Who killed Karen Freed?

Because of my work on the Chicago Heights true crime book, I get approached about researching other cold cases. Most don't go anywhere, and there isn't much more to say about this one. Out of respect for the victim's family, names and some other details have been changed.

Who killed Karen Freed?

We know who: Gerald Peters. We know he did it because he told his mother he'd done it. We know how he did it: with a borrowed gun.

Karen was an only child, a 1972 graduate of Manual High School in the small Illinois town of Lone Tree. After high school, she moved to the Northwest side of Chicago and got a job as a waitress at the Overtime Lounge on Wisconsin Avenue. She was a petite 5'3" and a co-worker described her as happy-go-lucky and trusting, a product of the wholesome way she'd been raised.

She met Gerald Peters at the lounge and they moved in together after knowing each other only a few months. He was ten years older than her and had already been divorced three times, and Freed's cousin would describe the relationship as tumultuous.

The 1977 Labor Day weekend in Chicago was gorgeous, sunny and warm, and an uncharacteristically gentle wind hid strong riptides in Lake Michigan. That Friday Peters and Freed had argued at the bar and he took her purse and left.

The next day two female friends drove Freed to the apartment she shared with Peters to retrieve her purse. They dropped her off at about 1 and waited outside. After about an hour they heard sirens, and an ambulance and police cars screeched to a stop behind them.

Earlier that day Peters had written a suicide note on Holiday Inn stationery: "This is the last day of my life. I can't face reality." He said he couldn't take any more rejection, adding a postscript: "Karen, I love you. Please understand. I just want love."

The landlord unlocked the apartment door for the police. The phone was off the hook and blood was spattered in the bathroom and the towel rack was broken. Freed was dead, lying on the bed in a terry cloth robe and panties, blood pooling below her head. Peters lay beside her, in jogging pants and sweat socks, also dead from a gunshot wound to the head. She had been shot once through her right temple with a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson, with no silencer, and he was lying next to her, to her left. The gun lay beside his left hand.

After he'd killed Freed, Peters had called his mother to say goodbye and to tell her he'd killed her. His mother called the police. A first-floor neighbor reported that she had heard Peters say "I'm sorry, I'm sorry I did it, forgive me." The landlord told the police she "heard moaning from the apartment." No one had heard gunshots.

The police concluded that "there was no indication that Peters intended to take (Freed's) life. She must have entered the apartment at the wrong moment…[H]e just intended to kill himself, but then she came over unexpectedly and he decided to kill her too."

Police theorized that when Karen showed up at the apartment Peters chased her into the bathroom, shot her, and placed her body on the bed. The Medical Examiner disagreed, saying she had been shot while lying on the bed. There was no discussion of the fact that Freed had been shot in her right temple, while Peters was found lying to her left, with a gunshot to his right temple, the gun beside his left hand.

Two cylinders of the gun were empty, two had live rounds, and two had been spent, one for each victim. The police reported finding no prints on the .38. The last official mention of the gun in the police report was a note saying: "Efforts are being made to contact the registered owner to ascertain how the weapon was in the control of the offender."

The gun was registered to Dean Lucevic, the son of a prominent local real estate attorney. Lucevic wouldn't have been hard to find. Thirty-five when his gun killed Freed, he had an extensive history in the area. His family had money trouble of some kind--he placed a legal notice in the newspaper that he was "responsible only for debts and sig. only."

His father had once shot a man in the leg when he tried to collect $600 they said Lucevic owed for a motorcycle. The father was charged with reckless endangerment and the younger Lucevic with assault, but the charges against both were dismissed without explanation. The police say the records of that incident have been lost.

Lucevic was hired by the sheriff's office as a deputy just a few months after Freed's murder. His tenure there was troubled, and he resigned a few years later for unspecified misconduct but was reinstated at a lower pay. In 1985 he was acquitted by Judge Lou Sontino of charges he repeatedly used a stun gun on a handcuffed prisoner, despite a fellow deputy testifying against him. Sontino was rumored to have ties to the Outfit, Chicago's ruling crime lords at the time, and would lose his seat on the bench shortly thereafter.

The investigation into how Lucevic's gun got into Gerald Peters' hand was quietly dropped. The same goes for questions about inconsistencies at the crime scene and exactly how Karen Freed died. The police know who committed the murder; they even had a confession. That was enough.

Lucevic remained with the police force for over two decades. He fathered nine children and was described as a "gentle giant," a "great big man. When he walked down the street, people would shudder. But he really was a gentle man who always had time for everybody." His big loves were guns and motorcycles and he rode with the Bronze Knights club for many years. He died in 1998 at the age of 56.

But before he was a police officer, Lucevic owned a Smith and Wesson and he loaned it to Gerald Peters, who used it to kill Karen Freed. We'll never know why he loaned it out, or if he got the gun back, or exactly what happened in that apartment that windy and warm Saturday afternoon.

Karen Freed was laid to rest back in her little hometown, just another victim of a jealous man with easy access to a gun, her short life now receding beyond human memory.