Brown's Chicken Massacre: 30 Years Pass Since Grisly Palatine Murders

PALATINE, IL — Many crimes get media attention for a short time before seemingly disappearing into the annals of time. That is not so for the infamous Brown's Chicken massacre, one of the most gruesome and horrific events to ever occur in Chicagoland.

Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of the crime in which seven people working at the fast food chain were found dead in a freezer at the restaurant on Northwest Highway near Smith Street in Palatine. All seven employees had been executed, according to police. The crime, which remained unsolved for nearly a decade, sent the community into a frenzy and puzzled the local police force.

The deceased included the owners of the restaurant, Richard E. Ehlenfeldt and his wife, Lynn W. Ehlenfeldt, of Arlington Heights. Also dead were five of their employees: Guadalupe Maldonado, 46, of Palatine; Palatine High School students Michael C. Castro, 16, and Rico L. Solis, 17; and Thomas Mennes, 32, and Marcus Nellssen, 31, both of Palatine. Six were found shot to death, while another had been brutally stabbed, according to police. The bodies of the seven victims were discovered piled on top of one another.

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Two men — James Degorski and Juan Luna — were eventually charged with the crime at Brown’s Chicken and Pasta and are currently serving life sentences behind bars.

But the case remained unsolved until 2002 despite numerous leads over the years that followed. That's when investigators got a break in the case as the ex-girlfriend of one of the killers came forward to police. Anne Lockett said she had been threatened by Degorski not to go to the authorities with the details of what had happened, or she would also be killed. Eventually, though, Lockett did tell police what she knew, and it led to the arrests of Degorski and Luna, who was a former employee of the restaurant.

"I think it was honestly the guilt," Lockett recently told Daily Herald. "It wasn't necessarily that they got away with the crime. It was the fact that these people, the victims' families — their kids, their parents — were suffering."

Human DNA extracted from a preserved piece of chicken found at the murder scene also helped solve the case.

"Ultimately, the chicken is what saved us in terms of, you know, we had the foresight to freeze that... it took six years before we got the DNA, but it took another three years after that before we figured out whose DNA it was," retired Palatine Police Officer Bryan Opitz, who served as one of the case's lead investigators, told WLS-TV.

The case has been featured on numerous true-crime podcasts and television news programs over the years. It also drastically hindered the bottom line at the entire Brown's Chicken franchise, based out of Elmhurst, which saw sales plummet, bankruptcy and eventually the closure of over 100 restaurants across Chicagoland reports Chicago Tribune, including the Palatine location.

Following its closure, a dry-cleaning business took over, but it was short-lived. The building was demolished in 2001, and the site remained vacant for another decade until a Chase Bank opened there.

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