Child killer Robert Serritella died in state prison while serving a 45-year sentence for the murder of Skokie teenager David Chereck, NBC 5 Investigates has learned. Chuck Goudie reports.
Child killer Robert Serritella died in state prison while serving a 45-year sentence for the murder of Skokie teenager David Chereck, NBC 5 Investigates has learned.
After strangling 15-year-old Chereck, Serritella remained free for two decades. He was eventually prosecuted only after a TV news investigation did what law enforcement didn't: We bothered to look for him.
"You're a seeker of the truth … and I like that, my friend." Those were the words that Serritella said to me when I tracked down the suspected killer in Las Vegas while I was an investigative reporter for ABC 7 in 1998.
The truth about Robert Serritella? He was a killer hiding in plain sight for 20 years, since New Year's Day 1992, when he murdered the smiling Skokie teenager who was out with friends from Niles West High School.
The night David Chereck died, he had gone bowling, picked up snacks at a neighborhood store and walked in the park.
It was a low-key start to a new year, until Serritella lured him into his car and strangled him with his own scarf, shoving his body out in a forest preserve.
Serritella baited detectives and even the victim's parents with phone calls and tidbits of information, but he wasn't arrested back then and Forest Preserve police lost track of him. They also seemingly lost interest in him.
The case took on new life when I traced Serritella to an apartment a few miles from the Vegas Strip and questioned him on a public sidewalk. During a lengthy interview, the murder suspect admitted seeing Chereck the last night of the teenager's life.
SERRITELLA: "As I was traveling down the street there, this boy waived his hand at me, you know. And I was going about 35 miles per hour, and I had no idea what he was waiving about, so I stopped…"
GOUDIE: "Did you kill that boy…?"
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly Chicago Catch-Up newsletter.
SERRITELLA: "No I didn't. I don't know who did. Except I saw this fellow in the car … and the car pull into the … ah … watchemacallit … the forest preserve …"
Serritella proceeded to offer details of the murder that were not publicly known. But it wasn't until 2014 that Cook County's Cold Case Squad re-evaluated what Serritella had told Goudie 16 years earlier.
The cold case team re-examined the evidence against Serritella and made an arrest. A jury found him guilty, and he was imprisoned until early January of this year, when the Illinois Department of Corrections sent a notice that Serritella, 82, had died at downstate Menard Correctional Center.
About 350 miles away, when David Chereck's mother Esther heard about the killer's death, she doesn't recall having a "shrieking" moment.
"It was that he died in prison, not at home in his own bed. That's all I thought about, that he was paying for. He was paying for his crime."
Esther Chereck had lost her only son and then lost David's father, Alan. He died in 2000 of cancer and with a broken heart. And so, each morning when she opens her eyes on a new day, Esther, now alone, looks across her suburban apartment to a portrait of her late son hanging on the wall.
GOUDIE: "Was justice served in this case?"
CHERECK: "Justice delayed was served. It doesn't change my life, because I lost my son so many years ago. Not only I lost my son, I had to watch everybody else grow up. Everybody else that I knew that were his age, graduated high school, went to college, got married, have children, they're all in the 49-year-old range right now."
GOUDIE: "Are David and Serritella in the same place right now?"
CHERECK: "No, I don't believe a God that is all forgiving. I don't think about Serritella. … I think about my son and, and the joy that he brought me, you know, and that's also from my faith that he's OK. … So I'll be OK until I meet with him again."
Esther Chereck said the wheels of justice moved too slowly in her son's case and that for her and other parents of murdered children, there is no such thing as "closure."
But with Serritella gone, dead in prison, now when she closes her eyes, she will no longer have to see the face of the man who took her son.
Instead, she will hear her son's last words to her in 1992, when he left on New Year's Day to see his friends and told her: "I love you."
