ILLINOIS 1993 Cold Case Solved After 9 Years — Justice for the Brown’s Chicken Victims
On the night of January 8th, 1993, seven employees were cleaning up at the end of the evening shift at Brown’s Chicken and Pasta in Palatine, Illinois, a quiet suburb northwest of Chicago.
Richard and Lynn Ellenfeld, the couple who owned the restaurant, along with five employees, were preparing to close.
Two of them were Michael Castro, 16 years old, and Rico Solless, 17 years old, high school students working part-time after school.
No one walked out of the restaurant that night.
When Michael’s mother called the police because her son had not come home, the police opened the door and discovered seven bodies piled on top of each other in two walk-in coolers.
Six people had been shot multiple times.
Lynn Ellenfeld had her throat cut before being shot.
Michael Castro was stabbed in the abdomen after being shot.
The killers stole less than $2,000.
Seven lives exchanged for less than $2,000.
Evidence was right there at the scene.
DNA from saliva on a partially eaten piece of chicken.
A palm print on a napkin in the trash bag.
But 1993 technology was powerless.
And two women who knew exactly who was behind the massacre dared not open their mouths because the killers threatened to kill them if they spoke.
The case froze.
9 years passed.
More than 30,500 leads led nowhere.
$100,000 in reward money went unclaimed.
The restaurant was leveled.
Palatine tried to forget.
But in the freezer of the Illinois State Police Laboratory, the partially eaten chickens still sat there waiting for the day technology would catch up.
It took 9 years, a leap forward in DNA technology, and two women who finally dared to break the silence for the most infamous cold case in Illinois to be solved.
This is the story of seven ordinary people on an ordinary night and of justice that took nearly two decades to arrive.
If you are the kind of person who stays until the end of the story who wants to know not only what happened but also why justice took 9 years to arrive then you have come to the right place.
Subscribe to Cold Case Reopened.
We go deep into the cases that everyone else has forgotten.
To [clears throat] understand how truly brutal the Browns Chicken Massacre was, you have to understand what Palatine was like in 1993.
It was a suburban town of about 39,000 people located northwest of Chicago.
The kind of place people moved to to get away from city crime.
Treeline streets, good schools, neighbors who knew each other’s names.
Violent crime in Palatine was almost non-existent.
The police here were used to handling petty theft and traffic accidents, not mass murder.
Brown’s Chicken and Pasta was a fried chicken chain with more than 100 locations across Illinois and Indiana.
Founded by Frank Portillo, famous for its crispy buttermilk fried chicken and fluffy biscuits.
The store at 168 West Northwest Highway was one of the busy locations situated on Palatine’s main commercial street.
For local residents, it was as familiar as the corner diner in their own neighborhood.
Nothing about this location, this street, this town suggested that it would become the scene of the worst mass murder in the history of Chicago’s suburbs.
Richard Elenfeld, 50 years old, and his wife, Lynn Elenfeld, were the couple who owned this Brown’s Chicken location.
They had three daughters.
Jennifer, the eldest, often worked at the restaurant with her parents.
The other two daughters were supposed to be there that evening, but for reasons of luck that no one can explain, both were absent.
Richard and Lynn were not just restaurant owners.
They were the ones who stood at the stove, served customers, and cleaned up at the end of the day alongside the employees.
They knew the names of every regular customer.
They were the kind of people who built a small business with their own hands and never asked employees to do anything they were not willing to do themselves first.
Guadalupe Maldonado was the restaurant’s cook.
His younger brother, Pedro, would be one of the first to arrive at the restaurant looking for him when he did not come home that night.
His sister-in-law, Maria, would stand outside the restaurant the next morning in the biting cold, waiting for news that no one wanted to deliver.
Thomas Mens, 32 years old, and Marcus Nelson, 31 years old, were the other two adult employees.
They had their own families, their own lives, their own plans for tomorrow that never came.
But the two victims who hit everyone’s heart the hardest in this case were Michael Castro and Rico Solless.
Michael was 16, Rico was 17.
Both were students at Palatine High School, classmates working part-time at Brown’s Chicken after school to earn extra money.
They were kids who did everything the adults told them to do.
Go to school, go to work part-time, come home on time.
The Filipino origin families of both boys were part of the growing immigrant community in Chicago suburbs.
Hardworking families who placed all their hopes in the next generation.
Michael and Rico did not know that Friday night, January 8, 1993, would be the last night of their lives.
None of the seven people knew.
That night, the restaurant closed at 9:00 pm as usual.
Palatine was immersed in the characteristic January cold of the Midwest.
Temperatures dropping below 0°.
Wind from the direction of Lake Michigan cutting across the empty streets.
The last customers had left.
Seven employees stayed behind to clean, count the money, prepare to lock up.
That was the routine every evening.
Nothing unusual except one thing.
The restaurant door was never locked that night.
What happened inside during the next 30 to 40 minutes would not be fully known until nearly a decade later when the killers finally confessed.
But the result was apparent the next morning.
That night when the clock passed midnight and Michael Castro still had not come home.
His mother, Mrs. Epipania Castro, began to worry.
She called the restaurant.
No one answered.
She called again.
Still silence.
She contacted the Palatine police and said her 16-year-old son should have been home long ago.
The police initially responded slowly.
Michael’s parents would later criticize the police for not reacting faster that night.
Saying they had contacted the police many hours before an officer actually arrived at the scene to check.
Pedro Maldonado also went to the restaurant looking for his brother Guadalupe.
The restaurant was dark.
The door was closed but not locked.
Something was not right.
Around 2:30 am on January 9, the police finally went inside.
What they found inside the two walk-in coolers would haunt the Palatine community for decades afterward.
Seven bodies piled on top of each other in the two coolers and the freezer behind the kitchen.
All had wounds, blood frozen solid on the cold metal floor.
One of the first officers on the scene later said he could not count the number of victims immediately because there were so many bodies in such a small space.
Police searched the scene for clues, including the trash bins and the roof.
They discovered the restaurant had been cleaned spotless before the killers left.
The cash register was open.
The amount stolen was estimated at less than $2,000.
The news spread on the morning of January 9 and Palatine was shaken.
Maria Maldonado stood outside the restaurant in the morning cold, telling reporters words that no one could forget.
They are not telling us anything.
We do not know if he is still alive or already dead.
She did not know that her brother-in-law had been lying in that freezer all night.
The three daughters of the Ellenfeld couple received the news that their parents had been killed at the very restaurant their family had built.
The Castro family received the news that their 16-year-old son, the boy who only worked part-time to earn a few extra dollars, would never come home again.
Police carried the body of each victim out of the restaurant in front of television cameras.
Palatine had never witnessed anything like this.
No one had ever thought they would have to witness it.
And the only question that the entire town, the entire Chicagoland region, the entire country was asking was just one.
Who did this? Within a few hours after discovering the scene, Palatine police determined that this was not the act of a single killer.
Investigators believe there were multiple perpetrators using 38 caliber handguns and knives.
The Cook County Medical Examiner confirmed that all seven victims had wounds, but the level of brutality far exceeded an ordinary robbery.
Six victims were shot multiple times.
Lynn Ellenfeld, the restaurant owner’s wife, had her throat cut before being shot once.
Michael Castro, the 16-year-old student, was stabbed in the abdomen after being shot.
That behavior was not the behavior of someone who only wanted money.
That was the behavior of someone who wanted to make sure no one survived to tell.
The killers had herded all the victims into the two walk-in coolers behind the kitchen before executing each one.
They acted systematically, coldly, without panic.
And before leaving, they cleaned the restaurant spotless, wiped the tables and chairs, rearranged the furniture, creating an appearance so normal that no one suspected anything for many hours afterward.
That meticulousness was more frightening than the violence itself.
It showed the killers were not in a hurry, not afraid, and in complete control of the situation.
But they made one mistake.
Or more precisely, they left behind one thing that at the time no one recognized the true value of.
In the trash bin at the scene among the garbage bags and food wrappers, there was a partially eaten chicken dinner.
Someone had eaten chicken at the restaurant before or during the massacre and left a piece of chicken still bearing saliva.
On a napkin discarded in a nearly empty trash bag, there was a palm print.
In 1993, DNA was still a young technology in criminal investigation, but a forensic scientist named Jane Homier had an intuition that would later prove to be the most important decision in the entire case.
She picked up the partially eaten chicken and placed it in storage in the freezer at the Illinois State Police Laboratory.
Almost as an afterthought at the time, no one knew that that piece of chicken would sit in the freezer for 6 years before technology caught up.
and no one knew that it would become the only key that unlocked the entire case.
But in January 1993, the police did not have DNA to work with.
They had what they thought was enough.
A shocking mass murder, enormous public pressure, and nearly unlimited resources.
Within 3 days, Palatine Police Chief Jerry Bratcher organized a 75 person task force, including Palatine Police, Illinois State Police, and FBI investigators.
At its peak, more than 100 people were investigating the case at the same time.
In just the first week, they screened 1,150 leads.
That number would rise to more than $30,500 in the months and years that followed.
The reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killers reached $100,000 by January 25, less than 3 weeks after the murders contributed by the town government, businesses, and private donors.
The task force worked day and night, and they began making arrests.
On January 9, just one day after the bodies were discovered, police arrested a former Browns chicken employee.
He was from Elgen.
They held him for 2 days, then released him for lack of evidence.
This man was later fully exonerated, sued the Palatine police for wrongful arrest, and received a settlement in 1997.
On January 15, police arrested five other men, released all of them almost immediately, holding only one for an unrelated charge.
In March 1994, more than one year after the massacre, Palatine police arrested then released another man from Chicago.
Each arrest created a brief wave of hope followed by disappointment.
The press reported extensively every time there was a new suspect, then went silent when the suspect was released.
The victim’s families were pulled into a repeating emotional cycle.
Hope, waiting, disappointment, then hope again.
If this case is touching you in a different way, hit the like button.
We tell stories like this every week on Cold Case Reopened.
cases that freeze for years, sometimes decades, until someone refuses to let them be buried.
Subscribe so you do not miss the next case.
Back in Palletine, the disappointment began turning into anger.
And that anger was not only directed at the anonymous killers, it was directed at the police.
The Chicago Tribune published an editorial accusing the Palatine Police of lacking competence in basic investigative procedures.
The police were criticized for not interviewing residents and employees of nearby stores until many days after the murders.
Michael Castro’s parents publicly accused the police of not responding promptly that night when they called to report their son missing.
Frank Portillo, president of the entire Browns Chicken and Pasta chain, became the harshest critic.
He advocated for an independent review of the Palatine police investigation.
He even organized a radio program to maintain public pressure.
In 1997, the Better Government Association responded with a harshly critical report on the Palatine Task Force.
3 years later, the Illinois Crime Commission issued its own report.
This time praising the police efforts, two completely opposing reports.
But no matter who was right or wrong in that debate, the result did not change.
No one was arrested.
No one was prosecuted.
Seven people had died and no one had to pay.
In July 1993, 6 months after the massacre, relatives of some victims hung a sign in the window of the Browns chicken restaurant.
The sign read, “Who killed seven people 6 months ago and why?” That question would hang over Palatine for another 9 years.
While Palatine police chased thousands of leads that led nowhere.
While the press criticized and the victim’s families hung signs asking who had killed their loved ones, the two men truly responsible for the massacre were living completely free.
They did not flee.
They did not leave the country.
They did not even leave the Chicagoland area.
Their names were Juan Luna and James Dorski.
And the story of how these two men slipped past every radar of law enforcement for nearly a decade is the story of the failure not only of the police but of everyone who knew the truth but was too afraid to speak.
Juan Luna was 18 years old on the night of the massacre.
He grew up in the Chicago suburbs, a child in an ordinary working family.
No criminal record, no history of violence.
And this is the detail that makes the case particularly terrifying.
Luna had once been an employee of the very Browns chicken restaurant at 168 West Northwest Highway.
He had worked for the Ellenfeld couple.
He knew the restaurant layout.
He knew the closing procedures.
He knew where the cash register was.
He knew where the walk-in coolers were.
And he knew how many people usually stayed after closing.
When Luna walked into the restaurant that night, he was not walking into a strange place.
He was returning to his old workplace.
Only this time, he did not come to serve fried chicken.
James Dorski was Luna’s close friend from high school.
He was a few years older than Luna, lived in Hoffman Estates, another suburb near Palatine.
Dorski had no direct connection to the Browns Chicken restaurant.
He had never worked there.
He did not know the victims, but he knew Luna, and Luna had a plan.
The motive of these two men was not personal hatred, not revenge, not insanity.
Prosecutors would later describe the motive with the most chilling words imaginable.
Dorski wanted to do something big.
According to the statements of the people, the two men confessed to later.
Luna wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone, and Dorski agreed to help.
That was the entire reason.
Seven people died because two 18-year-old kids wanted to experience the feeling of murder.
And the amount of money they stole, less than $2,000.
Early in the investigation, Palatine police actually interviewed Luna along with other current and former employees of the Ellenfeld couple.
That was standard procedure.
When a murder occurs at a business, you check the employees.
Police checked Luna’s alibi, and somehow he slipped through.
He was not detained.
He was not followed further.
He returned to normal life.
In the years after the massacre, Luna moved to Carpentersville, got married, had one son.
He worked as an appliance installer.
He lived the life of an ordinary suburban man, the kind of person neighbors nod to every morning without ever suspecting.
Dorski also disappeared into ordinary life.
He moved to Indianapolis, worked as a repair man.
No criminal record, no trouble with the law.
nothing to suggest that he had participated in killing seven people in the walk-in cooler of a fried chicken restaurant.
Two killers lived free in broad daylight while the victim’s families buried their loved ones and waited for justice that never came.
But there was one thing the police did not know throughout those nine years.
Luna and Dorski were not completely silent.
They had bragged.
On the very night of the murders, just a few hours after the seven people were executed, the two men had confessed to at least two women.
Eileen Bakala, a friend of Dorski, had given the two a ride home that night.
On the way to Elgen, they told her that they had robbed a Brown’s chicken restaurant.
After Bala dropped off Luna, she continued driving Dorski to Hoffman Estates.
When the car passed the Brown’s Chicken restaurant and Dorski saw a swarm of police cars and ambulances surrounding it, he began telling her what had really happened inside.
Not just robbery, murder.
Anne Lockett, Dorski’s girlfriend at the time, was also told a few days later.
Both women knew.
Both stayed silent, not because they did not care, but because Luna and Dorski threatened to kill them if they opened their mouths.
Think about that.
Two women lived with the knowledge that they knew who had killed seven people.
Lived with the fear that if they spoke they would be the next victims and lived with the moral weight pressing on their shoulders every day for nearly a decade.
Their silence was the shield protecting Luna and Dorski and it would last 9 years.
Meanwhile, the case officially became a cold case.
By 1994, despite thousands of leads and hundreds of hours of investigation, the police were no closer than on the first day.
In 1995, Brown’s Chicken and Pasta reopened at a new location in Palatine with a modern security system.
President Frank Portillo told the press that he was happy to be back, but the shadow of the massacre never left the brand.
Customers stayed away.
Revenue declined across the chain.
The name Browns Chicken, which once evoked crispy fried chicken and family meals, now evoked seven bodies in a walk-in cooler.
In April 2001, the Browns Chicken Restaurant building at 168 West Northwest Highway was demolished after a brief conversion into a dry cleaner.
The site became a parking lot.
No memorial, no plaque, just asphalt and emptiness.
Palatine tried to forget.
Residents tried to continue their lives.
Every January 8th, the winter cold seemed a bit harsher when the memory returned.
Someone occasionally placed a wreath where the restaurant once stood.
Reporters called asking if there was anything new.
The answer was always the same.
Nothing new.
Former police chief Jerry Bratcher, by then retired, once said a sentence that later became prophetic.
I do not know when, but the case will be solved.
He was right.
But the solution would not come from traditional police work.
It would come from two sources no one could have predicted.
A leap in technology and two women who finally decided that the silence had lasted long enough.
In 1999, 6 years after the massacre, an advance in forensic science changed everything.
DNA analysis technology had developed far beyond what was available in 1993.
New techniques allowed scientists to extract and analyze genetic profiles from much smaller, much older, and much more degraded biological samples than before.
And someone at the Illinois State Police Laboratory remembered that in the freezer there was still a partially eaten piece of chicken from the Browns chicken scene.
The piece of chicken that Jane Homier had picked up from the trash nearly a decade earlier, almost as an afterthought at the time, now became the most important specimen in the entire case.
It was fortunate that it had been preserved properly.
It was fortunate that no one threw it away during the 6 years the case was stuck.
It was fortunate that Jane Homier was the kind of scientist who believed you keep everything, even when you do not yet know when it will be useful.
Illinois State Police Deputy Director Robin Woollery later said that the extraordinary progress of technology was the factor responsible for the breakthrough that the Brown’s Chicken case set a new standard for the future of forensic science.
But technology alone did not solve the case.
It needed a person who dared to open their mouth.
And that person finally appeared in the spring of 2002.
Anne Lockett, then 26 years old, was a student at Eastern Illinois University.
Nearly 9 years had passed since the night her boyfriend, James Dorski, told her what he and Juan Luna had done at the Browns Chicken Restaurant in Palatine.
9 years living with that secret.
9 years knowing that two men who killed seven people were walking free.
9 years of silence because of fear of death.
Lockett later stated that Dorski threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
Luna also threatened the same and she believed them.
She had seen what they were capable of.
But secrets have weight and after nearly a decade that weight became unbearable.
At the end of March 2002, Lockett confided to a friend that she knew who was behind the Palletine massacre.
That friend did not hesitate.
She immediately called the Palatine police and told them to contact Lockett.
That call changed everything.
After nine years of stalemate, after more than 3,500 leads that led nowhere, after hundreds of interviews and dozens of wrongful arrests, the case finally had a real direction.
Police contacted Lockett.
She stated that on the night of the murders, Dorski had bragged to her that he and his high school best friend had done something big.
And then he confessed the details.
They had gone into the Browns chicken restaurant, robbed the money, and killed everyone inside.
Lockett also gave police the second name, Juan Luna.
Lockett’s disclosure led police to Eileen Bakala, the woman who had known the truth even earlier than Lockett.
On the very night of the murders, Bakala recounted the story she had kept in her heart for 9 years.
On the night of January 8th, 1993, after the massacre had occurred, Luna and Dorski came to her house in Elgen.
They smoked marijuana together.
Then the two asked her for a ride home.
On the way, they told her that they had robbed a Brown’s Chicken restaurant.
Pakala dropped Luna off first.
Then, when she drove Dorski to Hoffman Estates and the car passed the Browns Chicken restaurant on Northwest Highway, Dorski saw a swarm of police cars and ambulances surrounding the building.
He began telling her the whole story, not just robbery.
He said that Luna had lost control and started killing.
That Luna used a knife to cut the female restaurant owner’s throat, that they herded everyone into the cooler, that Luna shot four people, that Luna then handed the gun to Dorski and told him to shoot the remaining two people in the freezer and Dorski shot.
Bala said that on the way home, Dorski said he was sorry about what had happened, but he was not sorry enough to turn himself in.
And Bala was not brave enough to call the police.
She was also threatened.
She was also afraid and she also stayed silent for 9 years.
Now the police had two witnesses.
But they needed physical evidence to tie everything together.
And that was when the piece of chicken in the freezer finally came into play.
In April 2002, police placed Luna and Dorski under surveillance.
They requested DNA samples from both suspects.
On May 8th, 2002, results came back from the laboratory and confirmed what the investigators had hoped, but dared not be certain of.
DNA extracted from the saliva on the partially eaten chicken at the scene matched Juan Luna’s genetic profile.
He had eaten chicken at the restaurant before or while killing the seven people, and he left biological evidence right on the food, not only DNA.
The incomplete left palm print on the napkin discarded in the nearly empty trash bag inside the restaurant also belonged to Luna.
Two independent pieces of physical evidence, both pointing straight to the same person.
For the investigators who had worked on the case for nearly a decade, that was the moment of breakthrough.
Confirmation that the piece of chicken preserved almost as an afterthought in 1993 was the key that unlocked the entire case.
On May 16, 2002, Palatine police arrested Juan Luna and James Dorski.
At the subsequent press conference, prosecutors formally charged each man with seven counts of firstdegree murder committed in the course of an armed robbery, charges that made both eligible for the death penalty.
This breakthrough ended 9 years of investigation into one of the most infamous cold cases in Illinois history.
Luna was arrested in Carpentersville where he lived with his wife and young son.
Dorski was arrested in Indianapolis where he was working as a repair man.
Both had lived free for 9 years 4 months 8 days since the night they killed seven people.
After being arrested, Luna agreed to videotape a 43minute confession with Cook County prosecutors.
In the video, he recounted the details of the events of that night.
He said that when the first gunshot rang out inside the restaurant, he reassured the seven people inside.
Everyone lie on the floor and no one would be hurt.
But less than 40 minutes after that statement, all seven people were dead.
Luna also stated that Dorski had ordered him to guard Lynn Ellenfeld during the attack and admitted that he had gotten carried away and cut her throat.
Dorski also videotaped a confession, but much shorter, only 5 minutes, and the content was more controversial.
Prosecutors said he admitted killing two victims.
Defense attorneys would later say the confession was coerced.
But in May 2002, the two men who killed seven people at Brown’s Chicken were finally behind bars.
9 years of silence had ended.
However, the road from arrest to conviction would be longer than anyone imagined.
It took 5 years from the day of arrest before Juan Luna went to trial.
5 years filled with hearings, motions, delays, and countless trips in and out of the courtroom without any actual trial taking place.
Luna’s defense attorneys filed a series of motions to exclude the DNA evidence, invalidate the videotaped confession, and challenge the validity of the entire investigation.
The justice system moved at its own speed and the families of the seven victims could only wait.
They had waited 9 years for the killers to be arrested.
Now they had to wait another 5 years for the killers to go to trial.
For Jennifer Schilling, daughter of Richard and Lynn Ellenfeld, every delay was another time the wound was torn open.
Her parents had been killed at the very restaurant her family had built.
She had lived 14 years without answers, then had answers, but no justice.
The patience of the victim’s families was not a choice.
It was the only thing they had.
Finally, in May 2007, more than 14 years after the massacre, the trial of Juan Luna began at the Cook County Criminal Court in Chicago.
Lead prosecutor Dick Divine stood before a jury of 10 women and two men and called the murders a moment of horror.
There was one strange detail on the first day.
Divine repeatedly miscalled the restaurant Burger King instead of Brown’s Chicken and Pasta, forcing Judge Vincent Michael Gogggin to pull him aside to remind him.
A small error, but it showed that even the person heading the prosecution had to struggle with the weight and complexity of a case that had dragged on for nearly 1.
5 decades.
The prosecutor’s strategy rested on three pillars of evidence against Luna.
The first pillar was DNA.
Forensic experts presented to the jury how DNA from the saliva on the partially eaten chicken at the scene was extracted, analyzed, and matched to Luna’s genetic profile.
Prosecutors devoted about 25% of the entire case to the DNA presentation.
Jane Homier, the forensic scientist who had preserved the chicken in 1993, testified in court, recounting how she picked up the partially eaten chicken dinner from inside the restaurant where seven people were killed and placed it in the freezer.
She did not know at the time that her decision would solve the case.
She was just following procedure.
The second pillar was the palm print.
The incomplete left palm print found on the napkin discarded in the nearly empty trash bag inside the restaurant was also matched to Luna.
Two independent pieces of physical evidence placing Luna at the scene on the night of the murders.
The third pillar and perhaps the strongest was the 43minute videotaped confession.
In the darkened courtroom, the jury watched Luna sit in front of the camera and recount every detail of that night.
He described how he and Dorski entered the restaurant near closing time.
How he reassured the victims that if they obeyed, no one would be hurt, how everything escalated, how they hurtded the victims into the cooler and freezer, and how he admitted he had gotten carried away in the violence, using a knife to cut Lynn Ellenfeld’s throat.
Luna also said that he was not with Dorski when his friend discarded the knife and the gun used in the murders.
Alongside the physical evidence and the confession, prosecutors called two key witnesses, Eileen Bakala and Anne Lockett.
Bakala told the jury what Dorski had said to her on the night of the murders.
That Luna had lost control and started killing.
That Luna used a knife to cut the female restaurant owner’s throat from ear to ear.
That they herded everyone into the cooler where Luna shot four people.
That Luna handed the gun to Dorski and told him to shoot the remaining two people in the freezer and Dorski did.
Bakala’s testimony was the most detailed picture of what happened inside the restaurant that night.
Lockett Dorski’s former girlfriend, the one who broke the silence in 2002 and restarted the entire case, also testified.
She stated that Dorski told her Luna wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone, and Dorski agreed to help.
She also stated that she stayed silent for nearly a decade because both threatened to kill her.
Luna’s defense attorneys counteratt attacked fiercely.
They attacked the reliability of the DNA evidence, pointing out that the investigation was full of errors and that others had also confessed to this murder using details that only the real killers would know.
They argued that the DNA on the chicken might not be Luna’s.
And even if it was his, it only proved he had eaten at the restaurant, not that he had killed.
He had once been an employee there.
The appearance of his DNA at the restaurant was not unusual.
They also argued that police had provided Luna with key details of the case during interrogation, making the videotaped confession unreliable, that Luna did not tell the story himself, but only repeated what the police wanted to hear.
The jury reviewed the evidence throughout many weeks of trial.
They heard testimony from dozens of witnesses.
They viewed the horrific crime scene photos and the video recording the removal of the victim’s bodies from the restaurant.
They heard Luna in his own voice describe how the seven people were killed.
Then they entered the deliberation room.
The jury deliberated for about 8 hours and when they returned to the courtroom, the verdict was unanimous.
Guilty.
All seven counts of firstdegree murder.
Jennifer Schilling, daughter of the Ellenfeld couple, was in the courtroom when the verdict was read.
14 years after her parents were killed, finally one of the killers was convicted.
But the question of punishment remained.
Under Illinois law, seven counts of first-degree murder committed in the course of an armed robbery qualified for the death penalty.
Prosecutors requested the death penalty.
However, the jury had to be unanimous, and one single juror voted to spare Luna’s life.
One vote.
Just one vote saved the life of the man who killed seven people.
Luna was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
He would never walk out of prison, but he would live.
For the victim’s families, that was an incomplete victory.
Justice had been served, but not to the degree they hoped, and the case was not yet over because James Dorski, the second killer, had not yet gone to trial.
If you believe that stories like this deserve to be told, that cases everyone else has given up on still have meaning, hit the like button on this video.
It helps more people find this channel.
And if you have not subscribed yet, this is the right time.
We have many more stories to tell.
The trial of James Dorski began in August 2009, more than 16 years after the massacre and 2 years after Luna was convicted.
If the Luna case was built on a solid foundation of physical evidence, the Dorski case was a completely different story.
There was no DNA of Dorski at the scene.
No fingerprints, no palm prints, not a single piece of physical evidence placing Dorski inside the Browns chicken restaurant that night.
Defense attorney Mark Levitt turned the absence of physical evidence into the centerpiece of the entire defense strategy.
He said straight to the jury in closing that prosecutors could appeal to the jury’s emotions, could appeal to their senses, but what they lacked was evidence.
He had a point.
On the purely forensic side, nothing linked Dorski to the scene.
The defense team also pointed out that two different DNA profiles were found on the partially eaten chicken.
One matched Luna.
The second profile was never fully tested and did not match Dorski.
Defense attorneys argued that the second DNA profile belonged to Luna’s real accomplice and that person was not Dorski.
Prosecutors countered that the second profile could belong to Dorski, but there was not enough data to confirm or rule it out.
They also pointed out that two people do not usually share one piece of chicken and that the DNA evidence on the chicken connected Luna to the scene, while witness testimony connected Dorski to Luna.
That was the chain that prosecutors needed the jury to believe.
And that chain was built almost entirely from human testimony.
Anne Lockett, now renamed Anne England, was the central witness.
She stepped into the courtroom and recounted what Dorski had said to her after the murders.
She stated that Dorski and Luna had told her about the case because Luna wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone, and Dorski agreed to help.
England emphasized that she was completely sober that night when the two men recounted their crimes.
She was not drunk.
She was not high on marijuana.
She heard every word clearly.
And she stayed silent for nearly a decade out of fear of death.
Eileen Bakala also testified for the second time and repeated the testimony she had given at Luna’s trial.
She recounted that Dorski had confessed to her on the very night of the crime when the car passed the restaurant surrounded by police.
Dorski told her how Luna used a knife to cut the female restaurant owner’s throat, how they herded everyone into the cooler, how Luna shot four people, then handed the gun to Dorski to shoot the remaining two in the freezer.
Bala also stated that on the way home, Dorski said he was sorry about what had happened.
He was sorry, but did not turn himself in.
Prosecutors also called a police officer who had spoken with England when she first contacted police in 2002.
The officer stated that when asked, England replied that Dorski said he was sorry about what had happened.
Each piece of testimony layered on top of the other, building a picture of a man who had confessed his crimes to multiple people, but never turned himself into the law.
However, there was one notable thing.
Prosecutors never played for the jury the 5-minute videotaped confession of Dorski, the one they said he admitted killing two victims.
The reason was not announced, but many legal observers believe the content of the video was not clear enough or could be exploited by the defense against the prosecution.
No physical evidence, no confession video shown.
The case against Agorski stood entirely on the shoulders of the people who had heard him speak.
Defense attorneys focused on the false confessions from other suspects throughout the 9 years of investigation, trying to cast doubt that Dorski’s 2002 confession could also have been coerced.
They called more than 12 witnesses during 5 days of defense.
One evidence technician stated that a footprint at the scene had been damaged due to error the day after the murders and could not be identified.
The defense argued that such errors in the investigation could have overlooked leads pointing to other suspects.
Dorski did not take the witness stand.
Judge Vincent Gogan explained to him the right to testify and the right to remain silent.
He chose silence.
His mother, sister, and brother were present in the courtroom throughout the trial.
The trial lasted nearly 1 month with more than 300 pieces of evidence and about 60 witnesses.
After closing arguments, the jury entered the deliberation room.
They deliberated for about two hours.
When they returned, the verdict was unanimous.
Guilty.
All seven counts of first-degree murder.
James Dorski, 37 years old, showed no emotion when the verdict was read.
No grimace, no tears, no reaction.
But on the other side of the courtroom, about 20 members of the victim’s families held hands and cried.
Some had sat in the courtroom for many weeks, hearing again the details of how their loved ones were killed, looking into the face of the man they believed had pulled the trigger on two of the people they loved.
The judge sentenced Dorski to life in prison without parole.
Unlike Luna’s trial, this time no juror voted to spare his life, but there was also no death penalty.
Assistant prosecutor Tom Bias summarized the result in one sentence.
Witness testimony confirmed the evidence.
For the victim’s families, the verdict brought the closure they had waited 16 years for.
But as one relative once said, “Justice took an entire lifetime, the lifetime of Michael Castro, the 16-year-old victim.
The boy who worked part-time after school at a fried chicken restaurant and never came home.
From the time he was killed until the last killer was convicted, 16 years had passed, longer than the entire life he had lived.
Although the case was closed, its legacy spread far beyond the courtroom.
Brown’s Chicken and Pasta, the chain that once had more than 100 locations across Illinois and Indiana, never recovered.
The massacre, stuck to the brand like an indelible scar.
Customers stayed away.
Locations closed one by one.
By 2009, the same year Dorski was convicted, Brown’s Chicken filed for bankruptcy.
The media attributed it directly to the massacre.
By 2016, fewer than 25 locations remained open, and none in Indiana.
The restaurant building in Palatine had been leveled since 2001, turned into a parking lot.
One murder did not only take seven lives.
It destroyed a brand.
But case left a positive legacy greater than the loss.
It changed the way the forensic science and law enforcement community in Illinois handles cold cases.
It proved that biological evidence preserved properly can solve cases many years, even many decades after the crime occurred.
Jane Homier’s decision to pick up the partially eaten chicken from the trash in 1993, almost as an afterthought, became a standard lesson in forensic training.
Keep everything.
Preserve everything.
You do not know what future technology will be able to do with today’s evidence.
In 2010, the two women who broke the silence finally received a fitting reward.
Former Palatine Town Council Commissioner Jack Wagner released the $98,129 reward from the $100,000 reward fund established in 1993, split evenly between Lockett and Bala.
That money did not compensate for 9 years of living in fear, but it acknowledged that their courage had changed everything.
Without their voices, Luna and Dorski might still be living free to this day.
In 2022, the Illinois appellet court rejected Dorski’s appeal in which he challenged the sentence based on allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective defense council.
The sentence stands both Luna and Dorski will die in prison.
On the night of January 8th, 1993, seven ordinary people walked into the evening shift at a fried chicken restaurant in a Chicago suburb.
Richard and Lynn Ellenfeld, the couple who built a business with their own hands.
Guadalupe Maldonado, the cook whose brother would come looking for him in the dark.
Thomas Mens and Marcus Nelson, two men with families waiting at home.
Michael Castro and Rico Solstus, two high school students working part-time after school.
No one came home.
It took 9 years, one partially eaten piece of chicken in a freezer, one leap in DNA technology, and two women who finally dared to break the silence to bring the killers into the light.
It took another 7 years for both to be convicted.
Justice took 16 years, but it arrived.
You can kill people, but you cannot kill the truth.
Sometimes the truth just needs time.
This is cold case reopened.
We tell the stories of the forgotten victims and the people who refuse to let them be forgotten forever.
If this story stays with you, please subscribe and share it.
The next case is already waiting.
