Larry Eyler

What the record shows

Larry William Eyler, called the Highway Killer or Interstate Killer, was a house painter who divided his time between Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana. Between late 1982 and 1984 the bodies of teenage boys and young men were found near highways in Illinois and Indiana. A Cook County jury convicted him in 1986 of the murder of Daniel Bridges in Chicago and he was sentenced to death; he pleaded guilty in Indiana in 1990 to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan; and, in a statement his attorney released after his death, he confessed to 21 killings. He died of AIDS-related complications on death row in March 1994.

United Press International reported in October 1983 that a multi-agency task force was investigating at least 19 similar killings in Illinois and northern Indiana. Victims were typically restrained and stabbed and left in fields or woods near interstate exits. Ralph Calise, 28, of Chicago, was found in a cornfield near Lake Forest, Illinois, on August 31, 1983. By August 1984 UPI reported that police considered Eyler a suspect in as many as 24 slayings in four states.

Indiana State Police stopped Eyler on September 30, 1983, near Lowell, Indiana, and seized items from his truck. On October 28, 1983, Lake County, Illinois, authorities charged him with Calise's murder and held him on $1 million bond. In February 1984 Lake County Circuit Judge William Block ruled that Indiana police had detained Eyler illegally and seized his property without probable cause; the evidence was suppressed, bond was cut to $10,000 and Eyler was released on February 6, 1984, with the charge still pending.

According to the Illinois Supreme Court's 1989 opinion in People v. Eyler, the dismembered body of Danny Bridges, a 15-year-old who worked as a street prostitute in Chicago, was found in eight garbage bags in a dumpster on August 21, 1984. UPI reported that the dumpster stood outside Eyler's apartment building and that a janitor had seen Eyler put bags into it the previous afternoon. Eyler, still free on bond in the Calise case, was arrested that day and charged with murder and concealment of a homicidal death on August 22, 1984.

UPI reported that after about three hours of deliberation a Cook County jury on July 9, 1986, found Eyler guilty of murder committed during a kidnapping and aggravated kidnapping, making him eligible for the death penalty. Eyler waived a jury for the penalty phase and Judge Joseph Urso sentenced him to death on October 3, 1986, with additional terms for aggravated kidnapping and concealment. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence on October 25, 1989.

In December 1990 Eyler gave Indiana investigators a statement about the December 1982 killing of Steven Agan, 23, a car-wash worker from Terre Haute. He pleaded guilty to Agan's murder in Vermillion County, Indiana, on December 13, 1990, and was sentenced to 60 years on December 28, 1990. He named Robert David Little, a former Indiana State University professor he had lived with, as a participant and testified against him; a Vermillion County jury acquitted Little on April 17, 1991. Newsweek reported in early 1991 that Eyler, through attorney Kathleen Zellner, offered to confess to as many as 20 further killings in exchange for a life sentence; Cook County State's Attorney Jack O'Malley declined.

Eyler died at Pontiac Correctional Center on March 6, 1994, at age 41. Two days later Zellner announced that he had confessed to killing 21 men and boys in Illinois and Indiana between 1982 and 1984, with an accomplice in four, while still denying that he killed Bridges. The Associated Press reported that a Cook County prosecutor's spokesman cautioned that the confessions did not prove Eyler committed the crimes. The AP reported in July 2023 that DNA genealogy identified Keith Lavell Bibbs, 16, of Chicago, found buried at a farm in Lake Village, Indiana, in 1983, as a victim Eyler had confessed to killing.

Eyler was born on December 21, 1952, in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Before his arrest he worked as a house painter and, briefly in 1984, at a Chicago group home for disabled children.