Murder in Canaryville

by Jeff Coen

  The teen who had been beaten with the toy bat was a seventeen-year-old student who went to De La Salle himself, and he had been interviewed in the days after the killing with his parents present, according to one report. He acknowledged much of what police had pieced together by that point, but denied knowing about the shooting or being in the car when it happened.

  His evening had started at the party on Throop, he said. He had gone there with several friends, including the teen who would later tell police he had overheard Costello talking about shooting someone at the park. The friends he named included Costello, but notably excluded any mention of LaMantia, who had been placed at the party by a number of other witnesses.

  “After leaving the party about midnight they all went to McGuane Park. While they were there a group of youths from Boyce park rode by in an auto and made a remark,” the police wrote, summarizing what the teen had said. “He then along with the other youths in his company got into their auto and followed them. They caught up with them at Thirty-First and Halsted where a fight ensued.”

  As he spoke to police, the teen also removed LaMantia from being at the fight. “During this fight [the teen] stated that he was hit by an unknown youth and knocked out. The police arrived and broke up the fight and he and his friends went back to McGuane Park. While they were there they decided to go to Boyce Park and look for the other youths who had beat him up. At this time the police came and told them to go home,” the report said, but apparently they didn’t obey. “Then he and all of the aforementioned youths went to 30th and Emerald and there left in three autos to go to … Boyce Park to fight the previously mentioned boys.”

  When he arrived, though, the teen said, police were already in the park, and he noticed that other cars belonging to friends from his group were being stopped. He left in a car with three others, he said, and they went back to their own neighborhood. He rode around until 3 AM, he told the detectives, and then went home. He said he didn’t hear Hughes had been shot until noon the next day. “He denies having any knowledge of this incident or who owns the wanted vehicle in this case,” the accounted ended.

  Ferraro appeared to have been interviewed the following day. He was eighteen, a police report on that questioning said, and was working at the time as a pressman. His father sat in as detectives talked to him and advised him of his rights.

  Ferraro told the detectives he had no idea why Hughes had been shot a few nights before.

  “Do you own or have access to a 1972 Chevrolet auto, green in color?” they asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Was that auto in your control on the night of 14 May 1976 and the early morning of 15 May 1976?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone else have access or control of that auto on the times mentioned in the previous question?”

  “No.”

  The detectives asked Ferraro to tell them about his activities that night. “At 9 PM I was babysitting with my girlfriend at her cousin’s house across the street from where my girlfriend lives,” Ferraro said. That was the girlfriend whose family name Gorman had linked to Shorty LaMantia, and she lived on Emerald.

  They’d been at her cousin’s house babysitting from 9:00 PM until 1:30 AM, Ferraro told them, according to a transcript of the interview included with the report Sherlock read.

  Had he left at any time? “Yes I left at 11:30 pm and went to Connie’s restaurant at 26th and Normal to get a hamburger.” Ferraro said he had only been gone for fifteen minutes. After the babysitting ended, Ferraro said he and his girlfriend had walked back across Emerald to her house, where they had stayed until 2:10 AM that Saturday morning.

  “Where did you go then?”

  “My girlfriend and I and my girlfriend’s mother and aunt left for Warsaw, Indiana,” Ferraro told the officers. There was no follow-up question about why they would do that at such an odd time. In Sherlock’s mind, the scenario was suspicious, and police at the time should have taken it apart down to the minute. The car alone should have warranted closer scrutiny. Here was a friend of some who might have been involved, and he had a car matching the description of the shooting car that he had said was in the area.

  Ferraro told the officers who were interviewing him that he had seen only the people they were babysitting for during the time he was discussing.

  “Do you have any knowledge of how or why or who shot John Hughes?” the detectives asked as they wrapped up.

  “No,” Ferraro said.

  It was not a terribly long interview, and no one had accused Ferraro of being involved in the shooting itself. But Sherlock remained very interested in the car. There was a note in the same police report that the family had volunteered to have it looked at, and that no dents from hurled bats were found. Despite the witnesses’ inconsistency on this point, police apparently were again looking for a vehicle with rear damage.

  But Sherlock noticed one thing almost instantly. Ferraro had said the babysitting job was in a particular block of South Emerald. In the report detailing how Nick Costello came to be scooped up near Boyce Field the night of the shooting, the driver of the car Costello was riding in had told detectives he picked up Costello and another teen after seeing them standing at Thirtieth and Emerald, just blocks from the babysitting job and Ferraro’s car. If the vehicle had been borrowed and used in the shooting, there was plenty of time to have left it back where Ferraro was. It was certainly very possible to Sherlock that Costello had accepted a ride back to Boyce to casually see if someone had been injured by the gunshot or just to avoid suspicion.

  Sherlock also knew that if the car had been involved in the shooting, it would explain the sudden desire of Ferraro and his girlfriend’s family to drive it to Indiana less than an hour after Hughes was pronounced dead at Mercy Hospital. Sherlock wasn’t fully aware of what the full family connections might be between the LaMantias and the family of Ferraro’s girlfriend. But if there were dots to connect, police hadn’t done it, or supervisors had tamped down the effort.

  It was time to chase a car, Sherlock thought, but not in any normal police pursuit. The vehicle he wanted to track probably had been in a junkyard for twenty years. He started by looking for Ferraro and the family of his girlfriend. In a computer search he found a woman with the same last name, still in the neighborhood, who was old enough to be the mother of Ferraro’s girlfriend. It would have been her house on Emerald the group had left, apparently to go to Indiana in the middle of the night, all those years ago.

  The older woman had moved since then. She lived in a small, tidy brick home along a park, just a stone’s throw from Midway Airport. Sherlock had no idea what to expect when he walked up a few concrete steps to knock on the door.

  8

  MARTHA

  On May 6, 1979, just shy of three years after John Hughes was shot and killed, a gunshot rang out inside a house in Bridgeport at 2812 South Shields.

  It was almost 9 PM when a 911 call went to a police dispatcher, with a young man’s frantic voice on the line. “Get an ambulance here right away. I need an ambulance right away,” the caller said. “I got … someone got shot in the mouth. How do I stop the bleeding? Just come here. I done … it was a mistake with a gun. It’s a girl, she’s young … Come here, please.”

  The dispatcher tried to make sure they knew where he was.

  “2812 South Shields. It’s a house,” the caller said. “Please hurry up … please. It’s my girlfriend.”

  The caller was Rocco “Rocky” LaMantia, by then twenty years old. The simple one-story brick walk-up with a bay window was the LaMantia home, where Rocky still lived with his mother and his father, Joseph “Shorty” LaMantia.

  Police officers raced to the call of a person shot, arriving within minutes. They were greeted by Shorty, who was standing in the street to meet them. “It was an accident,” he told them.

  It turned out Shorty had not been home at the time of the shooting. He had been at a communion party at a club called Garibaldi’s on Twenty-Six
th Street, where Rocky had called for his father before calling 911.

  The officers walked up the stairs and went inside to see for themselves, according to police reports. They found Rocky kneeling over a teenage girl in blue jeans and a yellow blouse. She had been shot in the left side of the face, just at the corner of her lips, and obviously wasn’t moving. Two more officers had arrived by then, and they saw Rocky with blood on his right hand, telling the girl over and over, “Don’t die. Don’t die.”

  The girl on the kitchen floor was Martha DiCaro, his longtime girlfriend. She was nineteen, and she was already dead.

  The officers pulled Rocky up and told him to give her some space. Shorty entered the room and asked to talk to his son outside. The cops allowed him to do that, and overheard Shorty as he ushered his son back to the front door. “Keep your mouth shut,” Shorty told Rocky. “Don’t say anything.”

  Minutes later, they went outside and placed Rocky in one of their squad cars. And he did say something. His initial call to 911 about a mistake with a gun was irreconcilable with the statement he now gave. He told police two men had come into the home wearing nylons over their faces, and they had been the ones to shoot Martha. They wore baseball jackets, he said, and one had on a western-style belt.

  LaMantia said he had been in the bathroom. When he walked out toward the house’s living room, Martha had been just in front of him. As they walked out, they were confronted by the two men, and one of them raised a pistol. A shot struck Martha in the face, knocking her back into him, he told officers, and the men fled.

  Police detailed the account in a report. “He then stated he made Martha comfortable and first called his father who was attending a communion party,” they wrote. “He then called 411 who told him to dial 911, and he then dialed 911 and notified police.”

  Some of the officers at the house then spread out into the neighborhood, looking for anyone who might match the description of the two men LaMantia described.

  Just then, Rocky’s brother appeared, and found him in the squad car. “Rocky, what did you do?” his brother said, as the two young men began to fight. Officers saw Rocky kicking at his brother from inside the car, and their father rush over to break it up.

  “I have the lawyer, don’t say anything,” Shorty told Rocky again, as officers stood nearby. “I know what the lieutenant is trying to do. Don’t say anything.”

  Rocky then began throwing up in the car before he was taken away to Area One police headquarters for questioning.

  Officers who had fanned out through the nearby streets found no home invaders with nylons on their faces. A Ms. Kostecka had been sitting on the front steps of her building for much of the prior hour and had a clear view of the front of the LaMantia house. No unusual men had come in or out.

  That’s because there weren’t any. The story had changed again. Back at Area One, LaMantia’s lawyer, Anthony Onesto, the same one who had told police handling the Hughes case to leave his client alone, was telling officers there that LaMantia wouldn’t be talking to them. DiCaro had come to the LaMantia home to visit Rocky, Onesto told police. During the visit, she found a gun in Shorty’s bedroom and had asked her boyfriend how to use it. Rocky supposedly had refused and taken it from her. She had tried to take it back, Onesto said, and when she grabbed for it, it went off by accident.

  How Martha had wound up in the kitchen wasn’t accounted for. Officers also had been to Mercy Hospital, where Martha had been taken. They viewed her body, and noted a “star effect wound” to her face. It was another way to describe a contact wound. The end of the barrel of the gun had been pressed right to her mouth when the trigger was pulled.

  One of the detectives working the case that day was named Kunz, and he had also worked the Hughes case. What he might have thought at the time about what had unfolded with one of the main suspects from the Hughes murder was unknown, as nothing was noted in police reports from that day. There was also nothing noted later, when the bullet was recovered from inside DiCaro’s skull. It had entered near her mouth and traveled upward into her brain, but had never exited. It was determined to have been fired from a .32 caliber Smith and Wesson long revolver, the same gun police suspected had been used in the Hughes murder.

  Any thought Sherlock had to find records on a forensic analysis of the weapon quickly faded. They did not exist. That’s because the weapon was never recovered, despite the LaMantias’ story being that Martha died in an accidental shooting while struggling for Shorty’s pistol—as opposed to masked intruders killing her and leaving with their own murder weapon. Shorty LaMantia had beaten the police to the house, that much was clear. So whatever happened to the gun that allegedly was from his bedroom would remain a mystery. And without access to the weapon that killed Martha DiCaro, investigators certainly couldn’t link it to the Hughes killing, a possibility that definitely would have been on the mind of Kunz and any other officer aware of both shootings.

  Investigators quickly began piecing together the troubled five-year relationship between Rocky and Martha. Members of her family were interviewed by two assistant state’s attorneys at Area One. Mavis DiCaro, Martha’s mother, told them her daughter had been trying to break things off. “Each time she would try, he would become very angry and threaten her, her mother’s safety or some other family member’s safety,” a police report on the conversation noted. “Because of these threats, the victim would go back with Mr. LaMantia.”

  There had been some physical abuse, Mavis DiCaro said; the police noted that no domestic violence complaints had been filed. The DiCaro family had occasionally told Shorty about his son’s behavior, and he would speak to Rocky.

  Martha’s mother also told police about an incident just a few weeks earlier. Martha had shown up at her mother’s workplace, a currency exchange in suburban Berwyn, because Rocky had said he was coming over and Martha was afraid. She had hurried in and gone around to stand behind the business’s bulletproof glass.

  “When Mr. LaMantia came in, he was very abusive to both women and threatened them both,” the police report stated. Mavis DiCaro had tried to call the LaMantia family but eventually had to call the police. Again, no complaint was filed, and officers had just told LaMantia to move on.

  After LaMantia stopped cooperating with police and prosecutors looking into the DiCaro murder, a decision was made to hold him while Martha’s brother and girlfriends were interviewed. Two investigators, including Kunz, also returned to the LaMantia home on Shields. There were a couple of things they were looking for: the gun, obviously, and a white sweater Rocky had been wearing when his girlfriend was shot. When they arrived, Shorty was there, and they asked about the sweater.

  “There is no sweater,” he told them, according to a report they made.

  When they asked about the gun, they got a similar reply. Shorty said he wouldn’t be answering any more questions until he spoke again to Onesto, the family’s attorney. Police officers asked if they could just go inside themselves and look around, and they got the same answer. Shorty called Onesto and came back and told Kunz and his partner they would need a warrant.

  Other officers were more successful. Martha’s ten-year-old brother Paul, a fourth grader at a Catholic school near the family’s home in Cicero, told police Rocky sometimes came to the house and threatened his sister and his mom.

  “He stated that Rocky would take his sister into her bedroom when he would come over and he was unable to see if Rocky would do anything to her,” one police report said.

  Officers also were interested in an account given to them by a Kirk Delise, a nineteen-year-old who was working at the Sportsman’s Park horse track in Berwyn. In the on-and-off tumult of the DiCaro-LaMantia relationship, Delise had gone out with Martha during one of the off moments. A few months later, about a year before her death, he had been at her house paying her a visit when Rocky had come by. “Enjoy your meal, it will be your last,” Rocky had apparently said to Delise, before taking Martha into her bedroom for fiftee
n minutes. She had emerged with red marks on her neck, Delise recalled.

  The altercation had continued, with Rocky allegedly threatening to hit Delise with a plate before the two stepped outside. According to Delise, Rocky had reached toward the side of his pants and threatened to shoot Delise, who told police he told Rocky to go ahead in front of everyone who was there. By that point, some of Delise’s friends whom he had called from the house had arrived. Things deescalated, but Delise told police Rocky would occasionally call to threaten him.

  Delise told investigators he had been at the club called Garibaldi’s with Martha’s brother Charles just a few days before Martha was killed. It was the same neighborhood hangout where Rocky would call his father after the shooting. Delise said he had seen Rocky there, and that Rocky had asked him whether he had seen Martha in Florida earlier in the year. Delise had been there at the same time.

  “Delise told him that he had seen her one time at the Limelight while they were in Florida,” police wrote in a report on the interview. “LaMantia told him that he was going to get engaged, buy a house, and open a car wash, and that if he ever caught Martha DiCaro fucking around he was going to shoot her and whoever she was with, and that his old man would pay $20,000 to get him off.”

  Police interviewed Charles DiCaro as well, who told them he and Rocky had a discussion after the confrontation with Delise at the DiCaro house. Rocky and Charles were from the same neighborhood, Rocky argued, so Charles shouldn’t let Delise and his friends gang up on him. Charles told officers he had replied that Rocky shouldn’t bully Delise, and Rocky had shown him a gun, saying he wasn’t worried about it.