Northwest Indiana News: nwitimes.com

CROWN POINT | David Maust insists he's killed only five people.

James McClister, 13, in 1974, while Maust was in the Army and stationed in Germany.

Donald Jones, 15, of Chicago, in 1981.

Nicholas James, 19, in Hammond, in May 2003.

James Raganyi, 16, and Michael Dennis, 13, in Hammond, in September 2003.

Those whispering about more bodies in Oak Park, Ill., where he lived for two years after being released for Jones' murder, are free to "tear up the floor" of the house, Maust said.

"There's no other victims," he said Saturday from the Lake County Jail. "The two years in Oak Park, I didn't hurt anyone."

Later, while talking about meeting Michael Dennis at a Hammond pool, Maust said: "I just wanted to hang out. If I knew he was 13, I wouldn't have hanged with him. I'd already killed a 13-year-old."

During an almost two-hour-long interview the day after being sentenced to three consecutive life sentences for killing the Hammond teens, Maust talked about murder, remorse, family, his past and his future.

Maust, who's caused five mothers to cry for their sons, said he often cries for his own mother -- even though she sent him to Chicago State Hospital when he was 9 to live among mentally ill children.

But almost in the same breath, he said, "I dumped her in 1976."

Nothing his mother said about him throwing rocks at his sister, setting fire to his brother or trying to drown him is true, Maust said.

"She used it to get me locked up because she didn't like me."

Days after his parents divorced in 1963, she took Maust to stay with his father, who promptly returned him the next day.

"She told me, 'I'm going to get rid of you one way or the other, so you might as well run away.' She used running away as an excuse to get me locked up. She admitted that last year in her interview with the Hammond police. She said, 'He never ran away. I was hoping he would, but he never did.'"

He described the mental hospital as "a child's paradise. All I did was play all day."

"I had no social skills. No education. No nothing. I left the mental hospital when I was 13. I was damaged then," he said. "I shouldn't have been allowed to leave the mental hospital. I shouldn't have been there in the first place. Being lonely is what destroyed me."

In Maust's logic, he killed because he "wanted something that was taken" from him.

"My family was taken away," he said.

But he knows his thoughts are skewed.

"I don't think like others. I don't process information as other people do. I understand more or less why I did what I did. Because of the way my mother treated me over the years."

Maust said his younger brother, Jeffrey, who's appeared on television touting a book, "just wants to be introduced to a million dollars.

"He wants paid," Maust said. "He don't know me."

Jeffrey Maust told people David Maust "picked a bird right out of the sky with a rock," David Maust said.

"If I could do that, (my mother) wouldn't have put me in a mental hospital," he said. "She would have put me in a circus to make money out of me."

Maust said he's never had sex with anyone -- especially not those he hurt over the years or those he murdered.

"There was no sexual molestation -- none of them. Ask those that survived."

He did say he was raped three times in a Texas prison.

"I didn't do it to others because I didn't want no one to do that to me. I wanted affection from them, not sex."

While in the boys home, where he lived after being released from the mental hospital, he and other boys played a game in which they caused one another to pass out.

"We were playing a game called knock out. All the boys played it. We just wanted to touch another boy. ... We just wanted affection -- to be touched. There was no one there to do it. Besides no education, there was no touching. They couldn't tell you they loved you, give you a hug. Nothing."

Maust asked to be put in isolation while in prison. He said if he's put in the general population, his days are numbered.

"I believe they'll try to kill me. I think that's what should happen. I deserve what I have coming."

He isn't above hastening his own death, hinting at suicide: "I got plans I made two years ago -- a promise I made to myself."

"One year from now, I won't be around," he said.

And even though Maust knows God is "really mad" at him, he expects to be in heaven some day.

"He's really upset, but I believe he's going to let me come home because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior."

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