Chicago, IL:Quest to find killer turns life-consuming
Mark Fenster
By John Keilman
[Chicago] Tribune staff reporter
Published July 21, 2002
Harry Gedzius has spent 22 years trying to solve the murder of his
brother and the mysterious deaths of six babies.
He has hounded police and prosecutors, spent thousands of hours
investigating on his own and tried everything from confrontation to
vandalism to goad a confession out of the woman he was sure had killed
them all: Deborah Fornuto, better known to Chicagoans as Deborah
Gedzius.
Fornuto died in a Las Vegas car crash July 11. Some say that could
make it nearly impossible to crack the murder of her one-time husband,
Harry Gedzius' brother Delos, or resolve the deaths of Fornuto's six
children. Most of the children were pronounced dead of sudden infant
death syndrome, a finding that became nationally controversial as
scientists cast new suspicion on multiple SIDS deaths.
But Fornuto's death has not sidetracked Harry Gedzius. The Bridgeview
resident still is calling police and prosecutors, poring over old
newspaper stories and case documents and working out new scenarios in
his mind.
At 54, his own marriage is over. His health is failing. He can't work
anymore, and his sole income is a monthly $1,100 disability check.
What keeps him going is a belief that some clue is out there, that
some long-silent witness will finally speak up.
"At times I just wish that I could let it go, small periods of time
where I try to occupy myself with other things, but it always comes
back to me. It'll keep coming back to me until I get answers," he
said. "All I can say is I'm hopeful, now that Debbie's gone, that
people will come forward."
Harry Gedzius met Fornuto in the mid-1970s when his younger brother,
Delos, who was fresh out of the Marines, began dating her. She was
pregnant, recently separated from her second husband, and two of her
children had already died without apparent cause. Word among some
people in their Southwest Side neighborhood was that she had killed
them, Harry Gedzius said.
Fornuto's third child was born and died six months later. That did not
stop Delos Gedzius from marrying her.
And despite any misgivings Delos Gedzius may have had, he stayed with
his wife as three children he fathered with her inexplicably perished,
one by one.
Brother's suspicions
Harry Gedzius said his brother once confided to him that he thought
his wife was a murderer. But Harry Gedzius took it upon himself to
call the medical examiner when Fornuto's fourth child, a 1-year-old
named Jason, was found dead in 1980. That gave authorities their first
inkling that something was wrong.
Still, the Cook County medical examiner's office made the same ruling
it had in the deaths of Fornuto's first three children: SIDS, a
controversial diagnosis where infants apparently stop breathing in
their sleep.
Harry Gedzius said that after he made the call--as he did after
Fornuto's fifth and sixth children died--he was forced out of his
brother's life. His suspicions about the children's deaths rankled
even within his own family.
"My mother and my sister, for years they would say, `Harry, will you
get off it? Knock it off. All you're doing is causing trouble in the
family,'" he said.
Delos Gedzius and Fornuto separated in the late 1980s, and Delos
Gedzius moved into an apartment in Merrionette Park. Police found him
there the night of April 25, 1989, when, after three days of non-stop
television and radio noise, a maintenance man opened the door and
smelled death. Delos was lying on his couch, a bullet hole in his
temple.
The murder jump-started an investigation into all the deaths
associated with Fornuto. A grand jury heard evidence. Police
interrogated her for as long as 36 hours at a time, according to Rick
Halprin, her former lawyer. But her assertion of innocence never
wavered.
Inquiries stalled
With little else to go on, official inquiries stalled. Harry Gedzius
decided to take matters into his own hands.
He lived across the street from the Southwest Side bar Fornuto owned
and put up posters in the neighborhood promising a $1,000 reward for
information leading to his brother's killer. The posters were promptly
torn down. Each time he put up more, he said. Someone smashed his
car's windshield--three times.
Harry Gedzius said many people in the neighborhood were scared of
Fornuto. But emboldened by his certainty that she was a murderer, he
stood outside her tavern day and night, staring at her. He wrote down
the license plate numbers of bar customers. Once, he said, he
spray-painted "Killer" on the side of her building.
"I just tried to harass her, to get her to break down, to get her to
do something to me," he said. "I was just possessed with it, with the
fact that she could get away with all this stuff, and here I was
getting all these false promises from the authorities."
He also spent long hours in the library, compiling studies about SIDS,
peppering the medical examiner's office with questions to convince
authorities that the six deaths didn't add up.
Others came to share his suspicions. In 1997, after research cast
severe doubt on the prevailing view that SIDS could run in families,
medical examiners took another look at the deaths. This time they
revised their earlier rulings and pointedly called all of them
undetermined.
2nd grand jury
A second grand jury investigated Fornuto. But with no physical
evidence linking her to the deaths, authorities needed an eyewitness
or a confession, said Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue.
They got neither, and Fornuto was never charged.
Harry Gedzius' obsession loosened after the grand jury dissolved. He
had his own children to look after and a marriage that was failing, in
part because of his fixation on the case. Last year, degenerative
joint problems forced him to quit his job as a heating and air
conditioning technician and go on disability.
In the meantime, Fornuto remarried, moved west and began working in a
Nevada casino, according to her former lawyer. She drew perennial
interest from tabloid reporters and local law officials, who
discovered her past during a job-related background check. Last year,
she was busted on a marijuana charge along with Thomas Mannix, a man
15 years her junior.
Police say Mannix was driving Fornuto's Buick Roadmaster this month
when it sped through a red light in Las Vegas and slammed into a van.
Fornuto died in the crash. Mannix, who allegedly was drunk, faces a
dozen felony charges.
Some believe Fornuto took any secrets she held about her children's
deaths to the grave. Donoghue said that lacking a confession, the
medical examiner's office can do no more.
"I think the state's attorney will close this case also, because the
chief suspect is dead," he said. "I don't think there were any other
suspects in this case."
Cases still open
The Cook County state's attorney's office declined to comment, other
than to say the cases are still open.
Harry Gedzius' sister Joyce Mullin, while still hoping for answers,
believes Fornuto is facing divine justice. She sometimes wishes her
brother would ease up "for his own sanity. But he has to do what he
has to do."
Gedzius, still bitter about what he sees as bungled investigations,
isn't ready to give up on his brother's murder. He is convinced that
Fornuto was responsible in some way.
Maybe she let something slip to her friends or drug connections in
Nevada. Maybe now that she's dead, fears will ease and a witness will
come forward.
And so he presses on, calling Merrionette Park police and Cook County
prosecutors, pulling out old letters and notes and clippings, hoping
with a vengeance that it's not too late.
"I get the feeling that time makes people forget and [the
investigation] doesn't have the push behind it that it did before," he
said. "Everybody's gotten older, people have passed away. It's
something that's been laying to the wayside, just waiting."
crosem
evidence, but it's pretty obvious...
"Mark Fenster" <fenster_2...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:52fd2c69.02072...@posting.google.com...