From Gintlet, this is Reply-Off. I'm Alex Gilder. This week, the second part of On The Inside, a story by Reply-Off producer Shruthi Pinemani. If you haven't heard part one, go back to last week's episode and listen to it right now.
But here is a quick refresher. In February of last year, Shruthi found a blog that was written by a man in a maximum security prison in Illinois, his name is Paul Madrowski. Shruthi spoke to Paul on the phone just to sort of understand how he's writing a blog from a maximum security prison. And their conversations turned into a weekly routine.
And at a certain point, Shruthi began to wonder about his case. Paul is autistic and he claims that his autism played a big role in his conviction. And he says that he's serving a life sentence for murder that he didn't commit. So Shruthi started to investigate.
Here she is. So I started to look into Paul's criminal case this past September and it has taken me to all these different weird places that I never thought I would go. Maybe the best place to start is in the fall of 1988. Paul was 13 and he was a freshman at a new school, Westmont High, this is in the Chicago suburbs.
And Paul was starting the semester with a resolution. From here on out, everything was going to be totally different. Not the way it was in junior high. I tried really junior high to fit in and be popular, but it just wasn't me.
I can't do that. I can't, I can't, I just can't be that person. So in high school, I just went the opposite way. I was going to do it my way.
I was going to be me regardless of how it affected other people. I had more of a meccabillion place just more to be feared than loved. I didn't want everyone to love me and to be my friend. He wasn't trying to fit in anymore, but still, Paul just hated every single minute of school.
I hated being around all the people. I cried. Did you have a way of dealing with it when you were in high school? Like what was your coping mechanism?
My coping mechanism was after a while. Like actually shove them, like use your hands and shove them. Yes, I'd actually shove them out of my way, especially me, then I might punch them. That's crazy.
Yeah, I guess I didn't make a lot of friends. I wondered if Paul was exaggerating when he said this kind of stuff. But then I talked to a woman named Lisa who actually went to high school with him. And she says, yes, this is true.
When Paul would walk the hallway, all the students would just move out of his way. At some point I asked her, I said, who is that? And she said, oh, that's Satan. And I said, what?
She said, no, no, that's what he called himself. And what did you think of him calling himself Satan? Does that seem like, I don't know, sort of a high school type act? It felt very clear he wanted to be intimidating.
So, and he was. So Paul didn't like the kids at school. They didn't like him. But that didn't stop him from showing up at the occasional party where he'd basically stand around.
And that's how a year later he finds this crowd. How did you meet Brian? That's an interesting thing. Brian happened to be there and he withered me a lot of his wallet, a lot of money.
And I wanted that. And then he gave me the money and I gave it back to him because it was just not bad about taking his money. Brian was 19 years old out of school, worked as a cook at a ribs joint. But on the side, he was a bookie, taking sports bets.
Brian liked Paul. So he took him under his wing and in turn introduced him to this other guy named Bob Varrachi. Remember that name? Because Bob Varrachi is the guy that Paul blames for everything that has gone wrong in his life.
Bob was 25, so seven years older than Paul. He'd just come out of jail for selling cocaine. And to Paul, he was everything that Paul was not. People probably think of me as a very brilliant but intense person.
And to have this more, he's extroverted. He's an ex-fungal, and he can be a funny guy. A number of good fellows, the guy that are talking about Joe Pesci, he's a funny guy. And Joe Pesci is a messing with him about what do you mean by funny guy?
What I'm a fucking con, I'm you too. He reminds me a lot of Joe Pesci from the movie Good Fellows. I asked the assistant states attorney from back then, James McKay, about Bob Varrachi. And he says, this guy was just a poser.
If you saw Robert Varrachi, you understand what Robert Varrachi is all about. He's a thief. He's a little punk. He's a little pathetic excuse for a man.
He's, I don't know, 5'4", 5'5", maybe in heels. But... And what about Brian Palazzano? His name is Brian Palazz.
But at the time, he thought he was a wise guy. He was a wannabe wise guy. And he changed his name to Breante Palazzano. But he didn't have a drop of Italian blood in his veins.
He was really nothing more than a phony. Paul says pretty soon, instead of going to school, he was hanging out with Bob and Brian. These guys loved mob movies, Good Fellows, Godfather. And Bob and Brian were always fantasizing about living that life.
And they're actually doing a lot of the things they're seeing in those movies. Things like gambling, burglaries, a thousand little scams. I tried every which way to reach Brian and Bob for the story. I sent letters, emails, and I never heard back.
So everything here is based off of police statements, records, and interviews with people who knew them back then. And from all of that, here's what I think that Bob and Brian saw in Paul. He's a serious guy, straight-edge, doesn't drink or do drugs. He's young, but he's 6'3", and muscular.
And they liked having him around during business deals. He'd sit in the corner and look all intimidating. And sometimes they would send him out to collect debts from gamblers. Would you go with a gun or did you just go?
No, actually, I don't think I ever used a gun. Sometimes I would have some nunchucks or a night stick. Nunchucks. Nunchucks, I like nunchucks.
I guess what, sometimes I listen to your stories and I myself forget what's normal. You're in high school. Most of the people your age have jobs helping out at their dads like lawnmower business. Or something.
And you're like going around with nunchucks and trying to get people to pay up gambling debts. Did it ever seem like weird to you? Probably unlike a lot of other 15-year-olds, I had been fighting for almost my childhood. I'd been fighting with other kids and I'd been beating them up all throughout school.
And when Brian was like, hey, why don't you do this for money? Why are you getting all these fights? And you even get paid? He's like, so every now and then I would collect for people that owe money.
The way Paul talks about his whole period of his life with Bob and Brian, there's a nostalgia to it. That's the first time anyone really appreciated him. But not for the reasons you might expect. They couldn't trust each other because they're a bunch of con artists.
So they give me all the money to hold. So I'd have thousands of dollars on me. And they knew that they could always depend on me. Never could blow the money on myself or give the money to anyone else.
I remember Bob, for watching even, he wouldn't even trust himself with his own gambling. He'd call me on the phone and he'd say, Paul, come over here right away. I'm up like $5,000 and I don't want to blow it. And I'd throw over there the racetrack and I'd hold down to his winning.
You'd tell me beforehand, I don't give me any of my winning back. I'd better how much I'd wait for it. You're not getting bad. You've got to work on what you got left.
So Paul, Bob and Brian, that's the crew. That's Paul's inner circle. But there's one other guy I've got to tell you about. His name is Dean Fawcett.
He was kind of like a mild mannered, meek, a young man. That's State's attorney McKay again. No altar boy mind you, okay? But clearly not a leader and was led astray by stronger personalities.
I've seen photos of Dean from back then. He's this guy in his early 20s, baby faced, big smile and glasses. Paul didn't really care much for him. I never actually, I didn't like Dean that much.
He's kind of like a stoner guy. And I just, I was pretty much only around him when he was with Brian from hanging around with us. Well, he thought we were the greatest things in the world. Because at that point, the crew, they were tough guys.
They carried guns, they beat up people. And Dean, he'd been arrested a couple times, but just for minor stuff. His thing was stealing checks from people and then trying to buy stuff. It almost seemed like a compulsion for Dean.
In fact, one day when Paul was 17, he brought Dean and Brian over to his parents' house. They hung out for a bit. And then Paul's friends took off. Over that day, Paul's mother was paying bills and she noticed something weird.
I realized go to write the next check out the bank right away. And they told me that through four of those checks had already been cashed. Dean had bought almost $2,600 worth of stuff. He'd even tried to buy a car with one of her checks.
Right away, she called Paul. And he was really, what? He couldn't believe it. How did you feel about the fact that Dean had stolen the checks?
He did that. That's how I felt. Yeah. He was doing that disrespectful.
He'd go to my parents' study and steal checks. That's like stealing from me. The cops arrested Dean and then he turned around and blamed Paul. He said Paul had given him those checks.
So soon enough, the cops came for Paul. Linda decided she didn't want to get her son into trouble. So she dropped all the charges against Dean and Paul. Now, in a lot of groups of friends, these two probably would never have spoken again.
But these were not normal friends. Paul says Brian steps in and he ends up acting as a peacemaker. He gets Dean to give Paul some money to patch things up and they forget all about it. That's what Paul says.
But this little question, whether Paul actually forgave Dean, ends up mattering in a big, big way, two years later. So flash forward two years. It's December, 1992. It's right after Paul's 18th birthday.
Paul gets into a huge fight with his dad over the fact that he's coming home late every night and he ends up just walking out of his parents' house. He moves in with Bob Froggi and Bob's wife, Rose. And then the whole group, they go on a little crime spree. I let assistant state's attorney, McKay, explain.
Paul Majrowski, Robert Froggi, Robert Froggi's wife, Dean Faucet, and two other individuals, one of whom was a young lady, were involved together in going to various retail stores around the Chicagoland area and buying items with bogus checks. They had stolen from a number of people. It was Christmas timing. We went shopping and we all received some gifts from Dean Faucet.
Like, for example, we were at them all one time and he bought me some Terminator glasses and a sports blazer. Are you in the store? Are you in the glasses? Are you like a short-singer fan?
I was a short-singer fan when I was a kid. I just liked to say, I just made a number of really good movies and getting them out of the child. I kind of looked up to them. They bought all kinds of jewelry and all kinds of retail items from some high-end stores, writing bad checks for all of them.
By the end of the week, Dean and his crew had stolen $13,000 worth of stuff, silverware, sunglasses, and necklaces and teddy bears for this girl Nadine that Dean was trying to impress, a leather trench coat for Paul. And how did you feel when you guys were doing this? Was it fun? Was it fun shopping?
I hate shopping. Right, but you knew the checks were bad, right? Dean Faucet, Dean Faucet, writing bad checks. Okay, he's bouncing checks off his account.
What's new? I'm going to celebrate this successful spree they've been on. So he rented an enormous suite at the Ramada Inn. And this would be the last time they'd all be together.
So you guys go back to the hotel room and then what? I can't really refer you to these questions like I should know and then I'm being dishonest by communicating like this is so long ago. I've asked Paul many, many times to recount for me the details of that evening. And he always says, everyone is hanging out.
Things seem normal. Here's what Paul says he remembers. The guys, they were all hanging out in the room and Paul, he goes downstairs where there's an Olympic-sized pool. It's empty, it's Christmas time and he remembers just swimming.
Lap after lap after lap. He goes back to the room, stays there that night. We, Brian and I woke up early and we're getting ready to leave. We asked Dean Dean Blaine and that he stayed up all night.
Is there a last chance? You want to leave? You want to ride? And he's like, no, no.
So we leave. That brings us to the second week of January 1993. I mentioned this in part one of our story. This is the week of the most horrific murders the Chicago area has seen in decades.
The first is a mass shooting at a chicken restaurant in the suburb of Palatine. Things are still searching for clues in this weekend's bizarre mass murder. A door to the restaurant was open. The victims were mostly high school stoves who worked there at night.
Somebody went into a fried chicken restaurant, shot the seven people who worked there and put their bodies in a freezer. No clues. All the blood in the restaurant had been meticulously mopped up and nobody had any idea why somebody would do this. The overwhelming emotion in Palatine is still fear because the killer or killers have not been caught.
And then 10 days later, a mother and daughter in the neighboring suburb of Barrington, they're taking a walk along the railroad tracks and they come across what looks like a dead animal. And then they realize it's a human body. The body has no head, no left arm and no right hand. The medical examiner says that they look as though they've been sawed off by a steady hand.
An FBI task force swoops in to investigate and there on the body they find a single clue. Welcome back to the show. We're looking at the case of prison blogger Palmadrowski. Here's Shruti.
Earlier last month, I went to Chicago to meet Jennifer Black. Motherfucker, I didn't go to my badge. She's Paul's current attorney. I was okay.
Okay. We'll just have to go through security. We'll just go back in here, continue in the other direction. There's a body.
It's like ribs. Oh, say. In the picture, there's a body that's half covered in snow. The skin is gone and it's clearly been out there for a while.
How do they find that piece of paper in there? I think it's in the part that's under the snow. Jennifer says the cops end up digging the body out of the snow. And then in the pocket of the jeans, they find a slip of paper.
It's hotel stationery and someone has written out in words 100, 100, 1000, and then there's two scribbled names, maybe Dean. And on the other side, there's a phone number and a hotel room number. So yeah, I was Ramada in, room 34. It's like straight out of a bad, caught movie.
Yeah, it really is. It has the room number. You know? It's seriously.
And there's 100 wrong. It's classic. The police contact the hotel. They ask who was staying in room 34 on those dates.
And they find out it's a woman named Nadine. This is the very same Nadine that Dean Faucet had been wooing with Teddy Bears and necklaces. By this point, police had looked through missing people's reports and they had a photo of Dean Faucet and when they showed it to Nadine, she said, yeah, yeah, that's my friend Dean and I haven't seen him since December. Nobody has.
The cops call Dean's mother and they do a DNA test, which confirms it. The body by the tracks is Dean Faucet. And let me just remind you, the cops and FBI, they suspect that the same crazy person who is behind the murders at the chicken restaurant might be linked to the murder of Dean Faucet. Because these two incidents happened so close together in the same time span.
And so the police, they just pile resources onto the case of Dean Faucet, more than 100 cops and they've got FBI informants looking everywhere for leads. Around that time, Bob Faucet's wife, Rose, she reaches out to a friend supposedly a guy with mob connections. She's very, very upset and she tells him, my husband came home one night covered in blood and I think he knows something about that chicken restaurant thing in Palatine. What Rose doesn't realize is that her friend is one of those FBI informants.
He tells the FBI and days later, the cops arrest Bob Faucet. This is the biggest news across Illinois. It was just everywhere. On every channel Bob Faucet will be caught in and he apparently was connected to the Palatine massacre in some fashion or he had information about the Palatine massacre.
I just remember it being repeated on every station and seeing him being let out handcuffs and trying to hide himself. The cops question Bob Faucet and he seems to know everything about that body by the train tracks. And he's willing to show them how the holding went down. In that evidence box back at the courthouse, I saw a photo from that day.
It's a police photo. Bob Faucet is standing in a wide open field. He's short, has big, dark eyes. He's wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, sweatpants, and he's pointing out of the frame of the picture as if to say, over there.
Bob leads the cops to the exact spot where Dean's body was found. And then just nearby, he points them to another place where they find a shovel and a saw. A week after Bob's arrest, Paul is out driving his car, a blue Mustang. He's on the corner of Cicero and Archer and suddenly he's ambushed by what looks like a SWAT team.
I had firearms from numerous directions pointed at little red dots all over my body. They pulled me out of the car. They shoved me on the ground. I was like, I want to turn immediately.
And of course I was talking to another car. I was taking the police station. I was like, I want an attorney. And they're like, you're never going to see an attorney.
And they kept on bedoring me about information. I was like, I'm not talking to you. I'm not talking to you. I'm not talking to you.
I want an attorney. Quickly, cops make clear that they think Paul killed Dean. Not only that, they think he's also behind the chicken restaurant massacre. They question him for two days straight and the police don't seem to have a motive linking Paul to the chicken restaurant, but the media runs with it anyway.
His psychological profile according to police, that of a brutal killer whom one detective says is capable of lining up seven people and executing them. A loner, weird Satan. The names used to describe the suspect Paul Madrasi by those who knew him. Paul swears up and down, he didn't kill Dean.
The Dean was just a guy he barely paid attention to. But the cops, they say they have a motive for why Paul would have killed Dean. They say that Dean had gotten scared about all those bad checks he'd written over Christmas and that he was going to go to the cops and rat out his friends. And so, the cops say, Paul killed Dean.
Since it all because either one that was responsible plus the, even if it won't be the maximum talent, it's the penalty. It's something that you're going to kill someone. What do I care? Right.
But if I could be the cop for a second, right? And I find like Dean, it's like he shows up his dead body with his head and his arms sawed off. I find out that he's been running this check cashing scheme with you and with Bob Vrocci and he has his history where he ratted you out before. I don't think it's that crazy to think that you would be involved in his death.
But killing somebody and being, you might think of me as maybe a brute and maybe even a violent person at times. But, you know, school bully and maybe beating up some people, there is no way I would do that. And with Dean Falsett, maybe I didn't like him that much, but I thought killing him. So Paul says that what went through his mind was these cops have nothing but this ridiculous motive that just won't hold up.
So he stuck with his line. I want a lawyer. I'm not talking. But he has a problem.
As you've heard, his friend Bob has been talking. And he's been telling the cops lots of things about Paul. At one point, one of those cops, John Coziol, comes into Paul's interrogation room and puts the statement down in front of Paul. Check out this.
Have to say about this. Do you want to comment on this? Why don't you talk to us? Look, Bob, Ross, you said, all these things about you.
You don't talk to us. The state attorney is going to run with it. And so they hand me this, uh, the statements or the report. And I start leaving through with and finally, uh, I read like a paragraph here and a paragraph there and then finally John Coziol gets kind of, uh, I don't know, upset me.
So this is all you got to look at and you go to the last page and he points out the signature and it says Robert Froci. And it's like a really Robert Froci signature. And I'm like, I have no idea if that's a signature. You could have wrote that signature.
I don't believe anything you say. That statement, the one Bob apparently signed says, yes, I, Bob Froci was there at the scene of the crime, but only as a helpless witness. And Paul and Brian, they forced me to come along because, uh, witness a murder and that we threatened to kill him and his family and everybody loves. And for some reason, we chose a spot of people out to where he lived all his life.
Paul says that at first he just couldn't believe that his friend had said all these things. But then after a few days, he just had to admit these were Bob's words. And how did you feel then? He was trying to blame me for everything underneath the sun.
I was, I was, I was, I was both portrayed. I mean, I've done so many things for him. I've worked out for him and he just wanted to shove me under the bus for an experience. I mean, I would have never made up this if I actually committed a murder, not that blame on my friends.
That's a step and I never would even think of it. I wouldn't consider it a notion at certain time. Believe it or not, I would have taken a bullet for some of my friends. I would die.
Not that throw him underneath the bus. Why do you think that's so important to you? What's that loyalty? Yeah.
I don't know. I just know most of the world, I think of, I don't feel interconnected with a lot of people, but those people that are in my inner circle, I feel a strong, a stronger bond will. I mean, other people are so, to take people. I don't think the same way I do.
They don't have the same integrity. They put on different faces when they're whipped like in school. They put on a different face for their friends or when they have a child. They put on a different face.
They got all these faces. I'm the same person all the time. Whether it's with you, Bob or at least or anyone. I'm the same person.
But is he though? I mean, in conversations with me, Paul seems totally relentlessly consistent with his stories, but there is evidence that makes me question all of that. People other than Bob came forward to the cops. Brian, Nadine, Bob's wife Rose.
All of them told police, Paul was definitely involved. They said things like I overheard Paul say that he wanted to kill Dean. One of them said, you know, the last time I saw Dean alive, he was getting into a car with Bob and Paul. And there were other things like right after Dean's murder, Paul and Bob leave town together.
They drove to Clearwater, Florida, where they rented an apartment, did a few odd jobs, and lived for a couple months before coming back to Chicago, before they got arrested. Paul swears that the move, that was all Bob's idea. He was just tagging along. But there's just one last thing that looks so suspicious.
The map. Police found a map book of the Chicago suburbs when they searched Paul's bedroom, and on the page that showed Barrington, right where Dean's body was found near those railway tracks, there's a mark, like X marks a spot. So all of this looked really incriminating. And Paul and I have gone over these details many times.
And no matter how mightily he tries to explain away all this incriminating stuff, I still don't know. I can't know what actually happened that night. There's only one person who knows for sure. He's the one person who says he was there when Dean was murdered.
Next week on the inside part three, Bob Ferracci speaks. Reply all hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman, our producer, Shruti Pinamini, Fia Benin, and Chloe Prasinos. Our executive producer is Tim Howard. Our editor is Peter Clammy.
Production assistance from Mervyn de Ganyos and Tom Cody. We were mixed by Rick Juan. Special thanks this week to Eile Shonil, Lisa Cook, John Carpenter, Alex Rodriguez, Diane Dungy, Joseph Shostrom, and a big thanks to Patrick Brown, the coolest impound evidence manager ever. Matt Lieber is a mouse pad with a kitten in a basket on it.
Our theme music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash ReplyAll. Our website is ReplyAll.Ninja. This Saturday, May 21st, as part of New York Magazine's Vulture Festival, I will be having a live conversation on stage with comedian Paul Shear, who you might know from, how did this get made podcast, or a million other amazing things.
So they're still tickets available. You can get them by going to the Vulture Festival website. Just Google ReplyAll Vulture Festival. You can find the tickets that way.
Come see us. It'll be a lot of fun. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week for part three of On The Inside.