Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions

by Wensley Clarkson

  If Eddie had to shout this loudly to be heard, then he’d probably alert the entire street when he went knocking on Clarence Benkowski’s door to announce his trick-or-treating surprise. But yet more problems lay ahead.

  When Eddie wandered up the street to the end of South Yale Avenue his heart sank. Dozens of school children were marching up and down the street in trick-or-treating disguises. It looked as if the entire population of under-15-year-olds in Addison had all decided to hit South Yale at exactly the same time.

  Eddie ripped off the mask in a fit of frustration and stood there in his white skeleton costume, jumping up and down on the spot. His two female accomplices looked at him with horror.

  ‘I’m not doin’ this. I can’t start shootin’ at the guy in front of all those kids. I’ll never get away with it.’

  Eddie abandoned the hit there and then. Judy was furious. She’d been dreaming about that ugly hulk of a husband being gunned down. Now Eddie Brown was ruining all her plans.

  ‘But you gotta do it, Eddie. You cut a deal.’

  But Eddie Brown had a new plan in mind.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Judy. I’ll kill that son-of-a-bitch. But not tonight. It’d be crazy and we’d all end up in jail.’

  Judy reluctantly agreed.

  ‘OK. But it’s gotta be soon.’

  Ring. ‘Where’s my breakfast?’

  Ring. ‘Come on, I’m goddam hungry.’

  Ring. Ring. Ring.

  Clarence Benkowski was providing his usual pre-breakfast performance. At least on this day his mother was away at a relative’s, so Judy didn’t have to put up with her as well. In the kitchen, Judy muttered quietly under her breath, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll get just what you deserve in good time.’

  If Clarence hadn’t been so lazy, he might have got up from the breakfast table where he was slouched and lumbered into the kitchen to witness Judy pouring the contents of twenty sachets of sleeping pills into his coffee.

  Instead he just kept on ringing that damn bell.

  Ring. ‘Move your ass, woman. I’m HUNGRY.’

  That last ring was the signal which would hopefully mark the beginning of the end of Clarence Benkowski’s life. For it helped Judy feel no guilt as she emptied the last of those packets and then swilled them around in his coffee. The more he rang the bell, the better she felt about killing him. It was a wonderful feeling – just to contemplate the end of her unhappy life.

  Just keep ringing, Clarence. Just keep ringing. Soon you’ll never ring again.

  Then Judy tipped the empty pill packets into the trashcan, before moving towards the dining area with a new spring in her step, a new bounce in her walk.

  ‘There you go, sweetheart.’

  She hadn’t called him that for years. ‘Sweetheart’ was a term of endearment. How could she have even contemplated feeling warmth towards this lazy, fat bully of a man she was about to murder. Yet a tingle of excitement and passion ran through Judy’s body as she put the tray down on the breakfast table. Then she sat down and quietly sipped at her tea, her eyes straining upwards and across the table towards Clarence. But he hadn’t even lifted the coffee cup yet.

  Clarence Benkowski was a predictable creature of habit. He liked to first gulp down his fried eggs, then stuff some crunchy toast into that big fat mouth of his. Then that cup of coffee would be lifted to his lips. Be patient. Relax. He’s going to drink it. All in good time. All in good time.

  The Chicago-Sun Times was spread across the table in front of Clarence, as it always was each morning. Something caught his eye. He stopped eating and gaped at the sports results.

  Not once in all their years together had he even uttered a word of conversation to Judy over breakfast. That was another of his most cherished habits. But that cup of coffee remained untouched. Judy’s initial excitement was starting to slide into desperation. Come on! Come on! Get on with it!

  She felt desperate. Maybe it was time for desperate measures.

  ‘Sweetheart.’ For some weird reason she used that word again. ‘Sweetheart, drink your coffee or it’ll get cold.’

  For a few seconds, Clarence screwed up his blubbery face and looked at his wife quizzically. She never spoke at breakfast. Why the hell was she bugging him to drink his coffee? Never before in more than 20 years. Why now? But, as with most things in Clarence’s life, he gave it no more than a brief moment of consideration. Any further analysis would have been totally out of character.

  Judy was angry with herself for weakening in the face of such adversity. She mustn’t try to make him drink his coffee or he might get suspicious. She didn’t dare look up again in case he caught her eye and saw those telltale signs of guilt.

  Judy was virtually shaking with anxiety. Maybe she’d blown it. Had he sussed her out? She shut her eyes for a split second in the hope all that doubt and anguish would simply go away.

  Then it happened. The unmistakable slurping noise was like music to her ears. She opened her eyes to see him gulping like a fat bull at a water trough as he tried to wash all that greasy food down his big, ugly gullet. At last, he was going to pay the ultimate price for his cruelty and greed.

  As he sucked that big coffee cup dry, Judy felt the rush of relief running through her veins. She sighed quietly to herself. She later admitted it was one of the most satisfying moments of her life.

  Seconds later …

  ‘I don’t feel so good. Think I’ll lie down a while,’ belched Clarence.

  The sleeping pills were already kicking in.

  The previous day, pint-sized Romeo, Eddie Brown had provided Judy with very precise instructions on how many tablets she should feed him. Just enough to knock him into a deep slumber rather than complete unconsciousness. That way, no one would be able to tell he’d been drugged.

  Clarence Benkowski got up and struggled towards the bedroom. He only just managed to get to his beloved waterbed before collapsing in a heap of rolling fat. A few seconds later, Judy crept into the room just to make sure he was out. Then she walked quietly back into the hallway and phoned Debra. ‘He’s asleep. You and Eddie better get over here fast.’

  Judy put the phone down gently and awaited her two accomplices.

  Debra was the first to turn up at the house. She hugged Judy warmly to show her good friend she supported her completely and utterly. The two women then walked into the front room and sat side by side on a sofa and counted the minutes until Eddie arrived. Eventually the back door opened with a creak and their hired killer walked in.

  In almost complete silence, Judy handed Eddie her husband’s World War Two Luger pistol and motioned him towards the master bedroom where the master lay sleeping on his waterbed.

  The two women then sat back down on the same sofa. Debra put on a pair of stereo headphones and began listening to heavy metal on her Walkman. She didn’t want to hear what was about to occur.

  Eddie had earlier said he’d use a pillow to muffle the sound of the gun, but that didn’t prevent Judy from hearing the thudding pops of three bullets being fired into her husband’s slumbering torso. She didn’t feel any great outpouring of emotion. Just a sense of relief that it was finally over.

  But there was more work still to be done. Judy and her two accomplices needed to make it look like a burglary that had gone wrong. All three began pulling drawers of clothes out and spread them all over the bed where Clarence still lay. Incredibly, the waterbed was still intact because all three bullets had embedded themselves in their target. Judy was disappointed in a way because she really hated that waterbed. But then it would have caused such a mess if it’d leaked everywhere.

  Meanwhile, Eddie continued smashing the place to bits so as to make it look like the house had been robbed. But all this was proving much more stressful to Judy than the murder of her husband.

  ‘No. Not the china, please,’ she begged him.

  Judy stopped Eddie destroying her vast collection of china memorabilia which she’d lovingly collected for many years. Eddie w
as irritated.

  ‘This is supposed to look like a robbery.’

  ‘Surely, we can still make it look good without wrecking my china?’

  Eddie shrugged his shoulders. Judy was paying him, so it was her decision.

  Before Eddie was to flee out of the back door, Judy had to hand over the first instalment of $1,000. She also allowed Eddie to take two rings from a jewellery drawer as a ‘bonus’. The rest of the cash would be given to him within a week. Seconds later Eddie had disappeared. Mission accomplished.

  After he’d gone, the two women embraced. They’d done it. They’d got rid of the animal. Now there was a big wide world out there waiting to be conquered. It was going to be the beginning of Judy Benkowski’s new life. But before they could leave the ransacked house, Judy checked down the street. It was mid-morning; husbands were at work, mothers were out shopping. Not a person in sight. They strolled casually out into the bright autumn sunlight.

  The Italian restaurant where Judy and Debra went to celebrate that lunchtime was so crowded that the only thing noticeable about them was that they ordered a bottle of very expensive white wine. Few citizens in Middle America drink alcohol at lunchtime so their toast to one another raised a few eyebrows.

  ‘To us. Long may we live without husbands.’ They chuckled before downing each glass in virtually one gulp. And it wasn’t just a new life of freedom that Judy was looking forward to; Clarence’s life insurance was worth at least $100,000 and then there was the $150,000 resale value of the family house.

  Judy Benkowski reckoned she was going to be a very merry widow indeed.

  ‘He’s been murdered. He’s been murdered.’

  Judy’s hysterical voice sounded very convincing to local police detective sergeant Tom Gorniak. He’d been patched through to the Benkowski home after Addison police station had received an emergency call from Debra and Judy, who’d just ‘discovered’ Clarence Benkowski shot dead on their return from a ‘shopping trip’.

  In a bizarre three-way conference call between the detective’s radio, the police station switchboard and Judy Benkowski, DS Gorniak tried to ascertain what had happened as he drove at high speed to South Yale Avenue to answer their emergency call. By the time he rolled up at the house, paramedics had already arrived. Gorniak found the two women weeping in the front yard, tried to console them and then got a uniformed officer to keep an eye on them while he carefully examined the crime scene before the police technicians arrived. Gorniak knew this was the best time to look around because everything remained untouched and exactly as it had been at the time of the murder. He was immediately puzzled by the way in which the victim’s body lay slumped in bed as if he’d been taking an afternoon nap. How could he have slept through the noise of an intruder who then leaned over him and fired three bullets into his head at close range?

  Burglars just didn’t usually do that sort of thing. Even in trigger-happy America burglars rarely used their weapons. Most professional burglars would get the hell out of a house the moment they were disturbed. So Gorniak quickly concluded that the victim was asleep when he was shot. He didn’t even have time to turn around and see his killer.

  Then investigator Gorniak noticed the clothes thrown from the drawers over the body. That meant the killer had ransacked the room after the shooting. It just didn’t make sense. He wouldn’t have bothered to do that, surely?

  Tom Gorniak had been a policeman for ten years and he knew only too well how dangerous it was to draw any conclusions at such an early stage in a murder investigation. But he was convinced this looked like a contract killing.

  Outside, he leaned into the squad car where Judy was sitting and asked her, ‘Did your husband have any enemies, Mrs Benkowski?’

  Gorniak tried to be gentle. After all, this was the grieving widow he was talking to, and she seemed to be really upset.

  ‘No,’ Judy replied through sniffs. ‘He had no enemies.’

  But Tom Gorniak had a hunch, so he persuaded Judy Benkowski to visit the police station with him that evening. He said he knew how bad she must be feeling, but it was important they went through a few details so that the killer could be quickly apprehended. Judy agreed. She didn’t want to seem to be hindering the police enquiries in any way. Soon Gorniak and his colleague Detective Mike Tierney were gently probing the widow for clues. They were already convinced she had a lot more to tell them about this case.

  Naturally, Judy started getting a little edgy. She had to tell them something so maybe a half-truth would keep them happy.

  ‘Now I remember, I did notice someone outside the house this morning,’ she recalled anxiously to the two detectives.

  Gorniak and Tierney raised their eyebrows. Why didn’t she mention this before?

  Judy then described in precise detail how she’d returned from her shopping trip with her friend Debra and they’d seen this rather short, stocky black man.

  ‘I think he was runnin’ away from the house,’ explained Judy.

  The two officers were even more puzzled. They began pulling in the reins. Both sensed that Judy Benkowski knew a lot more than she was admitting. Their next move was to haul Judy’s friend Debra Santana in for questioning. As the detectives waited with Judy for Debra to arrive, they tried an old and trusted police technique.

  ‘It would sure help us if you could tell us everything you know. How about we start from the beginning again,’ asked Tom Gorniak.

  Judy hesitated. She had a lot on her mind and she was starting to think that maybe the officers were well aware of it. Then she took a long, deep breath. ‘Well, I think I knew that black guy running away from my house. His name is Eddie Brown. He’s Debra’s boyfriend.’

  Tom Gorniak and Mike Tierney looked at each other and smiled. They knew they were about to hear a confession to murder. As Gorniak later explained: ‘After all that planning, Judy Benkowski went and gave it all away before her husband’s body was virtually cold.’

  In September 1989, Judy Benkowski sobbed uncontrollably as she was sentenced to 100 years in prison for hiring hitman Eddie Brown to murder her husband. Du Page County prosecutor Michael Fleming had earlier demanded that Judy get the death penalty, but Judge Brian Telander ruled that there were mitigating factors that ‘precluded the imposition of the death penalty’.

  These included no prior criminal record, numerous health problems and several character witnesses who testified on her behalf and told the court her husband was a lazy bully of a man. Prosecutor Fleming described the sentence – which meant Judy would not be eligible for parole until she was 97 – as ‘fair and appropriate. She claimed she wanted a divorce and he wouldn’t go along, but she never even talked to a lawyer about it.’

  On 31 August 1991, Judy married sweetheart Clarence Jeske at the Dwight Correctional Institute, in Illinois. The couple had first met before her husband was murdered but they both insist their relationship did not begin until after the killing. By a strange twist of fate, Jeske now lives in that same house where Clarence was murdered, in South Yale Avenue. He’s even been made legal guardian of Judy’s two children.

  Chapter Sixteen:

  EMERGENCY LANDING

  The noise of aircraft taking off from nearby Heathrow Airport every 30 seconds is the sound that dominates life in Hounslow, Middlesex, a sprawling concrete jungle of high-rise estates and tatty between-the-wars housing. Not surprisingly, property prices have remained low in Hounslow. It’s stuck in a no-man’s-land between the city and the countryside but in recent years has become a magnet for Asian immigrants.

  These hard-working people have opened numerous shops and businesses and live the sort of lifestyles many of them could never have achieved back in their homeland. And without those many hundreds of thousands of immigrants from countries like India and Pakistan, corner shops in the UK might have become a thing of the past, as the huge supermarket chains continue to swallow up customers at an alarming rate. In Hounslow, many of these small businesses stay open virtually all day and nigh
t providing their owners with healthy profits.

  The other reason why the Asian population in places like Hounslow has done such good business is that many shops are staffed by members of their own family. Wives, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers are expected to do their fair share behind the counter and many are already living on the premises. It certainly saves them a packet in wages.

  Mohinder Cheema was one such classic example of a successful Asian businessman in Hounslow. Since arriving in Britain in the Fifties, he’d gradually bought up an off-licence, two shops and numerous other residential properties at a time when prices were but a fraction of what they are today. But he liked to keep his success close to his chest. Even his attractive dark-haired wife, Julie, didn’t know exactly how much Mohinder Cheema was worth, even though they’d been married for many years and had brought up three children.

  There were times when 44-year-old Julie Cheema wondered why she’d married her husband in the first place because they seemed to have so little in common. Their romance and eventual wedding in 1985 had surprised both their families. He was the frail, yet astute millionaire. She came from a traditional British background.

  Julie later admitted she was attracted to Mohinder’s business acumen. He had a wonderful eye for a deal; an ability to make money out of nothing. She had seen him as ‘a good investment’. But that kind of attitude is not usually enough to keep a marriage intact. For there was another side to her husband that most women would find hard to cope with. Mohinder Cheema suffered from chronic asthma and frequently had to retire to bed when his breathing became seriously affected. As a result, the couple rarely had sex together after their children were born.

  Initially, Julie had been a very sympathetic nurse to her husband, but she gradually began to resent the constant interruptions to her life. And she longed for some passion in their marriage. So Julie Cheema started looking elsewhere for affection.