If You Think Too Hard It Only Makes You Mad

By Kevin Guilfoile

It was less than a year ago that we chronicled the trial of Jeanette Sliwinski, the former stripper and trade show model who ran her Mustang at 90 miles an hour into the back of a Honda Civic, killing three Chicago musicians. She was found guilty but mentally ill of reckless homicide and was sentenced to just eight years in prison.

And this Thursday she will walk out of jail.

To understand how eight years became ten months, you have to accept that prison math is all about subtraction. There was time served. Time off for good behavior. Time credited for counseling. It's a fact of an overcrowded prison system.

But I wonder if the original sentence--eight years for taking three lives--was as light as it was only because Sliwinski chose a car as her weapon.

We have a habit of calling any collision involving an automobile an "accident." No doubt if you had been listening to AM radio in Chicago on July 14, 2005, the traffic report would have warned you of an "accident" at the intersection of Dempster and Niles Center Road. Somebody missed a red light. Somebody was texting while driving. Just an accident.

But what happened on that spot that day was no accident.

If on July 14, 2005, Sliwinski had walked into that intersection with a gun or a bomb and, in an attempt to take her own life also killed three other people, she would not have received a prison sentence of only eight years. I guarantee you she would have been committed for life. She would have been called a danger. A threat to society. But what is the difference between that and steering a 2,000 pound missile into the back of another car at almost 100 miles an hour?

The difference is John Glick, Michael Dahlquist, and Doug Meis might have survived if Jeanette Sliwinski had only shot them.

My Fate Is Sewn Into the Hem of Her Failings

By Kevin Guilfoile

The August issue of Chicago magazine includes a lengthy update on the fate of Jeanette Sliwinski, the model/stripper who killed my friend Doug Meis and two other Chicago musicians three years ago. Incredibly, although she was sentenced to eight years last November (far less than prosecutors sought in a bench trial) due to incomprehensible prison math, she's likely to get out of prison in just a few months:

[A]round Thanksgiving this year, [Sliwinski] will be asked to gather her things and prepare for her release from Dwight Correctional Center. The announcement will probably come on the day before her sentence officially ends: Jail officials say they time it that way so nothing holds up the inmate's last obligation—a meeting with a prison counselor. In this meeting, Sliwinski will receive a check from her "trust fund," the bank account that holds the prison wages she has earned since her first day in jail. The counselor will then describe the conditions of Sliwinski's parole, likely mentioning whom she'll report to and how she will be expected to conduct herself. Before she's set free, Sliwinski will likely learn that, in two years' time, she can petition for the return of her driver's license.

Depressing as that thought is (and perhaps nothing will anger you more than reading about the violence done to her victims in Noah Isackson's account and then glancing at Sliwinski's unblemished, unemotional DOC mug shot), there is a light at the end of the weekend. Doug was a drummer in several bands. One of them, Exo, disbanded after his death--the thought of playing those songs on stage without Doug's exuberance behind them had become unthinkable. But this Sunday night (August 10) at Schuba's in Chicago, Exo is reuniting for an acoustic show, with all proceeds being donated to the Doug Meis Gifted Artists of Tomorrow Scholarship Fund. It will be intense and it will also be great fun, an emotional gathering of musicians and friends honoring Doug and John Glick and Michael Dahlquist, as well. Absentstar will open the show and the terrific Coach K, who nearly ten years ago DJ'd the infamous McSweeney's event at the Ethiopian Diamond restaurant, will man the turntables starting at 7PM.

I hope to see you there. I hope to see lots of people there.

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Simon Baatz's For the Thrill of It is out this week. The extensively researched non-fiction account of the Leopold and Loeb case is reviewed in this weekend's Trib and I have a short piece on the legacy of that murder (featuring comments from novelist and Friend of the Outfit Sam Reaves) in Saturday's book section. I commented on L&L just a few weeks ago so I'll leave it at that post and this weekend's essay, but frequently when I read a book like this it helps me to make a map of the events. And since I'm much more familiar with Chicago's north side than I am with the south side, it was particularly helpful for me in this case.


View Larger Map

This was a working map I slapped together as I was reading and I make no warranties to its accuracy. But it really struck me as I followed the geography of this case that, sensational as it was (and still is), this really was a neighborhood crime. The murderers lived within blocks of each other and Richard Loeb lived right across the street from their victim, Bobby Franks. (The fact that Kenwood is now Barack and Michelle Obama's neighborhood adds an irrelevant yet irresistible contemporary twist, of course.)

History has dwelt on the existential evil of the case, but the real horror of this particular Crime of the Century was a timeless one--the fear of the devil who lives next door.

Naivete and Speed Make a Great Combination

By Kevin Guilfoile

"It didn't work. I want to die. You don't understand. I want to be dead."

Those were words allegedly spoken to paramedics by Jeanette Sliwinski, the 23-year-old Chicago model who two years ago drove her red Mustang convertible at almost 90 miles an hour into the back of a Honda Civic, killing three Chicago musicians on their way to lunch. Sliwinski's trial began this week and it's not an underreported story, at least not around here. The papers are giving it prime space. The blogs are all over it. The local television stations have reporters at the Skokie courthouse. Even the national networks have nosed into the proceedings because of the bizarre nature of the charges and also, undoubtedly, because the defendant is as easy on the eyes as she is hard to stomach. There really shouldn't be much for me to add.

Except that Jeanette Sliwinski murdered my friend.

We have a tendency to sentimentalize the character of the unfairly and prematurely dead, but I could produce a hundred witnesses to tell you that Doug Meis wasn't a guy you even had to know well before you grew to love him. You only had to watch him play the drums. He always had this incredible look, this incredible, transparent look of undiluted joy on his face. His elbows moved around his hands in these wild and joyous, concentric and eccentric orbits. Whenever I brought someone to see the band Exo play for the first time, they always said the same thing to me during the rare silence--God, I can't take my eyes off that drummer! It was impossible to watch Doug play and not know how much fun he was having. And it was impossible to be around him and not have that much fun.

On the morning of July 14, 2005, Jeanette Sliwinski got into a fight with her mother and climbed into her sports car with a bottle of gin and the intention to kill herself. But she wasn't only going to kill herself. She was going to do it in a way that would punish her mother and everyone else that had made her life so unbearably unhappy. Her suicide was going to be a spectacular one. She would kill herself violently. She would kill other people in the process. It would be on the television. In the newspapers. And the long list of people who had wronged Jeanette Sliwinski would have to live with all that blood and destruction forever on their consciences.

Her first thought was to drive into a train, but when she got to the tracks there was no train there. Angry and determined, she pushed the accelerator to the floor. She ran through one red light. A second. A third. Her life would end when something, and hopefully someone, stopped her car.

Michael Dahlquist, John Glick, and Doug Meis had just left the offices of Shure Microphones to get a bite for lunch. They were stopped at a red light on Dempster, waiting to make a left hand turn toward Wendy's.

Sliwinski spotted the rear of their car, retargeted her eight-cylinder missile, and gunned it.

According to Sliwinski's interpretation of the vague, unwritten laws in her head, maybe she thought this couldn't be a homicide. At the moment Sliwinski decided she would never again press the brake of her car, she had never seen Michael Dahlquist, John Glick, or Doug Meis. In the tiny universe with Jeanette Sliwinski at its center, these individuals didn't exist any more than a city in China she'd never heard of. How could she kill someone who wasn't alive? This was the brilliance of her plan. At the very moment these men would enter the plane of her existence, Jeanette Sliwinski would leave it. Her mother and all her other enemies would feel the anguish of the dead she would leave behind, but Jeanette never would.

She would be out of there.

Sliwinski's lawyers are going to try to spin her pathological narcissism as insanity. They've asked for a bench trial, probably deciding that between the testimony of appalled witnesses and the grief of the victims' families and the inevitable slide show of the defendant's glamour shots, she would never get a moment's sympathy from a midwestern jury. Instead they will put five psychologists on a full court press, trying to hang their hopes on a judge's interpretation of insanity law.

But Jeanette was not temporarily delusional, as her lawyers will claim. In fact her plan unfolded almost exactly as she imagined it would. There was violence. Blood. Death. Destruction. Headlines. Her mother was shocked, shamed, humbled, and humiliated. The only part of her scheme that didn't come together perfectly is that she wasn't crushed to death. In accordance with one of God's favorite jokes, she only fractured her ankle. The impact had injected the endless, incurable pain and sorrow of other people's suffering into her own soul, not somebody else's. And now she has forever to think about how good her life used to be.

After hearing the deafening crash, the manager of a nearby mattress store ran out into the street, a demonstration pillow still in his hands. He saw Sliwinski's overturned car, with the model's slightly injured foot sticking out the window. The lifeless body of one of her victims was splayed on the nearby concrete.

"Get me out of here!" he heard Sliwinski demand.

No, Jeanette. You're stuck here with the grieving rest of us.

UPDATE: Jeanette Sliwinski was found guilty, but mentally ill, of three counts of reckless homicide and one count of aggravated battery, lesser charges than the three counts of first-degree murder sought by the prosecution. Sentencing will be November 26. Channel 7 says she faces a maximum of ten years. The Associated Press says a maximum of five.