CROWN POINT — A month after prosecutors spared his life, David Maust decided it was time to die.
The day he was to be transferred to the state prison, the serial killer fastened his bed sheet around his neck, tied it to a clothes hook 5 feet above the floor and hung himself early Thursday morning.
A jail guard found him hanging in his single-occupancy Lake County Jail cell, according to police, one month after he pleaded guilty to slaying three Hammond teens.
Maust was in critical condition Thursday night at St. Anthony Medical Center in Crown Point.
Sources close to the situation confirmed Maust was “brain dead” and had been placed on life support.
Officials were attempting to contact his family to determine whether they wanted to give permission to take him off life support.
A hint of Maust’s mind-set comes in a seven-page letter authorities found in his cell Thursday.
In it, Maust says he briefly fled Indiana when police began investigating the fall 2003 disappearances of James Raganyi, Michael Dennis and Nicholas James — later found dead and buried under concrete in the basement of Maust’s Hammond home.
But, he writes, he decided to return, face the music and give the families of his victims the swift justice they deserved.
“I made a deal with myself that I would come back and take responsibility for every evil act I committed in life (including the three murders in Indiana) and then right before the trial or right after I testified in court I would do the right thing and kill myself, because I wanted the trial to be for the families and I didn’t want them to wait long for the justice they desired,” Maust writes in the letter, dated Monday.
A jail guard found Maust hanging minutes after the inmate was told he would be transferred Thursday morning from the jail to a state prison facility.
It was apparent from the condition of his homemade noose that Maust had been planning the suicide attempt for some time, Lake County Sheriff’s spokesman Mike Higgins said.
“The amount of tearing and twisting that went into fashioning that sheet, he couldn’t have done that spur of the moment,” Higgins said.
Maust’s brother, Jeffrey, said David may have found the prospect of leaving the facility where he had spent more than two years too daunting to face.
“If I had known he was about to be transferred, I wouldn’t have been surprised that he tried to kill himself,” Jeffrey Maust said. “When he has a sense of security, that’s all he has.”
Despite his comments in published reports and past personal writings about wanting to commit suicide, Maust was not on suicide watch at the jail.
Warden Caren Jones said Maust showed none of the suicidal tendencies that would cause corrections officials to assign him to the medical wing, where he would have been under constant surveillance via a closed-circuit camera in his cell.
“In addition, he didn’t say anything to anyone at the jail either,” Jones said.
“He had to see a psychiatrist prior to his sentencing, and there was no indication there of any suicidal ideas,” Higgins said.
But Jeffrey Maust wondered how officials could have missed his brother’s death wish.
“Anyone who knew him as a person, and his background, they would know he was suicidal,” Jeffrey Maust said.
In a Dec. 17, 2005, jailhouse interview with The Post-Tribune, Maust discussed past suicide attempts, and said, “I got plans that I made two years ago. I won’t discuss those plans.”
Lake Superior Court Judge Clarence Murray sentenced Maust on Dec. 16 to three consecutive life terms without possibility of parole in the killings of James, 19; Raganyi, 16; and Dennis, 13.
The bodies of the three were dug up by investigators in mid-December 2003 from beneath freshly dug concrete in the basement of the house where Maust rented an apartment, 4933 Ash Ave.
Maust also served 17 years behind bars in Illinois for killing 15-year-old Donald Jones on Aug. 9, 1981, after abducting the teen and attempting to coerce him into sex.
Maust was court-martialed by the the Army in 1974 for the killing of 13-year-old Jimmy McClisters, and sentenced to three years in jail.
Contact John Byrne at 648-3072 or jbyrne@post-trib.com
