Girlfriend Accomplice Not Called to Testify at Josh Miner's Hickory St. Nightmare Murder Trial

Alisa Massaro squirmed out of the Nightmare on Hickory Street murder case and got a five-year prison sentence in exchange for agreeing to testify against three friends also charged with the killings.

The prosecution of the alleged ringleader behind the grisly slayings rested Monday without Massaro ever taking the stand.

The attorneys for 26-year-old Joshua Miner will start presenting their case Monday afternoon.

Miner, along with Massaro, 20, Adam Landerman, 21, and Bethany McKee, 20, all were charged with the January 2013 murders of 22-year-olds Terrance Rankins and Eric Glover.

The four killed Rankins and Glover after Massaro and McKee lured them to Massaro’s Hickory Street nightmare house, according to police reports obtained exclusively by Patch.

Not long after Rankins and Glover arrived, Miner and Landerman strangled the two men to death, the reports said. Miner and his friends hatched the plot to murder Rankins and Glover because they were broke and wanted to buy cigarettes and alcohol, prosecutor Tricia McKenna said during McKee’s murder trial last month.

After throttling Rankins and Glover, Miner said he and Massaro pushed the bodies together and covered them with pillows and a blanket, turning them into a makeshift bed. They then had sex “at the edge” of the bodies with Landerman joining in, Miner told detectives.

Massaro also confirmed to detectives that she and Miner had sex atop the bodies.

Massaro—who faced life in prison if convicted of the double murder—will get out in less than three and a half years. While she wasn’t called during Miner’s trial, she did testify against McKee. The young woman from Shorewood was found guilty and will be sentenced to life in prison next month.

One of Miner’s attorneys, Lea Norbut, claimed prosecutors failed to prove he planned to rob Rankins and Glover before the killings. And without that proof, he can’t be convicted of killing Glover, which would lead to him possibly walking out of prison alive even if is found guilty of killing Rankins.

Will County Judge Gerald Kinney did not buy Norbut’s argument, in which she said prosecutors neglected to call “other witnesses” that might have helped establish the robbery theory.

During her interrogation by police, Massaro asked detectives at least twice if she could have a lawyer present and three other times told them she didn’t want to talk at all.

After Massaro landed her plea deal in May, Charles B. Pelkie, the spokesman for the Will County State’s Attorney’s Office, said it was unlikely her statements to police could be used against her in court.

“There was a nearly 100 percent certainty that (Massaro’s) statement, the statement that she made would have been suppressed, would not have been used at trial,” Pelkie said.

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