It was a cold early morning, Jan. 8, 1993, and it was shattered by six words blasting from a police radio: “Five in the cooler at Brown’s.”
Quickly, the details emerged, the horror spread and things got worse. There were seven people dead, the owners of a Palatine restaurant and five of their employees, fatally shot with a .38-caliber revolver, covered in blood, some shot six times and some only once.
Remember? This would come to be known as the Brown’s Chicken massacre.
The slaughter and the subsequent and frustrating search for the perpetrators and eventual murder trial captivated the media, traumatized suburban parents everywhere and became part of what writer Patrick Wohl writes is America’s “fixation with true crime.”
“In an odd way, reading or watching a true crime story can serve as an escape because it’s far from anything most people will experience,” he writes. “But for those who were actually there, the depiction of a tale involving the murder of a loved one can also be an exercise in re-traumatization.”
He writes these sentences and so much more in his new book, “Something Big: The True Story of the Brown’s Chicken Massacre, A Decade-Long Manhunt, and the Trials That Followed” (Post Hill Press), a sensitive and thoughtful journey back to that distant horror and how it continues to affect lives.
The author was born in 1994, the year after the Brown’s killings, and writes “as someone who was raised not far from where (the crime) occurred and grew up eating the fried chicken from the chain for which the crime is named eponymously referred, it always struck with me.”
And so he began to write a book that focused “on the stories of the people involved and the human elements of the tragedy.” Naturally, before diving in, he did his research and one of the books that was helpful to him was 2003’s “The Brown’s Chicken Massacre,” written by then Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune reporter Maurice Possley.
I knew what a fine writer Possley was in part because he and I had collaborated on a previous book, 2001’s “Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth,” about a prolific mob hit man named Harry Aleman and a heroic citizen named Bob Lowe who testified against Aleman.
We remain proud of that book and I talked to Possley, who now lives and works in Ireland with his wife, author Cathleen Falsani. He plans to read Wohl’s book and he remembers writing his Brown’s book.
“It was a very quick project,” said Possley, whose work focuses on prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful convictions, and other criminal justice issues. “The arrests in the Brown’s case came in May 2002 and I signed a book contract in July and the manuscript was submitted by either end of September, maybe October.
He provided some details: “I printed out every news story I could find about the case, from the day of the murders and up to and after the arrests. I assembled these as well as reports, such as the BGA report and other documents to create a timeline of events. I then began to write the story chronologically. I was able to conduct some interviews and I had some pals help in the interviewing process.”
Wohl is a Park Ridge native, graduate of Maine South High School who earned a law degree from George Washington University. He now works as an attorney in Washington, D.C., but is serious about his writing.
His first book, 2024’s “Down Ballot: How a Local Campaign Became a National Referendum on Abortion,” was about the 1990 campaign for Illinois state representative between Penny Pullen and Rosemary Mulligan. It was a race shadowed by the question of legalized abortion and was one of the closest races in Illinois history.
For this new book he spent two years talking to dozens of people, all but a few of them willing to share their memories and emotions. He interviewed victims’ family members, former cops, attorneys, a DNA expert and former suspects. Each of the book’s 24 chapters focuses on one person.
“People trusted me with incredibly intimate stories,” Wohl writes. “Many of them still live with this tragedy day in and day out. To them, it’s not just a story.”
That trust was well placed. Wohl is true to his word, expressed on the book’s opening pages, to respect “the families while still managing to tell a compelling narrative for readers with no connection to Palatine.”
I read Possley’s book again and Wohl’s the next day. Doing so gave me as full and insightful a package as I think possible, reminding me of the details of the crime, its effects and aftermath and artfully charting its ongoing ripple effect. You might want to try that same one-two literary punch.
In any case, it is important to remember the names of the dead. Those names were Richard Ehlenfeldt, Lynn Ehlenfeldt, Guadalupe Maldonado, Michael Castro, Thomas Mennes, Rico Solis and Marcus Nellsen.
What of the killers, now serving life sentences in an Illinois maximum-security prison?
Why dignify them. If you want to know, you can look that up.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com