Cold Feet? Lawyer In Hickory St. Nightmare Murder Case Not In Such A Hurry To Go To Trial After All

The attorney for a young woman charged with the grisly Nightmare on Hickory Street murders made a shocking declaration last month that he was ready to take her case to trial.

On Monday, he decided maybe he wasn't so ready after all.

Attorney Chuck Bretz requested—and was allowed—to put off the murder trial of Bethany McKee. The trial was scheduled to start July 21.

In a court filing asking for a postponement of the trial, Bretz claimed prosecutors produced 10 hours of taped conversations McKee had while in jail and dropped the recordings on him in just the last month.

Bretz's request to put off the trial also said prosecutors "now filed a motion asking to utilize extensive evidence of alleged misdeeds and bad acts on the part of (McKee) in their case in chief."

Whatever alleged bad acts Bretz was talking about are not on file at the Will County Circuit Clerk's Office. McKee, who turned 19 Sunday, was 18 at the time of the January 2013 double murder. Aside from the murder charges, McKee's adult criminal history includes nothing but a pair of traffic cases.

Prosecutors had planned on taking one of McKee's co-defendants—Joshua Miner, 25, of Joliet—to trial first. Miner's attorneys recently tried without success to get statements he made during a taped interview with police tossed.

Another of McKee's co-defendants, 20-year-old Alisa Massaro of Joliet, copped a plea to charges of robbery and concealing a homicide to slither out of the murder case. Massaro was sent off to prison for three and a half years in exchange for her future testimony against McKee, Miner and a third pal charged with the murders, 21-year-old Adam Landerman of Joliet.

McKee, Landerman, Miner and Massaro allegedly had a hand in the strangulation murders of Terrance Rankins and Eric Glover, both 22.

Massaro and McKee lured Rankins and Glover to Massaro’s home on Joliet's Hickory Street, and there Miner and Landerman throttled the two men to death, according to police reports obtained exclusively by Patch.

After the killings, Massaro and Miner had sex atop the dead men’s bodies, the reports said. The four 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.

McKee was at Massaro's home with her baby daughter but left the room before the killings, the reports said. McKee later took off from the house and met with her father, Bill McKee, in hopes he would help get rid of the bodies, police said. Bill McKee instead called the cops.

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