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Elk Grove is a prosperous, sleepy bedroom community north of Chicago.
Physically, it is just over 50 km from the blood-soaked streets of that troubled city. Figuratively, it’s a million miles away.
But on May 7, 1976, it wasn’t the south side that exploded in madness and mayhem – it was Elk Grove.
Inside a tidy suburban ranch home were the bodies of Frank Colombo, 43, his wife, Mary, 41, and their son, Michael, 13. The parents had been shot to death as they slept with a .32-calibre revolver.
Michael was bludgeoned with a bowling trophy and stabbed nearly 100 times. Frank took four bullets in the head. He had been tortured and severely beaten. Mary was shot between the eyes and her throat was slashed.
“Frank was shot in the back of the head, and his teeth came out,” Det. Ray Rose told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2006. “Mary was probably dead before she hit the floor. I can still see the rage on Michael’s body.”
Nymphomaniac
Missing the massacre was their teenage daughter Patty.
She was a wild child who liked sex – a lot. Something of a nymphomaniac, she was nothing like her squaresville parents and her little brother.
The 19-year-old had left home two years earlier to pursue her twin passions of carnal capers (with anyone and everyone) and partying.
Her straight-laced parents were so upset that they eventually disowned her when she refused to fly straight.
Sex with his dog
The teen terror met Frank DeLuca, a 36-year-old married pharmacist, when she was 16 and slinging coffee at a suburban diner. Eventually, he hired her to work at the pharmacy, and soon the odd couple began a torrid affair.
From the start, the twosome engaged in bizarre sexual practices, with Patty showing her classmates photos of herself having sex with her boyfriend’s German Shepherd.
Patty eventually moved in with DeLuca, his wife and five children. She would often perform oral sex on her beau while his wife and kids were in the swimming pool.
When the Colombos discovered he had ditched his wife for the teen temptress, her father pounded DeLuca.
“There was a lifestyle that Frank introduced me to,” Patty said years later. “That included sex with other couples. With other people.”
Did the mob do it?
Rose smelled a rat almost from the start.
Patty didn’t seem so shocked at the bloodbath and even offered cops a few loopy theories of her own, including that her father may have been taken off the board by The Outfit, Chicago’s notorious incarnation of the Mafia.
She arrived at the cop shop wearing barely-there Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie. And detectives quickly determined that Frank Colombo was an honest man. There were no mobsters in the picture.
“She could turn it on and turn it off,” Rose told reporters. “Smoking and joking, and then at one point lying over the casket and crying.”
Threesome for murder?
According to cops, Patty wanted the dough from her parents’ insurance policies and began plotting their demise in the summer of 1975. She even had a threesome with two men she met at a motel dive bar to convince them to commit the vile deed.
Ten days after the murders, Patty and DeLuca were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Her threesome friends dropped a dime on her, and it didn’t really help her cause that Patty’s story kept changing.
“Frank DeLuca did the shooting,” Rose said. “And the mutilation, the stabbing and the bludgeoning of the bodies was done by Patty.”
She had always hated her little brother, who had suddenly stolen the spotlight from her.
The sex-packed trial lasted a month, with the jury convicting the star-crossed lovers. They were sentenced to 200 years behind bars. Patty has tried for parole numerous times, only to be repeatedly shot down. Both remain in prison.
In 1979, Patty was back in the news for organizing sex orgies involving prisoners, guards and wardens that cops called a “prostitution ring.” The warden and other top officials resigned.
Prison prostitution
Frank DeLuca died in prison in January 2023, Elk Grove Village Police Chief Chuck Walsh told the Journal & Topics . He had been in custody at the Dixon Correctional Center when he died.
DeLuca and Colombo were on the cusp of yet another parole hearing – which would come up once every one to five years – by the Illinois Prisoner Review Board for DeLuca and Columbo. Walsh said he was preparing for both DeLuca’s and Columbo’s upcoming hearings.
“Any community member who wishes to protest the release of Patricia Columbo can send an email to [email protected], and Chief Walsh will relay their concerns to the Parole Board,” Walsh said in an email to the Journal .
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