Family of three murdered in Harvey

December 1, 2004

BY MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA Staff Reporter
 

Vinese Bell-Kracht had decided it was time for her and her 1-year-old son, Emery, to move on with their lives.

The 21-year-old bank clerk had had enough of the domestic abuse she said she suffered at the hands of her troubled husband of almost two years, Martin Kracht, relatives said. After the last incident more than a month ago, she'd filed charges, had him arrested and sought a restraining order against him, according to court records.

And she had started that new life, with a new job and a new apartment.

But Bell-Kracht's life came to a sudden and violent end Monday, police said. She, her son and her mother-in-law, Barbara Baker-Kracht, 52, were found murdered in Baker-Kracht's Harvey home. The three died at the hands of 24-year-old Martin Kracht, who less than two weeks ago moved in with the mother he allegedly killed, police and relatives said.

Chilling discovery

On Tuesday, members of Bell-Kracht's close-knit family gathered at their south suburban Richton Park home, struggling to understand the tragedy that had befallen the young mother, child and grandmother.

Police made the chilling discovery of the bodies at Baker-Kracht's home in the 15000 block of South Marshfield Avenue in Harvey about 9 p.m. Monday.

"It was a well-being check that was requested by a family member," said Harvey Police spokeswoman Sandra Alvarado.

Shortly after the bodies were found, Harvey Police arrested Kracht on a tip from relatives, who knew he was hiding in a garage only blocks away.

Kracht was expected to be charged with three counts of first-degree murder late Tuesday, according to Harvey Police and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.

"This appears to be domestic-related homicide," Alvarado said. "It was not a random act of violence. This is a senseless tragedy."

Police would not say how the three died, but they noted none of the victims was shot.

'Seemed like nice people'

Neighbors in the quiet neighborhood where Baker-Kracht recently bought her home milled outside their houses, helping each other grapple with the horror.

"When they first moved in, I came out to welcome them to the neighborhood. He and his mother seemed like nice people," Denise Lollis, who has lived across the street for 23 years, said Tuesday. "I have never, ever seen anything like this. This has been rough. It just keeps you praying."

Police said they may never know what triggered the killings.

Bell-Kracht's family said she had met her husband in 2002 through her brother, who had invited Martin Kracht to join the Jehovah's Witnesses faith her family practiced. Martin Kracht had attended Thornton Township North High School with Bell-Kracht's brother, Shaun Winston, graduating in 1998, Winston recalled.

Kracht began visiting the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses at 150 E. 124th Pl., in Chicago with Winston and his family of six siblings.

"He acknowledged he was living a life of debauchery, and said he wanted clean up life. He was baptized a Jehovah's Witness, "Winston said. "He met my sister, and they liked each other. I advised her against it," he added, choking back tears.

Winston's advice went unheeded. The pair dated for five months before marrying. But Kracht, then living with a friend in Harvey, was unable to support his new wife, floating from job to job, Winston said. So Dennis and Sherry Harris, Bell-Kracht's parents, allowed Kracht to move in with his wife and her family in Richton Park.

That's when the trouble started.

"He started pushing on her and she was pregnant. One time he pushed her down," Winston said. "That was when my father talked to him, and kicked him out."

Sought restraining order

The abuse reportedly got worse, culminating in an October incident that resulted in Bell-Kracht seeking a restraining order against her husband, barring him from her home in Richton Park. But on Nov. 8 she appeared in court in Markham and asked that both the protection order and the abuse charges be dismissed.

"The victim didn't wish to proceed," said Marcy Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state's attorney's office. "We don't know why."

Last summer, relatives said, Bell-Kracht had become convinced it was time to give up on her marriage and move on. She landed a job at Charter One Bank in Homewood and only last week secured a small apartment in south suburban Steger for herself and her son.

On Saturday, her family helped her move in, and on Sunday Kracht came to Kingdom Hall asking to see his son, her relatives said. Bell-Kracht acquiesced, letting him take the boy for a day and arranging to pick up Emeryon Monday evening.

"But on Monday, we didn't hear from her after work, which was unusual for Vinese. We knew something had happened when the police called."

Contributing: Stefano Esposito, Annie Sweeney, Lisa Donovan and Cheryl V. Jackson

Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0412010285dec01,1,3695005.story?coll=chi-news-hed

Suspect's mom, wife, son slain
Woman had filed abuse charges against husband, then dropped them

By Rick Jervis and Patrick Rucker, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Jo Napolitano and Bonnie Miller Rubin contributed to this report
Published December 1, 2004

The mother of an 11-month-old boy, Vinese Bell-Kracht was trying to piece her life together after a rocky two-year marriage. Last month her estranged husband, Martin Kracht, was charged with beating her, and the court ordered him to stay away from his wife and child.

But Bell-Kracht, torn between the pain of a troubled marriage and the challenges of caring for an infant son by herself, decided she had to have her husband's help. She asked that the charges be dropped, and on Nov. 8, they were, along with the court order of protection, prosecutors said.

About 9 p.m. Monday, Harvey police found the bodies of Bell-Kracht, 21; her son, Emery; and Barbara Baker-Kracht, 52, Martin Kracht's mother, in Baker-Kracht's Harvey home.

Kracht, 24, was arrested Tuesday morning in the garage of another relative's home in Harvey. He remained in police custody Tuesday night pending charges, police said.

Bell-Kracht's slaying ended what officials say was an abusive relationship that left a trail of court documents and police reports. For family members who had tried to steer her clear of the violence, it opened another painful chapter even as police and prosecutors pondered whether to charge Kracht.

"We're just numb," said Bell-Kracht's brother Shaun Winston, 24, standing outside his family's Richton Park home as family and friends filed in.

"That was my baby," Winston said, describing his sister as "the closest sibling I had."

Harvey police officials were tight-lipped about the details of the slayings, which occurred in the 15100 block of Marshfield Avenue. They could not confirm how the victims died or whether a weapon had been found.

At a news conference outside the brick bungalow where the slayings occurred, Cmdr. Merritt Gentry told reporters that he did not expect charges to be filed Tuesday by the Cook County state's attorney's office. Autopsies were scheduled for Wednesday.

"It's going to be a while," Gentry said. "We don't foresee any charges at this time, or any time soon, because there is a great deal of investigative work still to be done."

Family members described a relationship that was happy at first but quickly deteriorated.

Winston said he introduced the two. He knew Kracht when both were students at Thornton Township High School in Harvey and ran into him again, in the summer of 2002, at the University of Illinois' Chicago campus, where Winston was studying journalism. Kracht appeared sullen and depressed, Winston said.

"He said he wanted to get his life together," Winston said. "I told him to come hang with me. I regret ever doing that."

A devout Jehovah's Witness, Winston took Kracht to the movies, brought him to the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses Church in Chicago and introduced him to his sister.

Bell-Kracht, the middle of six siblings, was quiet and shy but loved dancing and showing off in front of her family, Winston said. She became drawn to Winston's new friend. They hit it off and were married four months later, in January 2003, he said. Kracht moved into the family's home on Capri Lane in Richton Park that summer.

But trouble soon started.

On Oct. 6, 2003, Richton Park police responded to a domestic-disturbance call at the home.

"They had gotten into a verbal argument, and she called police," said Richton Park Police Chief Leonard Czaplewski. "She did not want to press charges."

After that incident, the family expelled Kracht from the home, and he lived with friends and family members in Harvey while keeping in touch with Bell-Kracht, Winston said.

A year later, on Oct. 17, court records show, police responded to 2353 W. 57th St. in Markham and arrested Kracht on charges that he, "struck [his wife] about the torso with closed fists and threw her down to the ground."

Kracht was arrested that afternoon and charged with misdemeanor domestic battery.

At a hearing the next day, he was released on his own recognizance, but was ordered not to harass, abuse or stalk Bell-Kracht. He also was ordered to stay away from the Capri Lane home and the Charter One Bank in Homewood, where Bell-Kracht had been working as a teller since July. Visits with Emery were to be arranged through his mother, court documents show.

Bell-Kracht dropped the charges at the first court hearing on Nov. 8. She did so, Winston said, because she needed Kracht's help in caring for Emery and it was too difficult with the court's protective order.

"We listen very closely to our victims, and we take very seriously what their wishes are," said Tom Stanton, a spokesman for the state's attorney's office. "In this instance she did not wish to continue with the charges."

But in the interest of protecting the victim, even if she asks for the charges to be dropped, the state's attorney's office generally will not comply at the bail hearing, according to Dan Tsatoros, a former assistant state's attorney who is the court advocate coordinator and civil attorney for the South Suburban Family Shelter.

To protect the victim, the court will have jurisdiction over the person accused of abuse, who, at a bail hearing, is ordered not to have contact with the victim for 72 hours, and sometimes longer. After that period, even if the victim decides to drop the charges, the state can, without her cooperation, pursue a "victimless prosecution," Tsatoros said.

"But if the state cannot meet its burden of proof without the testimony of the victim, then the prosecutors' hands may be tied and are forced to dismiss the charges," he said. Such changes of heart occur about 75 percent of the time, he said.

Winston said his younger sister was on her way to getting back on her feet and trying to rid herself of her past with Kracht. On Saturday, she had moved into her own apartment in Steger, where she planned to raise Emery, and was saving to file for divorce, he said.

Last Wednesday, Winston said, he pulled Kracht aside after services at Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses Church and gave a stern, quiet warning: "Do not put your hands on my sister again."

"He was so bothered by what was going on in his life, he didn't even seem to listen," Winston said.

Kracht showed up at the church on Sunday to pick up Emery, Winston said. Bell-Kracht was scheduled to pick up the child from Kracht's mother's house Monday.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

2-22-04

By NANCY H. McLAUGHLIN, Staff Writer
News & Record


RALEIGH -- The baby would be 7 now, in elementary school and learning to read.

In an ideal world, her death never would have happened. In an ideal world, the teenage mom wouldn't be longing for forgiveness.

An ideal world is the one Racquel Phifer wants to be a part of -- not the concrete-and-glass world of the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where she is serving 10 to 13 years for the second-degree murder of her only child.

"I wished my mother could have looked at me and known something was wrong," the petite 27-year-old says of the concealed pregnancy in Greensboro in 1997 that led to her life spiraling out of control.

The high school dropout who had been raped as a child had already showed signs of undiagnosed mental illnesses before she gave birth that January to the infant the Greensboro community would come to know as Baby Jane Doe.

With her parents at work and her brother in school, Phifer laid out blankets on a cold day and delivered the baby on the floor of a room in her parent's upper-middle-class home.

After bathing her, playing with her dark hair and counting tiny fingers and toes, Phifer wrapped the hours-old newborn in a clean white blanket and placed her in a Dumpster in nearby Oka T. Hester Park. A man looking for cans the next day found her among the garbage.

Phifer's was the latest in a string of concealed pregnancies on the East Coast that ended in dead newborns that year. But the discovery of the dead baby in a Greensboro trash bin touched the heart of the community. It responded by taking care of Phifer's baby as if she were its own, dressing her tiny body in a donated white gown and diaper, transporting her to a graveyard in a hearse followed by a caravan of cars and carefully etching a grave marker that read: "May we reach out in love to every child in need."

"The fact that she was buried and put away nicely -- that all helps," says Phifer's mother, Baleria Phifer, a teacher who wouldn't know that the infant dominating local news coverage was her grandbaby until her daughter's arrest. "She was taken care of, she was surrounded by love'' from the community.

More than 500 people showed up for the funeral.

"What I remember most are the pictures of that little infant in the bottom of that Dumpster," says Howard Neumann, the Guilford County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case that summer. "I can still close my eyes and see her there."

Phifer, who won't be eligible for parole for at least three years, wants people to know she's sorry. She also wants to say "thank you" to the people who saw that the child she named Ri'vene Lea Anderson had a proper burial.

?Phifer, dressed in a dark-blue prison jumpsuit and girlishly pretty with her sliver of silver eye shadow, has spent years in therapy dealing with illnesses diagnosed after she was arrested, including dissociative amnesia, which causes fragmented memory, and schizoaffective disorder, which is marked by major depression and psychotic symptoms.

She says she can't remember all of what happened the day she put her daughter in the Dumpster, but she knows it never should have happened. She wants girls who may face her predicament to know her story and how a split-second decision could ruin their lives and the lives of others.

"If you don't want to tell your parents, tell somebody," says a suddenly subdued Phifer, also known as Inmate 58449, who still looks 19 except for the natural burst of gray in her hair. "I would love to have (the public's) forgiveness. I would love to have their understanding. But I'm doing this so that anybody else going through this will tell somebody.

"I know that type of fear is unbearable," Phifer says.

Phifer remains troubled by the past. She wishes she could go back to the day she thought she was pregnant. She says she knows it will be hard for people to understand how she could hold her baby and then place her in the trash bin in frigid weather.

"I actually thought of it as a baby sitter," Phifer says. "I got in and out of it four times. There was no trash in it. I put her there and told her I would come back."

Growing up in a strict home, Phifer had an exaggerated fear of disappointing her parents. Life already had been difficult. She had flunked at least three grades and dropped out of high school. In their investigation, police would find years-old suicide letters Phifer had written after she was raped at 11 by an older male relative.

In her devout Jehovah's Witness family, Phifer grew up hearing that sex before marriage was immoral. Her parents didn't know about the rape. They would have been mortified had they known about the pregnancy. She saw her situation as hopeless and believed she had no options.

"That would have been disgraceful to my mother," Phifer says. " 'What people think' is how I was raised."

Baleria Phifer didn't know about the deep-seeded antagonism her daughter held against her until she heard Racquel's confession read in court. Phifer says she was closer to her father, Larry, a long-distance truck driver.

She was able to hide her pregnancy because she had gained and lost 100 pounds the year before, something doctors later attributed to bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder.

As the baby grew inside her, Phifer began reading baby books and decided that she would ask an aunt if she could move into the aunt's home. But her aunt began helping someone else, so Phifer kept silent. The baby's father, a young man she had met at a part-time job, had moved back to Illinois. He wanted her to join him, but she had said no.

She says she called crisis-pregnancy agencies but somehow got it in her head that they just wanted to take her baby.

"I said, 'Could you help me tell my parents?' and they said, 'We can send you somewhere.' ''

Her water broke about midnight on Jan. 29. She delivered the baby at 2:27 p.m. the next day.

She had read "The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth'' and, remembering what she had learned in some medical classes, had already gathered blankets and scissors.

She says she was in labor when she drove her mother to work that morning.

"It was like I was doctor, nurse, coach," Phifer says. "I had read a lot, but then I was worried: What if she was breeched or needed special care?"

After delivering the baby, Phifer got into the bathtub with the baby and played with her until the phone rang.

"I'd decided I was just going to hand her to my mother," Phifer remembers thinking.

But her mother, who wanted her daughter to pick her up at work, was already angry when Phifer picked up the telephone.

"She was saying, 'Why aren't you here?' " Phifer says. "I wished I could have been woman enough to say, 'I'm late because I've just delivered my baby.' "

Instead, she panicked.

She drove around her neighborhood and then to nearby Hester Park, where she came upon the Dumpster.

Then she drove to her mother's job and picked her up, falling asleep in the car as her mother carried out her errands. Back at home she slept for the next 16 hours.

She didn't go back to the Dumpster. She says she doesn't know why. In her mind, it was almost as if none of it had happened.

But it had.

Darlene Maynard, a grief counselor who had already helped survivors and relatives of the Columbine school shootings and Oklahoma City bombing with their recovery, was one of the first to step forward when word got out that a dead baby had been found in a park.

"There had been several babies up north left to die. It was like, 'My goodness, this has come home,' " says Maynard, then-director of a Greensboro grief and loss-education center.

She began organizing a community funeral. People began calling, wanting to help. The city donated a burial plot at Maplewood Cemetery. The funeral drew a crowd that reflected the city's races, ages and economics.

Saying it touched the community emotionally is not an overstatement, says Maynard, who was part of the 150-car funeral procession.

"We get to the corner of Florida and Aycock streets, and these two old 'bummy-type' men, they stopped when her hearse went by and put their hands across their heart and saluted," Maynard says.

"She had become a symbol for our community," Maynard says. "I thought it was one of the most healing things our community has come together to do. Here was this c