Murder in Canaryville

by Jeff Coen

  Sherlock kept flipping through the file. On June 1 officers picked up two teenage sisters with the last name of Padilla and wrote a memo for Lieutenant Curtin. The older girl was eighteen, and the party on Throop had been for her birthday. Officers apparently asked them to name everyone they could think of who would have been invited or who showed up anyway, information that would have provided a good starting place for detectives.

  The sisters named the boys who appeared at the party, listing them by the park they hung out at. “From McGuane Park:” the report stated, followed by a list of twelve names. The third name listed was Rocky LaMantia, and Costello was fifth.

  On a list of girls’ names was Mary Mestrovic, as well as LaMantia’s girlfriend Martha DiCaro. There was no mention as far as the sisters knew of anyone having a gun at the party. And the interviewer made another note in the memo. “Mary wasn’t drunk,” the writer had typed after talking to the girls.

  Sherlock kept turning pages over. There were handwritten notes that appeared to be the results of other interviews with teens who had been moving around after the party the night of the shooting. The notes didn’t specify whether they were written by Gorman or other detectives at the time. There were scrawled accounts of memories of hurled insults and who went where in which cars after the Throop party. A white LeSabre. A brown Cutlass. A brown Duster.

  Sherlock’s eyes flitted across the staccato lines of supplemental reports filed by officers forty years earlier, the kind that had clearly been banged out on real typewriters. One was from the end of June 1976. So some six weeks after the shooting, there were detectives who still were trying to take the Hughes case apart. A few of the names had changed. One report noted that a police investigator “T. Strong” had gotten an anonymous tip about where the gun used in the Hughes case could be found, but it had gone nowhere.

  The same report also noted that police had started having some teens sit for lie detector tests, with most not being useful. And then, at the end of the same report, was another note, not about a polygraph but about a brief interview. The subject was a teen who was the girlfriend of a youth named Paul Ferraro, another name Sherlock had seen here and there in the file. Apparently the note was made as a possible alibi.

  “She related in summary that Paul had been with her all night with the exception of approximately fifteen minutes where he left her sister’s house to get a sandwich at approximately 2330 hours,” the report read.

  Sherlock stopped. So a teen who had drawn at least some interest by police had been unaccounted for not long before the shooting? And the story was that he had left where he was at 11:30 PM—to get a sandwich?

  He kept reading. “She further related that he then remained with her until approximately 0200 hours when they left together for Indiana,” the note ended. So this same teen had then left the state, just forty minutes after Hughes was pronounced dead?

  Sherlock was having trouble believing what he was seeing. Where was all the paperwork on this lead? Could it still be explored?

  Sherlock knew he was going to try. He set out to find members of the girlfriend’s family, who he hoped were still living in Bridgeport. His desire to find them only intensified when he learned from the paperwork what car Ferraro often drove.

  A green Chevrolet.

  There was one teen who was definitely not sitting with any police officer for a lie detector test.

  There in the Gorman file was a letter from a lawyer named Anthony J. Onesto, on letterhead from his Loop office on Randolph Street. He was already a lawyer of some note and would go on to represent organized crime associates and corrupt politicians, among others. The letter was addressed to Lieutenant Curtin and was regarding one Rocco LaMantia.

  LaMantia had already taken a polygraph exam, Onesto wanted the police to know, and that was going to be that. He was only writing because of the “fine reputation” of Curtin’s officers.

  “I trust that you and your men will continue to enjoy the fine reputation you now have with the defense bar in this area and honor my rigid demand that you no longer question my client about the Hughes killing—or any other matter,” Onesto wrote. “Any attempt to interview him further, particularly by picking him up and bringing him in for questioning, will be regarded as a violation of his rights, both as enumerated in the United States and the Illinois Constitutions. I am aware that Mr. LaMantia has already been interviewed at length by members of the Chicago Police Department.”

  Sherlock was left scratching his head yet again. If that was true, where were those reports?

  Onesto had kept writing. “Lest there be any misunderstanding, when I say I do not want Mr. LaMantia questioned, I mean both personally and by any other means. Nor are his parents or other members of his family, who I also represent, to be questioned. I trust that no contact whatsoever will be made with any of the above parties.”

  So apparently Onesto’s order for the Chicago Police Department had included Rocco’s father Joseph “Shorty” LaMantia, the reputed mobster. Maybe detectives had gotten the message.

  Onesto was nice enough to include the polygraph results for police. And that sheet also had made it to the Gorman file. The test had been performed by something called John Hancock Investigations, a subsidiary of the John Hancock Detective Agency, the letter said. Its logo was the familiar scripted name of the famous president of the Second Continental Congress who made sure King George could read his oversized signature on the Declaration of Independence, and who clearly was not running a detective agency in the 7500 block of North Harlem Avenue.

  In the letter were the results of the LaMantia lie detector session. LaMantia had been asked seven questions, the letter said, and the “zone of compairison [sic]” method had been used. The questions were then listed, though they carried no question marks:

  Is your true name Rocco LaMantia (yes)

  Were you present at the time John Hughes was shot (no)

  Do you suspect someone of shooting John Hughes (no)

  Do you know who shot John Hughes (no)

  Do you know whose car was used in the shooting of John Hughes (no)

  Did you shoot John Hughes (no)

  Are you withholding any information from the police regarding the shooting of John Hughes (no, I’m not)

  “There was no psychological stress indicative of attempted deception on Mr. LaMantia’s examination, other than in question #7,” the John Hancock examiner wrote. “It is possible that he may be in possession of information regarding this shooting. However, let me stress to you that this may be as a result of ‘outside issues’ involving this particular shooting or merely as a result of his feelings toward the police in general.”

  Sherlock stared at the paper. So not only had LaMantia been allowed to submit his own polygraph results, they had included the part where he apparently didn’t answer question seven completely truthfully? And that had triggered no alarms for anyone looking at the case?

  Sherlock made sure he wasn’t overlooking some pile of reports on leads related to LaMantia and any alleged alibi he had for the night of the shooting. He counted the pieces of paper he had that showed all the effort that went into figuring out the full timeline of where the teenage son of a Chicago Outfit figure had been the night of the shooting: none.

  LaMantia had been at the party where the night’s events apparently started. And he had quickly lawyered up and refused to cooperate.

  6

  THE EYEWITNESS

  Mary Mestrovic Murrihy was hesitating.

  She sat at a dining room table in the home of Ellen Hughes Morrissey, John Hughes’s sister. It was a place where maybe she could find enough comfort to do this again. The pathway through her dark memory of John’s shooting and its aftermath was laid out before her one more time. People kept making her walk it.

  Mary had the appearance of an older lady from her neighborhood who might be better suited to a bridge club than acting as a murder witness. She had clearly dealt with enough nonsense in her day
and wasn’t eager for more. This time there was a tape recorder, which she did not care for, but she agreed to speak anyway.

  She was angry, as much as someone like Mary might express it in her slightly reserved way. And there was a sense of bitterness that she had lost a friend this way and that her life had been so marked by it.

  Mary had no interest in taking the focus away from John, she said nervously. She was protective of him, even more than forty years later. They talked about how unusual it was that John would find himself in harm’s way, which brought a reaction from Mary. Other teens were closer to the car, she said. John wasn’t carrying a bat. “There were a lot of people at the park, and it wasn’t anything specific to John,” she said, seemingly protecting him again.

  Ellen sat at the end of the table with her husband. She was in seventh grade when she lost her brother, who was the seventh of eleven kids in the Hughes house in the 500 block of West Forty-Fourth Street in Canaryville. As they spoke, the women were just blocks away from that family home.

  Ellen’s memories brought laughter and a momentary release for Mary. The family had shared a single bathroom, and their grandmother had lived downstairs. Family life was as crazy as anyone would imagine in those circumstances, Ellen said, but their parents kept order. “I thought that’s how every house was,” Ellen said. She recalled her red-haired, six-foot brother as a sort of prototypical Irish American kid from Chicago. Sports were a love, but he had brains too. College surely would have been his route. There had been some dating, though that wasn’t such a major part of his life. For Mary’s part, they were just friends.

  Mary was the first to bring up the park. They were there all the time. “It’s what we did,” she said. “Played volleyball, softball, whatever was happening there.”

  The night John died, she had been with him at the party on Throop first. She remembered some of the boys having words over a girl, and they decided to leave. Heading to the park was just the natural next thing to do, and lots of other kids were milling around there.

  The look of the park had of course changed in all the years after the shooting. And because she had stayed in the neighborhood, the park had stayed in Mary’s life. She had been by it “a thousand, million times.” On the north end was a field house, with a large slab of concrete. That was where most of the kids hung out. They laughed and joked, and the boys would play basketball.

  A couple of cans of beer? “If you insist,” Mary said coyly. How about music? “That was a bad era for music, wasn’t it?” she said. The answer was classic rock. Stuff like the Doobie Brothers.

  On the night in question, kids came and went, Mary remembered, but she wasn’t really paying attention. Teens had arrived from the broken-up party in waves, in whatever cars they could find room in. The guys and the girls were clumped separately.

  She sketched out her memory on a notebook that was handed to her. The ball fields, the field house. She drew Root and she drew Lowe, the streets that came together at the park’s northeast corner. “There were cars parked here. A bunch of people were just sitting on the cars,” Mary said, continuing to fill in the scene with a pen. She had stopped waiting for questions. “Some people were kind of in the park. I’m like around here, with some girls by a car,” she continued, circling a rectangle she had drawn near the corner. John was a few cars away.

  Another car appeared, moving slowly. Mary didn’t remember who saw it first. The car reached the corner, near a crowd of people, many of them her friends. “People rushed to the street, and the next thing you know there was a shot,” she said, getting ahead of herself. She had been speaking for only fifteen minutes and seemed to want to get to and beyond the shooting as quickly as she could. She had recounted it with little emotion. Her voice had stayed almost monotone.

  Could she back up for a moment? It was a green car, she agreed. She “wasn’t good at cars,” but there was no question about the color. And the streetlight provided enough light for her to see someone sitting in it when it moved closest to her, before it reached the corner of Root and Lowe and her crowd of friends. “He was in the front seat of the passenger side, and the next thing you know, he ducked down, a gun came out of the car and fired a shot,” Mary said matter-of-factly.

  “He” was Nick Costello. She knew his nickname, “Horse,” and had called out to him when the car got close. Her family had known his family since she was in early grammar school, Mary said. She was one hundred percent certain. It was just a fact that she stated as if there were nothing to debate. She hadn’t had to stare into the car and struggle to find a name of someone she thought she might have recognized. She knew him, and that was that. Instant recognition. Mary stated it as if she had said the ocean is blue, and since everyone knows the ocean is blue, why carry on about the blue ocean?

  Then Mary came to a full stop. She was still sitting at the table, sometimes looking toward Ellen, and sometimes looking at her hands. It had gone from light outside the house to dark, making the overhead lights seem suddenly brighter. There were other parts of the story to move to, just after the gunshot. But Mary would wait for a question about it.

  What did she remember, then, about John being hurt? “Oh,” she said, as her voice cracked slightly. A single word into her answer, and pain had crept in. The steadiness was gone, and her voice shook. “Just that he was down on the ground.” She took a long pause. “It’s terrible. People running different directions. There was no … 911. I know there were houses on Lowe. I remember someone running to a house there. And then I don’t know,” she said.

  Minutes passed, she remembered. The police were not there. Exactly when she left Mary couldn’t say, but she eventually went home. She was stunned and had no idea that John died that night; she just knew he was going to the hospital.

  Again, she said, John was not an aggressive person. It would have been way out of character for him to initiate any trouble and charge the car, an act which she did not see herself. She wasn’t close enough to the actual shooting to be able to say if the shooter could have been targeting anyone who wasn’t John. There was no hint that she was making her witness account out to be any more thorough than it really was.

  “I mean really, technically, they shot into the crowd,” Mary said of her view. “I don’t know if they had an intended victim.”

  Ellen sat quietly at the table as Mary recounted what she had seen. As a seventh grader, she had been asleep when her brother was killed. Her memory was her sister, Theresa, then twenty, coming into her room and waking her up to tell her that her brother had died. He had been shot in the park. She remembers little after that, except that she was shaking. She had been awakened from a cold sleep. “Totally not understanding,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And shaking.”

  The days that came next were obviously clouded by pain, and Ellen was only able to wrap her mind around it like someone then in junior high could. She still had a paper route, for example. A neighbor had still managed to yell at her because her Sunday paper had been late that weekend and was so mad she told Ellen she had canceled her subscription. So someone drove her for the rest of the route.

  Maybe it was a thing that made some sense when nothing else did. “I had to deliver these papers,” she said. There was still a sense of fortitude in her voice. The fact that the paper route still mattered decades later said much about her.

  Still, things had changed immediately. “We were grounded, basically forever,” she said. She was laughing, but it had the ring of truth. The Hughes family had talked about moving to the suburbs. For the first time, Ellen’s older siblings were scared. She was scared, too. Before then, she had been a ’70s kid—parents just announced that everyone needed to be home for dinner or at least by dark. The carefree days of that childhood evaporated as the deep loss set in.

  The entry of a gun into the usual neighborhood dispute between their older brothers and friends and the Italian kids was also a marked escalation. Before then, the fighting had been of a simpler type—fists in
the alley to settle schoolyard disputes. No one could believe a life had been taken right in front of many of them.

  Within a few days, most of the teens had gone back to De La Salle and the other high schools. There was instantly talk about who possibly had done it. A name got back to the Hugheses: LaMantia.

  John Hughes’s wake lasted two days, there were so many people. Then came the funeral. John’s mother fainted at one point, an image that stayed seared in the memories of many who already were beside themselves as they prepared to bury their friend. De La Salle closed the day of the service, as teachers were spared standing in front of empty classrooms. The number of attendees was so large, it was impossible to have a luncheon afterward. It felt like most of the residents of both Canaryville and Bridgeport were there.

  In a sure sign that the killing and its aftermath took place in 1976, no one recalled a media presence as John was memorialized and laid to rest. Had such a public murder of a star high school athlete from a political neighborhood taken place in a later era, it could have been major news for days, with the family’s grief playing across network news and social media on steady loops. Newspapers would have followed every tiny development in the investigation, asking for updates, demanding press conferences, profiling the victim and his family. Teens heading to and from the funeral would have walked around satellite trucks as TV reporters tried to stop them to ask how they were feeling. As it was, Mary could barely recall a single mention in any newspaper, and Chicago still had three major ones—not only the Tribune and Sun-Times but also the Chicago Daily News, which wouldn’t shutter for another two years.

  Still, the murder seemed to attract a significant amount of police attention, at least at first. Mary remembered being taken by police out of class at Maria High School to the Ninth District. One of the officers was the “T. Strong” who had continually appeared in Sherlock’s Gorman file: Terry Strong.