Of it.
The little after 11:00 on the night of Friday, January 8th, 1993, a mother in Palletine, Illinois, called the police because her 16-year-old son wasn’t home from work.
His name was Michael Castro.
He worked the evening shift at the Browns Chicken and Pasta on Northwest Highway, a franchise that had closed its doors at 9:00 like it did every night.
By 10:00, he should have walked in the door.
By 11, his mother, Epipina, knew something was wrong in the way mothers know.
Across town, the family of another teenage employee, 17-year-old Rico Solis, was starting to feel the same thing.
Palatine officers drove to the restaurant.
The sign was dark.
The doors were locked.
Nothing looked disturbed from the street.
It was a cold January night in a quiet, affluent suburb northwest of Chicago.
The kind of town where a fast food restaurant after closing is the least interesting building for miles.
It was close to 3:00 in the morning before an officer got inside.
He found the register empty and the floor mopped.
He found the walk-in cooler.
Then he found the walk-in freezer.
Seven people were inside them.
The two owners of the restaurant and five of their employees, including the two teenagers whose parents were waiting up.
Every one of them had been shot.
One had also had her throat cut.
Seven dead in less than 45 minutes for roughly $1,800 from a cash draw.
And here is the part that would keep this case open for 9 years, 3 months, and one week.
There were no fingerprints that led anywhere.
No witnesses, no camera, no weapon, and a halfeaten chicken dinner in a trash can that nobody in 1993 had any way to read.
But the officer who bagged that dinner put it in the freezer.
Anyway, to understand what was taken that night, you first have to understand who was inside that restaurant and why none of them should have been there.
Palatine in 1993 was a town of about 40,000 people 40 minutes from the loop with good schools, culde-sacs, a metra, stop and a jewel.
Bill Clinton had been president for a little over two weeks.
Grunge was on the radio and the Bulls were in the middle of their first three Pete, which in that part of the world was the only news that mattered.
The Browns Chicken on Northwest Highway was a brick box with a drive-thru and a sign most people in the Chicago area could draw from memory.
A local chain, the kind of place you went after a little league game.
Richard and Lynn Ellenfeld had bought that franchise less than a year earlier.
Richard was 50, Ling was 49, and they had three daughters.
Like a lot of couples in their 50s, in the early 90s, they’d put their savings into a small business after the corporate world stopped being reliable, and they ran it themselves, nights included.
Two of their daughters had been scheduled to work that Friday.
Neither one ended up at the restaurant that night.
That accident of a schedule is the reason the Ellenfelt girls are alive.
Guadalupe Moltinado was 46.
The cook, a father of three who had come from Mexico and was supporting his family on a fryer and a prayer.
Marcus Nelson was 31.
Thomas Manis was 32, a quiet man whose twin brother would spend the rest of his life answering questions about him.
And then the two boys, Michael Castro, 16, a student at Palletine High School, working an evening shift the way 16-year-olds do for gas money and a little independence.
Rico Solis, 17, also at Palletine High, whose family had come from the Philippines not long before and who was by every account thrilled to have the job.
Seven people, two owners trying to make a go of it, a cook, two men punching a clock, and two tids who’d be home by 10:00.
At 9:00 on January 8th, Richard Ellenfelt turned the sign off and locked the front door, standed close, count the drawer, mopped the floor, wiped the counters.
Out by 10, two young men had already walked in before the lock turned, and sat down to eat.
Friday, January 8th, 1993, investigators would eventually reconstruct the evening down to the minute, and the minutes are what make this case unbearable.
Around 9:00 p.m.
The restaurant closed.
Two customers, both young, both white, both ordinaryl looking, were inside with a chicken dinner they’d ordered just before closing.
Nobody thought anything of it.
One of them, in fact, had worked at this exact Brown’s chicken not long before.
He knew the layout.
He knew the cooler.
He knew where the money was.
At some point after 9:00, the two men stood up and deduced a gun.
What happened over the next 40 minutes, we know mostly from a videotaped confession given 9 years later.
And we’re going to leave the detail where it belongs, in a courtroom.
What matters is this.
The seven people in that restaurant were herded into the back.
None of them fought.
None of them, prosecutors would later say, gave the two men any trouble at all.
But they were put into the walk-in cooler and the walk-in freezer, and they were shot one after another with a handgun.
Lynn Alenfeld’s throat was cut.
Then the two men did something that chills investigators more than the shooting.
They cleaned up.
They mopped the floor.
They wore latex gloves so there would be nothing to find.
They took roughly $1,800 from the register and the safe, and they walked out the back and into the dart.
By 9:50, it was over.
At 11:00 p.m., Epipania Castro called the police.
Around 2:30 a.m.
January 9th, officers finally got inside and opened the cooler door.
The scene inside that building would define a generation of Palatine police officers.
Chief Jerry Bacher, who would carry the case for the rest of his career, called in every resource he had and then some.
By daylight, there was a task force.
By the end of the week, there were more than a 100 investigators from the FBI.
The Illinois State Police and surrounding departments working out of Palletine.
And in the middle of all of it, an evidence technician was going through the trash.
In a bin near the dining area, there was a partially eaten chicken dinner, bones, gristle, and napkin.
It had been ordered just before closing.
It had been eaten by someone who was in the building after the doors locked.
In 1993, forensic DNA testing needed a far larger, cleaner sample than a Nord chicken bone could offer.
The technician had no idea whether the saliva on those bones would ever be usable.
He bagged them, labeled them, and put them in a freezer at the Palatine Police Department.
There they would sit for 9 years.
The investigation that followed was one of the largest in Illinois history and one of the most frustrating.
Palentine detectives interviewed every current and former employee of the Ellenfelts restaurant, as they should have.
Among them was an 18-year-old named Juan Luna, who had worked at that Brown’s Chicken and been let go.
He came in, he answered questions, his alibi was checked, he was released, a detail that would haunt the department for a decade.
Lunar arrived at the station with a friend who sat in the lobby and never spoke to anyone.
The leads came in by the thousands.
Over the years, the task force would log nearly 5,000 of them.
In the first months, Palatine arrested a man from Elgen, a former employee, and held him as the prime suspect.
He was cleared.
He sued for wrongful arrest and the village settled with him in 1997.
In March of 1994, police arrested a Chicago man and released him.
A Better Government Association report later tore into the way the investigation had been run.
Village officials fired back.
Chief Bratcher told reporters he didn’t know when, but the case would be solved.
Meanwhile, the families lived in the aftermath.
The Alenfelt daughters buried both parents at once.
Guadalupe Maldonado’s three children grew up without a father.
Thomas Manessa’s twin brother became the public face of a grief he never asked to represent.
Michael Castros and Rico Solace’s classmates at Palatine High School went to two funerals in one week and then went back to class and the restaurant sat there.
Brown’s Chicken as a chain went into a tail spin after the killings.
People couldn’t walk past the sign without seeing the cooler.
The Palatine location never reopened as a Browns.
For years, it was a different business, and nobody who knew the town ever forgot what the building was.
Here is the institutional failure stated plainly.
Two young men walked into a police station in 1993.
One of them was interviewed and both walked out because there was nothing in the file to hold them with.
The evidence that would eventually convict them was sitting in a feasa 40 ft away, and the science to read it didn’t exist yet.
9 years is a long time for seven families.
By 1996, 3 years had passed and the task force had shrunk to a handful of Palatine detectives.
By 1998, the Elgen man’s wrongful arrest settlement was old news, and the reward, nearly $100,000 raised by the village and local donors, had gone unclaimed so long that most people had forgotten it existed.
By January of 2010, the building itself was gone.
Palatine demolished the old Brown’s chicken rather than let it stand as a landmark to the worst night in the town’s history.
The families marked every January 8th.
Seven candles, seven names read aloud.
The Alenfeld daughters grown now, spoke for the brute.
Emanuel Castro, Michael’s father, spoke for the boys.
Jerry Brcher, retired without his answer.
The chief who replaced him.
John Kosial inherited a cold file and a frozen chicken dinner.
And somewhere in the northwest suburbs.
Two men in their late 20s went about their lives.
One had a wife and a young son in a carpentersville.
The other was working as a handyman and drifting through jobs, eventually landing in Indiana.
Of a thinker, the prosecutors would later establish had told people, girlfriends, friends in the weeks after the murders, one had told a young woman to watch the news because he’d done something big.
Those people had been threatened with their lives and they’d stayed quiet for 9 years.
The thing about a secret shared with that many people is that it only has to break once.
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Now, let’s get back to Palentatine because in March of 2002, a woman named Anne Lockett sat down with an old friend and said the one sentence she’d been swallowing since she was a teenager.
The friend’s name was Melissa Olay.
The two of them had known each other since high school.
Free High School in Palatine, the same school that Juan Luna and his close friend James Dorski had attended in the early 90s.
Lockett had dated Dorski back then.
She’d been, by her own later admission, high and drunk for most of that period of her life, and she’d been in his orbit in January of 1993 when he told her to watch the news.
In late March of 2002, she told Melissa Olay that she knew who had committed the Browns chicken murders.
She said Dorski had confessed to her in detail in the weeks afterward and that he and Luna had threatened to kill her if she ever spoke.
She said she had believed them.
Oberlay didn’t wait.
She called the Palatine Police Department and told them to talk to Anne Lockett.
Late number 4,842, the call landed with Commander Bill King.
He drove to see Lockett.
He listened and for the first time in 9 years, a Palatine detective heard a story that matched the inside of that restaurant.
Details that had never been released that only someone who’d been there or heard it from someone who’d been there could know.
King went looking for James Dorski and found him in Indiana working as a repair man.
In April of 2002, Dorski agreed to come back to Palatine with two officers for a conversation.
At the station, he voluntarily gave his fingerprints and a DNA sample.
He didn’t seem worried.
Police had already put both him and Luna under quiet surveillance.
Then the freezer door opened.
The chicken dinner the bones and evidence tech had bagged on the morning of January 9th, 1993 was sent to the lab.
By 2002, DNA science had advanced to the point where a trace of saliva on a bone was enough.
Here’s how it works.
In one sentence, a lab can now extract a genetic profile from the cells a person leaves behind in their spit and compare it directly to a sample taken from a suspect’s cheek.
On May 8th, 2002, the result came back.
The saliva on the chicken belonged to Juan Muna, the former employee, the 18-year-old who’d walked out of the station in 1993.
A second piece of evidence surfaced in the re-examination.
A napkin from that same meal carried Luna’s palm print.
A second woman, Eileen Bakala, came forward.
She’d worked with Digorski at a pizza place in Hoffman Estates and had picked him and Luna up from a Carpentersville grocery store parking lot.
On the night of the murders, they told her they’d robbed a restaurant.
Later that night, Dorski had asked her to drive past the Browns chicken.
When they saw the squad cars and ambulances, he’d told her the truth.
On May 16th, 2002, Palatine police arrested Juan Luna, 28, at a gas station in Carpentersville and James Dorski, 29, near Indianapolis.
The chief, John Kosul, called them people without a soul.
Juan Luna gave a videotacked confession.
It ran long.
He described walking into the restaurant with Digorski just before closing, ordering a chicken dinner and eating it.
And then what followed.
He admitted to one of the killings himself.
He said he’d been told to watch Lynn Alenfeld and had gotten caught up in it and that he’d cut her throat.
He said Dorski shot everyone else.
He described the mop, the latex gloves, the money.
Anne Lockett would testify that the motive, as it had been explained to her, was partly curiosity.
Luna had wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.
Dorsi had agreed to help two ordinary young men from Freed High School.
Seven people in a freezer to find out what it felt like.
Palatine, which had lived 9 years with the question of Shu, now had to live with the answer of why, and the answer was worse than anything the town had imagined.
It took five more years to get one Luna in front of a jury.
Pre-trial fights over the DNA, whether the chicken had been mishandled in storage, whether the chain of custody held went on and on, and the defense would attack that frozen bag of bones all the way to the end.
In the spring of 2007, Luna stood trial in Cook County.
The prosecution played his confession.
They put the DNA on the screen.
They put the palm print beside it.
On May 10th, 2007, after 11 hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of all seven counts of first-degree murder.
A week later, in the death penalty phase, a single juror, a young mother, held out against execution.
Luna was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
James Dorski’s trial came in 2009, and it rested on different ground.
There was no DNA for Dorski.
The case against him was built on his own statements to police, which corroborated Luna’s confession and on the two women, Anne Lockett and Eileen Bala, who told the jury what he’d said in 1993.
The defense went after Lockett hard, walking her through her teenage drug use and her psychiatric history.
She acknowledged all of it.
She also didn’t change her story.
On September 29th, 2009, the jury found Jans Dorski guilty of all seven murders.
Two jurors held out against the death penalty.
He too was sentenced to life without parole.
Dorski has never stopped appealing.
In 2016, he argued that Luna had acted alone and that Lockett was not credible.
In 2022, he argued that prosecutors had hidden the fact that Lockett was eligible for the reward.
A state appeals court denied him again in June of 2022.
In 2010, the reward, $98,129, was finally paid out, split evenly between Anne Lockett and Melissa Olay, the friend who picked up the phone.
Picture the Browns chicken on Northwest Highway at 8:45 on a Friday night in January.
Before any of it, Richard Ellenfelt behind the counter, Lynn beside him, both of them tired, both of them hoping the place turns a profit by summer.
Guadalupeel Maldonado at the fryer thinking about his tids.
Marcus Nelson and Thomas Menace wiping down tables.
Michael Castro and Rico Solis joking in the back.
16 and 17 counting the minutes until 10:00 when they’d be out the door and home.
That is who they were.
That is the version worth keeping.
The building is gone.
The site was redeveloped.
And for a long time, there was nothing to market.
Every January 8th, the families gather anyway.
Seven candles.
And here is what the Brown’s chicken case teaches more clearly than almost any other story in American True Prime.
An evidence technician in 1993 did not know what a chicken bone would be worth.
He saved it anyway.
A woman who had been threatened into silence as a teenager found 9 years later that she could not carry it anymore.
And a friend who could have said, “That’s your business,” instead picked up a phone.
None of those people were detectives.
All of them solved the case.
So, we’ll leave it with you.
Was life without parole justice for seven murders committed out of curiosity?
Or should the two hold out jurors have been overruled?
What stays with you more, the frozen chicken dinner or the 9 years two men spent living free while people who knew the truth stayed quiet?
And how many other evidence freezes across this country are holding something that today’s science could finally read.
Justice came for the seven of Brown’s chicken after 9 years.
Stories like theirs remind us that truth, however late, finds its way to the light.
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Thank you for watching.
