Cold Case Murder Trial Begins In Death Of Strangled Skokie Teen

SKOKIE, IL — The trial of the man accused of murdering a Niles West High School student by strangling him to death in a Morton Grove forest preserve more than 27 years ago began Monday. David Chereck, a 15-year-old sophomore, was last seen alive on the night of Jan. 1, 1992, on his way home after hanging out with a group of friends around Skokie. His body was found in the Linne Woods Forest Preserve the next day by a man walking his dog.

Robert Serritella, 76, was charged with Chereck's murder in 2014 and has been held at Cook County Jail ever since. But he had been on investigators' radar since just a few days after the murder, when the former Park Ridge resident called up police and explained he may have witnessed the teen leave a 7-Eleven store and get into a similar looking white car to his own.

Serritella's own admissions — to police, cell-mates, a reporter, friends and the victim's mother — make up the most significant evidence against him. He left the Chicago area during the investigation, spending years in California before his arrest 22 years after the killing.

Three of Chereck's friends who were with him on the night of his murder testified on the first day of Serritella's trial, recalling stops that night hanging around Ultimate Video, Village Inn and Oakton Bowl.

"[Serritella] was also hanging around," said Assistant State's Attorney Mary Anna Planey, delivering the prosecution's opening argument. "He saw the boys and the boys saw him."

Serritella then "lured" Chereck into the forest, made a sexual advance and was rebuffed, the prosecutor speculated. As the two struggled, Planey suggested, Serritella managed to wrap Chereck's scarf around his neck and tighten it "until there was no breath left in young David's body."

But knowing that he had been spotted by witnesses, including a police officer who noticed a white American sedan leaving the forest preserve around the time of the killing, Serritella wanted to throw the investigation off, according to prosecutors. So he "continued to talk about David's death to anyone that would listen," Planey said.

Assistant Public Defender Ellen Chase opened Serritella's defense by noting that the majority of the evidence prosecutors have was in their possession for years before they ever brought charges. The state's completely circumstantial case does not include any testimony that would put Serritella at the scene of the murder, she said.

"No physical evidence has ever linked him to this crime," Chase said. Serritella volunteered DNA samples, which do not connect him to the crime. Neither do fingerprints, foot prints, tire tracks or any other forensic evidence, the defense attorney said. Serritella contacted law enforcement right away because he thought he was providing authorities with helpful information, according to Chase, and he subsequently "maintained an interest in the case." It turned out his tips did not wind up helping investigators, she said.

"Just because he wanted to play detective and continued to show an interest in this case doesn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty," Chase said.

Prosecutors argue that Serritella is a child sex offender who targeted the victim, referencing a handwritten list found during an April 1992 search of his Park Ridge home titled "Boy profile for exploitation," containing a list of qualities he was seemingly targeting. The list included: "between 8 & 17 years old," "an underachiever," "parents were absent," "usually [without] previous homosexual experience," "has no strong moral or religious obligations," "usually had no record of previous delinquency" and "suffered from poor sociological development."

The list, along with witnesses who describe Serritella's sexual preference for young boys, was admitted at trial to suggest evidence of other, similar, crimes. In her opening statement, Planey said Serritella "profiled and exploited" the 15-year-old boy on his way home, "and on that day, his exploitation became deadly."

David's mother was the first witnesses called to testify. The retired nurse and Skokie resident remembered her only child as "very kind" and "trusting" with a close-knit group of friends. Ms. Chereck testified her son left the house after dinner around 6 p.m. on the night of New Year's Day 1992. David was about to leave the kitchen when she gestured to him that he had forgotten something. He returned, gave her a kiss and said "I love you," — "I love you too," his mother remembered responding.

"That was the last thing we said to each other," Ms. Chereck testified. As the homicide investigation went cold, she remembered police became increasingly distant, sometimes not even returning her calls with inquiries about the status of the case.

During her testimony, prosecutors played a 15-minute phone conversation recorded in 2013 after Serritella called Ms. Chereck to discuss the case.

"He wanted to know if anyone was found in David's death," Ms. Chereck said, recalling she was shocked by the call. "He wanted to know if there was any progress in the case."

She said she did not know how to respond but wrote down Serritella's number and contacted detectives, who set up a recording device on her phone. She left a voicemail asking Serritella to call back and, a few days later, he did.

"I'm sitting here with my Christian family," Serritella said, telling the mother of the boy he is accused of killing that she was on speaker phone with members of his Southern California church community. "I have nothing to hide in my life," he said. Serritella repeated his recollections, but when Ms. Chereck pointed out his timeline did not match the night of the murder, he suggested maybe the person he remembered seeing was someone else. Despite Serritella's insistence on his innocence, Ms. Chereck was unconvinced.

"I just want to hear why you did it," Ms. Chereck told Serritella. "I don't want to die and be in my grave and not know what happened to my son."

After a long pause, Serritella denied involvement. He asked Ms. Chereck to contact the police and suggest they follow up on his description of a car and a license plate. He also explained he had provided police and prosecutors with a sample of his DNA, which he said "would prove my innocence."

Prosecutors next called three of the four Niles West sophomores, now in their mid-40s, who were out with David Chereck on the night he went missing. They described slightly different versions of the events of the night, but all three had some recollection of being stalked by someone in a white, boxy sedan like the 1983 Chrysler New Yorker that Serritella drove at the time.

One friend recalled a white car pulling up to him as he walked by the Village Inn and a person yelling "Get over here!" from inside at some point around the time of Chereck's murder, though he did not remember if it was within two weeks or not. Chereck's other two friends described a white, older model American car idling in sight as the boys hung out at the Lorel Park playground shortly after 9 p.m.

But defense attorneys noted the witness accounts of white cars did not appear in the initial police reports. Assistant Public Defender David McMahon asked one of them about a detailed description he had given of a suspicious brown, rather than white, Cadillac in the bowling alley parking lot on the night of the murder.

Prosecutors then called the first witness intended to show Serritella is a repeat sex offender, one of at least a half-dozen men who describe being propositioned by Serritella in Chicago and California while under 18, according to prosecutors.

The man who testified on the first day of the trial was 16 when he encountered Serritella as he walked home from Lane Tech High School in the fall of 1991. Now 44, the man testified that Serritella flagged him down, claimed he was "scouting locations" for an arcade and handed him a business card. The card had the name "Ricco Rocco," multiple phone numbers and the message "Let's Come Together."

The man testified he called a number on the card and the two spoke to each other between 15 and 30 times, with Serritella hanging up and expecting a call back if another member of the boy's family picked up. They engaged in phone sex, and Serritella asked the boy to send him nude photos. They discussed auto-erotic asphyxiation as well as having sex in the forest preserve, the man testified, but he and Serritella never met again in person.

"He suggested we try to get together at the forest preserve," the witness said, testifying that Serritella had "tried to make arrangements." He said Serritella threatened to tell his mother about their relationship, which he ended as Serritella's demands became "increasingly bizarre."

Serritella is a registered sex offender in California due to a misdemeanor conviction for the offense of annoy/molest children under 18 in 1991. He was sentenced to 36 months probation in the case, which involved trying to run over a teen boy in his car after they rebuffed his advances, according to prosecutors. His interrogation by Palm Springs police after a 2004 arrest, where he allegedly admitted to being sexually attracted to under-aged boys, has been withheld from evidence by the same judge currently presiding over the trial.

According to his federal civil rights lawsuit against Cook County, which was later settled for $6,000, and police reports of his interviews with investigators, Serritella is a Vietnam-era war veteran who was poisoned by a "lethal dose" of carbon monoxide, which left him with short-term memory loss.

Among the other witnesses prosecutors said they will call later this week are two of Serritella’s former cellmates who testified in pre-trial hearings that he confessed his involvement in Chereck's killing. A third informant the prosecution hoped to call as a witness — a self-described "jailhouse lawyer" who claimed Serritella had sought his counsel — was excluded as a result of the hearings, which became mandatory under a law that took effect in January.

After five years in jail, Serritella turned down a plea deal offered by prosecutors and opted to waive his right to a jury trial. He was given a chance to plead guilty to murder in exchange for a sentence that would see him released from prison after five years. But at a pre-trial hearing earlier this month, he refused to take the deal and continued to maintain his innocence.

"My faith and trust is in God," Serritella said, according to the Chicago Tribune. "He knows I didn't commit this murder. Therefore, we're going to go all the way with this."

Associate Judge Lauren Edidin asked Serritella Monday to confirm his decision before the bench trial began.

"I'm going to let you decide the case, your honor," Serritella told the judge, who will determine if there is sufficient evidence to convict the senior, who uses a wheelchair in court, of a murder from more than 27 years ago.

UPDATE: Friend, Cellmate Testify Against Skokie Boy's Accused Killer