Genetic Genealogy ID's Victim of Chicago Serial Killer

Larry Eyler, the "Highway Killer", admitted to 21 deaths.

It angered him beyond belief.

His married boyfriend did absolutely nothing to further THEIR relationship. Why couldn't he come out? Why couldn't he commit?

Just thinking of it made his head throb with the palpable intensity of his heart. He heard the beating in his ears and head.

THUMP thump. Thump. thump Thump - a flash of searing pain shot through the space behind his eyes.

He kept the anger conscious as he looked at the teenager bound in front of him in the dilapidated barn.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP

The circular saws passing through his head were intolerable. He had to do something.

The Barn

The moonlight illuminated sheer savagery in a barn in a tiny, pastoral corner of Indiana that placid night in July.

Inside Brad Doe was alone and tied up. 'What happened?', he groggily wondered to himself. He could not think straight. Had he been asleep? Passed out from the alcohol the man gave him earlier? Drugged? He did not know.

It only took the man in front of the young Brad to intuitively know he was in mortal danger.

He could not remember how he met him. He could not remember why or how he passed out. He could not remember how he got to this uninhabitable barn.

He could not retrace what happened that night. It was all a blur. A powerful barbiturate in your drink will do that.

Still, something made him realize at a visceral, instinctual level that this man in front of him was dangerous - macabre and deadly - he stank of death. A mix of paint and rotten eggs lit up Brad's nasal passages.

The moonlight glistened off the knife the man brandished when a transfiguration occurred: the man became wolf in an instant. His teeth glistening, the moonlight lighting him to the point that Brad could see his eyes: hungry, voracious, focused with a rabid intensity.

Brad screamed in mortal terror…

Mushroom Hunting

That Tuesday October 18, 1983 was abnormally crisp. Fall was upon tiny Lake Village, Indiana - 120 miles northwest of Indianapolis and within spitting distance of the Illinois border.

October is prime mushroom hunting season in the area.

Harry and Gladys Hensen returned to their favorite spot. Off Highway 41, there sat an abandoned barn with their favorite mushrooming spot near it: under the ancient oaks. The spot had not revealed its secrets to another.

Until now.

As the Hansen's walked closer, they saw something on the ground which should not be there…

The Hansens immediately called the police after their find by the barn. This started a homicide investigation with local and state forensic teams on site.

The Investigation

Investigators found the corpses of four boys on the property. Two were in advanced states of decay and skeletonized.

The skeletonized victims in the barn were put inside banker's boxes labeled "Victim A" and "Victim B". A responding paramedic at the scene took to naming them Adam and Brad.

All four boys had their pants around the ankles. One was decapitated and his arm cut off. All showed evidence of torture with a knife and other implements. Two of the victims were identified in 1983 as two hitchhikers Michael Bauer and John Bartlett.

The Suspect: Larry Eyler

Investigators from Chicago to Newton County, Indiana knew immediately this was the work of the "Highway Killer" who terrorized a vast swath of the Midwest from 1978 (when he beat the charge of attempted murder) on to 1984 when the trail of dead stopped.

All the locations he used as primary and secondary crime scenes - that is, where he killed a victim and where he dumped a victim - were very close to one of the interstate highways in the Midwest.

A housepainter in Chicago named Larry Eyler became the prime suspect after an ex-lover put two and two together and phoned the four-county task force in Indiana.

The man said that Eyler stabbed a hitchhiker in 1978. Before the victim got away though, Eyler managed to bind his wrists and ankles. This was the Highway Killer's signature.

Eyler's ex-lover went on saying Eyler drugged a 14-year-old boy and had a penchant for bondage. Police swiftly brought him in for questioning.

Eyler and the Attorney

This is where the tie-in happens with yet another story of murder. That of the much-maligned and falsely incarcerated (at least once) Wisconsinite and Making A Murderer subject Steven Avery.

Avery's current lawyer, the shrewd and inventive Kathleen Zellner, is known for her tenacious and dogged work of freeing the falsely imprisoned.

Zellner was also Larry Eyler's ongoing appellate lawyer.

After Eyler was arrested, he made a deal with the state to lead them to more bodies in Indiana and Illinois if they took the death penalty off the table. He also put a timeline on this offer.

The state ultimately blew their chances waiting for word from Chicago prosecutors in Cook County and the deal evaporated.

This prompted Eyler to leave his meticulously detailed confession with Zellner on the condition that it not be released until after he died on death row - which he did in 1994 due to complications from AIDS.

Today

This brings us back to where this story ought to end, with the victims.

Using forensic genealogy, the DNA Doe Project identified John Ingraham Brandenburg Jr. of Chicago as one of the dead in the barn. No age was given.

"While my heart breaks for this family… I hope this brings them peace," a prosecutor in Newton County said Sunday.

Let us hope the fourth boy in the barn will also be identified in time.

Journalist and dogged student of all things forensic, Wess Haubrich, examines the nitty, gritty details you didn't know about famous (and not so famous but equally weird) crimes and their unseen motivations. Thanks for reading!

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