Murder in Canaryville

by Jeff Coen

  “They came there and took me out of school, without my parents,” Mary said.

  How did police even know she was a potential witness at that point? “I have no idea.” But it was her first recollection of having to deal with the police. Someone in the park could have told officers to find Mary. Her school must have called her mother, Mary acknowledged, because she caught up to Mary at the district station at Thirty-Fifth and Lowe. They were there for a long time, she said, though the years have warped her sense of time.

  She was also moved once to the police station at Thirty-Ninth Street and California Avenue, she said. “Seems to me we were in some kind of locker room. I just have a recollection of like, benches, and policemen going back and forth,” she said.

  Eventually detectives showed Mary a lineup, giving her a minute to see whether she recognized anyone that she had seen the night Hughes was shot. She didn’t need it. “It was like I was looking at you,” Mary said, motioning toward Ellen down at the end of the table. “They were asking me who I saw. I said, ‘I saw Nick Costello. He’s there. Right there in the lineup.’”

  As far as identifications go, it was as solid as they get. Mary automatically knew who she saw, and her memory had never changed. She wasn’t a reluctant witness. Police didn’t have to overpromise anything to her or threaten her to pick someone out, as they might if they were trying to flip a codefendant against a friend. But at the same time, her demeanor decades later made it clear she certainly wasn’t eagerly pointing a finger at someone she randomly picked to get her own brand of justice. She had lost a friend, sure, but another person she knew had been in the car the shot was fired from. That was all she wanted to tell police, after her mother convinced her. She wasn’t accusing him of firing the gun. In all she saw two lineups, she said, the one with Costello in it, and another with no one she knew.

  Costello, she saw at one point, was taken from the lineup to an air-conditioned room, where he didn’t seem that stressed. She, on the other hand, was taken back to the wooden benches by the lockers. Some officers had been nice to her, she said, but some certainly weren’t. Some began to make fun of her within earshot of her and her mother. “There’s people laughing all around,” Mary remembered, her voice trembling again. “It’s like a joke.”

  One officer she knew was Dave Cuomo. Her mother was an employee of his at the Coral Key, and Cuomo was making sure Mary and her mother didn’t forget it as they were being made fun of. “He made some joke like who my mother worked for,” Mary said. Cuomo had already talked to her father, after the basement meeting Furmanek told the FBI about. Mary knew Cuomo was making an empty threat, because her father had told Cuomo that Mary would never be kept from helping police and telling them exactly what she saw.

  “He made some off-the-cuff joke,” Mary said of Cuomo, remembering he teased that she would get in trouble for tattling or something. “Like, ‘Oh, if her father finds out—you better hurry up what you’re doing—because if her father comes up here, I’m just warning ya….’ Something like that.” The memory clearly upset Mary, who hung her head for a moment as she fought more tears. “It’s not really about my father coming up here,” almost as if she were sticking up for herself, still in the police station more than forty years earlier.

  She could have used a police ally or a lawyer then, but there wasn’t one. She was supposed to be their witness, helping them solve a murder case. The officers who said the worst things didn’t say them to her face, but she remained convinced they had said them loud enough for her to hear on purpose. And years later, she still recalled the things they said. “Some of them were calling me a drunk and a slut,” Mary said. “They said, ‘She knows nothing. It’s for attention.’”

  Her mother, Rita, was ill at the time, Mary said, and was a nervous wreck. But that didn’t stop some officers from trying to intimidate the pair. But once her sister also arrived at the station at Thirty-Ninth, most of the mocking seemed to stop. Mary did not remember arguing with anyone or yelling that she hadn’t been drunk, mostly because no one accused her directly.

  At the station on Thirty-Ninth, the car was discussed, the green Chevrolet. Mary remembered believing it was Paul Ferraro’s car, but she couldn’t tell officers the make and model. She knew it like you knew a friend’s or acquaintance’s car just by sight, but without paying a lot of attention. Officers at one point took her out to the parking lot, she said, to see if she could point out the car she thought she saw, or a car that might have been the same kind.

  “I don’t know, I couldn’t,” she said. “I didn’t find it.”

  It was all confusing, she said, because she thought she had seen the same car around school. She had even looked for it in the days after her ordeal with the police. It hadn’t been hard to find. “I remember my friends and I going to the house where Paulie Ferraro lived and looking in the garage,” Mary said. “And the car was in the garage.”

  Mary recalled that months later, she went to talk to the grand jury. She had a clear memory, despite learning from Sherlock that there was no official record of her ever having been there. She couldn’t specifically say whether it had taken place at the main criminal courthouse at Twenty-Sixth Street and California Avenue—and, again, she made no attempt to firm up her story by not admitting when she didn’t specifically remember some detail. It was this mixture of being firm on important details, not embellishing memories she clearly didn’t have, and having to be coaxed to say anything at all that gave Mary and her account so much weight for Sherlock.

  “It was a courthouse,” she said. “I remember people were sleeping. It disturbed me even at the time. I was a seventeen-year-old kid, and some of the grand jurors were sleeping.”

  She had been nervous, of course. She remembered a gallery of people. She remembered seeing a court reporter, tapping away as she talked. There was an assistant state’s attorney asking her questions, though she couldn’t remember each and every one. And, most important, Mary said, she told the grand jury the name of the person she knew who was there that night.

  “Was there anyone you recognized in the car?” Mary said the prosecutor asked her.

  “And I said yes,” she remembered, answering that it was Costello.

  The whole thing was over fairly quickly, Mary said. She remembered being surprised by that. She had been expecting to have to search her mind for more answers. There were a lot of questions she thought she should have been asked, but wasn’t. It didn’t seem very thorough.

  Ellen’s “Uncle Chuck,” her mother’s brother, had sat Mary down at one point just to give her an idea of the kinds of questions she might be asked; after all, Chuck Gilmartin was a lawyer and Mary was a teenager. Mary’s mother and Ellen’s mother were friends, they remembered, and Mary was friends with one of Ellen’s sisters. Everyone thought it might be helpful for Mary to have some idea what to expect from the process, but as it turned out, Gilmartin asked her many more questions than the prosecutor at the courthouse did.

  Mary did not recall whether anyone she knew had preceded or followed her when she testified. She didn’t remember whether she saw any other teenagers there waiting a turn. John’s friend, Larry Raddatz, had his own memory of going to a courthouse, but Mary did not remember seeing him on the day she gave her testimony. She had left the grand jury in pretty short order, she said, and while she might have been thanked for her time, nothing stood out in her mind about her departure. She left, and that was that. She never prepped for a trial that never happened. She was never sworn in and asked to repeat what she saw for twelve jurors who would decide the guilt or innocence of someone accused of shooting and killing John Hughes. Life kept going, and so did Mary.

  Ellen couldn’t remember at exactly what point the family knew there was a problem with the investigation. They had started by thinking they would sit back and let the police do their job. Their neighborhood had a number of police families, and they had never had a reason to be distrustful. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a h
ousekeeper; they didn’t have much experience with investigative matters anyway. Uncle Chuck was, at least at first, their best outside chance at making something happen to find justice.

  “By the time they realized the police weren’t really doing their job, it was really late in the game,” Ellen said. “You trust people to do the right thing. I don’t know what transpired that they thought there was a problem.”

  But later in the year that John died, the family did take a step: they hired a private investigator. He was the one who started poking around and came back to the family within days. “He asked my parents to meet him in the backyard,” Ellen said. “He really wanted to talk to them but he wanted to go in the backyard. He told my parents that he was strongly suggested not to take on this case.”

  Exactly who had “suggested” the private investigator move on to other matters was never revealed to the family, but paranoia set in. “My parents thought there was a bug in the phone and cameras in the streetlights,” Ellen said. She remembered the episode with the private investigator as a time when it seemed like everyone was going a little nuts. Her parents suspected that the mob was exerting influence over the case—a possibility that scared them. They had ten more children to think of and care for.

  She was laughing at the moment, but it was very serious then. Not only had the Hugheses lost a son and then not gotten justice, now they had to worry about some malevolent force inflicting further pain. Their lives continued but were forever changed.

  Mary went back to school. She went back to her job, as a cashier at a small grocery store at Thirty-Fourth and Halsted. But she didn’t forget about her friend or what she had told police. There were some in Bridgeport who also didn’t forget it. Mary said she was periodically harassed over it, mostly by girls in the friend circle of the teenage boys who may have felt threatened by Mary’s account of that night. When she was on the register at the grocery store, Mary said, “they would put a bunch of stuff in a cart, and I would check it out, and they would leave” without the items and without paying, making her do extra work for nothing. Once a group waited for her shift to be over and followed her home in a car. They never did anything to her or directly threatened her, but Mary got the message. Her family called police, who gave her mother a business card with a number on it to call in the event things got more serious, Mary said.

  For both Mary and Ellen, the killing changed the dynamic of the neighborhood. Families were less trusting. No longer was it a given on a warm night that there would be large groups of friends milling around at Boyce Field, or any other nearby park, for that matter. Mary finished her senior year at Maria, and then went away to school. She attended a small college in the suburbs for a year and then Illinois State, on her way to becoming a teacher. But even by the time she started college, it was over, Mary remembered. For police and the authorities, anyway.

  For Mary, it was never over. “This is not about me, if that’s what you’re trying to do,” Mary said. She was laughing with Ellen. She had walked the path through her memory again and come out the other side in the way she had wanted to. She had remembered what happened to her but had wanted to keep the focus on her friend John Hughes, and on the failure by police to bring his family justice. To Mary, her own feelings and struggles were completely secondary.

  But really, how did she feel now? It was with her every day? Mary wasn’t budging. “Mmhmm.”

  7

  DIGGING IN

  Sherlock continued poring over the Gorman file, looking for anything he could latch onto to move things forward. He was convinced Mary was being truthful, and had gone to his FBI bosses on the strength of her account.

  She had seemed unsure of herself at times, but she had been willing to put herself out there and help authorities yet again, despite what had happened to her and her mother and despite not having any closure decades later. She was an excellent witness, he thought, and that’s what he ran up the chain at the Bureau.

  He was flipping through Gorman’s old records when he came to a supplementary report. “Homicide/Murder,” it read. “John R. Hughes.”

  It was dated May 25, 1976. Gorman or someone apparently had considered it important, since when it was copied, someone had left a Post-it note on the first page. On the copy, it appeared as a white square with cursive writing in it, with an arrow pointing to the top of the page: “Nick Costello said he, Ferraro and LaMantia were together per wife statements,” the note read. Wife statements? Apparently that was a reference to Costello’s ex-wife, who had appeared before a grand jury in 2000.

  He kept reading. The document appeared to have been filed by Terry Strong, the case investigator. The date was ten days after Hughes had been killed, and it amounted to a summary of everything that had been done by that point to attempt to solve the case. “On 17 May 1976 the investigators were instructed to go into the 009th District on this investigation,” it began. “Mary Mestrovic … in the company of her mother Mrs. Rita Mestrovic … were brought into the 009th District by members of the …”

  The text on the report stopped for a page jump, and the next page appeared to be missing, but what followed was a typed account of what Mary had first told police. Sherlock hadn’t had it the first time he spoke to Mary himself. The summary said Strong had done the questioning, and a partner named John Boyle had typed it. It was noted the time was 1530, or 3:30 PM, on May 17, a Monday, which would track with Mary having been taken from school.

  What school she attended and what year she was in were the first thing asked. “Maria High School. Junior,” she had answered.

  At 1:15 AM two nights earlier, where was she and what unusual thing had taken place? “I don’t know the time, I was at Boyce Park at Root and Lowe streets. I was standing on Lowe across from the park gate, the group that I was with was talking about a group from McGuane Park coming down,” Mary had said, according to the document. “Then a car came and slowed up and waited for the cars in front of it to leave, then it started up and stopped in the intersection of Lowe and Root,” she continued.

  “People from Boyce Park started going towards the car. Then I heard a shot and someone said they got Johnny. I went up by where he got shot and some kids threw four or five bats at the car. Everyone said that we had to keep him warm so we put our coats on Johnny and someone said to call the police. After the police came me, George Shinnick, Fred Ramos and someone else I’m not sure went to Shinnick’s Tavern and told [John’s sister] Kathy Hughes what had happened and then I went home.”

  Strong asked, when the car pulled up and a shot was fired, how close had she been? “When it first pulled up I would estimate I was about 30 or 40 feet from the car and then when the shot was fired maybe 20 feet.”

  And did she get a look at anyone inside the car? “At the time I was positive that one of the persons in the car was Nick Costello,” Mary said.

  What did the car look like and how many people were in it? “It was light green, four doors. I don’t know makes of cars but it wasn’t too big or too small. There were people in the front and the back, four or five people.”

  The summary was typewritten on plain paper, with occasional underlining, apparently made by Gorman. Costello’s name was, of course, underlined. Sherlock kept reading. “The person that you say you were sure was Nick Costello at the time of the shooting, what part of the car was he sitting in?” Strong had asked.

  “Front seat passenger side,” Mary answered.

  Did she see who actually fired the shot at Hughes? “I seen Costello before the shot was fired and when the shot was fired I wasn’t really looking,” Mary said.

  How long had she known Costello? “Since I was in grammar school four or five years” was the answer.

  Had she seen the person she knew as Costello in the station that day? Yes. And was he the same person she had seen in the car the shot had been fired from that killed John Hughes? Yes again.

  Mary had told the officers there was nothing she wished to add to her statement, and whe
n asked, told them that she would sign it. “Because it’s true,” Mary said.

  The summary report continued for a few more pages, giving Sherlock a much-needed glimpse into the work that was done in the first few days of the investigation.

  The next sheet included a paragraph on Costello being brought into the Ninth District. He had been spoken to in the presence of his father, who apparently had not felt the need to bring a lawyer.

  “After being advised of his Constitutional rights, Costello was interviewed by Commander Haberkorn,” the report read. “Costello at that time denied participating or having any knowledge in the murder of John Hughes.”

  He had been confronted with what Mary had said, the report noted, including that he had been in the car the shot was fired from. “Costello again denied any knowledge of this incident and refused at that time to make any further statements in this matter,” it continued.

  Inside that paragraph, a name was circled: Haberkorn, the commander who had taken a role in the case. Someone had again applied a Post-it note to it, which again appeared as a white box with cursive writing inside. “Haberkorn took over this investigation and pushed dets aside,” it read.

  “Dets” was clearly short for detectives, and Sherlock agreed with the scrawled note. It would have been highly unusual for someone of Haberkorn’s rank to descend into an investigation and insert himself by interviewing a suspect who represented the key lead for the men working the case. The detectives knew best what they had gathered so far, and if Costello or another suspect had agreed to speak to the police, it would be the detectives who would be best positioned to notice inconsistencies or other nuances in the answers.

  Whoever typed this part of the report had made sure to include the fact that Haberkorn did the interview with Costello. To Sherlock, it certainly read like Haberkorn had sat down with Costello and his father, collected a “no comment,” and handed it to Strong and Boyle. Since there was no mention in the paragraph of a lawyer, there might have been an opening to press Costello and convince him that his best option for saving himself from facing possible charges himself could be to tell what he knew, if anything, about the shooting, especially since the best witness against him was not naming him as the shooter.