Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

Sometime after Caroline’s birth, they decided to place her in a care home outside the city, where she lived until her death in 2012. Whether they spoke of her to anyone, whether they visited her, and whether she herself knew what became of her family is unknown.

  Only one of Billy’s friends, Mike Bowling, remembered anything of Caroline. He recounted how he found the Carroll kids without their parents one day in their apartment, without supervision and without anything to eat. “This little girl was eating the ashes out of an ashtray,” Mike recalled. She would dab her finger in the ashtray and lick it off.

  Another cousin said the Carroll family came to visit them with little Caroline among them. Violet seemed upset at the prospect of having to give her only daughter away. This cousin remembered that Caroline seemed “different.”

  With his other friends, Billy never mentioned his sister.

  Despite his difficulties, Billy was savvy and enterprising. He had learned a bit of how the world worked through his time on the streets of Uptown. He knew there were easy ways to make money. Sometimes you even had to cheat or cut corners.

  Much like two other boys of his neighborhood, Phil Couillard and Dale Landingin, one report places Billy in the circle of an older gentleman who resold stolen bikes brought to him at his novelty shop called the Climax down in the Old Town neighborhood. More expensive bikes could be found up in the surrounding suburbs like Park Ridge and Evanston. By the early 1970s police had labeled bicycle theft in the metropolitan Chicago area “an epidemic.”

  The scheme didn’t run long. In 1972 the ring was shut down, and its leader arrested on grand theft charges.

  Billy maintained an almost obsessive lust for money. His father, Huey, later recalled to the newspaper that once Billy had grabbed a purse through the window of the El train as it rolled past the station platform. His take was $300 to $400.

  “He never actually picked my pocket or anything,” Huey later told a reporter, “but he was kind of clever and sometimes I’d let him talk me out of my money.”

  With or without money, Billy could find something to do all over Uptown. Fields and parks gave way to raucous games of fast pitch or basketball. In winter, they skated at Clarendon Park, or indoors at the Rainbo Ice Arena, where the Black Hawks sometimes practiced.

  If the public pools—like the one at Waveland Park or the one behind the firehouse on Wilson Avenue—were full, you could go east to the lakefront and jump off the rocks into the frigid water of Lake Michigan. “We drank and swam all night long,” Gene said.

  Just south of the neighborhood, if the boys had money, they could get into a Cubs game at Wrigley Field.

  As he got older, Billy developed an interest in fitness and athleticism. According to some accounts, he took inspiration from watching the 1972 Munich Olympics on television. “He was pretty vain about it,” Gene said.

  Billy haunted a range of gyms like the Sovereign Health Club—where a membership cost him about thirty dollars a month—or the local YMCA, where he often liked to swim or lift weights. As a result, Billy had a six-pack set of abs.

  His friends Randy Reffett and Sam Stapleton could often be found there too. “I called him a good friend because I got along with him,” said Clyde Reffett of Billy Carroll. “Got no problems with him. No fights.”

  But the prospect of fights drove all of them. Billy, Sam, Randy all became especially strong for their young age. Their siblings and friends often found them at the gym, lifting weights or boxing.

  “He was built like Mike Tyson,” said James Stapleton of his own brother, Sam. “At fourteen years old, he could bench two hundred pounds. But he had to. He knew he had to do that. He had to be strong to survive in that neighborhood.”

  The fact that these boys were friends isn’t surprising in itself. At times, with its many overlapping friendships, romances, or gangland alliances, Uptown—even the entire North Side—could feel like a small town.

  It was the conclusion of their journeys—for three strong, capable, and savvy boys to end up only feet away from each other in the spring of 1976—that seemed beyond chance or coincidence. A sick joke by a sad clown.

  When things got too tough, there were a thousand places and a thousand ways for a young boy to disappear in the neighborhood, let alone the city of Chicago.

  “I remember we used to have to come home when the streetlights came on,” Chris Reffett said, echoing a familiar adage about coming of age during the 1970s. “That’s how protective my father was of us.”

  If they were not home on time, their father expressed his displeasure through physical abuse, often beating them when they finally showed up.

  Despite their father’s strict watch over them, they often stayed away well after the streetlights had come on and gone off—sometimes even for several days. “We used to run away from home just to get away,” Clyde Reffett said. “We’d climb out of windows … None of us liked to be told what to do.”

  Looking back, Clyde believes he was the Reffett sibling that ran away for the longest duration—two and a half weeks, or so he estimates, when he was around eleven or twelve. “It was just something to do,” he said. “Get away from the neighborhood and just be free awhile. Not have to be around our parents’ dysfunctional alcoholic shit.”

  Since leaving Kentucky, their father was no better at controlling his anger. That said, his wife often fought back, once even taking a metal coat hanger and catching him through the mouth like a fish.

  At times, the Reffett boys tried hard to defend their mom from their dad. As the oldest, Randy often put himself in between them. “He took a lot of ass whoopings from dad, too, for sticking up for mom,” Clyde explained.

  When things became too much, Randy often disappeared. After a few days, he would always come home, but while he was gone, he and sometimes Clyde went down to Franklin Park, a little hamlet just south of O’Hare Airport. The Reffetts had friends there that would let them stay, often taking them dirt biking along nearby trails.

  Randy Reffett would often hang out on Mannheim Road, in an area known as “the Jungle,” where various gangs had inherited the territory since the days of Al Capone.

  Even when they were mad and needed time to cool off, Randy and Clyde would still phone home every now and then to let their mother, Myrtle, know that they were all right. No matter how long they were away, no matter how mad they were about whatever had happened back home or how nervous they were to see their father’s reaction when they finally walked through the door, the Reffett kids always came back.

  Samuel Stapleton, too, always came home, though there were many nights where he missed curfew. There’d even been some nights that had turned into mornings and days.

  “He would sneak out in the middle of the night and get arrested for curfew,” Randy Stapleton said. “Then he would go back out after my mom and dad thought he was in the house. But an hour or two later, the police would come, and they got him again.”

  In the Stapleton apartment, the flashpoint was often Sam and his stepfather, Bill Stapleton, who’d brought them up from Chicago for a better life away from poverty in Ohio. “There was always a fight at the house,” Randy Stapleton said. “It was always something going on with Sam. They were always fighting.”

  Oftentimes, and understandably, Bill would berate Sam for fighting with his brothers while the parents were gone. But other times, during family meals, Bill would yell at Sam—a growing fourteen-year-old boy—for eating too much.

  Bessie would try to put herself between the two, but sometimes she stayed out of it, which Randy Stapleton believes drove them apart.

  Still, Bill took care of Sam as his own. While there was always conflict between them—whether over Sam’s education, his eating habits, his fighting, or his late nights—Bill provided for Sam, and whenever he was gone for long, he was the first to lead the search to bring Sam home.

  “Was my dad a good dad to Sam, looking back on it?” Randy asked himself. “No, I don’t think so.” But Randy concedes that Bill w
as there for Sam when he needed him. “I can’t blame him for everything.”

  It was Bill who started combing the streets looking for Sam when he started sniffing glue or paint out on the street during one of his forays into the night. “He would pull him out from underneath somebody’s porch where he’s just completely out of his mind,” Randy recalled.

  Like other neighborhood kids, Sam and his friends often hung out at the Sunnyside Mall, a two-block passageway paved in 1974 as part of a city beautification effort. Within weeks it became a corridor for drug deals, shootings, and gang activity so notorious that even “police are afraid to go there,” according to a resident quoted in a Chicago Tribune article at the time.

  As Sam’s older sister, Juanita, walked through the mall one day, she found Sam there, his face buried in a paper bag full of fumes. She quickly grabbed the bag away from him.

  Angry and high, Sam stepped toward his sister, yelling at her to give it back. But Juanita wouldn’t have any of it. “Don’t you ever get in my face again, buddy,” she told him, and threw the bag in the garbage.

  By then, it was clear Sam needed help. His family took it seriously, as more frequently they could see that he was riding a cloud of fumes when he came home somedays. Unlike other parents, they recognized the problem and helped Sam see it too. Adding to her long resume of rabblerousing, Bessie protested local stores that offered easy access to glue and other chemicals.

  Not long after, Sam spent a short time at a drug rehabilitation center on Sheffield Avenue.

  “He realized he had problems,” his brother Randy recalled. “He was taking it seriously.”

  In Uptown, the abuse from Francisco Landingin Sr. persisted, though with additional family members hanging around it was harder for him to be alone with his children. Their lives began to diverge onto different paths, and the time they spent at home together dwindled.

  At this stage, the kids were in or approaching their high school years. Their outside activities and friendships bloomed; boys came to call for Denise and her sisters, and Dale started to flirt with girls.

  Sometime after Dale had been with Cindy Carrera during their time at Stockton School, he started dating another girl, a “blond Elizabeth Taylor,” as Denise described her. Dale would bring her to the apartment, telling Denise and their sisters to get out.

  Given the time frame, it’s possible it was the same girl Phil remembers he and Dale meeting one night at the Uptown Theatre where they worked as ushers but also sometimes hung out on their own to see movies.

  One evening, Dale, Phil, and a third usher encountered a pair of pretty girls who agreed to sit by them during the movie. On the sly, the boys drew straws to see which two of the three boys would get first dibs on the girls. Phil and the other usher won, leaving Dale out.

  After the movie, the girls followed the boys to the other usher’s car nearby. In the front, as he drove them around, the lead usher took one girl, while Phil took the other girl and sat in the back. Dale was the fifth wheel.

  Driving through Uptown, the girl with Phil whispered to him that she’d actually had her eye on the boy with the long dark hair. “I told her we were good friends, and I knew him well,” Phil recalled. He said to the girl, “He told me he liked you too.”

  When the car pulled into a gas station at Lawrence and Clarendon right before Lake Shore Drive and the lake itself, Dale and Phil switched seats. Dale nestled in closely to the girl.

  “He was a chick magnet, so what could I do?” Phil said.

  With that, they pulled out of the gas station and headed toward the lakefront. But as they turned sharply around a street corner, their car came upon another vehicle in a loud crash.

  As the shock and realization set in, the usher at the wheel began backing the car away from the crash, while the other car sat in place, stunned. Suddenly, they were flying back down Lawrence, back to the Uptown Theatre.

  “We have to ditch the car!” the driver told them.

  “Why?”

  “It’s stolen!”

  From that night on, Dale and his new girlfriend were together. Though it was not the idyllic, innocent fling Dale had previously had.

  Denise was home one day when she heard an urgent knocking on the door to the apartment. She went to open it and found the mother of Dale’s blond girlfriend standing there, visibly upset. With barely an invite to enter, the mother rushed into the apartment and began yelling.

  “She’s screaming, calling him names,” said Denise, who was the only one home at the time. Through frantic shouting, the girl’s mother explained that Dale had beaten up her daughter so severely that he’d put her in the hospital. Her mother had gone to the police and put a restraining order against him.

  One of the few times Dale and his best friend Phil Couillard fought involved the treatment of one of Dale’s girlfriends. Phil doesn’t remember all the details, but he believes it was around sex—when Dale wanted it, and his girlfriend didn’t.

  “I kind of intervened, because I think he started getting physical with her,” Phil recalled.

  “You can’t do shit,” Dale told Phil. “It’s none of your business.”

  Phil let it go, though things were still a bit tense between them. “I can’t say whether he hit her or not when I wasn’t around,” Phil said.

  Dale had naturally learned such behavior from Francisco. In his teenage years, he and his father would clash, arguing about the increasingly wayward direction Dale’s life seemed to be taking him. Many friends remember him working a range of jobs: movie theater usher, shoe salesman, and a Long John Silver’s busboy.

  But for the most part, as their children got older, Francisco and Dorothy had started to lose focus on their family as their own relationship continually got in the way. While Francisco remained abusive in many ways, Dorothy could no longer find a safe retreat in South Carolina. Around this time, Lucille died of cancer, and the granddaughter she’d been raising in Greenville—Dorothy’s daughter, whom Francisco had refused to take in—finally came up north to live with her other half-siblings. Even though her family had now grown, Dorothy had started finding quiet ways to rebel against the husband who had entrapped her at such a young age.

  Sometime before they moved into their house on Marshfield Avenue, Dorothy got a job working in a convalescent home across the street from their home on Lawrence. Previously, Francisco had not allowed his wife to work, believing himself to be the only capable provider, but also worrying that Dorothy would somehow escape. But in Uptown, Dorothy, like her children, enjoyed greater freedom and space to explore herself.

  Francisco worked as a taxi driver for Flash Cab; he was often away working long hours during the day or even at night. And without her husband waiting at home all the time, Dorothy found love with another man.

  Denise doesn’t remember specifically being told her parents were splitting up, but one evening, her mother just didn’t come home.

  With their older sister out of the family home on her own, Denise and her other siblings remained behind. But she and her brother were growing older too—around seventeen for Denise, and sixteen for Dale—and capable of making their own decisions. “Honestly, I don’t know how we got breakfast, lunch, dinner, and went to school at all,” Denise said of those days.

  Much like she does not remember one definitive moment when her parents separated and inevitably divorced, she does not remember when her family broke up, though these events occurred in close succession. One day, she and Dale were out the door and into the streets. Her youngest sister and half-sister were left behind for a time—though, not long after, her mother gained custody of them and took them out of the house, leaving Francisco alone in the family home.

  In Denise’s case, though, she had found a way out. Her sister’s husband had had a cousin from Mexico, Raul, who frequently visited the States. She had met him previously at a show before he’d had to go back to Mexico. When she was around sixteen, she ran into him on the street again, where he asked her o
ut.

  “I’m gonna take care of you,” Raul later told her.

  And for a time, she was gone.

  The family would never again be together, though for years they would still struggle to come to terms with Francisco’s abuse and its effects on their lives. For some of the family members, they’d never come to terms with it at all, and the siblings would drift even further from one another, wedged apart by the disputed memories of their father. And even their mother, who, as she pulled further away, turned to alcohol and drugs to help her deal with her pain.

  Denise believed it was her mother’s youth—when she met Francisco, and when she got pregnant the first time—that prevented her from developing a true maternal instinct. “We didn’t know that from my mother,” Denise said. “She didn’t nurture us. I don’t think she ever developed herself into an adult because of all the things that happened to her as a kid.”

  And yet in the middle of all those bad years, all the moments when Francisco—so small in stature—managed to take up so much space in their lives, there was still room for good times, warm moments when they might have felt like a family.

  There’s a series of family photos: the Landingin family goes to the beach during their time in New York, in the ’60s when the kids were still kids. In one, four of the kids stand with the ocean to their back, smiling tentatively at the camera. In another, Dorothy sits on a beach towel at the start of the boardwalk, which looms over them more like an abyss than a pleasant promenade for beachgoers. She has her arm behind a little girl—the youngest Landingin daughter at the time—who wears a bikini of pink ruffles. Dorothy’s smile is tentative, not fully at ease, secretive.

  In another photo, Dale stands in the sand in front of a row of shining cars, their blocky frames characteristic of the 1960s. He wears swim trunks the color of a robin’s egg and stands with his fists in the air in a boxing stance. The pose is prescient.

  None of the photos feature their father, the photographer, but his presence is evident, on their faces, in their expressions, in the positions of their bodies, in the implication of the amount of skin their bathing suits allow him to photograph.