Maust dead

BY RUTHANN ROBINSON
rrobinson@nwitimes.com
219.662.5331 | Saturday, January 21, 2006

Serial killer David Maust died the way he lived much of his life -- alone in an institution.

Maust, 51, died Friday morning of heart failure while still on life support at St. Anthony Medical Center, said Lake County Coroner David Pastrick.

At 3:50 a.m. Thursday, upon hearing he was to get ready for his trip to the Department of Correction to serve consecutive life sentences for killing three Hammond teens, Maust looped a homemade noose to a clothes hook 5 feet off the ground and hanged himself in the Lake County Jail.

Jail personnel found Maust 10 minutes later, revived him and sent him to the hospital, where he remained in critical condition throughout the day.

The question of organ donation came up, Pastrick said, and the coroner gave permission -- which is only one step in the 12- to 24-hour-long process.

"That process (harvesting organs) never took place because his heart failed," Pastrick said.

As of Friday night, Pastrick was waiting to hear from Maust's next of kin, mother Eva Reyes, regarding what she wanted done with her son's body.

Reyes told The Times if she had the money, she would like to have her son buried in the same Chicago-area cemetery her husband, Daniel Reyes, is buried.

"If (David) would have let Dan be his father like the other children did, he would have had a great father," Reyes said Friday afternoon from her Macon, Ga., home. "I'm really sorry that David had to have such a life. I loved him. I have been kind of broken up about (his death) all day.

"He didn't seem to want to be close to anybody else beside me. He had this thing that I was his mother only. He didn't want any brothers and sisters -- he told me that many times. I told him it was too late for that. (Maust had two older sisters.) He really had an attachment for me."

Reyes said she hadn't talked to Maust since he was "in Joliet," where Maust served time in the Illinois prison system in the 1980s after his arrest for killing Donald Jones, 15, of Chicago.

Maust asked Illinois authorities to keep him incarcerated for fear of what he'd do if he got out, but he was released and was on parole before he moved to Hammond.

In December 2003, authorities found the bodies of missing Hammond teens Michael Dennis, 13, James Raganyi, 16, and Nicholas James, 19, buried in the basement of Maust's Ash Avenue home.

Maust spent the next two years in the Lake County Jail awaiting trial, until he pleaded guilty to the deaths and was sentenced Dec. 15 to three consecutive life sentences without parole.

When Maust was 9, Reyes sent him to live in a Chicago mental institution. At 13, he went to live at a group home for children until running away years later.

At his mother's suggestion, Maust joined the Army. While stationed in Germany in 1974, Maust killed for the first time -- a boy named James McClister, 13.

In a seven-page suicide note, Maust prayed for himself, his victims' families and longed for his mother "to come and take me home."