Thomas Hawtree, a 17-year-old white male, was killed on September 4, 1972, inside his family’s rural home near Monee, Illinois. He died alongside his parents, Stephen Hawtree, 56, and Judy Hawtree, 53, in a calculated triple homicide that authorities soon connected to a wider series of killings across Illinois.
The Hawtrees were forced into the basement of their home and shot in what investigators described as an execution-style attack.
Contemporary accounts identified Stephen as a machine designer and reported no clear personal dispute or conventional motive that would explain why the family had been targeted. Thomas, the youngest son in the household, was caught in the same violent assault that claimed both of his parents. The placement of the bodies and the methodical nature of the shootings suggested that the victims had been controlled before they were killed rather than struck during a spontaneous confrontation.
The investigation widened after firearms evidence linked the Hawtree killings to the August 4, 1972, murders of four members of the Corbett household in Barrington Hills. Ballistics testing also connected weapons used in those crimes to the deaths of Southern Illinois University student Michael Gerchenson and Army Specialist William Richter. The apparent links transformed the Monee investigation from an isolated family murder into part of a multijurisdictional inquiry involving several police agencies and a growing list of victims.
In October 1972, authorities announced the arrests of men they alleged belonged to a loosely organized group known as De Mau Mau. Those initially jailed without bond included Reuben Taylor, 22; Donald Taylor, 21; Michael Clark, 21; Nathaniel Burse, 23; Edward Moran Jr., 23; and Robert Wilson, 18. Warrants were issued for additional suspects, and contemporary reports stated that eight men were charged in connection with nine killings, including the murders of Thomas and his parents. Officials cautioned that not every defendant was accused of personally participating in every homicide.
Police and prosecutors publicly characterized the defendants as members of a militant organization associated with former military personnel and suggested that racial hostility may have played a role in the broader series of attacks. However, the lack of an obvious motive at the Hawtree home remained one of the case’s most disturbing features. The organization’s exact structure and the extent to which it operated as a coordinated group later became disputed, but at the time the arrests were presented as the solution to a series of seemingly unprovoked killings.
The prosecutions that followed were complicated by separate indictments, trials in different counties and violence among the accused while they were being held. Nathaniel Burse and Edward Moran were killed while incarcerated in the Lake County jail before all of the cases against them could be resolved. Reuben Taylor, Donald Taylor and Michael Clark were later convicted and received lengthy prison sentences in prosecutions arising from the connected 1972 murder investigation, particularly the Corbett household killings. Publicly accessible historical accounts are less precise about the final disposition of each individual charge involving Thomas Hawtree, making it difficult to determine which defendants, if any, were separately convicted specifically for his murder.
Thomas’s death nevertheless remained formally associated with the same network of suspects and weapons linked to the other killings. What began as the destruction of one family in a quiet rural home became part of one of the Chicago area’s most alarming murder investigations of the early 1970s. Thomas, still in his teenage years, was remembered not as a participant in the conflicts investigators attributed to the suspects, but as an innocent son killed beside his parents in an attack for which no personal motive was ever clearly established.
