It was a crime that shocked the heartland—and sent reverberations across the country. In the early morning hours of Jan. 9, 1993, seven bodies were found stacked in a walk-in freezer at the Brown’s Chicken restaurant in Palatine, Illinois. They included the married couple who owned the beloved local food franchise and five workers, two of whom were high school students. They had been shot execution style; one of the owner’s throat was slit. And the killers disappeared seemingly without a trace.
That senseless act of violence shattered the quiet normalcy in the Norman Rockwellesque Chicago suburb, whose motto is “A Real Hometown.” And as the hunt for the killers dragged on for nearly a decade, the crime became a childhood fixture for George Washington University alumnus Patrick Wohl, B.A. ’16. Growing up in nearby Park Ridge, Illinois, Wohl was surrounded by news coverage of the murders—particularly after two men were arrested in 2002 and convicted of the crime.
“It was unsolved for so long that it almost became a thing of lore,” recalled Wohl, an attorney and author. “If you lived near Chicago, it was something that was always present to you.”
Now, more than three decades later, Wohl has returned to that night—not for the headlines but for the humanity. In his new book, “Something Big: The True Story of the Brown’s Chicken Massacre and the Search for Justice” (Post Hill Press, 2025), he eschews a true-crime focus on the murders’ violence and instead spotlights the grief and resilience of those shaped by its consequences.
“I felt the stories of the people whose lives were shattered were being left out,” he said. “I always wondered, ‘Who were they?’ There was much more to say about them.”
Over two years of research, Wohl interviewed more than 40 people—victims’ families, law enforcement, attorneys, even former suspects. He uncovered lessons about modern policing and DNA technology. And he faced hard questions about the ethics of America’s true-crime obsession. Most striking, he said, was the hours he spent talking to people in their living rooms, collecting their memories and earning their trust.
“I promised those I spoke with that I would tell a genuine story about their loved ones,” he said. “Not just as victims, but as individuals.”
From attorney to author
By day, Wohl, a former political science major at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, is a D.C. attorney specializing in government ethics and election law. But he fell in love with writing during his time at GW—through his classes with the University Writing Program and studying with Associate Professor of French Kathryn Kleppinger, who taught him that good writing went beyond good grammar. “She would turn [papers] back to me and say, ‘This could be crafted better. It could be more literary,’” he recalled.
As an attorney, Wohl published commentary in outlets like “Campaigns & Elections,” “The Hill” and “The Chicago Sun-Times.” But during COVID-19 lockdown, when others, he joked, “were learning how to bake bread,” Wohl was determined to expand his writing. His first book, “Down Ballot” (3 Fields Books, 2024), tells the story of a 1990 campaign for Illinois state representative that became a proxy battle for broader political issues like abortion.
Like that book, Wohl was drawn to the Brown’s Chicken drama for its local impact and its national implications—even as the case seemed closed.
In March 2002, after a nine-year manhunt by a task force of local and state police working with FBI agents, a former girlfriend of one of the killers implicated him. Police tied him to the murders through DNA evidence on a partially eaten piece of chicken found at the crime scene. Remarkably, a police officer had the foresight to save the bone in an evidence freezer for six years—well before technology had advanced enough to extract DNA samples.
Indeed, while local police were criticized for their handling of the investigation, Wohl says their strategy served as a framework for future manhunts. Working with a national task force “became the model for how these sorts of crimes would be investigated in the suburbs of Chicago and throughout the country,” he said. “It’s a lesson in technology and a lesson in looking back on old cases with new methods to shake things up.”
Gathering stories and trust
While the investigation received wide media attention—including a previous book by a “Chicago Tribune” reporter—Wohl took a different approach. Each of his book’s 24 chapters is named after and focuses on a person—from the seven victims to the two killers to the then-Palatine police chief. Through Zoom and in-person interviews, Wohl gathered the stories of prominent figures in the case, like DNA expert Henry Lee who also testified at the O.J. Simpson murder trial and Palatine’s then-mayor who recalled her town becoming so infamous that actor James Earl Jones stopped her at a gift ship to express his condolences.
Among Wohl’s most memorable interview subjects, he said, were the owners’ three daughters, who were in their teens and early 20s at the time of the murders. They implored him to be fair in his reporting—even to the killers.
“They were incredibly graceful,” Wohl said. “It brought home the responsibility you take on when people entrust you with their stories.”
In fact, Wohl found himself questioning the ethics of true-crime reporting itself. Given the viewing public’s fixation with Netflix miniseries and “Serial”-style podcasts, Wohl worries that the genre too often romanticizes gratuitous violence and overly humanizes monstrous criminals—with little sensitivity to the trauma of victims and their families. During his own interviews, which sometimes ended with his subject in tears, he faced doubts about asking people to relive the tragedy.
“There were times I’d ask myself: Is this really something I want to write about?” he said.
Wohl acknowledges the power of the true crime genre to, for example, revive a cold case or transform law enforcement tactics. For his part, Wohl’s goals was to honor the commitment he made to tell the stories without sensationalizing the crimes.
“Ultimately, he said, “the people impacted by this case—the families, the past suspects, police, attorneys—will be the ones to judge whether I kept that promise.”