Hickory St. Nightmare Killer Wanted to Flay Dead Man, Wear His Skin Like 'Leatherface': McKee

After strangling a young Joliet man with his bare hands, alleged Nightmare on Hickory Street killer Joshua Miner spoke of flaying his victim and wearing his face like a mask, a Shorewood woman told police detectives.

“He was going to take a picture later on with his face pulled off like Leatherface,” accused killer Bethany McKee, 20, said of Joshua Miner.

Miner, 26, was inspired to skin his victim and wear his face after he and his alleged partners-in-crime spoke of wanting to watch the horror flick Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which Leatherface goes on a murderous rampage and wears a dead man’s face like a mask.

McKee and Miner both face murder charges in connection with the January 2013 strangulation deaths of 22-year-olds Eric Glover and Terrance Rankins. Tuesday, on the second day of McKee’s trial, a taped police interrogation was played in which she told of Miner wanting to wear Glover’s face.

“I think it’s because of the dreads” Glover wore, McKee explained to Joliet police detectives. She said Miner wanted to “scalp his head and wear it like a hat.”

“I was laughing,” McKee admitted, but told the detectives, “I didn’t think it was funny.”

Miner remains in the Will County jail awaiting his own murder trial, as does Adam Landerman, 21. Another Joliet woman, Alisa Massaro, wiggled out of the murder case in May by copping a plea to reduced charges of robbery and concealing homicides. Prosecutors agreed to the plea deal to secure Massaro’s future testimony against her three alleged accomplices. She is due to be released from prison in less than three and a half years.

Massaro was tentatively scheduled to take the stand Wednesday but her testimony may be pushed back until later in the week.

During her police interrogation, McKee first blamed Glover and Rankins for instigating the attack by getting too grabby with her and Massaro. When confronted by detectives about fabricating that story, McKee admitted she was lying and tried to put the blame on Miner, repeatedly calling him “crazy,” claiming she was frightened of him, pointing out that he is an ex-convict, and mentioning that he and Massaro—along with Landerman—wanted to have sex atop the dead men’s bodies.

“Josh brought it up,” McKee said.

“Alisa, it took her a while,” she said, recalling how her childhood friend told her, “Me and him do a lot of crazy stuff. This will just be something new.”

McKee said she didn’t stick around to watch her friends copulate on the corpses, choosing instead to pass out in another room of Massaro’s Hickory Street house.

McKee also put the blame on her father, Bill McKee, complaining that he called the cops after she went to him for help with disposing of the bodies.

“I get it because it’s the right thing to do, but he told me he’s going to help me,” Bethany McKee told the law about her father, whom she realized dropped a dime on her when she saw the cops showing up at her Shorewood home.

“I called my dad,” Bethany McKee said. “I was like, ‘What the f—k? Did you just call the police one me?’ And he was like, ‘No.’”

When it really came down to it, Bethany McKee explained to the detectives, her father was the one responsible for the mess she was in.

“It was his fault in the first place,” she said.

“He was the one who kept kicking me out,” Bethany McKee said, point out that she “didn’t want to go to the shelter.”

No matter who—if anyone—crafted the plan to kill Glover and Rankins, once they were dead, Bethany McKee told the police she drove her young daughter to the home of a friend in the middle of the night. She then returned to the house on Hickory and went with her pals to buy cigarettes and cocaine with Rankins’ money. Bethany McKee said she smoked her share of the coke and passed out.

Before passing out, Bethany McKee said, she remembers her friends making racist jokes about the dead men.

“They were calling them n----s and all these racist comments,” she said. “Adam was just saying, ‘You should have been picking the cotton and this wouldn’t have happened.’ Alisa was just laughing.”

Earlier in the trial, prosecutor Tricia McKenna said Bethany McKee and her friends plotted the murders because they were broke and wanted liquor and cigarettes. And that’s pretty much what happened, Bethany McKee at one point told the detectives.

“It was because we really needed cigarettes,” she said. “We didn’t have any cigarettes.”

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