Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  In 1976 another boyfriend of hers, Lloyd, disappeared. Lloyd had battled drug addiction, spending time in rehab to try and get clean. He was eventually found dead of an overdose. “I know when they briefly opened his casket, I passed out,” she said.

  Both Cindy and Dale’s early lives were marked with difficulty. But for several brief months in the early 1970s, Cindy and Dale felt a young love that left an imprint on their lives. Some traces of that imprint still exist today.

  After graduation day 1973 at Stockton, some of Dale’s family even signed her yearbook, including his mother and a sister who wrote, “You must have something going for you … after all, my brother’s crazy about you.”

  Someone, possibly Dale himself, drew devil horns and a tail on his picture. At the back, he wrote several messages for her in his jaunty scrawl, including one:

  Yo, Cindy, my girl.

  I love you even though you might not love me. Remember me always.

  I was going to take up this whole page but I guess I won’t.

  Love always,

  Your Lover

  Frank W. Dale Landingin Jr.

  Ha!

  Ha!

  Ha!

  Danny Jockell found himself standing next to his friend Billy Kindred at the door to a high-rise apartment in Lincoln Park, where few people worried about their next meal or how to pay their bills.

  Billy Kindred, who’d brought him, knocked on the door. It was early evening, maybe six o’clock. There hadn’t been a plan exactly, they were too loaded on Southern Comfort at the time to have a clear one. The only objective was to get money, no matter how. The door opened. They went inside.

  The apartment belonged to a Chicago schoolteacher, a gay man in his thirties living alone. Danny doesn’t remember if Billy had called ahead to make arrangements, but it appeared from the start that Billy knew the man and where to find him. It was unspoken that the young boys were there for sex.

  Although they tried making small talk at first, they quickly became belligerent in their drunkenness, and the man asked them to leave. At that point, Billy and Danny revealed the true purpose of their visit. Irritated, the man told them he had nothing to hand over.

  Danny began tossing up the apartment, opening drawers and cabinets in search of valuables or cash, while Billy kept watch over the schoolteacher. The apartment was only a studio, but it was well kept and decorated.

  As Danny was busy ransacking—finding nothing of clear value—the man saw an opportunity and tackled Billy to the ground. Danny looked over to see the commotion and quickly came up behind them, throwing the man onto the bed and putting him in a chokehold.

  Fuming, Billy ran back into the kitchen and grabbed a butcher’s knife. When he returned, he thwacked it against the teacher’s head, splitting it wide open with blood. But it didn’t stop there. Billy had flown into an absolute rage, threatening to throw the man out the window, about seventeen stories above the street.

  Danny tried to intervene, putting himself between the teacher, Billy, and the pavement below. “It’s a good thing I was a bigger, stronger guy than Billy,” Danny remarked.

  As the chaos subsided, Billy and Danny, barely in control of the situation and still hammered, made a decision to simply flee. They both knew the teacher, still bleeding from his head, could identify them not only by sight but possibly by name.

  They ordered the man to take off his clothes to slow him down in case he somehow followed them after they’d fled. Then they cut the phone cords, using them to tie the man up in the bathroom. Last, they asked the man for his keys and the location of his car.

  Before they left, Danny took a towel and put it against the man’s head in an effort to stop some of the bleeding. He was fine for now, but there was no telling how soon he might get free and if he couldn’t, how long until he would bleed out.

  The boys hurried out from the apartment as calmly as they could.

  On the street below, they located the man’s car. To their surprise, the car sat exactly where he’d said it would be. Hearts pounding and still buzzed from Southern Comfort, they got into the car, started it up, and sped north back to Uptown.

  But the journey was not over.

  It wasn’t long before word reached the neighborhood that the police were on the lookout for Billy Kindred and Danny Jockell. Sometime after they’d left, the schoolteacher had gotten free and called the police. He knew enough about Billy to direct them to a suspect. The crime had happened in a more affluent neighborhood, and there’d be pressure for an arrest. The police would be on their trail soon.

  A day or two later, sober now, Billy and Danny knew they had to get out of town.

  With Danny’s girlfriend, Sherry,* they made plans to leave for California where they could stay with Danny’s older brother in Santa Monica. They’d lie low in hopes the police would forget about the robbery. But the evening had culminated in nothing short of attempted murder.

  They were sixteen, seventeen, and it could all be coming to an end. A wall of consequences had risen up before them, like the wall of traffic appearing in front of Danny on his way home in his Chevelle.

  After they’d gathered what they could, they went downtown to the Greyhound bus station where kids like them sometimes arrived from other corners of America in hopes of something new in the city of Chicago. Now they had to leave it all behind.

  By then, Billy was living on his own. Danny, too, lived with friends and rarely reported to his father. It would be easy to disappear.

  They put together what little money they had—money that, in happier times, would have been used for beer—and bought three tickets. They boarded the bus and headed west to California, the land of sun and sand and quite possibly a whole new life they might not even want.

  “We knew we were in big trouble,” Danny said,

  They spent a nervous few days crossing the United States. For Billy, it was one of the few chances in life he’d get to see something of the country. For Danny, he was passing through the Southwest, where he’d been born. They drove through canyons and alongside mountains, through deserts and plains.

  Along the way, they called Danny’s brother, Mike, from a payphone to tell him they were coming, though they never disclosed the reason for their trip.

  Arriving in Santa Monica, the boys had a happy reunion with Mike. Danny set aside his hard feelings that his older brother had left him and their other siblings to fend for themselves back in Chicago while he enjoyed the hippie lifestyle out west. For the moment, the Jockell brothers and Billy were all happy to see one another.

  Santa Monica in the 1970s was still the hippie haven it had started becoming the decade prior. Surfing and free love continued to find a home amid the palm trees and the beaches and the occasional movie star sighting.

  Mike lived only half a block from Venice Beach, and, without everyday responsibilities, the boys could spend as much time as they wanted tanning or swimming in the Pacific.

  But Mike hardly had enough money to provide for himself, let alone three equally broke teenagers. “We were just dead weight out there,” Danny explained.

  Another dynamic had also started developing inside the small Santa Monica apartment, as Mike began eyeing his younger brother’s girlfriend.

  “That was a temptation for him,” Danny explained, adding that his brother was a notorious “hound dog” with women. While Sherry was only sixteen—underage by California’s laws—and Mike knew the limits, he still recognized the desire bubbling up. “I started feeling old pent-up feelings of anger toward him,” Danny continued.

  Danny and Billy knew no one else could take them in, especially out in California. And back home, the situation had become dire. A friend had forwarded on a copy of the Chicago Police Department’s Daily Bulletin in the mail. Among the retirement announcements and missing person photos, they recognized their own faces staring back at them, wanted for burglary and attempted murder.

  By then, they’d been gone about two weeks from Chicago
.

  To make matters worse, they’d started hearing police helicopters passing over the buildings, searchlights slanting through the palm trees and shining through the curtains of the apartment. Most likely they were on the lookout for someone else, some other crime, but the prevalence and noise increased their anxiety.

  Billy made a decision then to leave California entirely. His mother, Lola, lived down in Florida with his stepfather. He could go stay with her, make up some story, and lie low. His own father lived there too. Maybe he’d take Billy in, and maybe they could even spend time together.

  With that, the boys parted ways, and Billy Kindred hit the pavement in search of a way from California to Florida.

  For a few days after Billy’s departure, Danny and Sherry stayed behind in Santa Monica to figure out their next move. Life in the town—with its beaches and surf shops—would have almost felt like paradise had it not been for the weight of their charges back home, and the tensions continually rising inside the apartment.

  Nevertheless, Danny and Sherry went about their routines, including trips to the nearby laundromat, where they found themselves on a seemingly mundane afternoon not long after Billy had gone.

  As they waited for their laundry to finish, Danny climbed up onto one of the machines to read a comic book as he waited. When the doors to the laundromat burst open, he looked up, almost unsurprised as a line of police officers flew in, guns drawn. Through screams and shouting, they ordered everyone on the ground.

  Danny and Sherry crouched down to the floor as police quickly zeroed in on them. When police pulled them to their feet, Danny presented them with a Social Security card he’d previously stolen, with the name “Grady Grant.”

  “Yeah, you don’t look like a Grady Grant, kid,” the officer told him.

  Both Danny and Sherry were cuffed and taken to Los Angeles County Jail. As soon as they arrived, they were separated. Since Sherry, a minor, had no connection to the crimes, she was quickly put on a plane and sent back home to Chicago.

  As he waited and worried in jail, Danny learned the circumstances around his arrest. His brother had been going through his jeans one day when he’d come across the crumpled-up bulletin with their wanted faces etched in ink.

  Mike had called their parents in Chicago asking them what to do.

  “Do what you think is best,” they’d told him.

  So Mike turned them in.

  With that, Danny Jockell was now on his own. He was two thousand miles away from home, seventeen years old and locked away in a jail cell with no hope of getting out.

  Leaving Stockton in 1973, Phil Couillard and Dale Landingin only briefly attended high school. Phil went to Senn High School for 1974, while Dale started at Lake View Academy, though he was briefly enrolled at Senn High. Not long into the school year, both boys stopped attending.

  “None of it seemed to make sense to me,” Phil said. “I didn’t know you had to know that shit to get any kind of degree, as I found out much later on in life.”

  The boys weren’t completely wayward during that time. The youth job corps program gave them jobs cleaning up local parks, and together, they also got work as ushers at the Uptown Theatre, where they served reheated popcorn in bags often eaten through by rats.

  Sometimes the boys even managed to catch a movie themselves. Before a film started one day, they each took a hit of acid. “I saw what appeared to be ghosts, all in white or gray,” Phil remembered vividly. “They appeared to be dressed in Victorian era clothing. Hats, boots, shoes, hairstyles. Dozens of them just walking across the front of the movie screen from one side to the other in a single row.”

  Phil turned to Dale and asked, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “What do you see?” Dale replied.

  Phil described the paranormal scene unfolding in front of him.

  “Walking in front of the screen?” Dale asked, as if confirming the same sight.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Phil said.

  As ushers, Phil and Dale often saw friends or neighbors from the area catching a movie. Many times, they watched as boys their age—clad in colorful gangland sweaters—streamed in to see kung fu films. Phil recalled a line of twenty to thirty Latin Kings coming in one evening without paying.

  “Come right in, no problem!” Phil and Dale told them, not wanting trouble.

  While they never officially joined a gang, the influence and lifestyle were part of their daily interactions and routines in Uptown.

  Behind the theater one day, Dale, Phil, and Phil’s brother looked up to see a Latino kid walking toward them.

  “Hang back a little bit,” Dale muttered. “I’m gonna walk up and talk to him.… If he comes up, don’t say a word.”

  When Phil asked why the extra caution, Dale replied, “He’s crazy, he beats people.… He always carries a gun.”

  As Dale went ahead, Phil and his brother did as he’d instructed and watched from a distance, trying to look nonchalant.

  Eventually the boy saw the Couillard boys and walked over. “You guys in a gang?” he asked.

  They said no but told him they’d gone to Stockton.

  “I went to Stockton too.”

  The conversation was minimal, but nearby, Dale had started fuming. As the boy left, Dale flew into a rage.

  “I told you, don’t talk to him!” Dale yelled.

  While the boy had also graduated from Stockton with them in 1973, he went by another name on the streets—Popeye, the Latin Eagle name he’d earned while building a reputation on the North Side. People knew him for two things: a notorious hatred of White people and the alleged murder of a high-ranking member of the Simon City Royals.

  Dale had managed to ingratiate himself with Popeye. For those who knew him, Dale’s ethnicity was hard to pin down. With a name like Frank, or Dale Landingin, he could dip effortlessly into any interaction with the White gangs; but with his darker looks, he could often pass for Puerto Rican or Mexican and hang with the Latin gangs, people like Popeye.

  Nevertheless, the boys often found themselves embroiled in conflicts alongside the gangs.

  Word came through one day that a local boy named Bill Bundy had been beaten up by some Latin Eagles at the Sheridan El stop. With a few kids including Phil, Dale led a group through the neighborhoods to the area around the Sheridan stop. As they marched farther west, the group grew until they numbered about twenty-five to thirty other boys, all looking for payback.

  They expected to find it at the YMCA on Wilson Avenue, an unofficial “clubhouse” for the Latin Eagles. When they arrived, Dale continued to take the lead, heading straight into the building and right up to none other than Popeye.

  The other boys watched as Dale and Popeye exchanged words calmly for a few minutes from behind a glass partition. Dale returned to his friends a few moments later. They’d decided against a confrontation, and Dale directed them to leave the YMCA.

  As Dale and his friends crossed an empty lot outside, they heard heckling from behind them. When they turned, six or seven of Popeye’s guys had stepped out and started yelling. “You punks ain’t got shit!” they called out to Dale and the crew.

  Dale broke away from the pack and grabbed a long pole that was left on the ground. He started waving it over their heads wildly. “Come and get it!” he called back.

  No one seemed to make a move. They could see guys coming out onto porches to see who’d come down into their territory. Gunshots cracked overhead, and Dale and the crew decided it was time to go.

  In the end, the slight against Bill Bundy—the kid who’d been beaten up by Latin Eagles at the Sheridan station—was never answered. He’d been a former student at Senn High School who’d dropped out to work in construction. For most of his life, he’d lived in the Buena Park area, not far from where Billy Kindred and Danny Jockell had grown up.

  On October 26, 1976, Bill Bundy went missing from the streets of Uptown.

  US Marshals arrived at the Los Angeles County Jail
a little over a week after Danny Jockell was arrested in Santa Monica. His extradition papers home had finally been drawn up. From there, they put him on a flight back to Chicago, his first ride on an airplane.

  Along the way, the marshals allowed Danny to order a beer, even joking with him, “We’re having a nice vacation. After we drop you off, we gotta go pick Billy up in Florida.”

  Billy Kindred had indeed made it all the way to Florida. No one knows for sure what happened along the way or how long it might have taken, but whatever transpired, by the time Billy got there, he was exhausted.

  Defeated, maybe a bit guilty, he turned himself in at the “first police station he found.”

  In Chicago, Danny traded one cell for another at the Cook County Jail. A judge set his bond at $20,000.

  Before the crime, Danny’s relationship with his parents had been precarious. His father had been absent as a workaholic, his mother absent as an alcoholic. Danny had even spent time in a foster home for a while. Nevertheless, now his parents rallied around him.

  With only $2,000 on hand, Danny’s father spent most of the day trying to reduce his bond and get him out. When he was finally freed at around eleven o’clock that evening, in the middle of a blizzard, he and his father found a nearby bar to share a beer together.

  Of course, there was a frank conversation about Danny’s future, but his father was also sympathetic and supportive. In fact, his father had found out about the car wreck—the entire catalyst for Danny and Billy’s odyssey. While Danny was gone, his father had had the car repaired. The Chevelle would ride again.

  The next time Danny saw his friend, Billy, they were standing in front of a judge inside a Cook County courthouse.

  While the boys faced trial together, Danny had his own lawyer, a hotshot attorney who’d allegedly been involved with the Chicago Seven, and who showed up to court, saying, “Don’t worry about it, I got ya taken care of,” as he breezed past in a full-length fur coat to speak with the prosecutor. Danny’s mother, who was then trying to get sober, had managed to retain the attorney.