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player ready...One of Jim Degorski’s most recent girlfriends knew him as a sweetheart who would never raise a hand to her, loved animals and nature and always was surrounded by friends.
And the Juan Luna his wife knows is a caring husband and father who worked six days a week and was looking for a second job so he could buy a home for his family.
The women now are struggling to fit the two men they’ve known intimately over several years to the picture police are painting of them: soulless monsters who killed seven people at Brown’s Chicken & Pasta in Palatine nine years ago.
While other women provided information to authorities about what Degorski and Luna allegedly did, ultimately leading to the murder charges, these two women who had long-term relationships with the men say they had no idea and are in shock over the revelations.
Degorski and the former girlfriend met a few years after the 1993 murders. They saw each other off and on, lived together for a while, and Degorski’s father was hoping they would get married. But they broke up about a year ago when their relationship cooled off.
In all their time together, Degorski never gave a hint that he might have been wrestling with anything as dark and horrible as the murders, the former girlfriend said Sunday.
Since she learned of Degorski’s arrest, she has been sifting through her memory for any signs she may have missed, but she said that so far she has found nothing to indicate that he could kill anyone, much less keep such a crime a secret for nearly a decade.
“He came into my life as a nice guy,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified.
Now she is reading news accounts in which past girlfriends say he beat them and tortured small animals.
One of the women, Anne Lockett, told police she has been living for years in fear that Degorski would kill her because he allegedly told her in 1993 that he and Luna were responsible for the Brown’s murders, police said.
But the recent girlfriend said the descriptions don’t match what she knows about him.
`I knew a different man’
“I knew him as a different man,” the woman said.
She described him as genuine and incapable of lying and having a large group of friends. He was the kind of guy who would pick up a friend in the middle of the night if his car broke down, she said.
Degorski enjoyed fishing, and because he usually was trying to lose weight, he often suggested outdoor activities such as biking or in-line skating.
At first, she said she couldn’t believe the news reports about Degorski, but her feelings started to change as she heard and read more of what authorities were saying.
Her reactions ranged from, “I feel lied to” and “I don’t believe it,” to finally, “I don’t know what to think.”
Imelda Luna has been just as baffled about the allegations against Juan Luna, her husband of eight years and the father of their 5-year-old son. But she is convinced that he did not kill those people in 1993.
“I can assure you my husband did not do this,” she said.
The soft-spoken woman said her husband has a quiet personality, and she believes they have a good relationship.
“I don’t know what other people might think of him, but for me, he is kind,” she said.
Juan Luna met his wife in 1994, on a visit to his hometown in Mexico. She said Luna was born there but came to the U.S. with his parents when he was 5.
The couple got married in Mexico later in 1994. They moved to the Meadowdale apartment complex in Carpentersville in August 1997 and have lived in their tidy one-bedroom unit there ever since, she said.
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The balcony of the apartment, crowded with plastic chairs, a couple of barbecue grills and a blue dirt bike, looks out onto the gas station where police arrested Juan Luna last week.
Wife talks about arrest
Imelda Luna broke down as she described what she knew of her husband’s arrest.
She said he had just picked his son up from kindergarten and was driving home when police stopped him at the Shell station.
“The boy said they handcuffed [Luna] and put a gun to him,” she said. “My son said, `I’m really afraid they’re going to kill my papi.'”
Imelda Luna was waiting for her husband to pick her up from her factory job so they could drive together to a job interview for him. Luna wanted another job, his wife said, so he could provide “more comfort” to his family.
But he never arrived.