In what would be the last transmission of his 30-year career, Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz told fellow officers he was chasing suspicious men.

His descriptions were deliberately vague.

Three men — two white, one Black — were what authorities had to go on after finding Gliniewicz shot dead in a swampy industrial area.

In brutal heat on Sept. 1, 2015, more than 400 police officers from an alphabet soup of local, state and federal agencies, six aircraft and 48 K-9 units joined the hunt for the would-be killers.

News of suspected cop killers on the loose terrified the community. Schools were locked down and roads closed.

But there were no killers. Rather, it was an elaborate ruse by a well-known and, by some accounts, beloved officer who staged his own suicide to escape the outcome of a pending investigation.

The fatigues-clad Gliniewicz was a local celebrity of sorts known as “G.I. Joe” for his work with the award-winning Fox Lake Explorer Post 300.

But a dark side was revealed in the weeks that followed. And after allegations surfaced that Gliniewicz had stolen thousands of dollars from the post for personal expenses, including a trip to Hawaii, sadness over his death turned to resentment and anger.

Gliniewicz, investigators said, had committed the ultimate betrayal.

Here are the stories of some who experienced that chaotic turn of events 10 years ago.

‘I’ll never forget it’

On the morning of Sept. 1, 2015, Lake County Sheriff’s Detective Chris Covelli was driving to work when he heard a dispatch on the police radio regarding Fox Lake Police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz.

“I’ll never forget it,” Covelli recalled. “You could tell hearing his name — the shock. He called ‘officer down.’”

Just six weeks earlier, Covelli volunteered to fill an opening as the new public information officer for the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, despite having no formal training in the task.

He had done some press releases on traffic crashes but could not have imagined the trial by fire he was about to encounter in Fox Lake.

“It’s completely changed the trajectory of my career and career path,” he explained. “I learned a ton from that incident and I take a lot with me every day when I communicate.”

Covelli remains the spokesperson and media contact for the sheriff’s office today and has risen to the rank of deputy chief. He also is a part-time teacher of crisis communications to first responders and government staffers throughout the country.

Covelli’s polished expertise was on a national stage in 2022 during the media blitz after seven people were killed and scores injured in a shooting spree at the Highland Park Fourth of July parade.

But approaching a makeshift command post in an industrial area off Sayton Road on a hot morning in 2015, Covelli didn’t know what to expect.

A couple hours had passed without any public messaging of a rapidly unfolding situation.

“We were way behind the eight ball. I didn’t know that at the time,” said Covelli, who was tapped to address the media and worked with incident command to develop a message.

By that time, hundreds of officers from agencies in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, multiple SWAT teams, several helicopters and other resources were assisting in the search for suspects. Information was coming from all directions.

A news conference was held early that afternoon outside a theater in downtown Fox Lake. When national media correspondents joined a second one that evening, Covelli realized the scope of the situation.

There were daily news conferences for at least a week and others peppered in over the next several weeks.

Although, admittedly, “very, very green at communicating” to start, Covelli adopted a philosophy in Fox Lake that he has followed and honed since.

“Tell people of the Fox Lake area everything we know and be honest. You can’t go wrong doing that,” he said.

That’s the only way to gain trust, he added. The caveat is to satiate the public’s need to know without compromising information crucial to the investigation.

“Until you know with certainty the conclusions, you don’t want to give a false ending to what happened,” he said.

Chaos and collective shock

During a 50-year career in law enforcement, Ray Rose was involved in some of the region’s most unforgettable tragedies.

He was lead investigator for the notorious Columbo family murders in 1976. In 1979, he worked the scene of American Flight 191 at O’Hare Airport, the deadliest aviation crash in U.S. history.

Both had a profound personal and professional impact on Rose, who spent 20 years as Mundelein’s police chief and was with the Franklin Park and Elk Grove Village departments before that.

Rose, who also served as undersheriff with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office from 2013 to 2017, said the shooting death of Gliniewicz would join those as the most memorable events in which he has been involved.

“There was just so much stuff going on [and] this octopus kept growing legs,” said Rose, who coordinated the scene initially and was involved in a branch investigation apart from the shooting itself.

“The news of Gliniewicz being shot rippled through Lake County but also across the country,” Rose added.

He was at his office when word came in that an officer had been shot in Fox Lake. The town’s police chief, Michael Behan, had retired amid internal issues just days earlier.

“I’m thinking I need to go out there,” he said. The scene was disorganized and chaotic.

“More and more people are coming and more and more people don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing,” Rose said.

Amid collective shock and trauma, challenges included the size, speed and scope of an intense search for the suspected killers and the number of complex details to address.

Maps were spread on a piece of plywood, a perimeter set up and roads closed. Rose contacted the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force, which would investigate what initially was thought to be a murder.

“I’m in charge but I don’t initially realize I’m in charge,” Rose recalled. As soon as one question was addressed, another would surface. Leads were jotted on index cards, narrowed and moved to the task force.

Rose was involved on an intense, daily basis for about two weeks and remained involved about a month. He assigned Michael Keller as Fox Lake interim chief and would meet with the FBI, village officials, the state’s attorney’s office and task force as the sheriff’s office investigations regarding the department and Gliniewicz’s finances advanced.

‘Nothing is what it appears to be’

Today, Mike Nerheim sits as a Lake County circuit judge presiding over criminal cases.

But in 2015, as Lake County state’s attorney, he found himself at the center of one of the most unusual cases of his career.

Initially, Nerheim seemed in line to prosecute Gliniewicz’s killers. Instead, he wound up prosecuting Gliniewicz’s widow, Melodie, for financial crimes involving Fox Lake police Explorer Post 300 funds.

Nerheim vividly recalls the period before Gliniewicz’s death was determined to be suicide. The law enforcement response impressed him deeply.

“Everybody just came to help,” he said. “There were hundreds of police agencies and federal agencies. They were all there. Police cars from towns I didn’t even know existed.”

Nerheim was on the ground daily in Fox Lake as the investigation evolved from what appeared to be a police officer’s murder into what clearly was a suicide.

“At the time, they were looking for suspects,” he explained. “We didn’t have anybody identified. There were different theories and leads on individuals they thought might have been involved.

“We were thinking this was basically an assassination of a police officer, and we were trying to make sure we were on the ground to provide all assistance my office could to determine who those people were, capture them, and ultimately prosecute them.”

Like others on the front line, he witnessed the murder theory slowly unraveling.

“There were little facts that would creep forward that gave you pause,” Nerheim said. “None of them, individually, were enough to say this is definitely suicide. It was really a combination of different facts over several days.”

As the investigation uncovered more information and determined the suspected motive for suicide, it revealed the investigation into Gliniewicz’s widow and subsequent prosecution, which Nerheim’s office initially oversaw.

Nerheim said he is limited in his ability to discuss details because of his judicial position and litigation restrictions.

In 2016, Nerheim’s office presented facts to a grand jury that led to Melodie Gliniewicz’s indictment on charges including disbursing charitable funds without authority for personal benefit and money laundering.

“This entire matter has been a sad and tragic saga for the village of Fox Lake,” Nerheim said at the time. “My hope is that we will be able to close this unfortunate chapter and move forward with ensuring a professional and transparent police department dedicated to the citizens of Fox Lake.”

Looking back, Nerheim said, “it was probably the most unusual case I’ve been involved in during my career, just in terms of where it started and how it ended up.”

He believes the case offers important lessons for prosecutors and investigators “to make sure you’re keeping your eyes open to all evidence and nothing is what it first appears to be.”

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