20 years later, emotions still raw for those who worked Lemak murder case

Emotions remain raw and images vivid in the minds and hearts of both first responders and prosecutors on the 20th anniversary of the grisly murder of three children at the hands of their mother in Naperville.

It was 20 years ago today that police got the call that Marilyn Lemak had drugged and suffocated her three children in their home the night before.

Now 61, Lemak is serving a life sentence at the Logan Correctional Center in downstate Lincoln for the murders of 7-year-old Nicholas, 6-year-old Emily and 3-year-old Thomas.

Naperville Park District Executive Director Ray McGury, then a sergeant and lead investigator on the case, remembers the dispatcher's relaying the 911 call on speakers throughout the Naperville police station.

“The dispatcher was crying. I'll never forget it as he said a mother killed her three kids and then tried to kill herself but it didn't work,” McGury said Monday. “Did I hear that right? Is this a cruel joke?”

It wasn't. Nearly 18 months later, in December 2001, a jury deliberated for nine hours over two days after a three-week trial before determining Lemak was sane when she sedated and suffocated her children. The panel rejected alternate verdicts of guilty but mentally ill or not guilty by reason of insanity.

Appellate Justice Joseph Birkett was DuPage County's state's attorney at the time and prosecuted Lemak.

He said prosecutors now use the Lemak case as training to investigate cases involving insanity claims.

“You have to take a picture of the life of the defendant. What was she doing in the days, weeks, months and hours preceding the crime?” Birkett said. “You have to reach into her psyche to see what makes her tick. We felt strongly that while she was medically suffering from depression and anxiety, she was not mentally ill.”

Birkett contended Marilyn Lemak committed the murders in an act of rage and retribution against her estranged husband, David, who had moved out of the house at her urging three weeks earlier.

“I could never really understand that because she initiated the divorce, then withdrew the divorce petition, then reinstated the divorce,” Birkett said. “Then she just went over the edge when David began dating another woman after his marriage had collapsed. He took another woman, his now-wife Janice, to a ball, and it pushed Marilyn right over the edge.”

The former Lemak house on Loomis Street still stands. Its owners donated the 1885 structure to North Central College in 2008 as part of a $4 million gift. It is now referred to by college officials as the A.A. Smith House and is used primarily for meetings and conferences.

Many, however, still refer to it as the Lemak house and associate it with its grim history.

McGury remembers walking up the staircase, as wide as three or four normal staircases, to find one of his officers at the door crying and shaking as he signed investigators in and out of the crime scene.

“I asked him what I could do to help him, and he just said, ‘Sir, you don't go in there,'” McGury said. “I didn't want to go in there. But I didn't have a choice.”

Walking in, he said, it was as if time stood still.

“The images I saw that day are still with me, but I don't dwell on those,” McGury said. “But the one thing that still gnaws at me is the mother-child relationship and how Marilyn was going to use the murder of her three children to get back at her soon-to-be ex-husband.”

Birkett initially sought the death penalty against Lemak, saying the premeditated and heinous nature of her crime merited execution. He later changed his mind, in part citing her deteriorating mental health and the wishes of David Lemak and Marilyn's family.

Birkett still sees his decision for Lemak as a fate worse than death.

“I hope she never forgets,” said Birkett, who keeps a photo of the Lemak children in his desk drawer “to remind myself how blessed I am to have children.”

Birkett still praises Naperville police and the relatively new DuPage Major Crimes Task Force for “leaving no stone unturned” in their investigation, a probe they were forced to do without their highest decorated detective, Sgt. Mark Carlson, who died by suicide the night before in a Cook County forest preserve.

Naperville Police Chief Robert Marshall, McGury and about 20 others who knew Carlson and worked the Lemak case gathered Sunday night.

“It was a melancholy night, for sure. Some emotions from that time are still a little raw,” said Marshall, who was the acting chief on March 5. “We lost a leader and a friend on March 4, 1999, and the next morning we reported to a horrific murder scene where three children were smothered. We grieved the loss of Mark and also allowed ourselves to talk about how the Lemak murders could have happened.”

McGury called it a turbulent time.

“It was a cascade effect of just stuff that you wouldn't believe if you saw it in a movie. You've got a colleague commit suicide and you've got the murder of three kids. Then you've got to bury your colleague, then you've got to stand at a wake and absorb the tension of the two families in the funeral home,” he said. “It was like being on DEFCON 4 for not a minute or an hour but a series of days. Trying to unwind from that and put it in perspective was challenging.”

Years later, as a result of those two days, Marshall instituted a peer support program in the police department to help officers recognize the symptoms of stress and trauma associated with the job and be able to refer them to professional counselors.

“It's been a great asset to the men and women of this department,” Marshall said.

McGury, who later served as the Bolingbrook police chief before joining the park district, said he's proud of his career, but the Naperville group of 20 years ago was special.

“I could not be more proud of the people I worked with who brought justice to those three kids,” he said.