CHICAGO -
Police say the strangulation and
attempted dismemberment of two black Illinois men, allegedly at the hands of four young adults, is
one of the most heinous cases they've seen.
Three of the people arrested
were playing video games when police arrived at a Joliet home, where the bodies
of Eric Glover and Terrence Rankins were found Thursday.
"This is one of the most
brutal, heinous and upsetting things I've ever seen in my 27 years of law
enforcement," Police Chief Mike Trafton said. "Not only the crime
scene, but the disregard for common decency toward human beings."
Police said Glover and
Rankins, both 22 and from Joliet, were lured to the home of 18-year-old Alisa
Massaro and then robbed and killed. Officers discovered the bodies of Glover and
Rankins on Thursday when they were called to the home, where they found Massaro
playing video games with Adam Landerman, 19, and Joshua Miner, 24.
The three, who are all from
Joliet, were arrested on first-degree murder charges. Bethany McKee, 18, of
Shorewood also faces first-degree murder charges. All are being held on $10
million bond and appeared in court Monday.
"It's demonic,"
Rankins' mother, Jamille Kent, said. "This is evil."
Outside the Rankins home
Monday night, some friends came to pay their respect.
"He was full of joy,
full of energy," Ryan Travis says of his friend. "He always liked to
make people laugh, this, this didn't have to happen."
Joliet is a city of about
150,000 people located about 40 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.
Trafton said Massaro,
Landerman and Miner were "very much surprised" when police walked in
on them Thursday. McKee had left the house but police arrested her later in
nearby Kankakee.
Kent said her son and Glover
had been friends for five years. Family members said they called police
Thursday night after they hadn't heard from the two since Wednesday.
"It's just
senseless," Glover's mother Nicole Jones said. "It's hard for me to
say the words."
"Why would these
monsters…I can't even call them people or humans no more because anytime you
commit a heinous act of murder and then just keep on partying?" Eric
Glover's father Bobby Jones said.
Glover graduated from Joliet
Central High School and had made the honor roll and participated in football,
wrestling and track, his family said. Rankins, described as "a very
outgoing, loving, fun person" by his mother, graduated from Joliet West
High School.
"In order for person to
you know what I'm saying do a crime like this it must've been brewing in their
soul for a long time," George Leftridge, the victims' friends said.
"You don't just wake up in the morning and say yea I'm going to go behead
comebody or chop somebody up."
Glover's parents are hoping
for justice, remembering the last time they saw him alive.
"I just said ‘just be
careful we love you.' He left, and lo and behold, we would never know that that
would be the last time that we could tell our son that we loved him and hear
him say that he loved us back."
Massaro's father, Phillip Massaro,
told The Herald-News in Joliet that he was in disbelief.
"All I can say is it's a
terrible thing that happened, and I can't believe my daughter had anything to
do with it," he said. "I don't know what happened. I just don't know
what to say. I can't really talk about it. I'm too devastated, and I can't talk
about it."
Massaro's lawyer, George
Lenard, did not immediately return phone calls to The Associated Press for
comment Monday. Charles Bretz, attorney for McKee, declined comment.
Public defenders for
Landerman and Miner could not be reached. No one answered the phone at the
public defender's office in Will County.
Miner's mother, Melodie
Miner, told The Herald-News that "there's no way my son can do this."
Miner previously was convicted of residential burglary, according to the
newspaper.
Charles Pelkie, spokesman for
the Will County State's Attorney's office, said State's Attorney James Glasgow
will personally prosecute the case, as he did former police officer Drew
Peterson's. Jurors convicted Peterson in September of first-degree murder in
the 2004 drowning death of his third wife.
Pelkie would not discuss any
details about the investigation in the Joliet slayings, but he did address the
issue of race. While the two victims were black and the four suspects are
white, Pelkie said there is no information at this point that indicates race
was a factor in the killings of Glover and Rankins.
Also, Landerman's mother,
Julie Larson, is a Joliet police sergeant, but Pelkie said she will not be
involved in the investigation of the case in any way.
Because
thou hast had a perpetual hatred, and hast shed [the blood of] the children
of Israel by the force of the sword in the time of their calamity, in the
time [that their] iniquity [had] an end:
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Therefore,
[as] I live, saith the Lord GOD, I will prepare thee unto blood, and blood
shall pursue thee: sith thou hast not hated blood, even blood shall pursue
thee.
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Ye
are of [your] father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He
was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there
is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is
a liar, and the father of it.
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He
sitteth in the lurking places of the villages: in the secret places doth he
murder the innocent: his eyes are privily set against the poor.
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