vanish as quickly as his temper. The tantrums were occurring two or three times a week when he finally drove her out of her own apartment and she had to move in with her mother. That's when she filed charges against him.

  It wasn't the first time he had been in trouble with the police. His problems started some six years earlier, about the time his parents divorced shortly after moving to Chicago from New York City. His father recalled that Dale took the divorce hard. He first quit Lake View High School, and was picked up for stealing cars and selling marijuana.

  Dale never indicated that he had a sexual interest in other men, but his girl friend was aware that he had dealings with homosexuals and frequented their hangouts. It wasn't an interest in sex that led him to the association with gays, Mary-Jo realized. Dressed casually but neat, he used his appealing 120-pound, five-foot, five-inch frame and arrogantly handsome face to attract guys who would spend money on him or give him money and presents. He was little but macho, and they flocked around him.

  "He made them think he was going to have sex with them. But he didn't have any intention of doing it. When they got wise, they'd stop seeing him," Mary-Jo remembered. He used gay men the way some really pretty girls use men. He said he enjoyed using them."10

  Nine days after Frank Wayne Landingin, Jr. dropped from sight, a naked body, water-soaked and bloated, was pulled from a marina on the Des Plaines River in the small community of Channahon, south of Joliet. The bearded young man had been strangled to death. His bikini undershorts had been stuffed into his mouth and jammed with vicious force down his throat. Police began the job of identifying the corpse.

  Footnotes

  14 Chicago Sun-Times, December 31, 1978.

  10 Chicago Sun-Times, December 28, 1978;

  6...

  Buried Dreams

  and a

  President's

  Wife

  The last thing Jon Prestidge's friend said to him when the Michigan youth stepped out of the apartment to begin a night of barhopping was:

  "Be careful. You're not in Kalamazoo anymore. There are plenty of crazy people in the world and a lot of them are here in Chicago."11

  Jon had heard warnings like that before, as recently as the previous day. On March 14, 1977, he had telephoned his mother, Mrs. Nancy Cassada, of Gobies, near Kalamazoo, and told her he planned to stay in Chicago a couple more days. He said he was going nightclubbing.

  Mrs. Cassada cautioned her son to be careful. She worried about him going out alone. He usually carried forty or fifty dollars with him and wore turquoise rings and other jewelry and she was afraid he might be mugged. Even his older brother Michael worried about Jon and warned him to beware of strangers. The brothers were close and Michael knew that Jon could be naive and dangerously trusting of other people.

  The gangly twenty-year-old blond youth was a free spirit, who was sure that he could take care of himself. He had graduated from Kalamazoo Central High School after transferring there from Gobies in his senior year and going to live with his father, Lewis Prestidge, a musician. Although he was bright and learned quickly, he preferred farm work and the outdoors to studies. He dropped out of Kalamazoo Community College after attending only a short while and began working intermittently at various motels in the area. He had a cheerful, outgoing personality and got along well with the other employees. But he was adventuresome and believed in taking advantage of the footloose years between school and full adult responsibilities. So he traveled, and his friends learned that he might leave a job at any time to hitchhike to some faraway state.

  He always told his family where he was going when he left on trips, and kept in touch at least weekly with telephone calls. For a while his calls were from Philadelphia, where he stayed several months working for a contractor.

  He was enjoying life, seeing the country and making new friends. But by early 1977 he had begun to think seriously about a career, and when he telephoned home from Chicago he told his mother he planned to check into a nursing school that had a program for men. He thought he might like to specialize in anesthesiology, and had arranged for an interview on March 16.

  Medicine appealed to him. As a member of the profession, he would be exposed to the excitement of working in hospitals, as well as having the satisfaction of knowing he was helping other people.

  He liked being with others, and New Town, with its twenty-four-hour bluster of activity, offered new experiences and new friends. The apartment he was
staying in with a friend of his grandfather was a mere few blocks from Broadway discos and young people's bars like Crystal's Blinkers, Broadway Ltd., The Phoenix, and the Fat Black Pussy Cat.

  Jon may or may not have known that Blinkers and the Broadway Ltd. were frequented primarily by gay crowds, and the others by mixed male and female couples. But part of the fun of club hopping was exploring new places. Chicago and Illinois liquor laws permitted nineteen- and twenty-year-olds to drink beer and wine and most of the clubs along Broadway catered to clientele of those ages or a few years older.

  No one will ever know if Jon remembered the warnings of his mother and his brother, or his host's admonition not to trust everyone, as he walked the half dozen blocks to the neon-lighted action on Broadway. No one will know because he was never heard from or seen alive by his friends again. He never returned to the apartment and he never showed up for the interview at school. He just vanished.

  Nine days later, on March 24, his family reported to police in Chicago and Kalamazoo that he was missing.

  Mrs. Cassada knew something was horribly wrong when a week passed after Jon's last telephone call and she hadn't heard from him again. She had expected to hear about the school interview, or about his arrangements to drive a new car from Chicago to Colorado the following week to go skiing.

  "He had a lot of things planned—that's how I knew something had happened," Mrs. Cassada said. "He'd never run away or anything, he had no reason to. He did as he pleased anyway."12

  Chicago police recorded the information provided by Jon's mother. He was not a juvenile and there was no evidence of foul play. He was listed as voluntarily missing, as were an increasing number of other youths last seen in New Town or Uptown.

  The information about Jon was filed with reports on 19,455 other men, women, and children listed by Chicago police in 1977 as missing from the city. Of those, about 14,000 were minors, including approximately 6,700 children under seventeen officially classed as juveniles.

  The necessary reports and investigations created mountains of paperwork. An average single report fills six sheets of paper, and detailed investigations fill many times that number. Youth officers have pointed out that no human can struggle through that much paperwork and pinpoint similarities between cases. Hours can be consumed going through the reports to determine which cases demand priority attention.

  In the same year 175,557 boys and girls under eighteen were reported missing nationwide, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation uniform crime reports. Most of them come back when they have had enough of the streets and the strain of living hand-to-mouth—if their families want them. Not all families do. Some children called "throwaways" by professionals, have been pushed out of their homes for economic or other reasons and have nowhere to return to. Many of those who don't return are forced or seduced into prostitution or pornography. Some are murdered.

  Regardless of their age, all missing persons reported to Chicago police are the responsibility of the Youth Division, headed by Commander Harold Thomas. Part of a metropolitan police department with some thirteen thousand men and women, the Youth Division has fewer than six hundred officers and a handful of clerical employees available to handle missing reports averaging more than fifty daily. Additionally, they have all the other duties traditionally assigned to officers who work with missing persons and minors. Several of the nation's larger cities have even fewer officers assigned to trace thousands of missing children.

  Except in unusual cases where known violence or an abduction has occurred, the missing juveniles get most of the attention, especially those children thirteen years old and younger. Thomas refers to those youngsters as "tender-age children." One of the reasons that tender-age children are given priority is their vulnerability to sexual exploitation and street violence. Searches begin as soon as the child is reported missing. Police in squad cars and on foot comb the neighborhood, interviewing residents and looking in alleys, basements, abandoned buildings, garages, and anywhere else a child is likely to be hiding, in trouble, or dead. Perhaps second only to the fear that a child is dead is the fear that he or she may be abused sexually.

  Amazingly, the problem can become even stickier when older children are involved. Such bewildering laws and regulations have been passed to protect the civil rights of juveniles that it is becoming increasingly difficult to protect them. One of the problems preventing police from making the most effective possible use of computers to locate missing persons is fear of violating rules of confidentiality.

  Youth officers are prevented by the confidentiality rule from circulating lists of missing children under seventeen across the country to brother police departments, according to the commander.

  "You cannot expose the child according to our law. And I understand this," Thomas says. "They assume that this child is going through a problem period, a troubled time. And if we have the services for this child we can turn him around before he is an adult. We don't want to label him or stigmatize him by putting his picture in the paper."

  Nevertheless, a Federal Bureau of Investigation computer network lists more than 21,000 disappearances, most of them juveniles and young adults, and the information is available to local police departments. Indications of foul play are considered serious enough in only about 5,200 cases to justify automatic notice to local law-enforcement agencies. There is also a state computer as well as the local Chicago police department computer, but by the beginning of 1979 none had been programmed to pinpoint common denominators in seemingly dissimilar cases.

  Parents can publicize information, including pictures of their missing children. Policemen cannot. Police departments do, of course, exchange information about missing children, but according to Thomas, most of the data is passed by personal contact or by telephone. Other youth officers have been quoted as saying that sharing of information between departments in Chicago and the suburbs is practically nonexistent. The problems that exist between overlapping police jurisdictions are especially troublesome in missing-persons cases.

  A good-looking, even-featured man with a smooth acorn-colored complexion, Thomas leans forward in his chair at the Police Administration Building on South State Street and looks people confidently in the eye, talking in firm, sincere tones when he discusses the job of protecting minors in a city of more than three million people.13

  "Somewhere along the line I think we've said that children have the same rights as adults and that's the way it will be," Thomas says, shaking his head. "But children are not adults, and they need help."

  Jon Prestidge was neither a runaway nor a juvenile. Nor was Russell Nelson. But like Jon, Russell made the innocent mistake of visiting Chicago's New Town at the wrong time.

  Both young men were about the same age. They were each from Midwestern towns much smaller than Chicago. And they had been in the city less than a week when they disappeared.

  One thing they didn't share was scholarship. Russell graduated as an honors student from his high school in Cloquet, Minnesota, a small town located between Duluth at the southwest end of Lake Superior, and the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation. Most of the town's 8,700 inhabitants trace their livelihood to one of the three large lumber mills that produce wood and paper and are the foundation for the area economy.

  Russell's father, Robert, is a crane operator for the Continental Oil Company in a nearby community. One of Russell's older brothers found a job as a baker and the other a job as a laborer on a Burlington Northern Railroad construction gang, but Russell planned to be an architect.

  He was bespectacled and bookish. He admired the work of architect Mies van der Rohe. He liked the music of singer Donna Summer, and teamed with a girl friend to win several disco contests. A slight five-foot, eight-inches tall and 130 pounds, he shied away from his high school hockey, football, and ski teams and elected instead to apply himself to reading, art, photography, and drama. In his junior year he acted in Oliver, and the next year he was in the cast of South Pacific. He managed
to sandwich activities as a Boy Scout and work as a stock boy in a Cloquet store between his studies without hurting his grades. In his senior year he won both a community scholarship and a VFW scholarship.

  In September 1974 he enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis as a major in pre-architecture. A few weeks after beginning classes he met Thomas Maurer, a sixty-year-old clergyman with the United Church of Christ and a lecturer in sexuality at the university's medical school. Russell moved into Maurer's condominium in the Towers, a posh apartment complex.

  According to reporter James Warren in an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, Maurer acknowledged that he is homosexual, but insisted that he never had sexual relations with his young roommate. He said that their ties were closer to a father-son bond. It was a relationship approved of by Russell's parents. "I think Russ became the son Tom never had," Mrs. Norma Nelson was quoted as saying.14 Maurer went so far as to change his will, making Russell the sole beneficiary.

  But Russell had sprung from people and a community where youngsters are taught to make their own way. He interrupted his classes after two successful years and told his friends that he planned to make as much money as possible and return to school in the fall. Still living with Maurer, he began working eighty hours a week as a custodian at the medical school and as a waiter at the First Street Station, a popular restaurant. His mother said he had also once worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, as a draftsman, and established trust funds for nieces and nephews. He told her several times that if he died young he wanted to donate his eyes to science.

  His work at the restaurant was so impressive that he was promoted to combination waiter-host in the evenings. His fellow employees overlooked occasional subdued boasting about living the good life in the Towers. He also liked to give the impression that he was street-wise and knew his way around, a not too unusual bit of posturing for a college boy.