Illinois Charges Man With 1 Slaying in Gay Murders

by Deborah Pines and George Stuteville

Larry W. Eyler, a former Indiana liquor store clerk, was arrested in Chicago Friday and charged with one slaying in a string of homosexual murders in Illinois and Indiana. Eyler, 30, who keeps apartments in Terre Haute and Chicago, was arrested as he left the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago. Eyler just had left a hearing where a federal judge denied his request to have police return his pickup truck and other confiscated property. He was apprehended at 3 p.m. by investigators from the Lake County, Illinois, Sheriff’s Department and the central Indiana gay murder task force.

Eyler was held under $1 million bond in the Lake County Jail Waukegan, Illinois. He has refused to make any statements, police said. He was charged with the murder of Ralph Calise, 28, Chicago, said Lake County Sheriff Robert H. Babcox. Calise lived in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood where Eyler has an apartment. Calise’s body was found Aug. 3 in a cornfield near Lake Forest, Illinois, a northern Chicago suburb. He had been stabbed, police said. Several hours after the arrest, Eyler’s Chicago attorney Kenneth K. Ditkowsky filed a petition for criminal contempt against police in federal court.

Before the arrest, federal Judge Paul Plunkett had held a hearing on Eyler’s $250,000 civil rights suit. The suit charges that detectives in Illinois and Indiana had been harassing Eyler. Ditkowsky’s petition claims the arrest is the latest example of police harassment. “If they don’t have anything, there will be some police in jail,” Ditkowsky said. The lawyer claims to have three witnesses that will testify Eyler was in Chicago on the day of Calise’s murder. “They arrested him for a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed,” Ditkowsky said.