Donuts, Death, and the Devil: The True Story of the Chicago Ripper Crew

A Monster in Human Skin: The Making of Edward Spreitzer

Edward Spreitzer didn’t exactly grow up in a horror movie. No red flags waving from the jump. He was born in 1961 in Chicago to a teenage mom and a father who looked at his son like a permanent disappointment he never got around to returning.

Teachers called Edward quiet and shy, more interested in helping the janitor sweep than learning anything from a blackboard. He lagged behind in school, both socially and academically. At one point he was in the same grade as his younger sister. Not great for the self-esteem.

By the third year of high school, Edward checked out completely. He dropped out, wrecked the family car at 18, and got kicked out of the house. He moved into the Brer Rabbit Motel. Not exactly luxury housing. He started working at Winchell’s Donuts to scrape by.

Despite all that, his family didn’t give up on him. They still pushed him to learn a trade. He wasn’t going to be a scholar, but he could maybe fix a pipe or wire a fuse box. That kind of life, simple and stable, wasn’t totally off the table.

Then came Robin Gecht.

And Edward’s path took a hard left into the darkest parts of humanity.

The Electric Connection: From Donuts to Darkness

Robin Gecht wasn’t someone most people would want to model their life after. But to Edward Spreitzer, he looked like someone who had it all figured out. Robin was eight years older, had a job, a wife, kids, and carried himself like he knew something the rest of the world didn’t. That illusion was enough to pull Edward in.

They met at Winchell’s Donuts, where Edward worked. Robin came in often. Eventually, he offered Edward a ride when his car broke down. That ride would be the beginning of something way worse than either of them probably realized at the time.

What Edward didn’t know was that Robin had learned his electrician trade under John Wayne Gacy. Yes, that John Wayne Gacy. The clown. The killer. A little detail that might’ve made some people pause, but Edward wasn’t wired that way.

He was drawn to Robin. This was someone who seemed like a grown man with a real life. And Edward, living alone in a motel and barely scraping by, wanted in on that. He wanted the job. The confidence. The direction.

Robin had plenty of direction to give. None of it good.

Robin Gecht: The Charmer with a Trail of Abuse

Robin Gecht wore the mask well. On paper, he looked like a normal guy. But under the surface, things were rotten.

There were already disturbing rumors about him. He had been accused of molesting his own sister. His wife never spoke publicly about abuse, but people in the neighborhood talked. And so did the sex workers he frequently hired.

According to them, Robin had a thing for pain. He’d ask them to stick needles into their own breasts. Sometimes he went further and asked them to cut off their nipples and show him how they “worked.” No one seems to have gone that far, but the requests were real. So were the witnesses.

Some of these women later said that if the stories about his wife were true, then she probably had it worse than they did. And they weren’t exactly being treated with care.

This was the man Edward admired. The man who picked him up from work, offered him advice, and eventually pulled him deeper into something sickening. Robin didn’t just groom people. He built a system. A cult-like hierarchy where he played leader, manipulator, and predator all at once.

The Van Ride That Changed Everything

One night after Edward’s shift at Winchell’s, Robin offered him a ride. But it wasn’t just a ride home. Robin had something else in mind. He said they were going to “pick up some whores” and told Edward to hop in the van and hide in the back.

Robin explained the plan. He’d find a woman, bring her into the van, and drive to a secluded spot. When he knocked twice on the side of the van, Edward was supposed to come out and help. Help with what, exactly, wasn’t made clear.

That night, Robin picked up a woman named Linda Sutton. She was 29 years old and a mother of two. When Edward stepped out of the back of the van, Linda was already in the front seat, clearly drugged.

Robin dragged her into the woods. Edward followed. He said he could hear her panicking, but he didn’t know what was happening until Robin called him over to see.

Robin had sliced off one of Linda’s breasts and had raped the open wound. Then he cut off the other breast with a metal wire. Robin showed Edward how to do it himself, as if it were some kind of lesson.

Ten days later, the body was found in a field behind the Brer Rabbit Motel. A maid had complained about the smell. Dental records confirmed it was Linda Sutton. Her body was so badly decomposed that some parts were already down to the bone. The wounds in her chest had accelerated the breakdown.

She had been dead for only three days.

This was Edward’s initiation. His first act with Robin. It would not be the last.

The Brer Rabbit Motel Crew: A Murderous Brotherhood Forms

After Linda Sutton’s murder, Robin’s circle expanded. Two brothers joined in—Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis. Like Edward, they had tough upbringings and low IQ scores that put them right on the edge of being classified as intellectually disabled.

Thomas and Edward each scored a 75 on intelligence testing. Andrew came in at 74. For context, the minimum score to join the U.S. Army is 83. These were young men who were easy to manipulate, and Robin had no problem taking full advantage of that.

All of them lived at the Brer Rabbit Motel, except Andrew, who at one point was living with Robin and his family. Robin told people Andrew was helping with the kids. A grown man being brought in as a nanny? That wasn’t normal. But nothing about this situation was.

With the four of them now fully in orbit around Robin, they started moving like a unit. They became what the press would later call the Chicago Ripper Crew. A name meant to echo Jack the Ripper. Same kind of horror, only this time it was happening in the Midwest in the 1980s.

They weren’t killing for money. This wasn’t about robbery or gang turf. It was about violence for its own sake. Women were their targets. Especially sex workers. And Robin’s obsession with breasts wasn’t just a preference. It became the center of their twisted rituals.

The Attic Rituals: Inside the Chicago Ripper Crew’s Disturbing Obsession

Once the crew was fully formed, Robin took things even further. He wasn’t just leading a group of followers—he was building a cult. And at the center of it was his obsession with breasts and a makeshift Satanic altar in the attic of his home.

After murdering their victims, the crew would cut off the women’s breasts and bring them back to Robin’s house. That’s where things got even more disturbing. In that attic, surrounded by symbols and candles, the men would take turns masturbating onto the severed breasts. Robin would then slice off pieces and pass them around like some grotesque communion.

The leftovers were placed into a specially built box and stored on the altar. According to Thomas Kokoraleis, there were times when the box held as many as fifteen.

This wasn’t about belief. There’s no evidence any of them actually followed Satanic doctrine. It was theater for power and control. Robin made the violence into a ritual, something that bound the group together through shared depravity.

It wasn’t enough for them to kill. They had to own it, mark it, and reenact it. Again and again.

Lorraine Borowski: The Crew Targets an Innocent Woman

Up to this point, the Chicago Ripper Crew had mainly targeted sex workers. But that changed one morning in 1982.

Twenty-one-year-old Lorraine Borowski was on her way to open the real estate office where she worked. Her car was parked just steps from the building. She never made it inside.

Edward and Andrew spotted her on the street. They snatched her and took her to a secluded area, where they beat and assaulted her before stabbing her repeatedly. An autopsy later revealed multiple broken bones and stab wounds that looked like they came from both a knife and something sharper, possibly an ice pick.

Her body wasn’t found until five months later. By then, most of the evidence had been lost to time and the elements. But the brutality was still clear.

Lorraine didn’t fit their usual pattern. She wasn’t a sex worker. She was a young professional, going about her normal morning. And that may be what made this attack stand out. It showed that the crew didn’t have a type. They had an opportunity.

And they took it.

No One Was Safe: Shui Mak and the Escalation of Violence

Two weeks after Lorraine Borowski was murdered, the crew struck again. This time, it was Shui Mak—a thirty-year-old woman walking home from her shift at her family’s restaurant. Robin pulled the van over and offered her a ride.

She accepted.

What followed was another brutal scene. They drove her out to a remote location where she fought back hard. But it wasn’t enough. Robin beat her, and while Edward held her down with a wire wrapped around her neck, Robin sliced off her breasts. He raped the wounds in the same way he had with Linda Sutton.

There was no ritual at the house this time. No attic. No altar. This was quick, violent, and messy.

Not long after that, the group tried something different. Robin targeted a group of men. Rafael Tirado and Alberto Rosario were standing by a phone booth with a friend when the van pulled up. Robin opened fire. Both Rafael and Alberto were hit. Alberto survived. Rafael didn’t.

The randomness of the shooting made no sense. There was no lead-up. No clear motive. It looked like the crew was unraveling—escalating with no plan and no logic.

Then came Beverly Washington. And everything began to fall apart.

Beverly Washington Survives: The Woman Who Brought Them Down

Beverly Washington was thirty years old and working the streets when the crew pulled up in their van. Robin Gecht offered her a ride. Once she was inside, the violence followed a script he had written before.

He forced her to swallow a handful of pills. Then, while she drifted into unconsciousness, he raped her. When she was out cold, he sliced off one of her breasts and dumped her near the train tracks like trash.

But Beverly didn’t die.

She woke up, bleeding and drugged, and managed to get help. In the hospital, she gave police a detailed description of Robin, the van, and what had happened to her. She remembered everything—his face, the layout of the van, even his behavior during the assault. Her memory became the foundation of the case.

The police now had a description, a vehicle, and a location to start with. They traced the van back to Robin Gecht’s home. When officers showed up, Robin came outside and acted cool. Too cool. He agreed to talk but kept his distance, emotionally and otherwise. He told them he had been with Edward that night, offering them both an alibi.

But it didn’t hold up. Something felt off, and the detectives knew it.

Robin was arrested. Then the rest of the crew started to crack.

Cracks in the Crew: Confessions, Convictions, and a Leader Who Walked Free

Once Robin was in custody, the rest of the crew didn’t hold out long. Edward Spreitzer and Andrew Kokoraleis confessed almost immediately. Seventeen murders, they said. Seventeen. And that number didn’t include the other horrific assaults and mutilations they described in detail.

They blamed Robin for everything. Said he manipulated them, gave the orders, and turned their group into a factory of horror. Thomas Kokoraleis was arrested soon after. He also confessed and took investigators straight to the Satanic altar in Robin’s attic.

Edward pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life without parole. But in a separate trial for the murder of Linda Sutton, he was sentenced to death. That sentence was later reduced to life in prison.

Andrew wasn’t so lucky. He was sentenced to death for his role in Lorraine Borowski’s murder and executed by lethal injection in 1987. That execution sent shockwaves through Illinois. The governor responded by commuting all other death sentences to life in prison. It marked a turning point in the state’s death penalty debate.

Thomas also faced charges in Lorraine’s murder. Because he cooperated, he was given life instead of death. In a move that shocked a lot of people, he was released on parole in 2019. His current whereabouts are unknown.

And then there’s Robin.

Despite all the confessions, the witness testimony, and the ritual evidence in his attic, Robin Gecht was never charged with murder. The only physical evidence tying him to any of the crimes came from Beverly Washington’s assault. That gave prosecutors enough to land a 120-year sentence. He’s eligible for parole in 2042, when he’ll be 88.

Warren Wilkosz, the former DuPage County Sheriff who worked the case, didn’t mince words. He once said, “Gecht would make Manson look like a Boy Scout.”

And yet, somehow, the ringleader walked away with no murder convictions.

Only one member of the Chicago Ripper Crew is out.

Only one was never held accountable for the full extent of what happened.

And none of it feels finished.