Joliet's Nightmare On Hickory Street Killer Continues Ending Lives, Even Inside His Illinois Prison Cell

JOLIET, IL — After using his strength and brute force to end the lives of two young men during Joliet's Nightmare On Hickory Street killings, Joshua Miner, now 37 years old, is responsible for another murder, even though he is confined to spend the rest of his natural life behind the barbed wire fences of the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Back in 2024, Chicago's ABC-Channel 7 reported that Chicago native Andrew Ortega, 44, was found dead in his Western Illinois Correctional Center cell that August. According to ABC, Brown County sheriff and coroner Justin Oliver determined that Ortega was strangled overnight, with an undershirt/tank top arm strap tight around his neck as a ligature. The coroner ruled Ortega's death a homicide.

Ortega's cellmate at the time of his strangulation was Joliet's Joshua Miner, the notorious Nightmare on Hickory killer, who was already serving two life sentences for the January 2013 killings on Joliet's west side.

Then last August, ABC-Channel 7 issued a follow-up broadcast, revealing that Miner had taken responsibility for his latest killing. Miner pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of cellmate Ortega and Miner was given another life prison term, in addition to the two he has already from Joliet.

ABC-Channel 7 reported that on the morning of August 26, 2024, the Illinois Department of Corrections guards at the Western Illinois prison facility discovered Ortega's body in his cell after he had missed breakfast. Looking in his cell, the guards may have been thrown off by the shoes, pants and a shirt stuffed with the pillows to make it appear that Ortega was sleeping in his top bunk, the Chicago television station reported.

Back in January 2023, Joliet Patch reported that 10 years had now passed since Adam Landerman, 19, Bethany McKee, 18, Josh Miner, 24, and Alisa Massaro, 18, lured Eric Glover and Terrance O. Rankins to Massaro's house in the 1100 block of North Hickory Street to murder the two 22-year-old men.

Joliet's police chief at the time, Mike Trafton, announced that robbery was the motive in the gruesome killings of the two young men, who were strangled on Jan. 10, 2013. Joliet Patch later reported that the four proceeded to abuse the dead men’s bodies, and Miner and his occasional girlfriend, Massaro, had sex atop the corpses of Glover and Rankins.

"I think you need to know this is one of the most brutal, heinous, really upsetting things that (I've seen) in 27 years of law enforcement," Trafton told Joliet Patch at the time. "It is the worst thing I've come across in my career. After the homicides were committed, they continued the party atmosphere, I guess I would say, without getting into it any further."

Joliet police learned about the Nightmare on Hickory Street homicides at about 4 p.m. on Jan. 10, 2013, when they received a tip that they would find two dead bodies at the Hickory Street address. When officers arrived, they found the victims and then heard noise indicating there were other people in the house, Joliet Police Commander Brian Benton said at the time.

Landerman, Massaro and Miner were arrested there; McKee was arrested at a home in Kankakee, Trafton said.

After ending the life of his cellmate at Western Illinois Correctional Center, Department of Corrections determined that it was time for Miner to move elsewhere. He's now assigned to the Pontiac Correctional Center, which puts him much closer to his hometown of Joliet.