Victim: Lindahl ‘said no one would believe me’
Aurora woman details escape from suspected killer
Annette Lazar shivered with fear as she felt the cold metal of the 9mm gun against her temple.
“You’re not going anywhere,” growled the man holding the weapon.
Only minutes earlier on that sunny spring morning in 1979, Lazar had been walking to a friend’s house in Aurora. The stranger pulled over in his car and asked if Lazar, 20, wanted to buy some marijuana. She agreed and followed him to a nearby house and into the basement, where the man showed her his pet falcon while “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues blared from the record player.
Then he put a gun to her head and ordered her into the bedroom and sexually assaulted her.
The gunman, she later reported to police, was Bruce Lindahl, the same man authorities said last week is responsible for as many as 12 murders and nine rapes in Aurora, Naperville and other west suburbs in the 1970s and early ’80s. The case resurfaced last week when authorities announced DNA had connected Lindahl to the 1976 murder of a Woodridge teenager.
In two interviews with the Beacon-News, Lazar recounted her harrowing experience, what she said to Lindahl that helped her escape, and how authorities discounted her story. It’s the first time she’s shared those details with anyone other than police or her immediate family, she said. Aurora police said Lazar’s story lines up with their reports of the incident. The case was brought to the Kane County state’s attorney’s office but charges were not authorized, police spokesman Paris Lewbel said.
Lindal would go on to rape and kill one woman and stab and kill a Naperville high school student, authorities say. There may be other victims, they said.
“He was a monster,” Lazar said. “I tried to tell them there was a monster and nobody wanted to listen.”
Ted Bundy-type
Lindahl was a smooth talker with sharp blue eyes, and he was known to various police departments for his multiple run-ins with law enforcement, although he had no felony convictions. He was described as a Ted Bundy-type by a former Naperville police chief. He was a “caveman, whose sexual appetite included raping women, young men,” Chief James Teal told the Beacon-News in the 1980s.
Lindahl graduated from Downers Grove South High School in 1971 and later worked as a teacher at Kaneland Vocational School in the auto repair shop, police said. He skydived in Hinckley and frequented bars and restaurants in Naperville, Lisle and Downers Grove, Kendall County coroner’s officials said.
He moved around from Chicago to Downers Grove, Lisle and Woodridge before he settled in Aurora around 1978, police said. Police said Lindahl’s crimes started in 1974 and continued until his death in 1981 at age 29.
Lindahl’s contact with police was not entirely negative. In 1978, the Aurora Police Department awarded Lindahl a plaque for helping a 19-year-old woman who had been injured by a hit-and-run driver.
“If you saw him in a store, you’d think he was a cool guy,” Lazar said. “He was friendly, but when he showed what he was really about, it was frightening because you knew he meant it.”
Lazar said Lindahl grabbed her around the neck and forced her into the bedroom at gunpoint, then told her to take off her clothes.
“I told him that I was going to call the police and he told me to go ahead. He said no one would believe me because he lived with a cop,” Lazar said.
The Beacon-News reported last week that one of Lindahl’s close friends was a now-retired Aurora police officer. Lindahl and the officer met at a skydiving club, played racquetball, went out for dinner and drinks and attended late-night parties together. The officer, Dave Torres, sold his house to Lindahl in October 1979. Torres denies that Lindahl ever lived with him, but Lazar’s attack occurred in the same house seven months before the sale, police reports and property records confirm.
Lindahl ripped off Lazar’s pants and she realized she wouldn’t be able to fight him off, she said. Laying on the bedroom mattress, she tried flattery, complimenting Lindahl on his looks and offering to be his girlfriend if he let her leave.
She wrote her name and number on a piece of paper and gave it to Lindahl, she said, to keep up the ruse. Lindahl allowed Lazar to leave, and she went to the hospital for a rape kit test and reported the incident to the police. Lindahl told police Lazar was his girlfriend and showed them the paper with her name and number as proof.
By the time Lazar met Lindahl, it had been three years since 16-year-old Pamela Maurer of Woodridge was raped and stabbed to death in Lisle. Police announced last week they had connected Lindahl to Maurer through DNA, solving the 44-year-old case.
“I had no idea who I was dealing with and that he was already a murderer,” Lazar said.
Fifteen months after the attack on Lazar, Lindahl struck again, authorities say.
Witness disappears
Karen Weeks-Kozman lived down the street from Lindahl. She said she still vividly remembers loading her children into the family van in June 1980 when a naked woman came running toward her and frantically asked for help.
The woman was 25-yearold Aurora resident Debra Colliander.
Earlier that day, Colliander was locking her bicycle outside Northgate Shopping Center in Aurora when a stranger asked her to help him start his car, she told police. She refused at first but agreed to help when the man she later identified as
Lindahl asked if she would step on the gas pedal while he worked on the engine. When she got in the car, the man pulled out a sharp object, held it to her neck and drove off with Colliander.
She was taken to Lindahl’s house, where he threatened her with a handgun, raped her and took several nude photos of her, authorities said. When Lindahl fell asleep, she ran until she reached Weeks-Kozma about five houses away.
Weeks-Kozma said she quickly brought Colliander inside, gave her some clothes and wrote down Colliander’s story, hoping to remember every detail to tell the police.
Colliander described the man who attacked her as having amazing “blue eyes,” Weeks-Kozma said. “My daughters and I looked at each other and instantly knew it’s Bruce (Lindahl).”
Torres, Lindahl’s friend on the Aurora police force, said he heard the dispatch call for assistance at his former address and rushed over. He said found Lindahl naked and asleep. I told him, “Hey, Bruce, we have to talk to you,” Torres said.
When other police arrived, they found a gun and nude photos of Colliander. They arrested Lindahl. One of the officers confiscated the plaque that police had awarded Lindahl for his help with the hit-and-run victim two years earlier, Torres said.
Lindahl was charged in Kane County with deviate sexual conduct, rape and aggravated kidnapping. Two weeks before Colliander was set to testify against Lindahl, she vanished. She was last seen leaving her job at Copley Hospital in October 1980.
As the only remaining witness, Weeks-Kozma was on high alert. Police kept a close watch on her house, and she talked to the chief of police nearly every day, she said.
“He would walk his dog in the rain and just stand on that corner, looking at my house,” she said. “Or he’d drive past the house and stop and watch my girls playing in the yard, sort of teasing or threatening me.”
The judge eventually dismissed the case against Lindahl in March 1981 because Colliander was missing and could not testify.
Five days later, Lindahl lured an 18-year-old man, a high school student, from a Naperville bowling alley to a friend’s apartment. Lindahl stabbed the teen 28 times, killing him. In the frenzy of the attack, Lindahl severed an artery in his leg and bled to death on the apartment floor.
In April 1982, Colliander’s body was found by a farmer in an Oswego Township cornfield. Kendall County authorities said this week they don’t have DNA to connect Lindahl to Colliander’s death, but they and other members of law enforcement believe Lindahl is responsible.
Debra Colliander’s sister Susan Colliander said Lindahl tore apart her family and they never fully recovered.
“My mom became a zombie,” Susan Colliander said. “I want people to know what stomach and heartwrenching feelings she had. My dad gave up hope.”
Virginia Garza said she and her husband bought and moved into Lindahl’s former Aurora home after Lindahl’s death, not realizing their new home was connected to a violent criminal. Garza said her husband found hundreds of photographs of naked people hidden in the walls, ceilings, floorboards and in the basement rafters of the home. Not knowing their significance, he threw them out, Garza said. Detectives said they have recovered some photos allegedly taken by Lindahl which are now being used to identify potential victims.
From her home in rural Paw Paw, about 40 miles west of Aurora, Lazar said her attack changed her life in ways big and small. She can’t listen to the Moody Blues, and she hates going out at night, she said. She carried guilt and shame for most of her young adult life.
“So many times I wanted to drive by that house and throw a rock at the window because he did that and no one believed me,” Lazar said. “I was mad at myself too for putting myself in a dumb situation.”
For years, she buried the case in her mind until she received a call from detectives last week that they had connected Lindahl to the Maurer’s death in Lisle. Lazar, 61, told her mother and adult son about her attack, shortly before sharing her ordeal with the Beacon-News.
She’s glad people are seeing Bruce Lindahl for the person he was, she said. “He was a monster.”
“If you saw him in a store, you’d think he was a cool guy. He was friendly, but when he showed what he was really about, it was frightening because you knew he meant it.” — Annette Lazar