Gera-Lind Kolarik is an American journalist, playwright and best selling author of true-crime books. [1] Her work has been included television appearances on Maury Povich, Phil Donahue, 48 Hours, Inside Edition. [2] Kolarik founded Evidence Video, a Chicago-based video production company that assists attorneys in personal injury and workers compensation cases. [3]
Kolarik was born to James, a factory worker, and Geraldine Kolarik, a homemaker. She grew up in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, Illinois with her older sister Barbara Marie, an elementary school teacher. Kolarik graduated from Morton West High School where she was the feature editor of the school newspaper The Morton West Falcon. She attended and graduated from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Illinois with a BA in Communications and an Illinois secondary school teaching certificate. [1] [4]
According to Chicago publication, Skyline, "After graduating from Rosary College, Kolarik discovered her interest in crime when she covered the police and political beats for City News Bureau. On her first assignment, a bullet whizzed past her ear while chasing a fleeing bank robber. She keeps it as a good luck charm. [5]
Since 1973, she has reported for several Chicago-area newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, World Newspaper, Oak Park and Life Newspapers of Berwyn and a freelance stringer for the Chicago Daily News. [6] She later worked as an overnight assignment editor for WBBM-Channel 2, a producer for John Drummond's Chicago Chronicles, a weekly series featuring prominent Chicagoans and as the Chief Daytime Assignment Editor for WLS-TV. In 1984, while working as an assignment editor at WLS-TV, Kolarik won an Emmy Award for Best Spot News Coverage for the fatal shooting of Judge Henry Gentile. She also won two awards for Individual Excellence at the 26th Annual Chicago Emmy Award Presentation. [6] She was also nominated for an Emmy Award for her coverage of serial killer Larry Eyler [7] and for the five-part series, Playground Safety she produced with TV anchor Linda Yu. [1]
Besides working as a TV journalist, Kolarik wrote a play and published three true crime books. In 1984, Kolarik wrote Shattered Dreams, a play about a fictional newsroom’s operations on Christmas based on Kolarik’s experiences as a reporter for the City News Bureau. It debuted on Christmas Day at the Chicago Press Club as a contribution for the organization’s scholarship fund. [8] [9] According to the Chicago Reader, Kolarik’s play, "explores the brutal psychic costs that sometimes accompany a lifetime in the news business." [10]
Her first book, Freed to Kill, describes the locating and arresting of suspected serial murderer Larry Eyler, his release on a legal loophole, and his second arrest months later for another murder. [11] Kolarik began following Eyler's case when he was first arrested in 1983. But it wasn't until the day he was convicted of murder in 1986 that she left her job at WLS-TV to research the Eyler case. [12] [13] It took Kolarik four years to complete the book which involved more than 200 interviews—with police officers, journalists, the families of victims, past sex partners of Larry Eyler, and even Sarah Dobrovolskis, the wife of Eyler's lover, John, who died of AIDS in January 1990 — as well as researching police records and archival material and visiting the crime scenes. [14] The book, which alleged that Eyler was connected to several murders, resulted in the investigation being later reopened by Indiana police. [15] According to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, "Despite all of the prosecutorial and police talent working full-time on these tortures and heinous murders, she was the first to spot a link between the Indiana and Illinois killings and to alert the Lake County sheriff to the multi-state pattern of the crimes." [16] Freed to Kill is considered to be one of the factors in bringing charges against Eyler’s suspected accomplice, Robert Little, for assisting him in torturing and killing Steven Agan in 1982. Little was later acquitted of all charges. [17] [18] During the Eyler trial, Kolarik was featured as the cover story "Sleuth in a Skirt" in Inside Chicago's November/December 1990 issue. [19] Freed to Kill reached the number seven spot on the Chicago Tribune's non-fiction list in 1990. [20]
In 1994, Kolarik published I Am Cain about the 1990 murders of Winnetka, Illinois residents Nancy and Richard Langert, committed by a local teen. [21] [22] While researching the book, Kolarik hung out among Biro's acquaintances, in the juice bars, punk rock bars and schools. One of Biro's friends hit her and broke his fingers on her bulletproof vest. [23]
Her most recent true-crime story, Prisoners of Fear, recounts the story of Connie Krauser Chaney, who was stalked and eventually murdered by her estranged husband Wayne Chaney who was then shot and killed by police the next day. [24] [25] through letters she had written to her family as well as excerpts of Wayne Chaney's depraved diary. Connie Chaney's murder compelled the State of Illinois to ratify one of the nation's first and toughest anti-stalking laws, the 1992 Illinois Stalking Law. [26]
Ann Rule, American true-crime writer said, "Gera-Lind Kolarik gets better with every book! Prisoners of Fear is as chilling as today's tragic headlines about women who love the wrong men...searing...gripping...spellbinding...Read and beware." [2] All three of Kolarik's books have been sold for movie options. [4]
In 1988, she founded Evidence Video which produces day-in-the-life documentaries and depositions by witnesses. [3] For one of the cases she worked on, which involved six children killed in a car crash, the trial tapes were shown on the "Today" show, as well as on local TV. [27]
In 2012, digital (ebook) editions of Prisoners of Fear, I Am Cain and Freed to Kill were published. In 2015, audible versions of Prisoners of Fear and I Am Cain also became available.
Kolarik is active in programs that help Chicago-area students from low and middle income families and minority students to gain a better education. She sits on the Board of Directors for Queen of Peace High School, an all-girl Catholic school in Burbank, Illinois.[ citation needed ]
While visiting China, Kolarik met a university student studying Chinese Literature, Yanfei Hu. Kolarik decided to sponsor that student's pursuit of her MBA in the United States. [28] Since then Kolarik has sponsored other Chinese students who want to study in the U.S.[ citation needed ]
Richard Benjamin Speck was an American mass murderer who killed eight student nurses in their South Deering, Chicago, residence via stabbing, strangling, slashing their throats, or a combination of the three on the night of July 13–14, 1966. One victim was also raped prior to her murder. A ninth potential victim, student nurse Corazon Amurao, survived by hiding beneath a bed.
The Wonderland murders, also known as the Four on the Floor Murders or the Laurel Canyon Murders, are four unsolved murders that occurred in Los Angeles, California, United States, on July 1, 1981. It is assumed that five people were targeted to be killed in the known drug house of the Wonderland Gang, three of whom—Ron Launius, William "Billy" Deverell, and Joy Miller—were present. Launius, Deverell, and Miller, along with the girlfriend of an accomplice, Barbara Richardson, died from extensive blunt-force trauma injuries. Only Launius' wife Susan survived the attack, allegedly masterminded by organized crime figure and nightclub owner Eddie Nash. Nash, his henchman Gregory Diles, and porn star John Holmes were at various times arrested, tried, and acquitted for their involvement in the murders.
Diann Burns in Cleveland, Ohio is a former television news anchor and a nine-time Emmy Award-winner. She is best known for her years as a prime-time weekday anchor for two Chicago television stations. Burns appeared in several major movies and at least one television dramatic series. She was the first African-American woman to anchor the prime-time news in Chicago. She entered the Chicago TV market as a reporter after a successful career as newspaper journalist. She earned an advanced degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York.
Helen Voorhees Brach was an American multimillionaire widow whose wealth had come from marrying into the E. J. Brach & Sons Candy Company fortune; she endowed the Helen V. Brach Foundation to promote animal welfare in 1974. Brach disappeared on February 17, 1977, and was declared legally dead, as of the date of her disappearance, in May 1984. An investigation into the case uncovered serious criminal activity associated with Chicago horse stable owners, including Silas Jayne and Richard Bailey. More than a decade later Bailey was charged with, but not convicted of, conspiring to murder Brach; he eventually received a sentence of 30 years after being convicted of defrauding her.
Richard Cain, also known as Richard Scalzitti, was a notoriously corrupt Chicago police officer and a close associate of Mafia boss Sam Giancana.
Crime in Chicago has been tracked by the Chicago Police Department's Bureau of Records since the beginning of the 20th century. The city's overall crime rate, especially the violent crime rate, is higher than the US average. Gangs in Chicago have a role in the city's crime rate. The number of homicides in Chicago hit a 25-year high in 2021.
Linda Yu is a Chinese-American former news anchor and author. Yu is best known as co-anchor on the Eyewitness newscast for WLS-TV in Chicago, Illinois from April 1984 until November 2016. Yu became Chicago's first Asian–American broadcast journalist when she began her news career in Chicago at WMAQ-TV in 1979. For her broadcasting work, Yu has received a total of five local Emmy Awards including one for her report examining the aftermath of 9/11 in 2001. In 1984, Yu was honored with a National Gold Medal from the National Conference of Community and Justice for her documentary, "The Scars of Belfast".
Drew Walter Peterson is an American convicted murderer and former police sergeant who was found guilty in 2012 of the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio, a few months after their 2003 divorce. Peterson first received national publicity in 2007 when his fourth wife, Stacy Ann Cales Peterson, disappeared. Although the police and Stacy Ann's family suspect foul play, she has never been found.
Chuck Goudie is an American television journalist based in Chicago. He has been the chief investigative correspondent of ABC-TV owned WLS-TV, in Chicago since 1990. He has been with ABC7 since April, 1980.
Kathleen Zellner is an American attorney who has worked extensively in wrongful conviction advocacy. Notable clients Zellner has represented include Steven Avery, Kevin Fox, Ryan W. Ferguson, Larry Eyler, and 19 exonerees who are listed in the National Registry of Exonerations.
Andre Crawford was an American serial killer, rapist and necrophile who killed 11 women between 1993 and 1999 in Chicago. Many of the women were addicted to drugs or worked as sex workers. He also had sex with their corpses. In 2009, Crawford was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
Larry William Eyler was an American serial killer who is believed to have murdered a minimum of twenty-one teenage boys and young men in a series of killings committed in the Midwest between 1982 and 1984. Convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection for the 1984 kidnapping and murder of 16-year-old Daniel Bridges, he later voluntarily confessed to the 1982 murder of 23-year-old Steven Agan, offering to also confess to his culpability in twenty further unsolved homicides if the state of Illinois would commute his sentence to life imprisonment without parole.
Silas Carter Jayne was a Chicago-based stable owner, horse trainer, and horse trader who was heavily involved in criminal activity, including fraud, intimidation, arson, and murder. He covered up the infamous Peterson-Schuessler murders and hired the murder of his stepbrother.
Susan Murphy-Milano was an American nonfiction author, violence expert and host of the weekly radio crime show "Time's Up" and author of a book by the same title. Murphy-Milano died in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, in 2012, aged 52, from cancer.
The Newton County John Does are two young murder victims whose remains were discovered by mushroom foragers in Lake Village, Newton County, Indiana, on October 18, 1983. Both victims were discovered alongside two other murder victims whose bodies were identified within months of their discovery. All four were victims of the serial killer Larry Eyler.
On the evening of November 18, 1987, police went to the mobile home of Russell Keith Dardeen, 29, and his family outside Ina, Illinois, United States, after he had failed to show up for work that day. There, they found the bodies of his wife and son, both brutally beaten. Ruby Elaine Dardeen, 30, who had been pregnant with the couple's daughter, had been beaten so badly she had gone into labor, and the killer or killers had also beaten the newborn to death.
Mark Nykanen was an American novelist and journalist. Nykanen began his career as a journalist for New Times Weekly in Phoenix, before becoming a news director at KDKB radio and news anchor for Arizona PBS. He then received four Emmy awards for his work as an on-air correspondent at NBC News; an Edgar Allan Poe Award for writing the NBC documentary Silent Shame: The Sexual Abuse of Children; and shared a Dupont-Columbia Award for Investigative Journalism. After NBC, Nykanen served as the Press Secretary for California Governor Jerry Brown’s 1992 campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. He later became an author, publishing five novels under his own name and two under the pseudonym James Jaros.
Art Petacque was a Chicago newspaper reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Petacque, who specialized in writing about crime and in particular about the Chicago Outfit shared the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Local General or Spot News Reporting with his Chicago Sun-Times colleague, Hugh Hough. During the later part of his career, Petacque also worked concurrently as a commentator for WLS-TV in Chicago.
Russell H. Ewing was an American broadcast journalist in Chicago from 1967 to the late 1990s. Working for WLS-TV and WMAQ-TV, he established a reputation as an investigative journalist, and became known as a go-between who negotiated more than 115 surrenders to police of wanted felons, often wanted for murder.
The I-70 Strangler is the nickname of an unidentified American serial killer who killed at least 12 boys and men in Indiana and Ohio between June 1980 and October 1991, dumping their bodies near Interstate 70 (I-70). Though officially unsolved, it is believed that deceased serial killer Herb Baumeister might have been the perpetrator.
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