Customer Reviews

Deadly Thrills: The True Story of Chicago's Most Shocking Killers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the best true crime story I've ever read. I live outside Chicago and remember reading about Robin Gecht and his buddies. It would have been front-page news except it was given short shrift because of the Tylenol killings. Her details about the inner workings of the police department, the personalities of the people working on the case, and the methodical explanation of the evidence, are fascinating. She makes you care about the victims and their families but doesn't subject the reader to any psychobabble. She doesn't justifying the killers' actions because of their childhoods. I read this book non-stop, didn't put it down until I was done. This is an excellent first book, I hope she writes many, many more. Five stars aren't enough.

I knew, or at least thought I knew Andy Kokoraleis. He had been a neighbor of mine at the time of his arrest. I had spent many evenings relaxing and having a few cold beers after a hard day at work with a couple of my neighbors including Andy. When I arrived home in Villa Park from work one November afternoon in 1982, several of my neighbors ran up to my car. They asked me if I had heared about Andy, and explained that the Police had been there and arrested him earlier that day. I thought they were kidding until I watched the 6:00 news, saw his full screen picture and learned that he had signed a detailed confession to the torture and murder of as many as 18 women. A short time later, a job offer took me and my family to another part of the country and I never followed or knew what the outcome of the trial was until March 15th of 1999 when I was watching Chicago's WGN News and learned of his scheduled execution. I gathered as much newspaper coverage as I could find and learned of this book by Jaye Slade Fletcher. Two days later on St. Patrick's Day, Andy was indeed put to death by lethal injection. I had doubts about his guilt until I learned that in his final words, he appologised for the pain he had caused his victims and their families. When I purchased and read the book "Deadly Thrills", I was horrified by the unspeakable cruelty of these four evil men. I remember Andy introducing me to his brother Tommy and his friend Eddie Spreitzer, but I don't recall ever meeting Robin Gecht. I can't comprehend how four people this twisted can actually find each other. It,s not like you can just run an ad in the classifieds of your local paper that reads "Help Wanted, Sick twisted sadistic killer in need of three helpers to torture and slaughter the worlds female population. This book told the story of the unspeakable acts commited by these men in some vivid detail, but the picture that will always haunt me is that of Andy Kokoraleis in my house holding my nine month old son in his hands, knowing what else those hands had done. The thing that scares me is, I never had a clue.

I found the book hard to put down -- in fact, I read it straight through in a matter of hours. I was greatly entertained, but found myself hungry for more details. This series of crimes, in my opinion, is unparalleled in regards to cruelty and gruesomeness, with the possible exception of Jeffrey Dahmer's murders. But I was left with many unanswered questions. The book's 316 pages of large type was just not enough to delve into even ONE of these crimes in any real depth, much less all of them, and the trials were skimmed over even faster. All in all, I recommend the book for its entertainment value, but I would think most true crime fans will be left unsatisfied.

This book is very well written. I live in the immmediate area that these crimes took place, unfortunately, and I can testify that all accounts written in this book are enormously accurate. She did not miss a single detail.

This is a story that needs to be told, but this large-print paperback feels like it is just getting started when it abruptly ends. Robin Gecht and his "gang" of murderous associates are astonishingly violent boys trapped in men's bodies. Gecht, the clear ringleader, was so depraved and brutal that he forced his own wife to stick pins into her breasts and leave them there even after the wounds became infected. Yet that doesn't even begin to describe what he did to other women that he and his followers picked up on the streets on Chicago in the early 1980s.

Unfortunately for readers, this book promises more than it delivers. The book's back-cover claim that Gecht once worked for John Gacy is never mentioned in the book, nor does there appear to be any substantiation for the claim that Gecht "chose Charles Manson as a role model." Instead, we learn that Gecht worshipped Elvis. And while there is a reasonable amount of information on Gecht's childhood, this book presents only a small amount of insight into why this man would want to commit such ghastly crimes. However, it is difficult to blame the author for the lack of material since Gecht was apparently unwilling to talk to investigators.

The book jacket says that Jaye Slade Fletcher has written many articles regarding law enforcement and true crime, and that Deadly Thrills is her first book. Alas, the book reads like an extended article. It's not so much a "story" as it is a narrative that covers the confessions of two of Gecht's cohorts, Eddie Spreitzer and Andrew Kokoraleis. The trials of these four men (the fourth is the other Kokoraleis brother, Tommy) are only given a few pages' coverage at the end of the book.

One reason that it may have been tough to write a "police procedural"-style narrative is because the police simply didn't know what they had. In their minds, detectives from varying Chicago districts had several murders to solve and a few skeletons found in varying locations. It wasn't until Eddie Spreitzer cracked in response to questioning on a single attempted-murder case that detectives realized they had multiple men involved in seventeen or eighteen killings.

If you're a fan of "profiling", you might be interested to know that then-FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler happened to be in Chicago when one of the killings occurred, and parts of his profile are mentioned. But other than that almost cameo appearance, profiling didn't catch the killers and thus isn't a major story in this book. And this is certainly not a detective story. The crimes against women are absolutely grotesque and I'd like to add that this book probably isn't for everyone and should definitely be kept where children can't stumble across it. But for those of us who never heard of Robin Gecht except in passing, this book does bring the full horror of his crimes to life. It's a middle-of-the-road true crime book that I feel could have been better, but it's still worth 3 stars.

I don't normally read true crime books, but picked up this one because a functionary in the horrible events described herein is scheduled to be executed -- unjustly in my view. I must say I was greatly taken both with Jaye Slade Fletcher's thorough reporting and fast-paced narrative. I recommend this story to anyone interested in criminal justice.

A model of what a true crime book should be. It gives essential details of some particularly horrific crimes, but without being prurient. It describes the process which led to the capture and judgment of the killers clearly, with no woffling (the writer is a police officer and, in the best sense, it shows - she must be an excellent witness). Relevant psychological information is given; psychobabble is avoided. The author is to be particularly commended for the respect she shows the victims, some of whom were hookers (she even explains the origin of the word "hooker", which for an English reader like myself is very helpful). And she writes well; her grammar and syntax are way above average for this kind of book, and she paces her narrative perfectly. I can only agree with other reviewers; if you want the perfect true crime book, look no further!

Jaye Slade Fletcher's 1995 work of true crime, DEADLY THRILLS, presents the case of four deranged Chicago area sociopaths in their early twenties, brothers Anthony and Tommy Kokoraleis, Eddie Spreitzer, and their leader, Robin Gecht. The boys' routine was to either entice prostitutes or kidnap non-prostitutes in order to get them into Geicht's van, which was tricked out as a torture chamber. The women would then be subject to torture as sadistically vile as any veteran reader of true crime has encountered. Suffice it to say, in what is a major understatement, Robin enjoyed, for openers, slicing women's breasts. While Tommy and Eddie are presented as mentally slow, Anthony and Robin seem to have been normally intelligent, though obviously aberrant as it gets in most other respects.

Fletcher writes the story in standard true crime style: crimes mingled with police investigation followed by the unremarkable trials, which she, mercifully, briefly summarizes rather than quoting. This indicates a major positive in Fletcher's work, a lack of extraneous material. There is little filler and while police work is a large part of the story, it is presented in interesting and relevant fashion, rather than focusing on what the detectives wore, how may cigarettes they had smoked before dawn, and how many steaming cups of bad coffee they had to consume to say awake for days at a time. These standards in rotten true crime are blessedly absent.

But DEADLY THRILLS, while containing many positives, is also weak in certain areas.
The first is that Fletcher occasionally fabricates conversations and presents as fact scene setting material she could not possibly know. She does this reasonably well and not frequently enough to ruin the book, but it remains a shortcoming.
But the main deficiency I found in this book is the absence of background material on the principals. There is a short chapter on Gecht's life, which is informative, but which I wish had been expanded considerably. And there is no background at all on the Korkaleises or Spreitzer.

Still I found DEADLY THRILLS to be a quick and interesting read and it is pretty good for a first time author. If I could, I'd give it 3.5 stars, and, taken for what it is, I recommend it.

I heard about this crime from a t.v. show and wanted to know more. I haven't been able to read more than a few chapters a day (I usually devour true crime) because this is the singularly most horrific true crime story I've ever know. The story is written well enough, considering the subject. If you like truly gory, senses defying cruilty and nightmares, then you must read this book.

A model of what a true crime book should be. It gives essential details of some particularly horrific crimes, but without being prurient. It describes the process which led to the capture and judgment of the killers clearly, with no woffling (the writer is a police officer and, in the best sense, it shows - she must be an excellent witness). Relevant psychological information is given; psychobabble is avoided. The author is to be particularly commended for the respect she shows the victims, some of whom were hookers (she even explains the origin of the word "hooker", which for an English reader like myself is very helpful). And she writes well; her grammar and syntax are way above average for this kind of book, and she paces her narrative perfectly. I can only agree with other reviewers; if you want the perfect true crime book, look no further!