Crime & Safety

Another Alleged Hickory Street Nightmare Killer's Sanity Questioned

Alleged Nightmare on Hickory Street murderer Adam Landerman's lawyer filed court papers claiming the young man is "unable to completely understand" what's going on with his case.

The attorney for one of the alleged Nightmare on Hickory Street murderers has filed court papers questioning his client's sanity.

The lawyer for Adam Landerman, 20, has asked for the appointment of an expert to conduct a psychological examination of the young man. It was the second time mental fitness issues have been raised by a lawyer in the case.

One of Landerman's alleged accomplices, 25-year-old Joshua Miner, has already been subjected to a psychological examination. Miner's attorney said last month that he was found fit to stand trial for murder.

Landerman and Miner—along with two young men, Alisa Massaro, 20, and Bethany McKee, 19—face murder charges in connection with the January 2013 strangulation deaths of Terrance Rankins and Eric Glover, both 22.

According to police reports obtained exclusively by Patch, the two women lured Rankins and Glover to Massaro's house on North Hickory Street in Joliet. Not long after the two men arrived, Miner and Landerman throttled Rankins and Glover, killing them, police said.

Once Rankins and Glover were dead, Massaro and Miner had sex atop their bodies, the reports said. The four friends then concocted a plan to dismember the corpses of their victims and began procuring supplies, including a blowtorch, to carry out the plan, the reports said. Miner reportedly intended to keep the dead men’s teeth as trophies.

Landerman, Massaro, McKee and Miner never actually got around to cutting up the bodies, the reports said, and they left the corpses on the floor while they continued to party, drink and do drugs. Mike Trafton, the Joliet police chief at the time of the murders, called the killings "one of the most brutal, heinous, really upsetting things" he had experienced in his entire career.

The motion filed by Landerman's attorney, Edward Jacquays, said "Landerman has previously been treated for mental health issues and received medication for the same" and his "mental capacity" currently "renders him unable to understand the nature and purpose of the proceedings to adequately insist in his defense."

The evaluation is hoped to determine whether there is a "bona fide doubt as to (Landerman's) fitness to stand trial" and if at the time of the killings he "lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of the conduct he is being accused of committing."

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