Outside along a cul-de-sac called Royal Oaks Lane, a flawless lawn surrounds a wide-windowed brick house. Everybody knows the family inside.
Dad was a college football player and youth football coach. Mom taught gifted kids. Son was a Sandburg High School sports star who became a college quarterback. Daughter also was a star high school athlete who played college basketball and became a TV sports reporter.
But behind the closed doors of Allan and Anita Kustok’s 4,000-square foot Orland Park home, there was money trouble.
A history of a failed business, court cases and short-lived jobs sent him to work at the Cook County Jail for a couple of years. The mortgage on the expensive house was underwater.
But these were not the only strains in what appeared to be an ideal family – tensions that have surfaced publicly after the tragic death of Anita, who was killed by a gunshot to the head early Wednesday in the bedroom of her home.
Sources close to the murder investigation said her husband was cheating on her, and police were talking to the woman involved in the extramarital affair.
Still, on Friday, a day after their father was charged with killing their mother, the couple’s son and daughter behaved in court as their devoted mother had raised them to.
Clinging to each other, Zak and Sarah Kustok sat stoically, silently behind their father and his defense lawyers. Zak’s wife was nearby, dressed in black.
Then they stood by their father even after prosecutors described in detail what they believe he had done to their mother:
Before dawn Wednesday, he held a revolver inches from his wife’s cheek and pulled the trigger as she lay in their bed. He then nearly fired the gun into his head. Instead he emptied the revolver into an armoire. He rolled her body up in his green robe, the top sheet from the bed and the fitted sheet. It took him 90 minutes before he drove her to the hospital in his car. He never called 911.
He told police that he found his wife lying dead on her back with her hands crossing her chest, a gun in the right one. The gunshot woke him up.
In the Bridgeview courthouse, Sarah and Zak listened together, squished at the end of the hard front bench, her arm wrapped around her brother. The Kustok family always stuck together. This would be no different.
“The Kustok children know their father couldn’t have committed the act the state is accusing him of,” read one of their attorneys.
Charged with first-degree murder, Allan Kustok, 59, denies killing his wife of 34 years.
On Saturday morning, Kustok was moved from the Cook County Jail to the Kankakee County Jail because of his familiarity with the jail where he once worked and some of its staff, a Cook County sheriff’s police spokesman said.
Kustok can’t afford the $200,000 bond needed for his release. His lawyer on Friday told the judge the family could barely scrape up a tenth of that sum.
The couple had taken out mortgage after mortgage on the spacious house with two fireplaces in the 10900 block of Royal Oaks Lane. They started with $538,000 in 2001. Then $650,000 in 2003. Then $664,000 in 2006, borrowing against the property’s rising value.
But Allan Kustok was working at the Cook County Jail, making about $46,000 a year, according to a sheriff’s spokesman, while his wife taught at a Riverside elementary school. He was a sanitarian in the jail complex, doing some maintenance work and keeping up cleanliness inspection standards for a federal agency.
In October 2007, he resigned, about the same time he started selling for a biotech company.
As a young married couple, the Kustoks had a business, Illini Container Corp., that distributed cardboard containers starting in 1985 – first in Lansing, then in Mokena, according to state filings.
Allan was the president, Anita the secretary.
Illini Container lasted about 10 years and was sued for foreclosure and other matters in its last years. Allan found another job in the packaging materials industry. Then another one in Joliet.
In 2003, he became sales manager for Commander Packaging Co. in Monee for an annual $100,000 base salary. Four months in, he was let go. He sued his employer for breach of a five-year contract, saying it owed him more than $600,000.
A jury awarded him $1 million in 2006. He and the company settled for a little less.
Meanwhile, sources told the SouthtownStar, Allan strayed from his marriage, carrying on an affair with a local woman for at least the past five years. Police investigating the fatal shooting have questioned the woman, sources said.
Sources told Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed that he might have used an Internet site for married people interested in having sex with others.
His white hair looking slept-on, Kustok appeared Friday before Cook County Circuit Judge Joan M. O’Brien in light blue scrubs. He had spent Thursday night in the Orland Park police lockup.
His wife’s body still lay at the county morgue. No funeral arrangements have yet been made for her.
Kustok kept his gaze straight while in court. He did not look at his children, seated directly behind him, who kept composed as they learned their mother died immediately. A single bullet tore through her left cheek and out the back of her neck on the right side, prosecutors said.
Sources later told the SouthtownStar she was shot while lying down by someone standing over her.
Kustok did not speak in court, except to answer the judge’s few questions: What is your name? Do you understand we need your passport and guns if you bond out?
The only time his children were heard speaking aloud was to each other, standing shoulder to shoulder after the hearing, behind their attorney as he addressed a throng of reporters.
Zak put his arm around his sister and gave her a hug. She looked at him and whispered, “I love you.”
