Ceramic Shop Murders Terrorized Joliet: 40 Years Ago

Jul 28, 2023

JOLIET, IL — Forty years ago this weekend, Nick Ficarello was a young detective at the Will County Sheriff's Office when he was called to the ceramic shop at 1405 East Cass St. on Joliet's east side.

"The amount of blood on the floor in the back kiln where they made the pottery, there was a lot of blood, very thick," recalled the now-retired Will County investigator and former Braidwood police chief who lives near Manhattan. "It was a very horrific and brutal scene. They just looked so surreal and lifeless.

"It was a very hot day and a lot of activity on the east side and the 7-Eleven along Briggs Street because people were buying lottery tickets," Ficarello continued. "For Illinois, it was the highest amount at that time, $6.5 million. I specifically remember the $6.5 million."

The bodies of four women were discovered shortly after noon that Saturday, Aug. 20, 1983, inside The Greenware by Merry Ceramic shop along the busy Route 30 corridor between New Lenox and Joliet.

The victims were the ceramic shop owner Marilyn Baers, 45; and her three customers, who all drove together to visit the store that Saturday morning: Barbara Dunbar, 38; Anna Ryan, 75; and Ryan's daughter-in-law, Pamela Ryan, 29.

The four women were stabbed a total of 43 times.

In retrospect, the ceramic shop murders were the last of the series of agonizing killings that put both the Joliet community and law enforcement on edge that summer, remarked current Elwood Police Chief Fred Hayes, who worked the midnight shift for the Joliet Police Department during the summer of 1983.

Hayes recalled the Joliet Police Department "began doubling-up" officer patrols that summer following the previous month's Homer Township killings that were also committed by the same killer who terrorized the pottery shop.

Milton Johnson, who lived with his mother and stepfather in the Forest Park area of Joliet, was let out of prison by the Illinois Department of Corrections in March 1983, after spending the previous 12 years incarcerated in Pontiac. Johnson had raped and tortured a teenage girl from Plainfield with her cigarette lighter and taunted her boyfriend, who was forced to lay down on the front floorboard of the car as Johnson committed the backseat rape at Joliet's Pilcher Park woods in 1970.

Within a few weeks of the Aug. 20, 1983, ceramic shop murders, Illinois State Police visited Milton Johnson at his parents' house and asked him a few questions about the family's pickup truck, his whereabouts and his knowledge of the summer's Joliet area crime wave. No arrests took place that afternoon as Johnson had just emerged as a possible suspect, one of many.

Afterward, Johnson and his stepfather moved the perfectly operating truck to a friend's garage in the Fairmont area, and the truck remained in the garage until police seized it the following March, at the time of Johnson's arrest.

Physical evidence from one of Johnson's murders on I-55 was recovered inside the truck.

Represented by private counsel that his parents hired out of Chicago, Johnson was tried and convicted in 1984 of raping an 18-year-old girl along Interstate 55 near Wilmington and killing her boyfriend. The exhausted downstate couple had pulled off the interstate to sleep.

For the ceramic shop murders, Johnson served as his own lawyer.

Convicted of a total of five murders and one attempted murder, Johnson was sentenced to die by lethal injection at the Illinois Department of Corrections. About 20 years ago, then-Gov. George Ryan abolished the death penalty, and Johnson's sentence was changed to life in prison without parole.

He has lived at the Menard Correctional Center for decades, and in May, Johnson celebrated his 73rd birthday.

"I believe if he wouldn't of been caught, in my opinion, he would have continued his modus operandi at a later date," Ficarello remarked during this week's interview.

Ficarello credited fellow Will County Sheriff's Detective Dave Simpson for having a huge role in securing the arrest and conviction of Johnson.

Although Johnson was never tried for the Blum sister killings, Will County authorities determined that Johnson was the likely assassin who broke into the home of two older sisters who lived in rural Joliet Township along Rosalind Avenue.

Sisters Zita Blum, 66, and Honora "Nora" Lahmann, 67, were found shot to death and their bodies were burned inside their home. One of the women was sexually tortured.

The killer of the Blum sisters used the same rare copper bullets to take their lives as were used in all the rest of the Joliet area slayings that were connected to Milton Johnson.

"Dave Simpson grabbed a hold of the case," Ficarello said. "Dave was like a dog on a bone because he always felt it was connected back to Nora and Zita."

Among the noteworthy evidence from the ceramic shop murders were several fingerprints and Converse All-Star gym shoe impressions that tied Milton Johnson to the killings.

"I believe it was a combination of Will County Sheriff's Police Department and State Police working together and not letting egos get in the way," Ficarello said of solving Milton Johnson's murders. "Everyone working on the case was always giving more than 100 percent, on both Will County and the State Police."

In light of the 40th anniversary of the ceramic shop murders this weekend, Elwood Police Chief Hayes does not want to overlook the Homer Township slayings in which a total of five people ultimately died, including two Will County Sheriff's Office auxiliary officers: Denis Foley, 50, and Steven Mayer, 22, whose father was a Will County Sheriff's sergeant at the time.

Between 3 and 4 a.m. on July 16, 1983, six people were shot near 147th Street. The homicide victims were George Kiehl, 24, Cathleen Norwood, 25, Richard Paulin, 32, and the two sheriff's deputies. Kiehl's girlfriend was shot in the shoulder, and she survived, running to a nearby farmhouse, screaming for the farmers to wake up and call police.

The Homer Township killings were described as ambush-style murders, and they happened on a remote stretch of unlit road. A fishing reel repair receipt, with the name of Milton Johnson's stepfather, was found under Mayer's body by Will County deputies.

Police later determined that the stepfather was in Mississippi for a family reunion, but Milton Johnson had been using the pickup truck on weekends during that summer's crime wave.

In July 1983, Hayes said he was on the Joliet police softball team, and they were supposed to play Foley and Mayer's Will County Sheriff's team at the old Knights of Columbus ball field on Joliet's west side. Needless to say, members of the Will County Sheriff's Department did not show up and the game was canceled and that's when Hayes learned of the horrific tragedy.

The killing spree around Joliet drew national attention and the killing rampage left Joliet residents and also police on the edge, Hayes recalled.

New York's controversial Guardian Angels came to downtown Joliet, pitching several tents around the courthouse lawns, as the Guardian Angels mobilized community foot patrols, escalating tensions between them and Joliet area police as the killer's identity still remained unknown.

"The whole notion of Terror Town, USA, that is not exaggerated," Hayes said during this week's interview. "The whole summer during the terror of Milton Johnson, everyone was on the edge, and we were on our toes. It was a very uneasy summer, and it was a very unseasonably hot summer. It was just a very different time ... we had two auxiliary deputies gunned down, so everyone rode in two-man cars."

Forty years ago, Hayes noted, the term "serial killer" was "completely pretty much unheard of" to most Joliet area citizens, and the notion of a Black serial killer was even less common on a national spectrum.

"He broke the stereotypical mold of a serial killer, right?" Hayes said of Johnson. "Obviously, since then, that stereotype has since been proven wrong, but in 1983, there were not a lot of African-Americans that were known to be serial killers."

In retrospect, Hayes said he wished the Will County State's Attorney's Office had prosecuted Johnson for the Homer Township mass killings. By the late 1980s, State's Attorney Ed Petka opted not to pursue any more murder trials; Johnson already received a total of five death sentences for murdering the four women in the ceramic shop plus the late night I-55 killing of 18-year-old Tony Hackett. After watching her boyfriend's murder, Hackett's girlfriend was abducted, blindfolded, raped, stabbed in the stomach and thrown out of Johnson's pickup truck before sunrise along a rural stretch of Route 53 near Elwood and left for dead.

Because a pair of Good Samaritans driving along Route 53 shortly after sunrise stopped to rescue her, she survived her attack and lived to testify at Johnson's trial that he was their perpetrator.

One other interesting footnote Hayes recalled is that all of the summer of 1983 killings connected to Johnson happened outside of Joliet city limits.

Therefore, the Joliet Police Department was not directly involved in solving the crimes. The 1970 Pilcher Park torture rape that sent Johnson to the Illinois Department of Corrections for a period of 12 years was investigated and solved by the Joliet Police Department.

Because of the lack of public notification laws at the time, Joliet police and Will County detectives remained in the dark, during the summer of 1983, that Johnson was paroled that March.

"I'm not the prosecutor, but I always felt I would have liked to have seen (that Homer Township trial) move forward," Hayes said during this week's interview. "They chose not to, and that's a prosecutor's decision. If there was ever a reason for the death penalty, Milton Johnson is the poster child, absolutely."

All told, Will County police and prosecutors tied Johnson to 14 murders, one attempted murder and the rape of teenage murder victim Tony Hackett's girlfriend during the summer of 1983 Joliet area crime wave.

"These were one of the most horrific crimes in the country," Hayes said. "It was, to me, always very spur of the moment. All of his attacks were blitz attacks. It was not like there was a domestic relationship. His was very unique. In 1983, it was rare to have a stranger killing a victim. Back then, most homicides had a connection between the victim and the offender."

Retired Will County Sheriff's Detective Dave Simpson said he and Marty McCarthy of the Illinois State Police were the last investigators to have a chance to interview Johnson, back in March 1984, at the time of his arrest for the I-55 slaying.

On Friday, Simpson said he does not believe Johnson will confess to any of the homicides.

"He'll never confess," Simpson remarked. "He spent so much time in the Department of Corrections (for the Pilcher Park rape), 12 years. For Milton Johnson during those 12 years at the DOC, that was like an advanced degree in commiting crimes. (Once he got out) he was going to make sure there were no survivors, no witnesses would testify against him."

Simpson said that Will County prosecutors worked closely with the police and everyone did the best they could, but that in some of the murder cases Johnson was not charged with, the evidence was not as strong as the ceramic shop slayings and the I-55 rape and murder.

"It's just unfortunate we were not able to put together more information," Simpson said. "Those people have not been forgetten. It's heavy, it's very heavy."

In addition to the copper-jacket Lubaloy bullets, filtered cigarettes were found at the Blum double murder house, and those were the same brand of cigarettes Johnson smoked, Simpson said. However, no eyewitnesses connected Johnson to the Blum sister murders on Rosalind.

"Their anniversary is June 25th and there is no resolve, no comfort in it, that they were left out of it," Simpson said of the prosecution. "The biggest miscarriage of justice was Governor George Ryan doing away with the death penalty. In essence, rolling Milton Johnson back into a life sentence. But there are several other crime scenes and the families of those loved ones never got any recognition, no justice. Nora and Zita were set on fire. There certainly was no justice for them."

In the summer of 2021, at the suggestion of Joliet trial lawyer Frank Cservenyak, I published Terror Town USA through WildBlue Press in Colorado. The book about Milton Johnson is available in paper back, ebook and in audiobook format.