ALBA, Texas — A billboard on this tiny farming group about 60 miles northeast of Dallas advertises a $75,000 reward for data that results in an arrest within the mysterious dying of a Chicago space physician who was discovered lifeless final 12 months on a ranch that he purchased for searching.
Dr. George Chronis was 57, an obstetrician and gynecologist from Palos Park. He was visiting his distant property final spring when his bunkhouse burned down.
His physique was discovered exterior the two-story, transformed barn early on May 4, 2018.
An post-mortem decided Chronis was burned over half of his physique — after he was lifeless. There was no smoke in his lungs. And there was an unexplained ligature mark round his neck.
A 12 months and a half later, the Rains County, Texas, sheriff’s workplace remains to be investigating. Was the physician’s dying homicide? An accident? Suicide?
“My gut tells me it was certainly some kind of foul play,” says Stacey Chronis, a sister-in-law.
“There’s no good explanation for how a man died outside a burning building with no smoke in his lungs,” says Chronis’ spouse Connie.
Frustrated with the sluggish progress of the investigation, the household and mates of Chronis posted the reward on this city of 400 folks in rural Rains County.
A billboard on U.S. 69 in Alba, Texas, gives a $75,000 reward for data resulting in an arrest and conviction within the dying of Dr. George Chronis, a 57-year-old obstetrician and gynecologist from Palos Park, discovered lifeless on his distant property in Rains County, Texas, on May 4, 2018.Angela Piazza / Sun-Times
Chicago legal professional Andrew Hale, a good friend of Chronis’ brother Paul, lately visited there with a movie crew, pondering of making a documentary on the puzzling case.
The billboard that went up final month over U.S. 69 footage a younger, athletic Chronis in a grey T-shirt. Pickup vans zoom previous it. Across the road, a restaurant boasts it gives “Good Ol’ Home Cookin.’ ” This is a spot the place cowboy hat and boots are correct enterprise apparel, and conversations can shortly flip to horses, crop-dusting and brushfires.
The Chronis ranch, now on the market, is about six miles west of Alba, Texas. It was the place Chronis would go to get away from the pressures of his medical follow, in keeping with his spouse. She says that, throughout his journey there within the spring of 2018, he was planning to hunt wild boars on the 79-acre property.
Connie and George Chronis of Palos Park at their wedding ceremony in 1991.Chronis household
An avid outdoorsman, Chronis favored to hunt and fish. And he rode a motorbike. But his household says he additionally was a renaissance man who spoke French and Greek, favored to cook dinner and will play three devices — guitar, trumpet and piano.
He was an athlete who, when he was youthful, performed baseball, softball, ice hockey and golf and who would nonetheless get out on a soccer subject now and again.
He was a craftsman, too. He constructed the deck at his suburban house and a deer stand in Wisconsin. Just a few years in the past, he took a welding class at Moraine Valley Community College.
“Shy of giving birth, there was not much he could not do,” his spouse says.
Chronis went to highschool at Morgan Park Academy and graduated from Northwestern University with a chemistry diploma.
He met his spouse, a nurse, in medical college on the University of Iowa. She remembers them ditching a hospital Christmas social gathering to go play pool.
“No one parlayed the day-to-day into hysteria like George,” she says.
The Chronises purchased the ranch in Texas a few decade in the past.
The physician hadn’t visited there for about three years, a couple of days earlier than flying to Texas on May 3, 2018. He texted his brother Paul: “I’m going down to my ranch. It’s my happy place.”
He was planning to satisfy with a lawyer about letting a Rains County man named Darrin Gowin graze cattle on the ranch, in keeping with Chronis’…