Tag: murder

The Rhoni Reuter Case: Marni Yang Convicted of Murdering the Pregnant Girlfriend of Chicago Bears Player Shaun Gayle

Shaun Gayle and Rhoni Reuter

No sports team captured the imagination of Chicagoans like the 1985 Chicago Bears. The charismatic Super Bowl champions captured the imagination of football players and the general public alike, and their TV commercials and personalities got as much press as their near perfect season and Super Bowl victory.   

Even though the 1985 Bears faded from the national limelight, many of the players remained local celebrities in Chicagoland throughout the ‘00s. “The Monsters of the Midway” still inundated the airwaves with TV commercials, personal appearances and guest spots on TV and radio shows.

While Mike Ditka and Jim McMahon received most of the ’85 Bears media attention, even the lesser-known players had a steady presence on the Chicago media circuit. Several of them, including Ditka, McMahon, Walter Payton, Gary Fencik, and Steve McMichael owned restaurants in the Chicago area.  But not all of the “Da Bears” remained prosperous post-Super Bowl Shuffle.

Richard “The Fridge” Perry is suffering from several health problems and lives in a poor, rural area of North Carolina.  Dave Duerson committed suicide in due to CTE from football injuries. Defensive tackle turned pro wrestler McMichael is suffering from ALS.

However, the post-Super Bowl Bears avoided major scandals – that is, until the 2007 murder of Rhoni Reuter.  the pregnant girlfriend of former Bears defensive back Shaun Gayle. Marni Yang, who had also dated Gayle, was convicted of shooting her romantic rival to death after staking out Reuter’s condo.

Gayle during his Bears heyday

The Set-Up

 Shaun Gayle, one of the second-tier of famous ‘85 Bears, played for the team from 1984 to 1994. He appeared in the Super Bowl Shuffle video, and seemed destined for a never-ending cycle of local TV commentary and sports convention appearances. Like other single pro athletes, he attracted lots of female attention.  His womanizing may have seemed like a harmless perk of his fame, but it eventually led to tragedy.

Gayle’s main girlfriend, Rhoni Reuter, met Gayle at the Bears camp near her Wisconsin hometown. Reuter and Gayle soon started dating, and their romance turned into an 18 year-long relationship. Despite this, they never married or lived together. According to Roni’s sister-in-law, the couple had agreed to have an open relationship.

Rhoni’s brother said he saw Gayle only 4-5 times in 18 years, which is unusual because of the length of his sister’s relationship with the athlete. However, he contacted Rhoni’s parents quite a bit.

Even though Rhoni and Shaun both agreed to a non-monogamous relationship, there’s no indication that she had any side flings. Of course, Rhoni’s family was wary of this arrangement at first, but Rhoni was deeply in love with Shaun, and spoke with him every day. They also went on trips together and were often photographed as a couple.

Gayle’s dalliances didn’t cause any problems in their relationship -until he met Marni Yang.

Marni Yang

Marni Yang. a Chicago area single mother of three, worked various jobs to support her kids, but still found time to pursue a career as a fitness model. I’ve been unable to find info on how many of her photos ever made it to publication. 

Yang met Shaun Gayle in 2005 when she gigged as a security guard at a Bears convention. They worked together on some real estate deals, and the relationship eventually turned sexual. However, Gayle continued his serious relationship with Reuter, and she became pregnant in early 2007.

This affair wasn’t an outlier for Yang, she dated a lot of guys, including several cops. She became obsessed with Gayle, and hacked into his emails.  When she discovered that he had been dating over a dozen other women, she sent letters to all of them. The letters stated that several other women were seeing Shaun and included a list of their names and addresses. Reuter had a copy of the letter in her purse the day of the murder. Rhoni’s mom also received one of the letters.

The Day of the Murder

On October 4, 2007, Rhoni opened her door to leave for her job at Macy’s. A slim figure dressed all in black entered the condo and ambushed Rhoni. The murderer killed baby Skylar with two shots to the abdomen and then shot Rhoni in the back of the head.  A neighbor heard the commotion and muffled gunshots. After a frantic phone call to Rhoni remained unanswered, she called 9-1-1. When the police arrived, they found Reuter dead on the kitchen floor.

After the shooting, witnesses described what looked like a petite teenager in a hoodie running from the scene. Security footage showed a small black car driving away shortly after the murder.

The local media jumped on the story immediately, and several people (including two of his former Bear teammates) told Gayle about Rhoni’s death before law enforcement. Gayle called the police department before they contacted him, and the officer who answered the phone was pretty businesslike when he told Gayle that someone had murdered Reuter.

The Investigation and the Suspects

Gayle was a person of interest, despite having an alibi, but was soon cleared by law enforcement. He had recently ended a relationship with Monica Kurowska, a fitness instructor/model, and told police she might be responsible for the murder. He’d had gotten a restraining order against her after she’d broken a window while allegedly trying to get into his apartment. The model had an alibi, however, and soon the focus turned to Yang.

The police checked the records of a nearby car rental company, which indicated Yang rented the car used by the murderer. She listed a friend’s address on the form, later claiming she rented the car for her friend because she didn’t have a credit card.  They found a book about making a silencer in the garbage at Marni’s home, and had video of her buying the items to build the silencer at a Home Depot.

There’s no doubt Yang learned a lot about guns and crime scene logistics from her law enforcement suitors. (One ex-lover, a married policeman, sued her for harassment, so Yang had a pattern of jealous, stalking behavior.)

As the investigation continued, police enlisted Marni’s friend, Christi Paschen, to wear a wire and catch Marni confessing to the crime at the local Denny’s.  

The recorded conversations, in which Marni described and eventually confessed to the crime, plus the rental car and Home Depot receipts/video gave the police had enough evidence to charge her with Rhoni’s murder.  In the first interrogation video, Yang has carefully crafted alibis for incriminating evidence offered by police. But the investigation soon wore her down, and the last interrogation room video shows Yang curling up in a corner after the detectives left.

Source: Illinois Department of Corrections

The Aftermath

Yang was found guilty and sentenced to two life terms in prison in 2011. Yang’s attorneys argued that there was no physical proof that she was in Reuter’s condo that day. Prosecutors contended that Yang had meticulously planned the murder and provided the store security tape, letters, her recorded confession and even said she took a medic alert bracelet from Rhoni’s wrist. Gayle took the stand and admitted that he had sex with Yang the night before Rhoni’s murder. 

Yang now she says she lied on the Denny’s recording. She claims she thought the cops were going to pin the murder on her (at the time) teenage son and confessed to the murder to protect him.

I feel sorry for Marni’s kids – they seem like good kids and, by all accounts, she was a good Mom devoted to giving them the best experiences she could afford.  (She even took them scuba diving.)  It’s too bad she didn’t do a U-turn on the lifestyle choices that led to this tragedy. Marni’s children wrote a book about their mother and the case, which was published in 2018. Understandably, most of the online reviewers dissed the book and agreed with the jurors’ decision.  

In 2022, Yang’s lawyers announced they had discovered new security footage from the barbershop where Gayle got his haircut on the day of the murder. They also say DNA and finger prints from the scene don’t belong to investigators, as originally claimed. Defense lawyers also contend that the shooter was much taller than their client, due to the position of Reuter’s body during the murder. A judge granted her lawyers request to present new evidence in March 2024.

On the surface, it seems highly unlikely that the new evidence will exonerate Yang. Surprisingly, one of Reuter’s friends believes Yang is not the murderer. 

Yang, 56, is now a gray-haired grandmother, but has never met her grandchild.

Shaun Gayle now lives a private life in London, where he works as an NFL commentator for Sky Sports. He occasionally comes back to the states to attend Chicago Bears fan conventions.

R.I.P., Rhoni Reuter and baby Skyler

Daniel Rakowitz- The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park

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Despite reading Bonfire of the Vanities, seeing news reports about “wilding” in Central Park, listening to Lou Reed’s New York album, and watching a 60 Minutes segment about the heroin epidemic in the city, I still moved to New York in late 1989.

I first visited the East Village shortly after I settled in New York. Geez, I thought, this place looks like Dresden after the bombing. You had to play hopscotch instead of walk to avoid all the dog shit and garbage on the sidewalk.

 Every odd character in the Tri-State area congregated in the East Village and the adjacent cesspool, “Alphabet City” (Avenues A –D). Of course, this area is now home to luxury condos and hipster shops. In the ’80 and early ‘90s, the East Village was filled with beatniks giving impromptu poetry readings, drug dealers, old hippies, punk rockers, Goths, sideshow freaks, pseudo-religious groups, and the homeless in their tents in Tompkins Square Park.

The bizarre crime du jour around this time was the murder of dancer Monica Beerle and the grotesque disposal of her body. Daniel Rakowitz, nicknamed “The Butcher of Tompkins Square”  killed his dancer roommate by punching her in the throat. He boiled her head, then made a soup from her brain and distributed it to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. (One of the homeless men allegedly found a finger in his soup.) Then Rakowitz dismembered her and put a bucket containing her skull and her bones in a storage locker at Port Authority Bus Terminal.

butchertompkins

A transplant from a small town in Texas, Rakowitz came to the East Village in the early ‘80s. He sold meth and marijuana and walked around the Village with a rooster. He would sometimes serve chicken and potato soup to the homeless people in Tompkins Square Park.  He dabbled in Satanism and got involved with a group called The Church of the Realized Fantasy.

Not content with being a follower, he founded his own religion, the “Church of the 966”, which relied on animal sacrifice. Rakowitz sometimes left chicken blood on walls as a trademark for his religion.

Unsurprisingly, Rakowitz had a history of mental illness, and had received shock therapy and anti-psychotic medication as a child. (He refused to take this medication as an adult.) He had also watched his mother die in a hotel room in France.  His father married his wife’s sister three months later.

Years after the crime, a friend of Daniel’s strict father called young Daniel a “mental case.” When Daniel was a teen, his father threw him out of the house. (It was about this time, according to the family friend, that Daniel got into the whole “Jesus thing.” When Rakowitz was 23, he married a 14 year old girl. (Apparently, this was legal in Texas at the time.)  Rakowitz beat his young wife, and would chain her to the refrigerator before he’d leave the house. He had also bragged to his wife about strangling a prostitute and decapitating a dog.

After moving to New York, Rakowitz answered an ad for a roommate, and stayed with a couple for a while. Unfortunately, when the couple broke up, Rakowitz was unable to secure a new lease on his own because he didn’t have a legitimate job. (Marijuana dealer in Tompkins Square Park didn’t count as a reference.)

He met Monika Beerle in Tompkins Square Park around this time, and she took on the lease. When they lived together, she dated other guys, and was somewhat of a free spirit, which Rakowitz didn’t like.  Beerle and Rakowitz may or may not have been boyfriend and girlfriend – it’s hard to tell whether they were romantically involved or just friends with benefits. Like Rakowitz, Beerle used drugs.

daniel_rakowitz2

Visitors to the apartment were greeted with a sign on the door that read “Welcome to Span Ranch East”. In the one widely-circulated photo of Rakowitz, he looks like an East Coast Charlie. When Beerle tried to kick him out of the apartment, he killed her.

He dissected her in a bathtub and made soup out of her brains. He tasted it, liked it, and thereafter referred to himself as a cannibal. He bragged about the murder to his friends in Tompkins Square Park. Eventually, some of the park’s inhabitants contacted police, who arrested Rakowitz on September 13, 1989, about a month after Monika Beerle’s murder.

Rakowitz confessed to police. (There’s an interview with Rakowitz available on Amazon.com. ) Along with a play-by-play description of how he dismembered the body, Rakowitz claimed Beerle killed his cat. (There was some suspicion that Rakowitz didn’t act alone in the dismembering and disposal of Monika’s body.)

In February 1991, Daniel Rakowitz went to trail for the murder of Monika Beerle. The jury found Rakowitz “not criminally responsible due to mental disease or defect” after nine days of deliberation. “I hope someday I can smoke a joint with y’all,’ he told the jury after the verdict. He also offered to smoke a joint with the judge.  The New York Times headline read “Man Acquitted of Killing, Boiling Roommate.”

Rakowitz was committed to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island. He is a diagnosed paranoid-schizophrenic.

In 1992, a member of The Church of Realized Fantasy, Randy Eastherday, was arrested on charges that he helped Rakowitz kill Beerle and dissect her corpse. In a strange addendum to this bizarre crime, former Diner and Dirty Dancing actor turned journalist Max Cantor died of a heroin overdose while researching the case.

As of April 2020, Rakowitz is still in Kirby Forsenic Psychiatric Center, despite several requests to be transferred to a less secure facility over the years. (Rakowitz’s ex-wife testified at one of the hearings.)

There’s not much information available on Monika Beerle. She was from Switzerland, studied dance at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and worked at sleazy dive bar Billy’s Topless to pay the bills. Her father was deceased at the time of her death and her mother lived in Switzerland.

R.I.P Monika Berlee

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