Crime & Safety

Woman in Hickory St. Nightmare Murder Case Ready to Go on Trial Next Month

The lawyer for one of the women in the Nightmare on Hickory Street murder case asked for her trial to start next month.

A young Shorewood woman charged with the Nightmare on Hickory Street murders is ready to stand trial next month.

The lawyer for Bethany McKee said during a Monday morning hearing that he wants her tried by Will County Judge Gerald Kinney and not a jury. The attorney, Chuck Bretz, also made his request for trial contingent on Kinney—and only Kinney—presiding over the case. Judge Kinney said he is retiring in November.

Prosecutors had planned on trying one of McKee's co-defendants—Joshua Miner, 25, of Joliet—first. Miner's attorneys are trying to get statements he made during a taped interview tossed. During the same hearing Monday, public defender Lea Norbut started making her case that the statements were coerced and Miner was never informed of his constitutional rights.

The hearing will continue later this week after Judge Kinney gets the chance to watch the 24-hour video of Miner's time in an Joliet Police Department interview room.

 Another co-defendant, 20-year-old Alisa Massaro of Joliet, copped a plea to charges of robbery and concealing a homicide to slip 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, 20-year-old Adam Landerman of Joliet.

McKee, 19, Landerman, Miner and Massaro all were arrested in January 2013 and charged with 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 strangled 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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