Anthony Joseph Tony Hackett, 18, of Joliet, Illinois, was shot four times and killed while he slept in a car parked along Interstate 55 near Wilmington on July 17, 1983. Hackett and his girlfriend had been returning from Great America in Gurnee when the attack occurred. The woman was sexually brutalized, bound and gagged, then stabbed and dumped by a road south of Joliet; she was found near death by a passing motorist and later testified at trial.

Milton Johnson, a paroled rapist, was convicted of Hackett’s murder. Johnson’s same summer 1983 crime spree in the Joliet area included the August 20, 1983, killings of four women in a Joliet ceramics shop and the July 16 shootings of five people in Homer Township. Ballistics and his method of operation linked Johnson to several other slayings that summer, though prosecutors did not build stronger cases on every suspected connection. If anyone knew Tony Hackett or has information about the July 17, 1983 attack, please share what is known.