Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (31 page)

Tony loved them both, especially Coach, as much as he hated the mother he never knew. His loathing for her festered in him. He blamed her for the worst parts of himself.

But Tony never really had a chance. Dyslexic, hyperactive, and angry, school was a death march. He despised anybody in authority. He started shoplifting before he could read, and the few times he got caught, he was let go.

Then at age six, he bashed another first grader in the head with a nail-studded two-by-four, just because the kid said something Tony didn’t like. At seven, he punched his second-grade teacher in the face for locking him out of the classroom.

Soon, Tony was shipped off to a special school for kids with behavior problems, kids just like him—and worse. Everything went downhill from there.

At eleven, when most kids were still collecting Care Bears and Pound Puppies, he hooked up with the Gaylords, a violent Chicago street gang. One of the oldest street gangs in the city, the Gaylords started after World War II as a mostly white, North Side softball club, but in the 1950s it grew into a greaser gang with little interest in games. In the ’60s, it evolved from a group of slicked-back-hair, bad-ass hot-rodders who rumbled over turf and girls into a full-fledged crime racket, selling drugs and guns while it protected its own invisible borders from encroaching black and Latino gangs—with murder, when necessary.

By the ’80s, the Gaylords had more than six thousand members and controlled large chunks of Chicago’s crime landscape. Kids like Tony Majzer were just what the gang needed to refresh the ranks and ensure their violent legacy. In return, they taught him to survive on the street.

At thirteen, Tony took up boxing, mostly because it was a free pass to hit somebody—or to be hit. He lost only one fight in sixteen bouts.

He was a good baseball player, too—so good, he dreamed of playing in college, or maybe even the Show, until he was shot in the knee during a drive-by.

He bounced around from one alternative school to another, almost never welcome for very long. Violence was a daily ritual for him. By the time school officials allowed him to go to a regular high school, he was a lost cause. Two months into the new school year, he pummeled a rival gang member in the hallway. He was sent to another tough alternative school that wasn’t tough enough. Finally, he was warehoused in a school for the worst thugs in the district, where he felt right at home. No proms, no student councils, no pep rallies. Just survival.

Tony grew up thin, sinewy, and tough. By the time he was seventeen, he’d been shot by rival gangsters from the Simon City Royals five times. Rather than arouse cops’ interest by going to a hospital, he plucked four bullets out of his own flesh. Six months later, when he saw his attackers on the street, he stalked them with two loaded .45s. He shot one in the head, one in the chest, and pumped three bullets into the third’s belly. He didn’t know if they died, and he didn’t care. That was just the law of his jungle.

At twenty, a drug-addicted Tony pulled his first hard time. He got eighteen months for helping a friend who burglarized a neighbor’s house. Tony looked a lot younger than he was, and, as a gangbanger, he certainly had plenty of enemies, so it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. But with an army of Gaylords in the house, he felt as safe as a skinny, white, gangster man-child could feel on his first day in prison.

One day, sitting in the weight yard at the Illinois River Correctional Center with some of his homeboys, Tony noticed an older white con, maybe in his forties, watching him. Eventually, the long-haired guy walked over and started talking small, the usual stuff between inmates.

KILLER DAVID MAUST WANTED SO BADLY TO BE NEEDED THAT HE KILLED ANYONE WHO REJECTED HIM.
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The guy said his name was David Maust. He said he was doing thirty-five years for murdering a trucker who had been screwing his wife. Killing his wife’s secret boyfriend made him a stand-up guy to most cons, but to Tony, he came off as soft and didn’t seem to know anything about the street. Dave was a big man, but Tony immediately pegged him as no threat. In fact, Tony presumed Dave needed his gang connections for protection.

A friendship sprouted. For the next year, Tony and Dave spent most days together. Dave was “a trusty,” an inmate who gains wider privileges and more freedom to wander around the prison doing certain jobs. He happily got Tony whatever he needed—soap, shampoo, smokes—and Tony liked the company. It was never sexual; Tony suspected Dave might be bent that way, but it didn’t come up. Dave just liked to fantasize out loud about resuming a normal life on the outside, or at least what passed for normal. He seemed to relish his role as the father figure to Tony and some of the other younger cons. He cast them all as players in his post-prison daydreams.

Like the Wyoming pot farm.

Eventually, Tony was paroled on his burglary beef but landed back in prison when he violated his parole. This time, they locked him up in Pontiac on another eighteen-month stretch while Dave finished his time at Illinois River and was paroled back to the world in the summer of 1999.

LAST HURRAH

Back in the world, Dave traded handyman chores for a studio apartment on South Kenilworth in the sedate Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, and took other odd jobs, occasionally sending money to Tony in prison. They stayed in touch, embellishing the dream they shared and making plans for their getaway.

Just before Christmas 2000, they decided the time had come. Tony, who was now living in a halfway program and wearing an ankle bracelet, packed his bags and boarded a slow bus to Chicago. He drank a fifth of vodka on the ride, and he made himself giggle imagining what it would be like to have all the pot and money he could ever want. He was smashed when Dave picked him up at the bus depot and took him to a little diner on the down side of town, where Tony was too drunk to eat. That night, he passed out on the sofa in Dave’s tidy little apartment in Oak Park.

Because his strict mother refused to let him stay at her home, Tony stayed at Dave’s apartment. For a couple weeks, they lived like two drunken college roommates who just happened to be ex-cons.

While Dave waited for his cash to be wired—there was apparently some small hang-up with the bank, nothing serious—they partied and drove around the city on shopping sprees. Dave, who always carried a wad of cash, lavished gifts on Tony—a computer, clothes, expensive new sneakers, a television, a DVD player, and more. They went to strip clubs and taverns. Dave draped his pet boa constrictor around the shoulders of a bare-chested Tony and photographed him naked like a couple of frat boys goofing around. And they talked constantly about Wyoming, an imaginary landscape whose myth loomed larger for Tony as every day passed.
As soon as Dave’s cash came through
…

One night, Dave asked the veteran gangbanger Tony a macabre question: When gangsters wanted to get rid of a body, how did they do it? Tony was only too happy to share a little street secret: Paint the corpse to mask the stench of decomposition.

One night, Dave asked the veteran gangbanger
Tony a macabre question: When gangsters
wanted to get rid of a body, how did they do it?

Otherwise, Dave was usually easygoing, although he grew testy when Tony talked about his girlfriends. Once, when Tony brought an old flame with him to Dave’s apartment, Dave kicked them out. It almost seemed like he was jealous.

Finally, the grand getaway was at hand. Dave announced his money had finally arrived and decided they would leave early Sunday morning, January 7, for Wyoming.

Saturday would be the last they would see of Chicago, of the law, of their shitty old lives. Saturday would be their last hurrah.

They rose early that morning and went to breakfast at a Denny’s in Franklin Park. Over eggs and pancakes they made travel plans. Tony was ready to hit the road. No, Tony was
past
ready.

“Hey, we gotta do the contest before we go,” Dave told Tony.

“What contest?” Tony wondered.

Didn’t matter much. He liked a challenge.

“I promised to give $450,000 to the kid who can drink the most shots of hundred-proof booze in fifteen minutes without puking or passing out.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, man, I’m serious. Three kids tried it already. It’s your turn now.”

“Yeah? What’d they do?”

“The record stands at fourteen right now,” Dave said.

“Fourteen shots? Fifteen minutes?”

“And no puking or passing out.”

“I just have to drink more than fourteen shots and I get, what, about a half-mill?”

Maust smiled and nodded. “Hundred proof. Your choice.”

Tony didn’t have to think very long.

“I’m in,” he said.

HOMICIDAL URGES

David Edward Maust was nobody’s friend.

Not because he was unfriendly, diffident, or disagreeable—although he was, at times, all those things.

But because he always tried to kill them.

David Edward Maust was nobody’s friend.
Not because he was unfriendly, diffident,
or disagreeable—although he was,
at times, all those things.
But because he always tried to kill them.

He was born April 5, 1954, in the small town of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, to feuding, dysfunctional parents. His abusive father came and went from the household with every blustery fight. His mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital for a time. And David, one of four children, was never quite right, even before a horrible fall that many believe left him brain-damaged as a toddler.

Growing up, he was often forced to stay outside the house until suppertime—and would be brutally punished if he was five minutes late. He once tried to set fire to the sheets in his little brother’s crib and later tried to drown him in a pond.

As a young boy, his mother often called him into her bed, where she stroked his body, French-kissed him, and forced him into weird sex. Days after divorcing in 1963, David’s mother tried to send him away with his father, who refused his skinny, blond son. So she packed up her kids and moved to Chicago.

A few months later, she committed her nine-year-old son to the Chicago State Hospital, a dreary children’s asylum for violent, disturbed, and retarded kids. She told him she would return when there was enough food for him—but told doctors he was a murderous freak. For the next four years, she visited David only when the courts forced her, although he often sat day after day at the window during visiting hours, watching for her to come up the long walk to the asylum’s front door. When asked, he would make excuses for her—for himself—such as “her back is bothering her” or “she is sick today.”

He tried to escape several times, but he was always captured. The asylum’s staff described David as a reliable, sensitive, and appealing child with a profound fear of abandonment and rejection.

But the manias, delusions, and compulsions that would mark him for the rest of his life had already begun to harden inside him.

At thirteen, with barely two years of schooling, David was transferred to a children’s home not far from his mother’s house—and she promptly moved without giving a forwarding address. At fifteen, he used an electrical cord to nearly choke a friend at the home to death when the boy wouldn’t play a drinking game with him.

David was immediately sent back to the asylum, where a psychiatrist diagnosed him with a dangerous schizoid personality, but he didn’t stay long. A few weeks later, David escaped and never looked back.

He tracked down his mother, who wielded a knife and threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave her house. He drifted among odd jobs and lived with different relatives for a year until his mother convinced him to enlist in the U.S. Army at age seventeen—and made him promise to send her all his pay.
Why not?
he figured.
I owe her for … well, she needs the money
.

David got out of basic training on November 19, 1971, and shipped out to Fort Ord in California, to be trained as a cook’s helper. He hadn’t been there but a couple weeks when he saw two young brothers near the front gate, trying to make a buck by shining soldiers’ shiny black shoes. Promising them twenty dollars to help him deliver a message, he took them to a vacant field nearby and started to choke them. One escaped, screaming bloody murder, and David fled. For whatever reason, he was never questioned about the attack and a year later was shipped to an American base in Germany.

But the change of scenery didn’t lessen David’s homicidal urges. They worsened. In once incident, he stabbed a seventeen-year-old boy, who never reported the attack. David had dodged yet another bullet, but his luck wouldn’t hold much longer.

In 1974, twenty-year-old David met Jimmy McClister, the thirteen-year-old stepson of a U.S. Army sergeant on his base, at a bowling alley. They became fast friends, but for reasons David could never explain, four months later he tied the boy to a tree in a forest, beat him to death with a piece of lumber, and buried the body under some leaves and branches.