Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (33 page)

Back at the apartment, a still-wary Tony helped clean up his own blood, which had pooled in a great circle on the floor and was spattered on everything.

Even more baffling than his decision to go home with Dave was his decision to share his bed that night, but he wanted to keep a close eye on the man who tried to kill him. That night, he didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time, aware of Dave’s slightest movement.

Even more baffling than Tony’s decision to go
home with Dave was his decision to share his
bed that night, but he wanted to keep a close
eye on the man who tried to kill him.

The next morning, Dave dropped him off at his parents’ home in Schiller Park, and they never saw each other again. Coach drove Tony to Wisconsin. On the way, the son told the father what had really happened.

“You’re not making this up?” Coach asked, incredulous.

“No.”

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

“He was right there.”

Embarrassed, confused, and afraid, Tony begged his dad to stay away from David Maust and not tell the cops anything. Dave was dangerous and unpredictable, he warned. Besides, in Tony’s world, you stayed away from cops and took care of your own business in your own way. More than once, he thought about sending some old gang buddies to pay a visit to the Oak Park apartment.

In the coming weeks, when Tony called to try to convince Dave to pay his $8,000 hospital bill, Dave always hung up. One time when he called Dave’s apartment, a kid answered.

“Get away from David,” Tony warned him. “He will kill you.”

The boy scoffed. Dave was a good guy and would never hurt him, he said. He wouldn’t listen. He, too, thought he knew the real Dave.

Two months after the attack, Tony finally reported it to the Oak Park Police Department, but Dave denied everything. With no other witnesses or evidence, the cops chalked it up to a gay lover’s quarrel between two worthless ex-cons and walked away.

Once again, astoundingly, David Maust had eluded any responsibility for his crimes.

And once again, a world of new friends lay before him.

PAYING FOR HIS SINS

David Maust stayed in his Oak Park apartment for a couple more years. A neighbor once asked him about a strange blood trail leading from one of his broken windows and a foul odor outside his apartment, but David had a ready explanation about a fistfight with his son—who didn’t exist.

In February 2003, Maust moved to a rented house on Ash Street in Hammond, Indiana, a gray and gritty steel town just across the state line from Chicago. He went straight to his grisly work.

On May 2, 2003, Maust killed nineteen-year-old Nicholas James, a coworker he had befriended at the trophy shop where he worked.

“I just went after him,” Maust wrote in his journal later. “I don’t know why, I just did. I planned to kill him three times but talked myself out of it.

“I came up behind him. I hit him in the head. I hit him with a baseball bat. Not a real bat. It was a souvenir. It had lead in it. I hit him once. After the first blow he was out of it, but he was still moving, so I hit him again. He was still moving. I hit him again and again.”

Maust tore up a concrete floor in the rented house’s dank basement. He covered Nicholas James’s naked corpse with blue house paint, wrapped him in plastic, and buried him in the hole, which he covered in concrete.

Later that summer, Maust met thirteen-year-old Michael Dennis and sixteen-year-old James Raganyi, a couple of runaways. He gave them pot, money, and booze. He took them bike riding and to ballgames. He wanted badly to be their father and their friend.

On September 10, both boys came to Maust’s house for liquor, which he supplied happily. And when the two boys passed out on David Maust’s couch, he strangled them both, duct-taped their naked bodies in black plastic sheeting and buried them in a basement hole he had dug five days earlier beside Nicholas James’s hidden tomb. And, again, he concealed their graves with a new concrete slab.

“They didn’t feel nothing,” he wrote in his journal.

When the boys were reported missing, their trail led cops to Maust’s Ash Street house, where they had been seen hanging around. When questioned,
Maust was friendly and cooperative. He let investigators wander around the place, but they found nothing.

But Detective Ron Johnson, a missing-persons investigator for the Hammond police, got a cold feeling from Maust. The ex-con’s odd smile haunted the veteran cop, but more important cases demanded his attention.

Months later, Maust’s land-lord mentioned some new concrete work in the basement, and Johnson had a bad feeling. With the owner’s permission, Johnson and two cops drilled a hole in the floor.

Coffin flies flew out.

Almost thirty years after he killed Jimmy McClister in Germany, more than twenty years after he killed Donald Jones in Elgin, Illinois, and more than three years since he tried to kill Anthony Majzer, David Maust’s luck finally ran out.

His case never went to trial. In a November 2005 plea bargain, Maust avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. He received three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

SERIAL KILLER DAVID MAUST’S PIPE-WIELDING SURPRISE ATTACK ON TONY MAJZER LEFT A WEB OF UGLY SCARS—AND A DEEPER MISTRUST OF FRIENDS AND STRANGERS ALIKE.
Ron Franscell

Maust was extraordinarily candid about his life and crimes, as if by finally saying things out loud, he might unburden himself.

He told investigators that he had planned to hide Anthony Majzer’s body in the wall of a closet in the Oak Park apartment. He’d even bought hundreds of pounds of cement to do the job in Oak Park, but when he couldn’t kill Anthony, he ended up hauling the cement to the new house in Hammond—and used it instead to bury the three boys he killed there.

AFTER HIS FAILED ATTACK ON TONY MAJZER, DAVID MAUST MOVED TO A RENTED HOUSE IN HAMMOND, INDIANA, WHERE HE BURIED THE CORPSES OF THREE TEENAGE BOYS. THEIR GRAVES WERE DISCOVERED BY LOCAL POLICE IN 2003.
Hammond, Indiana, Police Department

And in neat, meticulous script, he started handwriting a voluminous journal about his childhood, his sins, his demons, and his perverse psychology. It eventually spanned more than 1,200 pages.

At Maust’s sentencing, his own brother told the judge that David had tried to kill him twice.

“I think anyone who does such crimes should pay with their life,” David’s brother said.

A clinical and forensic psychologist who examined Maust found him to be a unique specimen. “In fact, one would be hard-pressed to design a developmental sequence more likely to produce a profoundly disturbed, relationship-ambivalent, and aggression-vulnerable individual than the childhood experienced by David Maust,” he told the court.

Later, David’s defense lawyer added his own perspective.

“There is a stereotypical vision of serial killers—a person without a shred of conscience,” he told a reporter. “David had one. He was capable of horrific violence, obviously, but he was also capable of genuine contrition. He was genuinely sorry right up until the time he did it again.”

This son of a psychotic, narcissistic mother and an abusive, often absent father, this child who had been dumped in a “snake pit” asylum at age nine, this pathetic man who desperately wanted to mean something to someone was certainly going to pay for his sins.

But on his own terms.

In county jail while awaiting transfer to the prison system, he twice tried suicide by stabbing himself with a pencil, although he recovered both times.

On January 19, 2006—the day he was to be transferred to prison—he finally succeeded. Barely two months after his sentencing, David Edward Maust was found hanging in his Lake County Jail cell. He had braided a bed sheet into a noose. He died at fifty-one.

Maust left a seven-page suicide note that again expressed his deep remorse for killing five young men and said he had considered writing a letter to his latest victims’ parents, telling them where to find the bodies, but decided against it.

“Dying is not my first choice,” the note said, “but it is the right thing to do. For when I look in the eyes of the mother’s [sic], I can feel the pain of their sorrow and I’m so very sorry for the pain they feel.”

He also longed, as always, for his mother.

“I wish my mother would come and get me,” he said. “But I know she won’t. I wish she would come and take me home.”

His self-loathing was on full display when his thick journal became public.

“I am the evilest person to live on this earth and to save the taxpayer’s money, I should’ve been destroyed long ago,” he wrote.

If there were other dead boys out there, Maust didn’t say. When police searched the Oak Park apartment, they saw no evidence of any burials, even though some people remain convinced Maust likely killed more than the five boys he admitted to.

But among Maust’s many handwritten admissions was this:

“
On January 6, 2001 (Saturday—late in the afternoon), I tried to kill Anthony Majzer, a 25-year-old I met in prison
.

“
I wanted to build a life with Anthony as his friend and be there for him and hope he would be there for me but Anthony was not going to let that happen because he was never going to change his ways. You see, I wanted to care about him and help him in life because he had all kinds of problems and so I was hoping he would come live with me so I would also have someone to do things with but he only wanted to use me for what he could get and go away
.

“
An [sic] it’s true that I only met Anthony because I lied to him and told him ‘I had lots of money from selling drugs.’ I was hoping in time I could turn that lie into the truth as we became better friends but Anthony wanted me to support him. So that Saturday night or should I say late afternoon I tried to get him drunk and then I beat his head in with a pipe but then I diceded [sic] not to kill him and took him to the hospital
.

“
That night when we got back I told him the truth about how there was no money. After that he started blackmailing me for money or he tried to, but I changed my phone number so he would think I moved and I never heard from him again
.

“
That night we came back from the hospital we slept together with are [sic] clothes on, but I did have naked pictures of both him and Kenneth [another of Maust’s earlier infatuations]. I had about 20 pictures each of Anthony and Kenneth, but only half were naked pictures and I wanted the pictures because they were friends of mine and every once in a great while I would look at them
. …

“
I was a very lonely person at times and would pray that God would send someone to be my friend and live with me
.…”

FLEETING FORGIVENESS

Today, Anthony Majzer blames himself for three dead boys, maybe more. He’s convinced the young kid he warned on David Maust’s phone is dead, too.

He wonders why he didn’t kill David Maust when he had the chance.

Tony was watching television in a federal prison in Minnesota when the news of Maust’s arrest first broke. He felt ill, then he cried.