Suspected Mass Slayer Target of Intense Probe
by Mario Fox
A janitor who found the dismembered body of a homosexual prostitute in an apartment house trash bin led police to the apartment of an itinerant house painter, social worker and liquor store clerk named Larry W. Eyler. Eyler’s name was familiar to authorities in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Wisconsin. He had earlier been suspected of being linked to the slayings of 23 other young men whose bodies were found across a four-state area in the past 22 years. Joe Balla, a janitor at an apartment building in Eyler’s solidly middle-class Rogers Park neighborhood, recalls finding the body on the morning of August 21. Balla recalls noticing a large strange-looking bag tied up with a string.
“I ripped it open and there it was, this leg sticking out a human leg,” the shaken janitor recalled. The dismembered body was that of Daniel Bridges, 16, an admitted homosexual prostitute from Uptown, a seedy, racially mixed high-crime neighborhood. Bridges had been stabbed repeatedly, cut into eight pieces with a saw and stuffed into six trash bags, said Dr. Robert Stein, the medical examiner. Eyler, who has steadfastly refused to discuss the murder with police, was indicted by a Cook County grand jury on murder and other charges in Bridges’ death.
He was being held without bond at the county jail, with an arraignment scheduled September 13. He had been released only last February from the Lake County jail, where he was being held on a charge of murdering Ralph Calise, 28, of Chicago, whose body was found last summer near suburban Lake Forest. Eyler went free after Circuit Court Judge William Block threw out key evidence in the Calise case and reduced his bond from $1 million to $10,000. The discovery of the dismembered body in Rogers Park triggered a painstaking effort by Chicago police to build an airtight case against Eyler.
“We want everything out of that house we can use, and we want everything in this case,” said police Sgt. Leo Roberts. “We can’t afford to lose him this time.” But some authorities have cautioned against making too firm a connection between Eyler, a Crawfordsville, Indiana native, and other unsolved killings in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Wisconsin. In Lexington, Kentucky, Detective Al Borne, referring to an unsolved 1982 case, said, “Eyler is no more a suspect (in this case) than one or two other people. I don’t want to get into a situation where we have some open murder investigations that we want to dump on this guy.”
Earlier this year, during an interview with NBC News and the Chicago Tribune on sexual abuse of children, Bridges had said he knew Eyler and that “he was a real freak.” “He used to come around Uptown and hang around.” According to Lake County Sheriff Robert Babcox, Eyler can be charming, soft-spoken and polite, “but at night, he is the macho, beer-drinking homosexual type.” A different portrait was provided by members of Eyler’s family following his arrest last fall. His sister, Theresa, described him as “naive.” And his mother, Shirley deKoff of Indianapolis, called him “a boy who was always open, friendly, helpful, incapable of hurting anyone.”
Mrs. deKoff said that in 1971, when he was a high school senior, Eyler planned to become a Roman Catholic brother but decided against it because he didn’t want to leave his family. Instead, he attended Indiana State University, then took a variety of jobs, including a brief stint in July at a Lutheran home for handicapped children. Block, the judge who ordered Eyler’s bond reduced in February, said the law gave him no choice. He said authorities had illegally detained Eyler in the case and had obtained evidence by searching his red 1982 truck without “probable cause” to suspect him of a crime.
This time, Chicago police obtained warrants to search Eyler’s apartment and the building’s laundry. In the apartment, detectives said they found department store receipts for trash bags and saw blades. Police also used laser beams to try to lift fingerprints and sprayed the apartment with a chemical that highlights traces of human blood.
According to investigators, they uncovered evidence indicating that Bridges had been bound with tape and cloth, stabbed in the bedroom and then dismembered in the bathtub. The bedroom walls were freshly painted to cover up the blood, they said. Meanwhile, authorities from Indiana, Kentucky and Wisconsin contacted Chicago police to find any possible connections with the 23 other unsolved slayings.
All of the victims were males between 16 and 28, all of their bodies were found in isolated spots. In all but three cases, in which the cause of death could not be learned, the victims had been stabbed. More than half of the victims had links to the homosexual community, and many were found partly undressed or dismembered. Authorities say that this time, they don’t want Eyler to go free. Block’s ruling “opened our eyes to the possibility of losing this guy,” said Terry Levin, a spokesman for the Cook County state’s attorney.
