Children seek answers in '81 Lakemoor murders
By JILLIAN DUCHNOWSKI - jduchnowski@nwherald.com
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| Ron Scharff (left) and his family are seen in happier times. Scharff was found shot to death June 2, 1981, at P.M. Pub on Route 120 in Lakemoor. Patricia Freeman, who worked at the bar, also was found dead. ( ()) |
Twenty-eight years ago this morning, Robert Freeman wondered why his mother hadn’t dropped off something at school for the end-of-the-year picnic.
He wondered whether it was because they had argued the night before, which also was her first night bartending at P.M. Pub on Route 120 in Lakemoor. He called his cousin.
“Later, I called back and the police department answered the phone at the bar,” Freeman remembered. “I was told that she was busy and couldn’t come to the phone.”
“Then my uncle came to pick me up from school,” Freeman said. “He didn’t want to say anything, but I could tell something was wrong.”
His mother, Patricia Freeman, 32, and her boss, Ron Scharff, 36, were found dead, each shot twice, about 11 a.m. on June 2, 1981, in the living room of an apartment attached to the tavern. Freeman left behind Robert and a younger daughter, while Scharff left behind three sons – ages 10, 8, and 2.
For more than two decades, the victims’ children lived with more questions than answers about their parents’ deaths.
“I believe in my heart somewhere that my mom is out there looking over me,” said Robert Freeman, now 41. “It doesn’t affect how I feel about her, but what I feel bad about is that I never got to tell her again that I love her.”
The apparent murders meant that Freeman’s two children stayed with area relatives until their father, Freeman’s ex-husband, prepared room for them. Scharff’s children, the youngest of whom has no recollection of him, watched their mother work to save his two bars so she could provide for her young family alone. At times, Kathleen Scharff had to answer patrons’ questions when they mistook water stains in the Lakemoor bar for blood stains, said her oldest son, Paul.
Now, though, sheriff’s police are close to closing a new investigation into the crime based on mob informant Frank Cullotta, who said a former partner-in-crime, Larry Neumann, told him he had shot two people in a McHenry County bar to avenge a perceived slight on his ex-wife.
Sheriff’s police did not seem to care too much about the information in 1982, Cullotta said, but last fall, a new generation of investigators found it credible enough to re-open the investigation.
They started with Cullotta’s mob biography, which was passed onto them after a Scharff family friend found a loose description of the murders detailed in the book.
Cullotta said Neumann was a “raving maniac” in Cullotta’s restaurant in Las Vegas when Neumann got off the phone with his ex-wife. Neumann told the others there that “some guy” in a lounge grabbed her by the throat. Cullotta tried to talk Neumann out of killing the man, who Neumann believed had disrespected him, according to Cullotta’s biography, which he co-authored with Dennis Griffin.
After Cullotta heard about a double homicide in McHenry County, he asked Neumann whether he was responsible. Neumann said he had left a younger man in the car and confronted the guy who allegedly had assaulted his wife, ultimately shooting him in the forehead and then shooting a woman who was nearby.
Then, Neumann searched the bar for a surveillance wire, took $6,000 cash and tossed the dismantled gun in a river, Cullotta said.
Twenty-eight years later, sheriff’s investigators want to interview one more person and wait for fingerprint and DNA tests to return from the crime lab. But investigators believe Cullotta was right – Larry Neumann is responsible for Lakemoor’s first homicides, said Lt. Andy Zinke, who heads the sheriff’s department’s investigations unit.
“At this point, everything indicates Larry Neumann is the likely suspect,” Zinke said. “If he were alive today, we would be requesting that the State’s Attorney take it to the grand jury for an indictment.”
Neumann died in January 2007 at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, where he was serving a life sentence for fatally stabbing a Chicago jeweler during a robbery. Sheriff’s police don’t believe they have enough evidence to charge any possible accomplices with a crime.
But officially closing the case can bring the victims’ families a peace that has been elusive for far too long, Paul Scharff said. He remembered his mother telling him about his father’s death after a family friend had picked him and his younger brother up early from school June 2, 1981.
“She looked at us and said: ‘Your father was killed,’ ” Paul Scharff said. “She couldn’t even say killed. She couldn’t get it out. When she said that, we just started bawling.”
He remembered his youngest brother running around outside crying but not understanding what had happened. His memories of the next few days are fuzzy.
But decades later, he’s still looking for public affirmation that the murders mattered.
“When [the murders weren’t solved] back then, the message is the community doesn’t care,” Paul Scharff said. “We don’t care enough to commit the resources to solve this. It puts you in a perpetual stuck. You don’t evolve; you evolve with a black hole inside you.”
