Prosecutors Want to Split Up 4 Charged With Hickory Street Nightmare Murders

Prosecutors want to split up the cases of the two young men and two young women charged with the grisly Nightmare on Hickory Street murders.

Will County Assistant State's Attorney John Connor requested the cases be severed during a Thursday morning hearing before Judge Gerald Kinney.

Mike Renzi, the attorney for one of the alleged killers, wanted to argue against the motion at a subsequent hearing.

"This one, I'm not ready to agree at this time," said Renzi, who represents 25-year-old Joshua Miner of Joliet.

Judge Kinney seemed inclined to grant the motion, as the four alleged murderers made conflicting statements, according to police reports.

"If these statements exist and they basically cross-implicate each other" the cases need to be severed, the judge said. He set a hearing for next month to settle the matter.

So far, Miner and his co-defendants—Adam Landerman, 20, Alisa Massaro, 20, and Bethany McKee, 19—have all appeared in court together.

The two young men and two young women were charged with murder in connection with the January 2013 strangulation deaths of Terrance Rankins and Eric Glover, both 22.

According to police reports obtained exclusively by Patch, Massaro and McKee 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.

During a March hearing for the murder case, another of Miner's attorneys, Lea Nortbut, said a psychological evaluation of the alleged murderer would be conducted before the end of April. That evaluation has been completed, Renzi said, and he agreed that Miner was found fit to face the murder charges.

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