Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (32 page)

Police found the poorly hidden body. After witnesses linked David to Jimmy, he was court-martialed for murder. His defense? David claimed he had unintentionally caused Jimmy to wreck while riding a moped they had stolen. The resulting injuries killed him, and David panicked, burying his friend under some woodland debris.

If David’s story seemed preposterous, the witnesses against him—those familiar with the relationship—were even worse. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and larceny and sentenced to four years in Fort Leaven-worth.

“I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE THE DEATH SENTENCE”

In prison, David suddenly had to face some dark truths about himself, particularly his twisted sexuality. He didn’t consider himself gay, although deep down, he felt sex with a woman would make him unfaithful to his mother. David had dated women, but never had sex with them; he never initiated sexual contacts with men, although he’d sometimes been forced into sex with other inmates. Voices inside his head thrashed it out endlessly.

He was attracted to another inmate, Bert, and they grew close. David was paroled in 1977 after less than three years, and while he waited for Bert to get out, he visited his mother to get his Army pay. She had spent all but twenty-five bucks on herself. She enraged him all over again.

Bert eventually joined David on the outside, but the old demons came along. Before they parted ways forever, David tried to stab Bert—rushing him, nearly eviscerated, to the hospital afterward—and later attempted to shoot him with a misfiring gun. Both incidents went unreported, but even after Bert fled for his life, David tried in vain to win him back.

By 1979, David found he could make good money and satisfy his perverse jones in kiddie porn. He paid kids to pose nude or have sex with other boys, then sold the pictures. One night, David stabbed a companion in a frenzied sexual rush and was arrested for attempted murder. Although the man testified vividly against him, David was acquitted. Incredibly, after at least a half-dozen near-fatal attacks and a murder, he had paid almost nothing for his sins.

But his compulsions were catching up to him.

In 1981, while prowling the streets of Wood Dale, Illinois, in his Blazer, David spied a kid he knew, fifteen-year-old Donald Jones. He called Jones over to his truck and offered him a hundred and fifty bucks to sell some pot. Jones agreed.

As part of the ruse, David drove Donald to an abandoned quarry near Elgin, where the two took some beer down to a secluded spot on the water’s edge. There, David punched the kid several times, tied his wrists and ankles with shoelaces, and forced him to drink several beers. As it began to rain, David stripped Donald naked and stabbed him hard in the belly.

“I’m only fifteen years old,” Donald whimpered. “Please don’t kill me!”

He threw the bloodied boy into the water, still alive but unconscious. Donald thrashed around for a few moments before he drowned. David pushed his floating body out into deeper water, buried the knife, and went back to his Blazer, where he calmly loaded his gear under the curious eye of a local cop.

Two days later, Donald Jones’s corpse was fished out of the murky water at the bottom of the quarry. David was questioned, but investigators found no reason to hold him.

The heat was on, so David packed his bags and headed for Texas in December 1981.

He’d barely been on the island of Galveston a week when he picked up a teenager outside a 7-11 by promising him an oil-rig job. Instead, David took the boy back to his hotel, where he tied him up and blindfolded him with his own T-shirt.

But David was unable to subdue the kid, so he cracked his skull three times with a hefty steel pipe.

The boy wasn’t dead, but David left him tied up on the bed, puking and bleeding for almost three hours. A trickle of blood from the boy’s right ear scared David, who inexplicably decided to release the kid. He drove the boy to a local park, gave him five bucks, and drove away.

But David wouldn’t be able to dodge this bullet.

Police arrested him. After a year in jail awaiting trial, he was convicted of assault on a child and sentenced to five years in prison, but he had barely settled into his cell at the prison in Huntsville when his whole twisted world turned upside down: David Maust, now twenty-nine years old, was indicted for the murder of Donald Jones, the fifteen-year-old boy he had stabbed and drowned in an Illinois quarry.

David was extradited to Chicago in 1983, but there was found to be mentally unfit to stand trial. For eleven years, David was bounced through several different Illinois mental hospitals before he was finally judged competent to be put on trail.

“I have been thinking about Donald Jones a lot,” David wrote in a jailhouse diary. “And I have been thinking about the bad things I did in my life, and now I would like to have the death sentence. …

“
I sometimes would think there was still hope for me; that I could have a family of my own to love. But now my hope is just about gone, and these things I cannot have. But I would still like to have had my own family, and if I would have had my own son I would never have put him in a State Mental Hospital. I would keep my son with me, and I would love him with all my heart, and I would help my son with his life, and I would be there when he needed me
. …

“
So on May 13, a Friday, in the year 1983, I thought it would be best if I told the truth for the first time in my life. For the murder of Donald Jones, I want the death penalty
.”

Thus, it was easy for David Edward Maust to plead guilty to Jones’s murder. He didn’t get his death wish, though: He was sent to Illinois River Correctional Center to serve thirty-five years for a killing he readily admitted.

AN UNSUSPECTING WORLD

David’s demons were bigger than he was. Soon, he was pining for companionship, playing the father figure, best buddy, and surrogate dreamer with the troubled boys all around him. They became the family he never had … and could never keep alive.

He didn’t tell anybody the truth about murdering Donald Jones. It was too dangerous to admit to killing a child in the joint. Instead, he made himself a hero, a cuckolded husband who merely defended his marital property against an interloper. Yeah, that was better. He wrote in his journal:

“
It’s true; I did play games in my mind—just lies I would tell younger inmates so that I could get to know them and have someone I could do things with and share my days with
. …

“
It’s true, I did like being around the younger inmates because I liked listening to the words they used and listening to what was important to them, like how they talked about their love for their families and the exciting cool things they did with their friends while growing up at home because I missed out on a lot of that and so it was cool to listen to
.

“
I enjoyed my days of caring about them, being there for them and helping them make it through prison with nobody causing them a bad time
.”

One of those boys was Anthony Majzer, who quickly became David’s next best friend.

Worse, David—a man who’d already killed two young men and attacked several others—would only serve five of his thirty-five years before he was unleashed again on an unsuspecting world.

And he wasn’t finished.

After breakfast, Tony and Dave went back to the apartment where Dave peeled a hundred dollar bill off the roll in his pocket and gave it to Tony.

“Go get the stuff and bring it back,” he said.

Tony drove Dave’s Mazda to a package store in nearby Schiller Park and bought a fifth of Smirnoff and a case of Budweiser. He even drove past a building where he thought he might like to open a nightclub with the money he was going to win. He picked up an old flame and fucked her before he returned to the apartment, thinking the whole time how much he was going to love being rich.

Dave was watching football on TV when he got back. The Oakland Raiders were playing the Miami Dolphins. Tony put the vodka in the freezer and popped a couple cold beers while they watched the game.

There, on the couch during the game, Dave leaned over and tried to kiss Tony on the cheek. Tony pushed him away and told him in blunt terms he wasn’t gay.

“If you do it again,” Tony said gravely, “I’ll kill ya.”

Dave apologized and swore it would never happen again.

After the game, Dave stood up.

“Okay, let’s get this contest going,” he said.

Tony sat at the kitchen table. Dave handed him a personal check for $450,000, with Tony’s name already typed in. Only the signature line was blank.

“It could be yours, man, if you beat the record,” he teased.

“If this check doesn’t clear,” Tony joked, “I’m coming back here to kill you.”

Dave started to pour the chilled vodka into a shot glass, but Tony waved him off.

“Not that way,” he said. “Put it all in one glass.”

Dave smiled. “One glass? You sure?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Dave measured fifteen shots into a water glass and slid it across the table to Tony. They both glanced at the cheap clock on the kitchen wall as Tony took a big swallow. He didn’t need fifteen minutes. He gulped the entire glass in less than three minutes.

“Okay, now no puking or passing out for another fifteen minutes,” Maust said ominously, rising from the table and going back to the sofa behind Tony, who kept his eyes on the ticking clock. His mind, not yet clouded by the vodka, was all tangled up in his dream nightclub, the passing seconds, Wyoming, the money …

Six minutes passed, then seven. Tony exhaled a sweet metal tang, and his belly started to burn. Eight minutes. He looked at the check and tried to envision his club in the dark, all decked out in neon and women and music … nine minutes … and he just wanted to be gone already, on the way to Wyoming, where he could live high and rich and be a kid again …

Tony really didn’t feel the first blow to the back of his head.

Nor the second.

But before a third vicious jolt cracked his head, he pivoted to see David land one across his forehead with a foot-long steel rod, possibly a weight-lifting bar.

“What the fuck?” Tony hollered as he crumpled to the floor. Blood dribbled down his face, drenching his white cardigan and seeping into the carpet. He was dazed but conscious.

Looking insane, Dave continued to whale on Tony, who curled into a ball to try to fend off the blows and screamed, “Wait, we’re friends! We’re friends!”

Suddenly, Dave stopped his fierce assault as if he’d snapped out of a brutal trance. He threw the bar on the kitchen table and slumped into a chair.

But Tony wasn’t waiting for whatever came next. Woozy from the beating and the booze, he summoned the focus to kick Dave’s chair, sending him sprawling on the floor. In a second, he pounced on Dave and whipped a knife from his pocket—a knife Dave had just bought him.

“Motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you!” he seethed, pressing his blade against Dave’s throat. He had lost too much blood and wobbled on his feet.

Dave admitted there was no money, no farm, no house … no Wyoming. It was all a lie.

No money?
Tony felt faint and cold.

“I need to warm up,” Tony said, still holding the knife on Dave. “Put some hot water in the tub.”

Dave drew a hot bath and Tony locked himself in the steamy bathroom with his knife and the telephone. His blood trickled into the water as he slipped into the tub, trying to warm up from the shock. He dipped his index finger in his seeping wounds and wrote his name and address on the tub’s tile, then rinsed it away.
If I die and they search for old blood stains
, he thought,
they’ll find it
.

Then he dialed the phone. His father answered. Tony told him he’d been jumped by some gangbangers and was in bad shape.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it,” he said, comforted by his father’s voice. “But I love you.”

He dried off, dressed, and then went back out to the living room. Dave was waiting, scared. He had no place to run. In a flicker of clarity, Tony realized he needed to get to a hospital, and Dave would have to take him.

“You’re taking me to the hospital,” Tony said, holding the knife on Dave again.

“Please don’t tell anybody what happened,” Dave begged. “Please.”

Tony prodded Dave to get going, forcing him into the car through the passenger side and holding the knife against his neck all the way to Gottlieb Memorial on North Avenue.

In the emergency room, Tony underwent several CT scans and X-rays of his skull. The tight skin across his skull was shredded, exposing the bone beneath. He was suddenly half-deaf in one ear and would soon develop a lazy eye and migraines. While doctors sewed up his gashes with forty-eight staples and twenty-eight stitches, Dave went to coffee with Tony’s distraught parents, playing the role of hero and embellishing the cover story even more.

The medical staff wanted Tony to spend the night for observation, but he refused. He didn’t trust hospitals or cops, and he was due back at his Wisconsin halfway house in the morning; the Wyoming trip was clearly not the escape plan he had hoped. Still unwelcome at his parents’ home—even after a ruthless bludgeoning—Tony made a decision that cast some doubt on his survival instincts: He went home with David Maust.

Not to a hotel.

Not to a homeless shelter.

Not to a real friend’s house.

Not to a bench at the bus terminal.

Not even to the secluded back booth of an all-night diner.

He was returning to his would-be killer’s turf to spend the rest of the night. His only hope was to make the morning bus going back to the halfway house.

They left the hospital sometime after midnight. Dave drove while a woozy, aching Tony held the knife. Dave apologized profusely on the way home, and Tony wasn’t sure what to think. Confusion was already screwing with his damaged head. Dave was his friend, he thought.
Maybe it was a brain tumor or a flashback
, Tony thought.
Maybe he just snapped. Maybe it was temporary insanity. Maybe
… Tony wanted desperately to believe something went terribly haywire with his friend and that whatever it was had passed as abruptly as it had surfaced. He didn’t want to think he had been so totally duped by a friend.