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Despite receiving a natural life prison term for the murder and decapitation of a friend more than 30 years ago in Barrington, Paul Modrowski is free again after a judge ruled the defendant had been too harshly sentenced in a grisly crime that garnered widespread headlines.
Modrowski was quietly released without media fanfare July 2 from Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet after serving more than three decades behind bars. He turns 50 later this year and, according to public records, is living with a relative in the southwest suburbs.
Two hikers found Dean Fawcett’s dismembered body without its head, left arm and right hand near a railroad embankment in Barrington on Jan. 18, 1993. Prosecutors charged Modrowski and a co-defendant, Robert Faraci, with the 22-year-old LaGrange Park man’s murder that April.
In a Tribune interview, the victim’s mother, Mary Kay Fawcett, said she assumed her son’s killer would die in prison.
“I just figured with what he had done, no way would they ever let him out,” Fawcett said. “The thing I keep wondering, hopefully it was quick and my son didn’t suffer. It’s hard to comprehend, even after 30 years.”
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Christy Gutowski.
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