For Richer or For Poorer - 9. Chapter 9 - Dino's Demise

It was the week before Halloween and Dino Czorniak was getting frustrated. After the debacle with Davis Caldwell and Ryan Vincenzo, Colin Meyers and he had been suspended from the force for a month. He hadn’t been back more than three weeks when the body of Colin was found, and he was forced to sit the investigation out. This pissed him off mightily. More of his criminal contacts like Colleen Ventura and his secret lover Natalia had been found dead over the next couple of days. When the Wisconsin police found Natalia’s body dumped in that lot among several trash bags, his temper flared and he flew into a rage destroying his office and tearing up the precinct. It got so bad that when he began to threaten the detectives taking over the case, he was tasered by a fellow officer and put into a holding cell. When he was finally released he was suspended indefinitely without pay. His already losing battle with alcoholism and substance abuse got much worse. He began drinking even more heavily and doing crack cocaine. The crack began to put him into drug induced delusions. He needed to let off some steam from his drug-fueled anger. It was then that his mother called.

“Sweetheart, it’s Mom. Your dad and I want you to come to the house for dinner. You need something to take your mind off Natalia,” Maria Czorniak said as soon as Dino said hello.

“Okay, Momma. I’ll be there at seven thirty. Love ya, Momma,” Dino said trying to hide his troubled state.

"Bye, sweetie. See you then,” she said oblivious to his slurring words.

After hanging up he went to take a hit from his crack pipe when he realized it was cashed. “Damn, I need more crack,” he grumbled to himself. He got up, picked up his half-full bottle of vodka, and drank it all in four gulps. When it was gone and he noticed he had no more alcohol either he threw the bottle at the wall where it shattered upon impact.

He looked at his $2,500 Rolex he stole from a drug lord, when his corrupt cop buddies and he set up a drug bust for them. That was after they double-crossed one of his cops and killed him. It was time to head to his parents’ home, but before he left he grabbed his off-duty revolver from his study’s desk drawer, but forgot to set the alarm. About twenty minutes later someone picked the lock and after tampering with the liquors in the cabinet above the sink, went inside and sat in the big leather chair in Dino’s study waiting for him to return.

***

An hour later he pulled up to Maria and Dominik Czorniak’s one-story ranch house in a middle lower class neighborhood in Bolingbrook, Illinois. He rang the doorbell and was ushered inside by his younger brother Jarek who looked like he was leaving for the gym.

Dino’s father Dominik was 58, an American man born of Polish immigrants, who came to America after the Liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by the Soviet Red Army. After a stint with the Navy he married Maria and became a cop with Chicago PD for 33 years before retiring five years ago. Dino considered him as a difficult and sometimes abusive father, he had a drinking habit and a temper with a short fuse to match. Like Dino he was very homophobic and never shied away from his anti-gay slurs.

His mother Maria, 56 was an Italian woman through and through. Born in a village outside Florence to a lower class family she ran off to the big city where she met Dino’s father who was at port with the US Navy. She was a typical Italian woman: she was a loud opinionated woman who didn’t back down from a fight when her husband’s fuse began to get really short. She was very passionate when it came to her kids. She was a stay-at-home chef

They fell in love and he left the military at 20 years old and smuggled her into the country. They married a few years later when she became pregnant with Dino and Jarek followed a few years later.

Jarek was the splitting image of Dino when he was 23, a rough and rowdy bruiser of a man. He was an up and coming boxer, just like Dino was growing up. Dino became a cop instead. He was heading to his match when Dino was entering the house. Like his father and older brother he was also very homophobic, and like Dino he had nearly killed a man for the suspicion of being gay. He also happened to be Jason Caldwell’s best friend.

As Dino sat down he felt his parents’ eyes on him.

“What? Why are you staring at me?” Dino asked haughtily.

“Oh bambino, you look like crap. Have you been sleeping at all?” Maria asked.

“No Momma, Natalia’s death was rough on me, and I haven’t slept all that much.”

“Jego,” Dominik said sternly, “her death was tragic, yes, but she was a married woman, it would have never worked out for you. It’s time for you to settle down and find a good woman who will make an honest man of you.”

“She was making an honest man of me, Ojciec. She was going to leave that bastard but he killed her. I loved her."

Dominik scoffed angrily, “Loved her! She was a good for nothing slut! You deserve better than that filth. She was worse than those fags that cost you your job.”

Dino bristled at that comment and reached for his gun. He retorted, “How fucking dare you? I ought to –“

“Ought to what boy? Kill me? You haven’t got the damn nerve,” his father interrupted challengingly.

“Oh yeah, well guess what old man, I do have the nerve. Let me show you,” Dino said evilly as he pulled out his revolver and shot his father in the shoulder.

His mother screamed, horrified after her son’s callous act. She screamed again louder when her husband went to grab the gun and it went off striking her in the chest. She began bleeding out slowly.

“Momma!” Dino screamed terrified at what just transpired. Turning his sight on his father who was kneeling next to his dying wife, he screamed in Polish, “You bastard! I'm going to fucking kill you for shooting Momma,” and with that he raised the revolver and shot his wounded father twice in the head. He then rushed to his mother’s side where she finally died in his arms.

In his drug and alcohol-addled mind he put on rubber gloves and in a panic began tearing the house apart looking for money and anything valuable to make the murders look like a home invasion. After ransacking the place, taking all the cash and jewelry he could find and seizing all the valuable electronics and putting them in the car, he left the crime scene. Two hours later an anonymous tip called into 911 regarding the horrific scene at the Czorniak residence.

***

After selling the jewelry and the electronics in different pawnshops across the Chicago metro, he had collected over $4,500. All the money went to the detective’s drug and alcohol habit. When he got home he opened a bottle of whiskey and poured a stiff drink. After finishing his drink he lit up his crack pipe not knowing that not only was his alcohol tainted with ketamine so was the inside of his pipe. After finishing his hit of his pipe and fixing another drink, he went to his study to contemplate what he had done.

He flipped on his light and saw someone sitting in his chair.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked perturbed, slurring his words.

He went to pull out his gun but he began to lose his coordination and he became disoriented; he dropped the gun and fell to the floor unconscious.

“Hello, Dino. It’s me, your worst nightmare,” the man said sardonically.

***
Detectives Raymundo Cruz and Elijah Heller were called to the Czorniak crime scene which looked like a home invasion-homicide, but they were suspicious due to the phone call to 911. It was untraceable, so there was no luck finding the caller’s location. They were searching the house for clues when Jarek came barreling through.

“Mamo! Tatu! What the hell is going on? Who the hell are you?” Jarek said angrily.

“I am Detective Elijah Heller, Bolingbrook PD. I’m sorry sir, who are you?”

“Jarek Czorniak. What the hell happened here?”

“Mr. Czorniak, I’m sorry but this is a crime scene. You can’t be here,” Detective Heller said pragmatically.

“Crime scene? What the hell happened here? Huh? Answer me damn it!” Jarek said heatedly.

At this time Raymundo Cruz walked out of the kitchen where the bodies were and said, “Mr. Czorniak, please calm down. My name is Det. Ray Cruz, are your parents Dominik and Maria Czorniak?”

“Yeah…” Jarek said hesitantly.

“I’m sorry to inform you, but your parents were murdered tonight, can I ask sir, where were you just before coming here?”

Jarek was shocked but he answered, “I was at my boxing match downtown, I've got witnesses.”

“I’ll need those names,” Heller said.

Jarek nodded in a daze and began writing names and addresses down. When he was done he asked a startling question, “Detectives is my brother Dino dead too.”

“We didn’t find anyone else here. Why?” Cruz asked with concerned interest.

“When I was leaving for the gym, Dino came in the house. Momma had asked him over for dinner. He looked strung out and didn’t look like he had slept for days,” Jarek said with worry for his big brother.

The detectives looked at each other and Elijah asked, “What time was this?”

“I left for the match at 8:30.”

The detectives shared another look.

“Detectives, what’s going on?” Jarek asked with growing anger.

“Your parents were murdered about 9:30 to 10 o’ clock. Your brother may have been the intended victim,” Cruz said stoically.

“Or our killer,” thought Heller.

He looked at Jarek and asked if he could stay somewhere else for the night, “After all this is a crime scene, you can’t stay here.”

“I was actually about to go stay with my girlfriend tonight,” Jarek said giving the Detectives her address and walked out.

“What are your thoughts partner?” Elijah asked Ray.

“I think Dino may have killed his parents to get money to help support his drug habit. But it’s conflicting with the ballistics saying that while he shot his father execution style in the head I believe he may have struggled with his father for the gun; the gunshot wounds to his mother were not instantly fatal, plus Dominik had residue on his hands and clothes showing that he had a hand on the gun when it went off. His shoulder wound to me says that he was shot as a warning not to cross him. I guess he didn’t listen,” Ray said observantly. He was spot on with his assessment of the scene.

An hour later, after canvassing the neighborhood they found the pair of latex gloves and the Colt .45 revolver Dino had dumped as he was leaving the scene of the crime. The gun had Dino’s fingerprints all over it, and his sweat was inside the gloves.

The detectives raced to arrest Dino Czorniak.

***

When Dino came to, he was in his bed. His head was pounding and when he finally got his bearings he realized he was chained to all four bedposts. He was in nothing but his underwear. He was also gagged and blindfolded.

“What the fuck is going on. What the hell happened?” he thought.

Even though he was blindfolded, Dino could sense someone in the room. Suddenly the gag was taken out of his mouth.

He yelled at the individual in the room, “Who the hell are you, I'm a cop God dammit! Let me go this God damn min—“

He was interrupted by a slap to the face. The presence spoke for the first time in a calm menacing tone, “Hello Dino, do you know why I am here?”

“N…n…no,” Dino said nervously. The voice sounded somewhat familiar.

“I'm here to kill you. You know why?”

“Kill me? Why? What the hell did I do?” Dino asked suddenly scared.

“Your excessive drinking and drug use led to my sister’s death, Dino!” the man roared at Dino who was shaking with fear.

“Your sister?! Excuse, but who the hell do you think you are? Let me go this instant,” Dino screamed at the sudden insinuation.

“Marco,” said matter-of-factly.

That one word sent Dino into a cold sweat. Shivers ran down her spine. “M…Mar…Marco, hey buddy…come on man, let me up. Let’s talk about this,” Dino said rambling trying to hold his composure.

“Nope, Dino. Can’t do that. Because of your wallowing in self-pity over your partner’s death and your growing drug habit, my sister’s dead. You know Natalia. Don’t worry, you’ll join her shortly,” Marco said with a tinge of anger.

“Marco, you got it all wrong. Jacob killed her. I had nothing to do with it. I haven't murdered anyone.”

“Oh really Dino? You didn’t’ kill anyone? What about your parents? Your clothes are covered in blood and your brother left a message saying they had been murdered. You have been a very naughty boy Dino.”

Dino was stunned. He had been on crack and alcohol. He had killed his parents and ransacked the house in a drug-fuelled blackout.

"What have I done?" Dino thought. He tried to fight back the tears.

“Please, Marco. Let me go. I’ll disappear and even kill Jacob for you,” Dino pleaded to the cold, psychopathic killer.

“Hmmm…tempting offer Dino,” Marco said pretending to ponder the offer then continued with an evil smirk, “But no. I'm gonna kill you for Natalia. You were supposed to protect her. She’s dead and so are you. Don't worry about Jacob, I will take care of him myself."

He pulled out the machete and his favorite knife and began slashing Dino’s extremities. Dino screamed as Marco began chopping off his arms and legs. Blood spurted all over the walls, the floor and the bed. The mirror above the bed was drenched in the spray of the life-giving fluid. Marco then pulled off the blindfold and gave Dino the last image he ever saw, Marco’s evil smile and the blood-covered machete.

Dino tried to plead with Marco, all the while screaming in agony as Marco was cutting his chest and stomach open with the serrated knife, “Please no more. Please spare me. Mar-“

“Spare you? Ha! Good bye Dino,” Marco said as he lifted the machete and swung down on Dino’s neck, decapitating him. The remainder of his blood squirted onto the nearby wall and the ceiling and then began pooling onto the mattress under Dino’s drawn and quartered corpse.

“Good riddance Dino,” Marco said as he wiped the machete and the knife on a towel in the bathroom. Then he took a shower grabbed some of Dino’s clothes, and sat down at Dino's computer to draft the cop's “murder note.” When he'd finished he hit print.

He then wrapped Dino’s freshly decapitated head in saran wrap and parchment paper and drove to Milwaukee where he dropped off the plastic-wrapped head on Ryan and Kieran’s SUV. On the way he made another anonymous phone call to 911.

***

Twenty minutes after Marco left, Detectives Raymundo Cruz, Elijah Heller, and three other police officers broke down the door after the second anonymous phone call about “a murder at Dino Czorniak’s residence” was made.

When they entered the bedroom the scene before them stopped them in their tracks. The overwhelming metallic smell of death churned their stomachs. One of the officers ran out of the house and threw up his lunch and refused to enter the crime scene.

“Son of a bitch,” Heller said, holding his arm across his face to dampen the smell that was making him sick, “How the hell did this happen so quickly?”

They called in the coroner for Cook County, David Helmsley, who forty-five minutes later came in to the room and began looking over Dino’s corpse and the items that Marco had used to hold him to the bed and torture him.

“It looks like he was bound to the bed, gagged and blindfolded, tortured with a serrated knife, and then chopped up by an extremely sharp blade,” he pulled out a liver probe he had inserted into the body and said, “This man just died less than an hour and a half ago, I’ll learn more from the autopsy.”

He started looking around, then turned to the detectives and asked, “Umm…do you by any chance know where the head is?”

Det. Heller was about to respond when an officer got their attention, “Detectives, we found something in the study.”

They followed the officer into the room where another detective sat in the leather chair behind the desk, reading the latest “murder note.”

“Correia, what do you have?” Heller asked.

“It’s The Ripper’s latest note,” Detective Adam Correia, who had worked with Dino with Chicago PD, said as he scrutinized the printed out note, “It was in the printer, and the laptop document shows it was printed 30 minutes before we arrived.”

“Shit! He must of waited for Czorniak to show up and snuck up on him then did that…” he said pointing in the direction of the bedroom, “Let me see the letter”

“Here Detective,” Correia said handing him the note. It read:

Dear Chicago Police,

My name is Dino Czorniak, in this letter I am confessing to the murders of Dominik and Maria Czorniak as well as many unsolved murders of drug dealers around the Chicago Metro. The names and case files have been sent to your emails. My murder was justified because I let my lover, Natalia die at the hands of her husband. Oh, Natalia, how I failed you so. As punishment I have been drawn and quartered and my head has been chopped off. You won’t find it unless you head to Milwaukee and ask Agents Kieran Pollack and Ryan Vincenzo of the FBI. And when you see them tell them I said hello and that The Ripper is not done terrorizing them or those faggot brothers of theirs. And another thing: he’s not done with his revenge on Jacob Caldwell either. He is just getting started. Also tell Jarek he is in his sights. Until next time, Detectives.

Sincerely,
Det. Dino Czorniak

***

Meanwhile back in Milwaukee, Ryan and Kieran stood dumbfounded and horrified at the sight of Dino’s severed and bloody head covered in plastic wrap sitting on the hood of their SUV.

“He’s struck again. But where is the body?” Kieran asked as his cell phone went off.

“This man is a monster!” Ryan noted.

“Agent Kieran Pollack here. How may I help you?” Kieran said.

“Agent Pollack, this is Detective Elijah Heller with Bolingbrook PD. We’re calling about a man you may have known. Detective Dino Czorniak perhaps?” Elijah said.

“Yeah, we have a history. We also have his severed head here at the Milwaukee County Coroner’s Office. Can I ask how he died and have you found a note or his body by any chance?”

Heller went on to tell him how Dino had died as well as Dino’s suspected killing of his parents, and said that crime scene photos and the “murder note” had been sent to their emails. After hanging up the boys called Melinda to get the head and after picking it up they went inside to check the crime scene photos and the latest letter.

“Man, you boys seem to be a target to this bastard aren’t you?” Melinda said as soon as she was told of the intricacies of the crimes.

A few hours later the two agents and the Bolingbrook Detectives were trying to figure out the crime scenes over speakerphone

“How did The Ripper get the jump on Dino in his own home?” Ryan asked.

Melinda came in with an answer, “His toxicology screen came back. He had high levels of ketamine mixed with alcohol and crack cocaine. He never stood a chance.”

“Man this monster is becoming a thorn in my side and it’s just gonna get worse,” Kieran said.

His statement proved prophetic. The murders of Maria and Dominik Czorniak at the hands of Detective Dino Czorniak and his subsequent murder at the hands of The Ripper led to the start of what was called by those in the communities of Lake Michigan as the “Halloween Horrors.”