CRIME HUNTER: Larry Eyler trolled Midwest for murder victims

Article content

To the janitor of the Chicago building, the trash cans felt heavy.

Article content

He decided to look inside and made a macabre discovery — a human leg.

“I knew right away it wasn’t a ham,” Joe Balla later told the Chicago Sun-Times.

And there was more. The rest of the human body had been severed into eight pieces and stuffed in the bags.

An autopsy showed the victim had been stabbed in his heart and lungs and then dissected with a hacksaw.

Before the kid’s death, he had been handcuffed and tied up.

Detectives soon had a name: Daniel Bridges, 16.

Daniel was from the impoverished Chicago neighbourhood known as Uptown where poor emigrants from Appalachia had settled looking for a better life and not finding it.

Just a few years earlier, the seedy neighbourhood had been the hunting grounds of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who by the date of the grim discovery, Aug. 21, 1984, was a resident of Illinois’ death row.

Article content

Bridges, like some other kids in the neighbourhood, had fallen into the world of prostitution.

Now, Chicago homicide detectives had a killer to find. They didn’t have to wait long.

Balla had told another janitor about the grisly find. Yeah, the man said, a man in his building was lugging around large garbage bags.

His name was Larry Eyler, a 31-year-old house painter. Detectives quickly found a hacksaw in the man’s apartment and the teeth matched the gruesome marks on Bridges’ body.

And there was much more.

Eyler was born into a dysfunctional home in 1952 in Crawfordsville, Indiana. By the time he was 14, Eyler knew he was gay. And in his late teens, he began cruising the Indianapolis homosexual scene.

He soon developed a reputation as having a penchant for leather and rough sex. Some of his former partners claimed Eyler was sadistic and had violent tendencies that emerged during intimate encounters.

Article content

And he also acquired a sugar daddy in the form of Indiana State University library science professor Robert David Little, but sources later said the relationship was platonic. Little was more of a father figure.

Now, in the summer of 1984, with Chicago still reeling from the twisted handiwork of Killer Clown Gacy, another monster was on their doorstep.

Even before the Bridges murder, cops suspected Eyler was the so-called Interstate Killer who had left a trail of corpses of young men throughout Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio, over the previous two years.

The first victim came in October 1982 when Steven Crockett, 19, of Kankakee, Ill., was found in a cornfield near the Indiana border. He had been mutilated.

Article content

The following April, workers discovered the remains of 28-year-old Gustavo Herrera under a pile of brush. Ervin Gibson, 16, was found on a heap of trash on top of a dead dog.

More victims began turning up. Some were missing their heads. Others had no hands.

Then, in September 1983, a sheriff’s deputy in Lake County, Indiana stopped Eyler on I-65. He had a hitchhiker in the passenger seat. They were brought in for questioning.

Inside the truck: A knife, boots, handcuffs and clothesline. Blood on the boots matched an August homicide victim named Ralph Calise.

But a soft-on-crime judge ordered Eyler released because his rights had been breached. The killer vanished until August when poor Daniel Bridges had his fateful encounter.

Article content

Eyler was convicted of Bridges’ murder in 1986 and was given a one-way ticket to death row. He would get the electric chair.

In 1990, he sent a letter to authorities offering to share a list of his victims and an accomplice if they dropped the death penalty in exchange for life without parole.

“I am asking you to spare my life,” he wrote. “I can never undo what I have done, but I do believe that I have good qualities. I love my family, and I know I have positive things to add to their lives.”

He named his sugar daddy, Little, as an accomplice and copped to the slaying of Steven Agan, 23. It was the academic, he claimed, who dealt the death blows in the BDSM murder sessions. Little was acquitted.

But before Illinois could claim its pound of flesh, Eyler was dead on death row on March 6, 1994, from a more insidious executioner: AIDS.

In his dying days, Eyler found the decency to release the names of his victims — a staggering 21 young men and boys in total.

Yet, Eyler never copped to the murder that ended his killing frenzy: Daniel Bridges.

His lawyer would later blame his upbringing, and frequent fights with a married lover for her client’s bloodlust. She noted he kept his victims’ shirts as souvenirs.

One of his victims, Adam Doe, remains unidentified. A second, Brad Doe, was finally identified in 2021 as John Ingram Brandenburg, Jr., who was 19 when he vanished.

[email protected]

@HunterTOSun