by David Nelson
Aside from the urban perils of daily life in the neighborhood, the situation inside the Landingin home had changed too. By 1963 the Landingin family had four kids inside their small apartment: one boy and three girls. Even without the space issues of the apartment, Francisco Sr. struggled to pay monthly rent and make ends meet in general for his family.
A lifeline came during a phone call with Pablo, or Paul, Francisco Sr.’s uncle who lived with his wife and children on the North Side of Chicago in a neighborhood called Uptown. Paul had come over from the Philippines in 1929, working as a busboy and waiter until he had saved enough money to buy a three-story apartment building on Lawrence Avenue.
“We’ll give you a place to live,” Pablo told Francisco.
In 1969 the Landingin family packed their things into their station wagon and drove west.
For Denise and Dale, the difference between Brooklyn and Uptown was immediately noticeable, despite both neighborhoods suffering from similar problems. The paltry freedom they’d been allowed in Brooklyn was now greatly expanded by their parents in Uptown.
“Me and my brother went berserk,” she said. “It was music, it was friends, it was sleepovers.”
As they approached their teenage years, the older Landingin children found themselves cutting class and even hitchhiking. “It was a very different time,” Denise said. “It was fun, it was free.”
Two of Dale’s friends came to the Landingin home one afternoon, banging frantically on the door. Dorothy went to answer it, finding two frantic little boys, yelling, screaming, “Dale’s dead! He’s dead! They ran him over at the gas station.”
“My mother fainted, collapsed,” Denise said, remembering how they left her in the apartment to go see for themselves, flying down Lawrence to the gas station at the corner before the road veered toward the lake.
But when they arrived, Dale was standing there, intact, healthy, and laughing hysterically. His family berated him for his cruelty. “That’s the kind of jokester he was,” Denise said of her brother’s devilish flair, his flirtatious fascination not just with girls, but the same kind of peril they’d first glimpsed in Brooklyn.
Later, at the same gas station, a car would eventually run over his foot, this time briefly requiring a cast. Throughout his life, Dale Landingin would walk the tightrope act of life and death wherever he lived.
The first time came when he was very young, well before Uptown, when his family was back in South Carolina, living with their grandmother Lucille, or “Granny.” Their mother had brought the kids there to get away from Brooklyn for a time. His sister Denise remembered playing with her brother in the rain one afternoon on Lucille’s property out in the countryside.
Near the house, a ditch had been dug, and the two kids watched as it filled rapidly with muddy water. As it did, they extended their feet over the hole, laughing and daring each other not to fall in.
Denise turned away just for a moment, and in that space of time, her brother’s laughter went silent. When she turned back, he was floating face down in the ditch, rainwater rippling all around him.
Denise screamed, but it was Granny who flew out from the house and into the rain.
Lucille lay beside the ditch, stretching downward into the water to reach Dale. Denise watched, petrified, as her grandmother lifted her brother’s body out from the water. Her brother emerged alive, sputtering and retching, gripped tightly against his grandmother’s body. This image was forever seared in Denise’s mind.
There would be more of these moments, in Brooklyn and in Uptown, bringing him closer and closer. Even by the loose standards of the 1970s, when there were far fewer rules and safety protocols in place, Dale Landingin’s many brushes with death stand out. In his short life he defied death, until one day he couldn’t.
Billy Kindred had seen how death could come quickly to anyone. After the drowning of his younger brother, Michael, Billy struggled to find a direction in his life. Those who knew him don’t remember Billy Kindred continuing school after Michael’s death. He did not attend school in Ohio for the brief time he lived there, and by the time he’d returned to the city, he was about sixteen, and too much time had passed for him to pick things up.
Without his mother, Lola, directly providing for him, Billy was on his own. His siblings had started their own families or left Chicago, so now he was at the mercy of whatever friend could give him a spare room or couch to sleep on. For a time, he stayed with Herman, a mutual friend he shared with his best friend, Danny Jockell.
For a time, things seemed to work out well between the two of them. But during the winter of Billy’s stay, Herman came home to find many of his possessions—including some guns—missing. Also gone from the apartment: Billy Kindred.
Sometime later, during a winter storm, Danny was sitting in a parked car with Herman when they saw Billy walking by. Danny called out to him, and Billy happily came over. As Billy reached the car, Herman emerged from the other side—Billy hadn’t seen him sitting next to Danny inside the car.
Standing in the falling snow, Herman accused Billy of stealing from him. Billy tried to make excuses for what had happened but did not deny it. It wasn’t good enough for Herman, who decked Billy in the face. They left him there, bleeding in the street as snow came down fast and thick. His best friend, Danny, had not intervened; this was between the other two boys. They could not fight each other’s fights.
While Billy continued to struggle to find work, things for Danny Jockell eventually turned for the better. Ever since moving from Phoenix, Arizona to Uptown, the situation for him and his six siblings had been difficult. While Danny’s father was a good provider, he was also a workaholic rarely spending time at home.
As for his mother, it was not unusual for Danny to walk home from school and find her passed out drunk in the doorway of a bar. Once or twice, Danny and Herman had to carry her home. “She’d come home once every week, once every ten days,” Danny estimated.
Like Billy, Danny ran into trouble with the local cops and neighborhood gangs. Danny remembered an incident when he and his friends were standing out on Kenmore, yelling at a neighborhood man and his wife as they went into a transient hotel together. After they had gone inside, the man came out alone to confront the boys. One friend—a boy named Jerry with Inuit background—approached the man with a baseball bat, hitting him three or four times. Eventually, an ambulance came to shuttle the man away.
The next evening, Danny and Billy found themselves in another confrontation as a random stranger came up to them on Kenmore Avenue looking for a fight. The man got so aggressive that a passing friend across the street pulled out a gun to help defend them.
Bullets flew through the air, landing all around them, including one in Danny’s leg. As Danny went to the ground, the stranger took off, unscathed. But Danny was badly wounded and in need of hospital care.
His friends quickly drove him to a hospital, where he found staff busy with an excess of patients that evening. “They didn’t have any rooms available,” Danny said, so he was forced to wait out in the hall on a stretcher, bleeding from his leg.
He waited forty-five minutes, before giving up. He was hurt, but not dying. And besides, he was sort of drunk and wondering what his friends were up to. “I got up and limped on home,” Danny said.
When Danny got back, Billy and their friends were surprised to see him, but Danny brushed it off, and they started drinking more.
In the sober light of morning, Danny’s leg ached. He realized the wound had gotten worse. Once again, his friends drove him to the hospital. This time, he knew he had to stay, waiting until they finally put him in a room with another patient, separated only by a thin curtain. That evening, his roommate began yelling incoherently from his bed. Danny realized it was the neighborhood man his friend Jerry had sent to the hospital.
Nervously, Danny asked the nurse for another room, fearing the man would recognize him as one of the boys from the incident. She assured him the man would not know w
ho he was. The man was in a near-vegetative state as a result of his injuries.
Sometime in about 1976 or ’77, Danny managed to find a job out in the northern suburb of Northbrook. His father had even bought him a new forest-green 1970 Chevelle Malibu for the commute. “I was feeling good about myself,” Danny reflected. “I was getting away from the drugs and the crime and making my dad proud of me.”
After work one evening, as Danny drove down the Edens Expressway on the western side of the city, he turned his gaze from the road just briefly. In that short moment, a wall of traffic appeared up ahead at a standstill.
Danny noticed in time to punch the brakes and save his life, but the Chevelle smashed into the car stopped immediately in front of him. The entire front end of Danny’s car was reduced to a crumpled tangle of metal and glass. Everything that had been going for him had suddenly gone to hell.
Without insurance to cover the damage, Danny tried his best to keep the wreck from his father. “From that time on, I started going nuts,” Danny explained. “I started drinking heavily, trying to think of a way to get that car repaired without my dad finding out.”
After too much Southern Comfort one evening, Danny and Billy started discussing ways to get out of his jam. Billy was industrious and shrewd, and it didn’t take long for him to come up with something.
“Between him talking in one ear like a little devil on my shoulder and Southern Comfort on the other shoulder, I did not make a good decision,” Danny said. The two friends took one last swig of whiskey and, with Billy leading them, went south, to the neighborhood of Lincoln Park for a way to change both of their fortunes.
“It turned out to be a pretty ugly scene.”
Phil Couillard also graduated from Stockton that day in June 1973. He remembers another summer day in around 1971, when he met his best friend, Dale Landingin, at a pool party, though not in Chicago.
Many years earlier, after a bad fall from a ladder left him with a broken back, Phil’s father had started using drugs to alleviate the pain of his injuries. “I know I saw him shooting up heroin,” Phil said. “That’s about my last memory of him living with my mom.”
After the divorce, both parents were unable to take care of Phil and his siblings. His mother had children from other relationships, but his father had started moving around rehabilitation facilities to try and get clean. The kids did as best as kids could do to take care of one another, “eating crap like white bread and sugar sandwiches and Kool-Aid for dinner for a while,” in Phil’s words.
Eventually, the police and child welfare services intervened when they found the Couillard children without parental supervision late one evening. Phil’s mother agreed to send them to live with their father at Gateway Foundation’s house in Lake Villa, a ritzy town about fifty miles north of Chicago near the Wisconsin line, where house residents were sometimes allowed to bring families.
Upon arrival, the Couillard kids found a spacious mansion on a peninsula wedged between Fox and Petite Lakes and surrounded by an expansive acreage of forest and marshland. Formerly owned by coal baron, J. K. Deering, the house—with its fourteen bedrooms, ballroom, boathouse, and swimming pool—had been sold to the state, then to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin, who’d converted the property into a getaway retreat for girls. In the late 1960s, it was sold again to Gateway Houses Foundation, a therapeutic rehabilitation organization operated by former addicts.
During the day, the kids ran through the fields, swam in the lakes or pools, went fishing, or explored the house. On a summer day around 1971, Phil remembers a birthday party for one of the residents’ kids. Phil and his siblings joined the party, splashing in the pool, running through the lawns, or eating cake. Sometime during the day, Phil and one of his brothers noticed a dark-haired boy struggling and choking in the pool. Despite a sea of adults around them, the boy continued to flail unnoticed until Phil’s brother leaped in and pulled him to safety.
Maybe it wasn’t as close a brush with death as he had had previously—or would have again—but it was a glimpse. Once he was safely at the side of the pool, the boy introduced himself as Dale Landingin from Chicago. He was there with his father and some of his siblings for the birthday of his cousin, a resident at the house.
Phil figured they’d never see him again. At the end of the day, Dale went back home, and Phil and his siblings stayed behind to continue life at Gateway House.
Not long after, Phil’s father moved them back to the city, where they stayed briefly in another smaller, less expansive Gateway House. By then, Phil’s father had married their stepmother, a woman from the program with her own children in need of care. The new family made the decision to leave Gateway.
From a fellow resident, they heard about an available apartment in Uptown, on Lawrence Avenue. It would be spacious enough for the combined family.
Living above them was the Landingin family, some of whom they’d seen before. Once more they met the dark-haired boy from the pool, living just a floor away.
But Dale and Phil didn’t become friends right away. “At first, we weren’t even that compatible,” Phil remembered. “I didn’t like the fact that he was kind of pushy and aggressive.” Phil figured it was Dale’s days in Brooklyn that made him opinionated and stubborn.
Nevertheless, a friendship grew between Phil and Dale. When the boys weren’t indoors—which was rare anyway—they played softball and football in the nearby parks. But even normal sporting activities came with risks for Dale.
Phil can still see Dale running toward the edge of McCutcheon Park toward Sheridan Road, turning back to catch a football coming at him in midair. While Dale caught the ball, he went too far into the road and caught the edge of a passing bus, clipping his leg and sending him to the ground. Although Dale ended up only with a broken leg, it was another close call, his orbit around tragedy tightening just a little bit more.
Their friendship deepened at Stockton, graduating together in 1973. Outside class they went to concerts at the many music palaces of Uptown, rocking to the sounds of Aerosmith, Golden Earring, and Supertramp.
In later years Phil remembered unsuccessfully trying to get Dale into a Led Zeppelin concert. Though Dale didn’t miss much. Five songs in, Jimmy Page was too sick or drunk to go on, and the performance fizzled out.
Many moments of their friendship were documented through photographs over the years. On the day Dale and his family moved to a house on Marshfield Avenue, Dale and a bunch of neighborhood boys took a picture inside the moving truck surrounded by boxes. Phil sits on the floor of the truck with his neat blond hair, leaning against a box where Dale sits perched. Another boy with a large afro hangs in the back. Later, he’d marry Dale’s sister Denise.
There’s another of Phil and Dale in a photobooth several years on. Phil, at the forefront with his unkempt blond hair, eclipses half of Dale’s face as they cram inside. Both have shaggy hair and crumpled cigarettes angling out of their mouths. Phil holds his through clenched teeth, but Dale looks as if he can barely keep his in against what seems to be an imminent laugh.
Phil and Dale continued to argue, as friends always do, even after they’d gotten close. “I remember one time we were talking about murder,” Phil recalled. “Dale said, ‘There’s no way you could kill someone and get away with it nowadays. The cops will catch you.” But Phil disagreed, replying, “You don’t really believe that, do you?” Phil cited the mafia as an example.
Dale insisted no murderer could cover up his crimes from the police for good. They would always get caught.
Phil let it go. “I guess his beliefs were his beliefs, and if you disagreed with him, he’d say you were wrong, and he was right.”
Dale’s relationship with Cindy Carrera had started going through a transition as well. While it had been exciting and felt like genuine love, Dale and Cindy Carrera spent time away from each other that summer between seventh and eighth grade. Another girl, Cindy said, had been waiting in the wings for Dale.
During their final year at Stockton Upper Grade School, Cindy and Dale found their way back to one another. They hadn’t forgotten each other, or how they’d felt. Soon, they were boyfriend and girlfriend again, walking hand in hand through the halls, meeting up after the final bell and heading off into the city.
As a sign of affection, Dale gave Cindy a rosary he’d received as a baptismal present as an infant. She held onto it like a talisman, carrying it around the neighborhood and back home with her. On one occasion, she found herself playing with it absentmindedly in the park where she lost it somewhere in the grass. She found it sometime later, but the rosary was destroyed. She never told Dale, but later, she felt an eerie premonition about it.
Cindy relished the moments she had as girlfriend to the “cutest boy in school.” Sometimes they found time alone too, though as thirteen-year-olds, it was hard to come by.
Once, they stole away to Dale’s bedroom on Lawrence Avenue, making out while Roberta Flack sang “Killing Me Softly with His Song” on the radio. When they finally emerged from the bedroom, Dale’s sister teased them.
But as 1973 slipped into summer once more, the kiss they’d shared in the sunlight outside Stockton began to wear off like it had the previous summer. Inevitably, like all love at that age, it began to fade. Things were only going to get harder. In the fall, Cindy would go to Lane Tech High School and Dale to Lake View Academy.
Cindy doesn’t remember ever breaking up with Dale officially. There was no fight, no tearful kiss, not even an amicable good-bye. They simply drifted apart, stopped talking, and then tacitly agreed they were no longer together.
Though they’d see each other again, Dale would find other girls to love. Cindy, too, would find love again, but she’d also find tragedy.