Brown's Chicken massacre

James Degorski, the other assailant, was found guilty in 2009 on all seven counts of first degree murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

On January 8, 1993, seven people were shot and killed at the Brown's Chicken & Pasta at 168 West Northwest Highway in Palatine.

[1] The victims included the owners, 50-year-old Richard E. Ehlenfeldt and 49-year-old Lynn A. Ehlenfeldt (née Wiese), and five employees: 46-year-old Guadalupe Maldonado, 16-year-old Michael C. Castro, 17-year-old Rico L. Solis, 32-year-old Thomas Mennes, and 31-year-old Marcus Nellsen; Castro and Solis were Palatine High School students working there part-time.

[6] Later, Guadalupe Maldonado's wife also called the police, concerned that her husband did not return home from work and that his car was still in the apparently closed Brown's Chicken parking lot.

[7] In March 2002, more than nine years after the murders, Anne Lockett came forward and implicated her former boyfriend, James Degorski, and his associate, Juan Luna, in the crime.

[9] Luna confessed to the crime during an interrogation, though his lawyers later claimed that he was coerced to do so through police brutality and had his family, who were Mexican nationals, threatened with deportation.

[19] In March 2014, a jury awarded James Degorski $451,000 in compensation and punitive damages after being beaten by a Sheriff's deputy in Cook County Jail in May 2002.

[20][21] Degorski appealed the verdict in 2016 and 2022, claiming that Luna had been the sole perpetrator and again calling Lockett's testimony uncredible due to her record for psychiatric issues and past drug addiction.

In 2016, Degorski also presented a sworn statement by fellow inmate Richard Bilik, whom Lockett had been dating during their own relationship, who alleged that Lockett had repeatedly asked him about the Brown's Chicken murders, after which Des Plaines and Palantine police took him in for questioning; Bilik had been serving a 15 year sentence for arson since 2012.