The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

“Bill Friedkin, this is Paul Crump.”

  He took my hand in both of his. The warden offered him a cigarette, then invited him to sit. Father Serfling stayed, but the armed guards were excused. So easy was their rapport, I had a feeling that Paul had been a guest in this office many times before. He was writing a novel called Burn, Killer, Burn, which was later published in 1962, about a condemned man who commits suicide in his cell rather than face the death penalty. His character, Guy Morgan, is a man filled with hatred when he arrives on death row. He had been beaten by the Chicago cops, and confessed to a murder he didn’t commit. But in the course of his imprisonment, he learns to take responsibility for his actions.

  You don’t often meet someone who’s been convicted of murder and facing the death penalty. Maybe it was because the warden and the priest were in the room, with two guards outside, but I had no fear of Paul. I didn’t feel I was sitting with a violent man. For the next two hours, he told me about his case.

  The robbery of the Libby, McNeill & Libby meatpacking plant in the Chicago stockyards took place on Friday morning, March 20, 1953. The local press called it “the most daring daylight robbery in Chicago’s history.” Four men wearing dark coats and black hoods broke into the Credit Union office and robbed the cashiers of $17,000 in payroll money. The captain of the Libby guards, Ted Zukowski, was killed. Another guard was pistol-whipped, and later testified against Crump, identifying him by his voice only, as having shouted four words through a mask, “Give me your gun!”

  When a black man committed a crime in Chicago, a general roundup took place in the black community, and “suspects” were quickly arrested, charged, and convicted. Four men were arrested for the robbery, and a ringleader, Hudson Tillman, was identified. After police persuasion, he and three others confessed, but they all implicated a fifth, Paul Crump, who along with the others worked at Libby. Only four suspects were observed at the crime scene, and Crump proclaimed his innocence. His alibi was that he spent the entire day of the robbery with a prostitute. Crump was married at the time, and this alibi did not sit well with the predominately female jury, even though the prostitute testified on his behalf.

  A legendary police lieutenant, Frank Pape, known as “Killer Pape,” led the investigation. Paul claimed that Pape and his officers beat a confession out of him, but his court-appointed attorney, Bill Gerber, had him plead not guilty at trial, while Tillman and the others pleaded guilty and received short prison sentences. They all testified against Crump, who was found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

  Over seven years, Crump’s appeals wound through the courts. In the years before I met him, he had eleven appeals, fifteen different execution dates, and forty continuances.

  Crump’s account when I visited him was dramatic and convincing. I liked him, and I wanted to believe him. I also met the man in the cell next to him, a short, wiry young guy named Vincent Ciucci, who told me his story as well. He also claimed innocence, had been on Death Row slightly longer than Paul, and was scheduled to die sooner. On one of his cell walls, Ciucci had small photographs of his three young children, who had died in a fire that also claimed the life of his wife in a small house in an Italian neighborhood on the southwest side.

  At first, Ciucci was a hero for trying to enter the burning house to rescue his family when he came home from work. Later, an autopsy found that the wife and children each had bullet holes that had claimed their lives before the flames. Ciucci had recently taken out a life insurance policy on them, and he had a girlfriend. He was to die in the chair in three months. I became friendly with Vince, and I remember being in his cell one day when he pointed to the photos of his three dead children. Tears welled up in his eyes. “I could never have killed them,” he said. His emotions seemed real to me, which made me question my ability to evaluate Paul’s honesty.

  After another long visit with Crump, he again took my hand in both of his, looked at me directly, and swore he was innocent. I wanted to believe him.

  “Can you help me?” he pleaded.

  “I don’t know, Paul, but I’ll try.”

  Ed Warren was head of programming at WGN-TV, a youthful man in his late thirties. I told him about my meetings with Warden Johnson, Father Serfling, and Paul Crump.

  “Ed, there’s a great documentary film in this. We could save an innocent man from the electric chair.”

  He cut me off. “Billy, save your breath. We don’t make films here. We do ‘live’ television. Live!”

  It’s easier to surmount barriers when you’re young. There’s a long road ahead, with many side streets. The Crump case had taken hold of me. That I knew nothing about how to make a film, though I had directed hundreds of live television shows, wasn’t going to deter me.

  I had the idea that if I could pull this off, it would be a powerful story, a kind of American J’Accuse.

  Wilmer “Bill” Butler was a live television cameraman at WGN. In those days, TV cameras were large and weighty, mounted on wheeled pedestals that allowed the operator to raise or lower the camera, push it forward or pull it backward, with one hand. There was a turret for changing lenses, from wide to medium to close. Butler had the smoothest touch of any camera operator in town.

  The first time Bill spoke to me was over an intercom from a control room to a studio when I was still a floor manager at WGN. It was down time, and I was examining one of the cameras, trying to penetrate its mysteries. I didn’t know anyone was watching until I heard a stern voice over the speakers: “Will the floor manager please keep away from the camera?”

  It was not a question but a command. I was embarrassed, as though I’d been caught stealing. I knew that the technicians’ union frowned on nonunion members touching the equipment. I apologized to Bill, and we gradually became good friends. We shared a common love of film, and we each harbored a desire to make them one day.

  Red Quinlan, general manager of WBKB-TV, the ABC outlet in Chicago, was one of the founders of Chicago-style television. His programs—comedies and musical variety shows as well as talk shows—were locally oriented, inexpensive, and innovative. They often pissed people off, but he didn’t care. If he liked it, it stayed on the air. A believing Catholic and a Chicagoan forever, Red was a self-contained, fearless, optimistic man—no subterfuge, no bullshit. He loved to rat-fuck his competitors. His bosses at the network often had to contain him, but they never owned him, and they mostly stayed out of his way.

  Red’s offices were in the ABC Network Building next to the State-Lake Theater and across the street from the Chicago Theater, where you could see first-run movies and live stage shows. I sat opposite Red at his oversize desk. “So, kid, you ready to come to work for me?” he asked.

  “I’ve got something else I want to talk to you about.” I told him about the Crump case and my desire to make a film of it.

  He sparked immediately to the idea. “Why won’t they make it at WGN?” he asked.

  “They aren’t interested in films.”

  Red stood and paced the room, his hands in his pockets. “Well, it sounds like a damned good story. You know how to shoot a film?”

  “Sure,” I said, without hesitation.

  “How much will it cost me?”

  “I don’t know, let me do a budget.”

  “This is something my network might be interested in.” He went to a window overlooking the Chicago Theater and turned to face it. After a few seconds he turned back to me. “Okay. Get me a budget, and I’ll give you a quick answer.” We shook hands.

  Butler was enthusiastic about working with me on a documentary. We had to make the film on our own time, because we both had full-time jobs. I was again doing live shows for WGN-TV, and Butler worked eight-hour days plus overtime five days a week at the station. But like me, he wanted to learn how to make a film by making one.

  There was a camera equipment rental shop on lower Grand Avenue below Michigan Avenue, Behrend Cine Rental. It was a family-owned business run by the eldest son, Jack Behrend.
Butler and I explained what we wanted to do, and Jack told us what equipment we needed and gave us a low rental rate. He also showed us how to load and operate a 16-millimeter Arriflex handheld camera, and to achieve synchronous sound with the new (to the United States) Nagra tape recorder. The demonstration took about an hour. It was the only technical instruction Butler and I ever had in filmmaking.

  We worked on a budget one Saturday at the kitchen table in the apartment I shared with my mother on North Sheridan Road. I presented the budget to Red the following Monday. He had never seen a film budget, but it was simple and brief. We asked him for $5,500 to make a one-hour film, with no fee for ourselves.

  Red looked at it for maybe two minutes. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll put six grand in a secret account called ‘Project J, for Justice’ that only you can draw on. If you can make this film for that, go ahead. And if you make it for less, you can keep whatever’s left over.”

  I thanked him and told him I’d be in his debt for life.

  Butler and I rented the equipment and prepared the shooting schedule. I contacted a number of people involved with the case, including Paul’s first lawyer, William Gerber; Paul’s mother, Lonie; his new attorney, Donald Page Moore; the surviving Libby guard who had been pistol-whipped; and former police officers, among others.

  I interviewed Paul and Warden Johnson until I knew the details of the case as well as anyone. In searching for a way into the story, I felt I needed someone, possibly a journalist, to join my effort and interview the people who would appear on camera. About a year before I became involved with the Crump case, I’d taken a journalism course at the Chicago campus of Northwestern University, one night a week, for eight weeks. I thought briefly about becoming a reporter, as my career in local television was at a standstill. The course was taught by John Justin Smith of the Chicago Daily News, who had his own column and could write about whatever he wanted. I enjoyed John’s class, and felt he had imparted to me not only the principles of journalism but a taste for it. I also liked him, and he became another of my early role models.

  His father was the legendary editor of the Daily News, Henry Justin Smith, who in the 1920s and ’30s was Ben Hecht’s editor. Hecht later immortalized him as “Walter Burns” in his great play The Front Page, written with Charles MacArthur.

  John was a conservative, old-school beat reporter, and a tough-minded columnist. I didn’t know if he was for or against the death penalty, but I convinced him to accompany me to the county jail to meet Crump. My belief that an innocent man might be going to the electric chair, and my dedication in trying to prevent it, was what hooked him. Anyway, here I was, his former student, sitting in his cubicle, telling him about a young black guy whose life was at stake, and about possible police brutality, and I was willing to risk my future and possibly my personal safety to try to save the guy.

  “Billy,” he said in a quiet midwestern drawl, “don’t you know everybody on Death Row claims he’s innocent? Everybody! Ninety-nine percent of all the guys in jail will tell you they were railroaded.”

  “I think this guy’s different.”

  “Why? How do you know?”

  “I met him. I think he’s for real. His defense was botched from day one. Warden Johnson thinks he could be innocent and doesn’t want to execute him.”

  John came with me to the county jail, and we met with Paul in the warden’s office for two hours, after which John agreed to be my narrator/interviewer. We filmed without a script, but later, Fran Coughlin worked with me to create a narration track.

  The first sequence we shot was a re-creation of the robbery. The Chicago Stockyards were still in operation, and we were able to sneak in and make shots of the “robbers” driving through the yards to the credit union office. I had friends in the black community on the South Side, and I recruited them to play the robbers. To play young Paul, I went to Brooks Johnson, whom I met through Lois Solomon. Brooks went on to become a collegiate track star, and later coach of the women’s Olympic track team. He had never acted before. To fill various other roles, the Libby plant guards and the Chicago cops, I used the Garvey clan, a family of amateur actors, four brothers I met through Fran Coughlin.

  My idea was to re-create the crime, exactly as its details had come to light, and to show the difficulty the surviving guard would have had in identifying Crump’s voice under the circumstances. The style of the film would blend dramatic re-creations with interviews of people actually involved in the case. Without ever having seen a documentary, I set out to make one. “Facts” are often complex and in dispute. The film was consciously designed as a polemic to save Crump’s life—a court of last resort. The question was, How had the evidence against him been obtained? Was his alibi “believable,” and was it supported by other evidence? It’s doubtful he would have been convicted under the rules that apply today, let alone sentenced to death.

  We interviewed Warden Johnson, who spoke about Paul’s rehabilitation in the seven years he’d spent in the county jail. Bill Gerber, Paul’s first attorney, confirmed his story of the voice identification by the Libby guard, and told us he had instructed Crump not to make a statement to any representative of the state Attorney’s office unless he, Gerber, was present. Shortly after that, he was informed that confessions had been obtained from Crump and others. “It was not a fair trial,” Gerber said angrily. “And the U.S. Supreme Court agreed; they sent it back for retrial.” Then he added, “At the time I undertook this case, I believed Paul Crump to be innocent. At the time of his retrial and conviction, I believed him to be innocent, and I still believe he’s innocent!”

  Crump’s alibi was a problem, but I dramatized it, with his voice-over describing what had happened. He claimed he’d spent the previous night and the morning of the robbery with a woman named Fay Hinton. He and Fay went to sleep about 7:30 a.m., and in the early evening he met with a friend in the neighborhood named Eugene Taylor. On the night of the robbery, Taylor told him that a friend of theirs, Hudson Tillman, was the ringleader and was holding the stolen cash. Taylor and Crump planned to go to Tillman’s house and rob him. “That’s right,” Paul admits. “I was going to rob Tillman.”

  Taylor and Crump went to Tillman’s house, where they were arrested and held for three days at Twelfth Street Police Headquarters. The police had staked out Tillman’s house on a tip, but after being interrogated around the clock, Crump was released! On May 26, 1953, Tillman confessed, and named Crump the trigger man. The police, led by Lieutenant Pape, went to Paul’s mother’s house, where they rearrested him. Paul’s mother Lonie described the scene to me: “Paul was sick. The police roughed him up and ordered him to get dressed. Then they beat on him and dragged him out.” Lonie Crump burst into tears, describing these events.

  Shortly after we began filming, Vincent Ciucci’s final appeal was denied, and a date was set for his execution. I had come to know Vince well, so he invited me to be one of the thirty witnesses to his execution.

  We had to arrive at the entrance to the Cook County Courthouse by 9:00 p.m., on March 23, 1962. We were advised to arrive early to get a parking spot, because the streets would be crowded. People would park around the jail and the courthouse on the night of an execution just to watch the lights dim at midnight, when the execution was to take place. There were security guards waiting at the entrance to take us through the underground tunnel that led from the courthouse to the Cook County Jail. We huddled together in a bitterly cold mist of rain. The other witnesses were local reporters and friends of Vince. At a table just inside the entrance, we had to surrender our watches, belts, wallets, all metallic objects, and, of course, cameras. Our left wrists were stamped in quarter-inch red letters with “SAIN,” the name of the Sheriff of Cook County, Frank Sain, the man in charge of executions. Sain was a garrulous red-faced man with thick hands, thick glasses, and the hail-fellow-well-met attitude of a Chicago pol: big voice, big features, thinning hair. He enjoyed his job, and once bragged to me how he had the electric chair de
signed especially for the county jail. An exact two-foot replica of the chair sat on a corner of his desk, and he was proud of it. We thirty witnesses then walked through a long tunnel with several checkpoints along the way, where security guards examined our wrists to make sure we were all SAIN. We were escorted into a claustrophobic yellow-brick room with five rows of old wooden benches facing a corrugated metal screen, behind which was concealed the electric chair. The room was a few steps from death row. Four security guards faced us. We were anxious and alone with our thoughts, except for a big man in his fifties with a ruddy complexion wearing an old black winter coat and a rumpled fedora. This was Ray Brennan of the Chicago Sun Times, a hard-bitten veteran crime reporter; the best known and most knowledgeable of his colleagues. He paced off to the side.

  Suddenly two more guards entered the room and grabbed the handles of the large metallic screen. It rattled upward, shattering the silence. As the screen continued its raucous journey, the echo of its movement hung in the air, and behind a thick plate-glass window in a smaller room in front of us was the black enamel electric chair, silhouetted against yellow brick walls.

  Another long silence. Apprehension turned to fear. The chair looked like a squatting alien, its stillness belying its destructive power. There were gasps in the room, and Brennan stopped pacing. Behind the plate glass, from a door off to our right, we saw four new guards enter. They were escorting Vincent Ciucci, whose eyes were blindfolded. He was slouched over, and I could hear faint murmurs through the plate glass, which meant, since the room was soundproofed, that he must have been screaming at the top of his lungs. The guards guided him carefully to the chair. A strange ritual was about to take place. It no longer mattered whether Vincent was guilty or innocent; a helpless man was about to be sacrificed in a way that was supposed to be more civilized than the stake or crucifixion.

  The loud whimpering behind the plate glass persisted. A guard stepped on a foot pedal at the base of the chair, clamping metal restraints around Vincent’s arms. Another foot pedal, and ankle restraints snapped shut. A black metallic mask was placed over his blindfolded face, then an electrified pad placed on top of his head, at which point Warden Johnson appeared. He whispered something to Vincent, and looked at his wristwatch. A long pause. Then the warden abruptly signaled to a control room off to our left and out of view. We couldn’t see who was behind it, but I was told that three guards each had their fingers on control buttons, so that no one of them would know whose finger had caused death.