County Keeps Electric Chair Next Door to Drew Peterson Trial Courthouse, No Plans Yet to Use it Again The electric chair hasn’t been used in an execution since 1938 but it seems to be in good condition. CHESTER, IL — Right next door to the courthouse where Drew Peterson is standing trial for allegedly plotting to have a prosecutor murdered, the county keeps an electric chair that was used to execute 17 men and one woman.Those 18 went from the death row at Menard Correctional Center — the same prison where Peterson now lives — to die in that chair between 1931 and 1938.The last two executions were carried out 10 minutes apart, according to the website Death Row Divas.First, there was 22-year-old Angelo Giancola. He was followed by Marie Porter, the 38-year-old woman who had hired him to murder her brother.“She had ordered the murder of her brother for $3,300 in life insurance,” Death Row Divas says. “He was killed on his wedding day, hours before his fiancée would have replaced Porter as beneficiary.”

After Illinois moved on from the electric chair to lethal injection as its method for executing the condemned, Menard’s chair was taken from the prison and shipped to a Springfield warehouse, said Carl Welge, a volunteer at the Randolph County Museum in Chester.“It was just gathering dust up there and we were able to get it down here,” Welge said.The museum is housed in a stone building constructed during the Civil War. It was built to be an archive for the county’s vital records, Welge said, and was an annex to the old courthouse.Menard had one of only three electric chairs in Illinois, according to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. The other two were at Stateville prison outside Joliet and the Cook County Jail in Chicago.Patch WeeklyVisit the Patch Weekly hub for another good read from our compendium of features and perspective for Illinois Patch fans. » turn the page to keep reading More from Joliet Patch Daily Newsletter - The latest Joliet news delivered to your inbox every morning

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Compare and Save $$$ Find out how we can help you save money when you buy from us. Roll Up Doors where you get more for less $$$With apologies to Elton John, it's goodbye Brown Derby Road.After several months of contentious debate over its proposed closing, concrete barricades were installed about noon Friday on the L-shaped road that links Homewood with Thornton, and the little road that was became no more. Thornton sold the road to Menards for $406,000 to allow the retailer to expand its store in Homewood that faces Halsted Street. Under the deal, Thornton will collect annual property tax revenue from Menards and will get at least $35,000 per year for 20 years from Homewood under a sales tax sharing agreement, starting one year from the opening of the expanded area of the store.Brown Derby Road, which is eight-tenths of a mile long, served as a connecting route between Ridge Road in Thornton and Halsted Street in Homewood, where officials pushed for the closing since February 2013 after Menards announced its plan to expand its lumber yard at the rear of the store.

To do so, the company needed to take a segment of the road or it would leave Homewood for a more accommodating site, Menards representatives said. Not wanting to risk losing a major retailer and the sales tax income it provides, Homewood officials in March informed Thornton that, whether or not Thornton agreed to vacate its portion of Brown Derby Road, Homewood would "pursue the option of permanently closing its portion of 175th Street east of Halsted Street."By doing so, Homewood would turn Brown Derby Road into a road to nowhere — cutting off its access to Halsted Street and leaving it without a northern outlet.Homewood Village Manager Jim Marino said village staff held discussions with Menards representatives regarding the expansion plan, and the only option that met their needs was to expand from the rear of the building, which required vacating the section of Brown Derby Road.Thornton Village Manager Doug Beckman said Homewood's threat regarding 175th Street put Thornton between the proverbial rock and a hard place

, and Thornton made the best decision it could. In June 2014, Beckman wrote in an open letter to residents that "with access to 175th closed to Halsted Street, Brown Derby Road does the Village (Thornton) no good." He also defended Homewood, indicating that Menards had put it in a tough sport by vowing to close its store if it could not expand, which would result in a "loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales tax revenue."But some Thornton residents didn't view the village's options as being so limited and wanted it to resist closing Brown Derby Road. The grass-roots opposition was led by former village trustee Judy Diekelman and Jack Swan, Thornton's mayor from 1993 until he retired in early 2013.Swan, a retired fire chief, expressed concern that closing the road would force ambulances to take a longer route from Thornton to the closest hospitals, stressing that minutes are often critical when transporting patients with life-threatening medical conditions."The public view is that paramedics save everybody," Swan said.

"Sadly, that's not true. We (first responders) have to know if there's a shorter way to get them (patients) to a hospital. This cuts that road off completely."He and Diekelman, who sat on the Village Board for nearly 28 years, worked with current village trustees Kim Atkinson and Debra Parisi to fight against Brown Derby Road being closed. With help from other residents, the four current and former village officials knocked on doors, collected more than 1,000 signatures on petitions, sent out fliers and contacted state and regional transportation planners and local media — all to no avail.Diekelman called the closing and everything that led up to it an example of "terrible government" and said she has "just resigned (herself) to the fact that it's happened and they're (Thornton officials) going to have to learn" the consequences.Closing Brown Derby Road will worsen traffic problems and adversely impact the economy in Thornton, Diekelman said, citing the small village's large trucking industry because of the massive limestone quarry that takes up more than a quarter of Thornton's area.

The accessibility and flow of the roads in and out of Thornton are paramount to keeping those businesses thriving, she said.Atkinson believes that blocking off the road will deter traffic from Thornton, hurting the village's businesses."Cars will either go north of us through South Holland or they'll head south through Glenwood because Ridge Road will be so congested," she said.On Friday, Thornton published a brief message regarding the road closing on its website: "We apologize for the inconvenience and recognize that many residents are upset with the decision to close the road. We also want to remind residents that Brown Derby Road to Halsted Street was not solely owned by Thornton. It was never our intention to close it. We explored many options to reroute traffic that were denied."Beckman said Menards intends to "start construction as soon as the weather breaks in the spring" and will begin running sewers and power lines through the newly purchased property this fall.Angela Denk is a freelance reporter.