No Surprise: Nightmare on Hickory Street Killer Josh Miner Guilty, 'Saw the Writing on the Wall'

Nightmare on Hickory Street killer Joshua Miner didn’t bat an eye when a Will County judge found him guilty of a gruesome double murder. He already saw it coming, his lawyer said.

“He wasn’t surprised,” said attorney Michael Renzi. “He saw the writing on the wall.”

During a lengthy police interrogation, Miner, 26, repeatedly admitted to strangling 22-year-old Terrance Rankins in January 2013. Even though no one proved—or even accused—Miner of choking Rankins’ good friend Eric Glover, also 22, to death at the same time, Will County Judge Gerald Kinney found him guilty of that murder as well.

The double murder conviction means Miner will be sent to prison for the rest of his life when he is sentenced next month.

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Miner confessed to police that he and three friends—Bethany McKee, 20, Adam Landerman, 21, and Alisa Massaro, 20—planned to rob Rankins and Glover and the young men were killed as a result of the plot. But even with that admission, Kinney said the law requires evidence to corroborate the confession.

“When the physical evidence presented at this trial is viewed as a whole, it is clear that the defendant’s admissions are adequately corroborated,” Kinney said.

Miner’s attorneys claimed otherwise, with one of them, Lea Norbut, insisting prosecutors failed to establish the robbery theory and neglected to call “other witnesses” that might have helped them do so.

Massaro was one witness prosecutors chose not to call, even though they secured an agreement for her to testify against her three pals. In exchange for her future testimony, prosecutors allowed Massaro to plea to reduced charges that will see her freed from prison in less than three years.

Massaro did testify at McKee’s murder trial. McKee was found guilty of murdering both Rankins and Glover even though she was not even in the room when Miner and Landerman allegedly strangled them to death.

Miner and Landerman killed Rankins and Glover after Massaro and McKee lured them to the Hickory Street nightmare house, according to police reports obtained exclusively by Patch.

Miner and his friends hatched the plot to rob Rankins and Glover because they were broke and wanted to buy cigarettes and alcohol, prosecutor Tricia McKenna said during McKee’s trial.

After Glover and Rankins were killed, Miner and Massaro had sex atop the dead men’s bodies, the police reports said.

In the wake of the slayings, Miner also spoke of flaying Glover and wearing his face like a mask, McKee told detectives during an interrogation at the Kankakee Police Department.

“He was going to take a picture later on with his face pulled off like Leatherface,” McKee said, telling how Miner was inspired by the horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which Leatherface goes on a murderous rampage and wears a dead man’s face like a mask.

“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.”

Landerman, the son of Joliet police Lt. Julie Larson, is the last of the four alleged Nightmare on Hickory Street killers left in the county jail waiting for his murder case to be resolved. Nicole Jones, the mother of the man Landerman allegedly throttled, attended each day of Miner’s trial and plans to be back for Landerman’s as well.

Jones told how she struggles to make sense of the killings, saying, “I’m tearing up, and to take a life, and you didn’t even know my son.”

“It’s hard,” Jones said. “It’s hard for me.”

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