I walked into the small office on the second floor of the Wayside Cross Ministries in Aurora this week and met the man infamously known as the Ripper Crew Killer.
I was well aware of his story, as is anyone not living under a Fox River rock: Thomas Kokoraleis, one of a group of four men suspected of killing as many as 17 women in Chicago and the suburbs in the early 1980s, was released from prison on Friday after serving half of a 70-year sentence. He agreed to meet with me to make his first public comments since his release from prison.
After registering as a sex offender with Aurora police over the weekend, he is now living at Wayside Cross, a move Mayor Richard Irvin vehemently opposes, as do a large number of community members who signed an online petition and are threatening to protest in front of the building.
Wearing a green lightweight sweatshirt, black pants and scuffed dark work boots, the man behind those horrible headlines greeted me with a firm handshake, and I noted his face seemed less menacing than the prison mug shot we’ve all come to recognize, especially when he smiled.
For the most part, he came across as a broken man with a strong desire for redemption that, on multiple occasions, brought him to tears. Speaking in a polite, humble voice, Kokoraleis admitted being “really nervous.” He frequently referred to me as ma’am in our nearly two-hour conversation, and at one point, caught himself, then apologized, after starting to utter a four-letter word when describing how he’s been hounded by the media since taking that first step into the free world.
“I do get angry at times,” he said. “But I watch what I say out of my mouth … I’m really trying to change my ways, my beliefs.”
Change seems to be at the center of his controversial stay in Aurora. While the mayor views Kokoraleis as a brutal killer who poses a potential and unnecessary threat to the safety of the community, Wayside Cross sees the 58-year-old as a sinner who paid his dues to society and wants to change. And with the support of this 91-year-old mission, he’s in the “best place possible” for “spiritual transformation” and a “chance of assimilating back into society,” Wayside Cross Executive Director James Lukose said.
Which is why, even with a growing social media petition against Kokoraleis, Wayside Cross has remained committed to helping its newest resident, despite the risks. Lukose has received an outpouring of support from members of the community, he points out, as well as his own staff and board of directors. But he understands the mayor’s concerns specifically for Aurora, and he worries about the backlash from donors, who are necessary for this well-respected nonprofit to stay so successful.
“This is your chance,” Lukose tells his controversial guest. “This is your chance to show all of us at Wayside, the community and the world that there is a silver lining to this story. That you are a redeemable person. But you have to work hard, harder than those of us whose sins are not as public.”
Kokoraleis listened intently to the man sitting across the desk from him. He nodded, his hands folded, and paused to carefully construct his words before responding.
“I want to be a better Christian. And I will do my best to become a productive member of society,” he finally said, wiping at tears. “I will not be a threat to Aurora and their citizens. I swear to that. I am willing to work hard to change my ways.”
Kokoraleis insisted it would make no sense to jeopardize his newfound freedom because he’s seen too many ex-offenders “go home and two weeks or a month later they are back again.”
“I want no contact with the families (of the murder victims),” he said. “I want to just go on with my life and be left alone.”
Although the two men have known each other only for a few days, they seemed to slip comfortably into the roles of mentor and student, something Kokoraleis said he never had when studying the Bible on his own while in prison.
Here in this quiet office at Wayside, Lukose brings up the book of Genesis 50:20, where, by using the story of Joseph and his jealous brothers, he wants to explain how God turned a heinous crime into a beautiful story.
Again, Kokoraleis listens intently. But later he admits that, although Lukose “keeps my interest when he talks,” it’s difficult for him to follow everything being said.
“I am slow … I can’t comprehend real quick,” he says. “But I will go back and mark (the Bible verse) and read it again and get it in my own head.”
Kokoraleis readily acknowledges he’s not had a so-called jail-house conversion, but is “in the process of changing, of learning.”
It wasn’t like he existed in some sort of spiritual vacuum in prison, he adds. “I was just in survival mode, always watching my back because of the nature of my case.”
A high school dropout, Kokoraleis recalls a tough childhood, where his father would require his family to attend services at the Greek Orthodox Church three days a week. Yet he was also a “brutal man,” Kokoraleis says, who once tied him shirtless to a table and administered 15 lashes across his back with a belt after his sister found drugs on him.
His father is now dead, as is his mother, who Kokoraleis told me had heart problems and “died in my arms when I was 17.”
It was soon after, he says, that he left home and became “a carpenter and painter.” But he was also drinking and doing drugs when he got caught up in the Ripper Crew case at age 21 that put him in prison until his release on Friday.
Kokoraleis took a bus and train to get from Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton to Chicago early Friday morning, traveling with only a small bag of personal items, including a sleep apnea machine, and $15 in his pocket. His brother Nicky, who had not corresponded with him in the entire 36 years of his incarceration, he says, picked him up. And he used a cellphone for the first time to talk to his sister, now living in Tennessee, who had corresponded with him “on and off” while he was in prison.
Except for her occasional letters, and those from a woman who began writing to him after his older brother Andrew, also a member of the Ripper Crew, was executed, Kokoraleis had “little contact” with the outside world — and, he added, no positive affirmation from anyone for 36 years.
Which is why, he said, he’s so grateful a friend of his brother recommended Wayside Cross.
“I just want to be left alone and do my thing here,” he said.
Lukose hopes that is possible.
On Saturday morning, when he found out the high-profile ex-con was coming to Aurora, the Wayside executive director read the recent report from highly regarded psychologists and a psychiatrist stating that Kokoraleis was not sexually violent. Experts have described him as a people pleaser with a low IQ who unwittingly became tangled in the police investigation while trying to help his brother.
In past news stories it was reported that Kokoraleis admitted in detailed tape-recorded police interviews that he was present during three attacks, but at his sentencing, he said he was never present. He also blamed police for feeding him crime details, which they vehemently denied. According to reports, his brother and a third defendant, Edward Spreitzer, did not mention him in their lengthy confessions, and authorities described those three defendants as “genetic nobodies” who the ringleader Robin Gecht, serving a life sentence, easily manipulated.
Lukose is well aware of all those facts, just as he knows the horrendous details surrounding the Ripper Crew case. But as a man who is determined to change lives and save souls, he is adamant that “because the past can’t be changed, we need to focus on the present and the future.”
“If not here, then where?” asked Lukose, who as much as anyone knows that if there are no programs in place for ex-offenders, their likelihood of reoffending is much higher.
Kokoraleis is now on a tight schedule — it includes daily Bible classes, chapel and a nearly eight-hour workday in the Wayside warehouse — that begins at 5:30 a.m. and ends when lights are out at 10 p.m. In a month’s time, a volunteer from one of the mission’s 30-plus church partners will begin working with him one-on-one, and he will also receive support through Wayside’s learning center and job training program, with the goal of eventually helping him find work and permanent housing.
“Society has made him a free man,” Lukose said. “I wish he was someone else’s problem. But he came here to Aurora. So we will do all we can do within our powers and limitations to make his transformation into society complete.”
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