It`s quiet again in the old house on Wood Dale Road where the murders took place.
Except for the lone policeman who sits in his patrol car to keep watch each night, it could be a scene from any of dozens of changing neighborhoods in Du Page County. There are no mansions on this stretch of Wood Dale Road, just a few old homes surrounded by brand new one-story offices and stores.
The policeman`s task is to guard the evidence from last week`s murders
–the old Cape Cod house left basically intact and a gravel driveway jammed with five or six abandoned autos that make the front yard look like a used car lot.
Cars used to be in and out all day long. Police suspect that was because the victims, Randall Remington, 33, and Kathy Ramey, 20, were involved in drug trafficking. They are investigating whether the murder of the couple was related to the drug trade.
If this proves correct, the crime would be the first drug-related murder in Du Page in at least five years. Even in unincorporated Wood Dale, it seems, life is starting to imitate television.
And a recent spate of drug-related seizures and arrests in nearby Itasca and Schaumburg suggest to police that large quantities of cocaine are being brokered inside Du Page County or just outside its borders, probably because of those areas` proximity to O`Hare International Airport.
Recent events include:
— In May, the Du Page Metropolitan Enforcement Group (MEG) arrested one man and confiscated one pound of cocaine in the parking lot of the Hamilton Hotel in Itasca.
— In June, Itasca police made the largest drug seizure in the village`s history after a maid discovered a suitcase packed with cocaine in the Holiday Inn on Irving Park Road. The drugs had an estimated street value of $500,000. One arrest was made.
— On June 17, the MEG and state`s attorney`s investigators seized almost a pound of cocaine in a raid on an apartment in Darien, 18 miles by expressway from O`Hare, and arrested three people for allegedly running a drug sales operation.
— On July 7, a Bensenville lawyer, David Lee Reeb, pleaded guilty in Du Page County Circuit Court to selling cocaine to undercover MEG agents.
— On July 17 in Schaumburg, just over the county line, Cook County and Schaumburg police arrested two men and charged them with selling $450,000 worth of cocaine.
That there is a drug problem in the suburbs is nothing new to residents of Du Page County. But its dimensions, specifically involving cocaine, and the illicit activities that are believed to follow it appear to be growing, according to county officials.
”Cocaine is clearly the drug we see most often,” said Du Page County State`s Atty. James E. Ryan, who estimated that 75 percent of all drug prosecutions handled by his office involve that narcotic.
”There are places where the problem is worse than here,” Ryan added,
”But Du Page County does not exist in a vacuum and it is affected by what happens around it. The fact that we`re a fairly wealthy community probably makes drugs even more available, because people have the wherewithal to purchase.”
”Cocaine is by far the most prevalent drug in the area,” said Michael Warga, supervisor of the MEG, activated only last October to combat the county`s drug problem. ”It`s more socially acceptable; it`s white and clean looking. . . . It`s only recently that we`ve begun to learn the hazards of cocaine use. Until now we thought it would just burn a hole in your nose.”
If the high-stakes cocaine trade has finally hit Du Page County, law enforcement officials predict, an increase in drug-related murders is probably inevitable.
”Anybody in law enforcement can tell you that drug abuse not only leads to property burglaries, it also leads to more violent crime,” Ryan said.
Drug Enforcement Administration statistics disclose that more than 77 kilograms, about 170 pounds, of cocaine have been seized in 1986 by DEA agents in the Chicago area–more than the amount seized during all of 1985.
According to the MEG, cocaine trafficking surpassed heroin as the drug of choice in the Chicago area approximately eight years ago.
”In the 1970s, Chicago was the main distribution center of heroin sales to surrounding states,” explained Russell Cerceo, MEG director. ”Chicago and New York were to heroin what southern Florida is to cocaine now. It`s shipped to southern Florida, then it goes to Georgia, Louisiana, etc.”
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”The means of getting the cocaine to the Chicago area are limited only by the imagination of the smugglers,” Warga said.
Much of the cocaine that reaches the Chicago area arrives at O`Hare, according to Warga. It is not uncommon for smugglers to try to conceal drugs in false luggage bottoms or in body cavities, he said.
”I once spent a month at O`Hare, and in that month we seized five kilos of cocaine and $500,000 in cash,” Warga said. ”It would be easy to load up a car with cocaine in Florida and drive it back to Chicago, but that`s too slow for many pushers. They have this jet-set mentality from watching `Miami Vice.` They want to jet down there and jet back. They want some glamor.”
Once the cocaine reaches the Chicago area, suburban residents who want to purchase narcotics will seek them from local suppliers or travel to Cook County, where drugs like cocaine are sometimes hawked on certain street corners.
”People using cocaine in the suburbs don`t flood to the park to do their cocaine,” explained Detective Joe Gurak of the Hinsdale Police Department, and director of Region II of Operation Snowball, a drug education program. ”A lot of it is done in social settings–parties, bars. You`re going to be getting it from friends, someone in the office or from someone in a school setting.”
Two anti-drug operations carried out in the last six months in Cook County indicated that suburbanites also traveled to Chicago to purchase narcotics.
A raid on East Humboldt Park in March, in which police rounded up 94 alleged street gang members for their participation in neighborhood drug activities, uncovered evidence that large percentage of sales were made to suburban residents.
On July 22, a Cook County grand jury indicted 43 reputed street gang members for selling illegal drugs on Chicago`s West Side. The Cook County state`s attorney office said that police officers observed many automobiles bearing suburban parking stickers at the sites where the drugs allegedly were sold.
Du Page County drug and alcohol treatment centers say that there has been a rising number of cocaine abusers in their programs. Drug counselors report that their clientele comes from all socioeconomic strata, and that a large number of cases involve adolescents and young adults.
Dennis Ferguson, coordinator of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services for the Du Page County Health Department, which treated 400 chemically dependent individuals in 1985, said the most dramatic increase in cocaine abuse was in the 25-to-40 age bracket.
”It is an age group where there is higher income and where cocaine is considered to be an acceptable recreational drug. It has a lot of appeal. It makes people feel energized and makes them feel like they can do more work, stay awake longer. But it`s a short-lived time. The high lasts about 20 minutes,” Ferguson said.
”When I first started in 1982,” said Jamie Gavin, field coordinator for the New Day Center for Substance Abuse at Hinsdale Hospital, ”there were one or two people out of approximately 20 who were using cocaine. Currently one-third of our patients are using cocaine on a regular basis.
”I was at a local elementary school,” Gavin added. ”By the age of 10, almost all of the kids were familiar with cocaine. What it did–the status thing. It was part of becoming an adult. . . . Adolescents don`t limit themselves to alcohol. They use the whole medicine chest–whatever it takes to get high.”
Gavin said that young people who are drug users often become involved in an informal network of distribution.
”Most young people don`t do it by themselves. They share,” Gavin said.
”Everyone who is involved becomes some kind of distributor.”
While law enforcement officials in Du Page County have not reported many incidents involving ”crack,” a more concentrated and potent form of cocaine, they fear its potential impact. Crack was reported in Chicago less than a year ago in a limited number of areas, according to Wayne Wiebel, research epidemiologist at the Illinois Department of Substance Abuse.
Wiebel said that ”crack” simply represents a new marketing strategy for drug merchants who are extracting the impurities from standard cocaine–a process many cocaine users execute themselves.
”As something that appears to the public as cheap and pure–that is misleading,” Wiebel said. ”It is just being marketed in smaller quantities. Thank God it`s still expensive.”
Law enforcement officials stress that prevention is as important as prosecution when drugs like cocaine infiltrate a community. The Du Page state`s attorney`s office routinely relays the legal implications of drug abuse in presentations to high school students, and Operation Snowball, a statewide drug education program started in 1978, relies on children to inform other children about the social and physical dangers of drug abuse at one of 60 chapters across the state.
If police prove there is a connection between the murders in Wood Dale and drug dealing, Du Page County will have further proof of how lethal the drug trade can become.
The only other possible drug-related murder in Du Page occurred in 1981, not far from where the Wood Dale murders took place. The bodies of Edward Jasper and Scott Sanders were discovered in the trunk of an automobile parked in a service station at the intersection of Irving Park and Medinah Roads. Police now believe that the victims were about to sell narcotics to two customers, who then killed the dealers and stole their merchandise. No convictions were made in the case.
”You`ve got drug dealers killing other drug dealers,” said Hinsdale Detective Gurak, ”but then you have innocent civilians involved.”