by Jeff Coen
But it was the third possibility that continued to play in Sherlock’s mind. That version would be the most damning for this woman’s family—and for Ferraro, for that matter. No one had seen Ferraro in the shooting car, and the best eyewitnesses had placed the gunman behind the wheel. That seemed unlikely to be Ferraro himself, and Sherlock’s top suspect was still LaMantia. So in version three, Ferraro had loaned his car to LaMantia, Costello, or another friend who was with them. Word had come that things had gotten out of control, a shot had been fired from the car, and now the cops were looking for it. And Rocky’s whereabouts were unknown in the time immediately after the shooting. What if he had gone home and told his father he was in trouble? Had Shorty LaMantia asked, or even told, this woman’s family to get the car out of Chicago? The DiCaro case had shown Rocky would go to his father for help in a pinch, and that he would get it.
One step was for Sherlock to track down the cousin Ferraro and his girlfriend apparently were babysitting for. Sherlock found her, and the woman said she was, in fact, related to the girlfriend’s family, and that her cousin often babysat for her during those years. She did not recall whether one of those times was the night of the shooting at Boyce Field, however.
It wasn’t enough to confront Ferraro with, Sherlock thought. Maybe the teen just left his keys in the visor and often let friends know where his car was if they wanted to borrow it. He was tied up babysitting, after all, and probably having some alone time with his girlfriend. Sherlock wanted to build up to something that might provide a little leverage.
The old police reports laid out the entire scenario once a careful observer put the pieces together. When a group of teens left McGuane Park and drove toward the shooting, they naturally went down Emerald, which was a one-way south. At Thirtieth is where they said Costello was picked up, near where Ferraro would have parked his car babysitting. It’s natural to think Costello, if he in fact was in the car, might have wanted to go back and see what had happened, or could have thought it would look less suspicious to appear there. In Sherlock’s mind, LaMantia, if he really was the shooter, might have been more savvy and known to stay away. He wasn’t with Costello when a group of teens picked him up, or when the kids in the car were stopped by police near the park a short time later.
As 2018 was turning into 2019, Sherlock found himself bouncing from rumor to rumor as he ran down his witness list. He caught up to a retired CPD detective, Michael McDermott. McDermott had been assigned to a Chicago cold-case unit in 2000, one that had briefly taken up the Hughes murder. Its work, along with attention from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, had led to Costello’s ex-wife, who told the grand jury and prosecutor Linas Kelecius about statements Costello had made about who was in the car.
McDermott didn’t give Sherlock much to go on. The case’s problems were ones he already knew. They were looking at LaMantia, but there was no physical evidence. No shell casings, no fingerprints, no gun. Everything was pointing in that direction, but it fizzled out.
Sherlock’s report on speaking with one man who knew Hughes was typical. “He stated he was two years behind Hughes in high school but stated he knew Hughes well,” Sherlock wrote. “He described Hughes as very smart, class president, and a very good athlete. He stated Hughes was popular in Canaryville and Bridgeport, known as a quiet, tough kid.”
Word had spread quickly that LaMantia could be involved, the man told Sherlock. But in 1976, no one who cared for their own safety was accusing him of anything.
12
A SICK FEELING
Sherlock spoke to Larry Raddatz at his home in the southwest suburbs. Raddatz was the friend who had been with Hughes the night of the shooting and pretended his car wouldn’t start when it looked like they might have to drive to a fight.
When Sherlock told him the case was reopened and that he was working it, Raddatz had immediately agreed to speak with him. Sherlock liked him immediately. The house was a working man’s home and reminded Sherlock of his own house. It was outfitted with just the essentials, nothing more and nothing less. Just like much of the South Side, where Raddatz was from. It was a place of pride, but there was no putting on airs.
Sherlock could tell Raddatz was a particular person and one who liked order. And, in fact, he was a manager at an industrial safety company. It felt to Sherlock that they would probably run in some of the same circles, all things considered. And funnily enough, Sherlock wound up bumping into Raddatz again not long after they spoke, seated near each other at a high school wrestling tournament at Mount Carmel High School.
Sherlock was at Raddatz’s house that day partly to make sure that, decades later, Raddatz still was sure of what he had seen. His name was all over the early reports as a potential key witness, and Sherlock wanted to lock down him and two other Hughes friends on their versions. For Raddatz, like so many others, the night had started on Throop at the house party. Raddatz definitely still recalled it.
The men spoke, and Raddatz took Sherlock back to those days in the old neighborhood. And the feud. The tension was always very high between his friends from Canaryville and a group from Bridgeport. Raddatz told Sherlock about the fights between the two groups, and about his own experiences, including once being beaten up when he was a child just because of the neighborhood he was from.
And the time immediately before the shooting was no different. In some ways it was worse. Raddatz remembered having a sick feeling in his stomach that something bad was going to happen.
He remembered leaving the party and that he had been the one to drive Hughes back to Boyce Field. It was only about a four-minute drive. Once they were milling around, a few other friends returned and told Raddatz and the others about the fight on Halsted. As Raddatz described the evening to Sherlock, he omitted the part about purposefully not starting his car, but the rest of the details were the same as Raddatz and others had described them before. He told Sherlock how he saw the green car approach. He said he was bad at instantly coming up with the make and model of cars. But when Sherlock showed him a photo of a Chevrolet like the one Paul Ferraro drove, Raddatz recognized it. That was just like the one he saw.
Raddatz told Sherlock the car slowly moved toward the park and then came to complete stop under a streetlight. Raddatz could still visualize it. It had stopped just a short distance from the group of his friends standing in the park. Insults were exchanged.
As he and Hughes and their friend John Russell rushed forward, Raddatz remembered seeing and recognizing Nick Costello in the passenger seat. He still remembered hearing someone yell, “Get down!” and seeing Costello slump. The shot came a few seconds later.
So Raddatz’s memory of the shooting was clear, but Sherlock still wanted to test him on what he could recall about the police and their handling of the investigation. Police reports—which Sherlock was suspicious of—said Raddatz and Russell had viewed a lineup the same night as the shooting, at 3:30 AM.
There was no way that was true, Raddatz told Sherlock. It was flat-out wrong. He would have remembered going to the police station that same night as Hughes’ death, even through the fog of the shock of what had taken place. To go from seeing his friend shot to staring at a group of teens who might be responsible at a police station? He clearly would remember that if it had happened. He definitely only talked to one officer the night of the shooting, he remembered, and that wasn’t at a station. It was at Mercy Hospital. He didn’t recall the exact substance of what had been said, but that was it. To Sherlock, the substance of what Raddatz had said to the officer wasn’t even important; he was slowly taking apart what police said they had done at the same time he was trying to solve the Hughes case.
Raddatz did recall seeing a lineup, but it was at least two days later. And there was another problem. While he couldn’t remember every detail about what took place, he told Sherlock he was one hundred percent sure he had picked out Costello. Sherlock shook his head. Now he knew that, along with the one provided by Mary Mestrovi
c, a second identification of Costello was missing.
Sherlock knew that in the police report that described the alleged 3:30 AM lineup, someone had attached a photo of what police contended was the lineup that Russell and Raddatz were supposed to have seen. Officers had written that neither teen picked out Costello or anyone else.
The presence of the photo was odd in and of itself. Sherlock knew from his own police work that, prior to November 2003, detectives were only required to photograph lineups that had resulted in a positive identification being made.
He showed Raddatz the photograph of the supposed negative lineup, the one with Costello wearing a bright yellow jacket. Raddatz said while he had seen Costello at the station and had told police that, this wasn’t the group he had looked at. He had never seen that group or the photo before.
If that was true, it suggested again to Sherlock that whoever had tried to make the Hughes investigation go away quietly had gone one step too far, exposing their effort to put a brick on the police work. They had suppressed Raddatz’s actual identification, saying he couldn’t pick anyone out when he actually had. But they had included a lineup photo in the file with Costello in it.
Also odd was Raddatz’s trip to the courthouse at Twenty-Sixth and California, ostensibly to give grand jury testimony. He didn’t recall the date, but he told Sherlock an officer had picked him up and driven him there. Russell was there as well, he recalled, but before they were brought in, a different officer told them it was time to leave, and that officer brought them home again. It was as if CPD was working against itself even then, Sherlock thought. Had some officers kept trying to work the case, being stymied every time it was discovered what they were doing? Sherlock knew that bringing witnesses all the way to a grand jury proceeding and then having a different cop shuttle them home would have been extremely odd in any year. There was no official record of Raddatz being brought to the grand jury at all.
In short, Sherlock believed Raddatz, much as he had Mary Mestrovic. He found Raddatz to be genuine. Raddatz gave off the vibe of a boss in a blue-collar field. He spoke directly and wasn’t a showman. There was no BS, and his somewhat rough demeanor commanded attention. But when he spoke about Hughes and that night in the park, there was vulnerability that was almost startling coming from such a man. He would fold his hands and lower his head, fighting tears that would come suddenly.
Sherlock had wanted to talk to Raddatz in part to make sure he hadn’t had a change of heart about what had happened. Suffice it to say he hadn’t. He was as steadfast as ever. Sherlock thought the emotions may have come so strongly because Raddatz was now a father himself. He knew what it would have meant to Hughes’s parents to lose their child in such a way—and then getting no justice would be salt in the wound.
The Raddatz interview left Sherlock with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he had an adrenaline rush. Aside from working toward proving who killed Hughes, Sherlock was picking at what was looking more and more like a real police cover-up. It wasn’t just that things were missing from the file. It was the right things to withhold if someone wanted to derail the work detectives were doing. Errant reports that helped Costello could still be found in the record, while documentation of work that would have hurt him were missing. Sherlock knew of at least two seemingly solid identifications of Costello, and instead of police using those identifications as leverage to get Costello to tell them what happened and who had pulled the trigger, it was as if they never existed.
But Sherlock was slowly coming to the realization that he had a problem. Call it his own sick feeling. Whoever had destroyed evidence in the case probably had done enough to ensure the case wouldn’t wind up in front of a judge. Sherlock had scored by finding the Gorman file, but there was still plenty of paperwork that he knew would never be found. He could rebuild what he believed had happened, and he was doing so with witnesses like Raddatz—solid and believable witnesses—but that was only going to go so far.
The goal in Sherlock’s mind shifted from “solve it” to “close it.”
Solving it would mean holding someone responsible. And the person Sherlock believed was the best suspect, Rocky LaMantia, was dead. But charging anyone else was going to be the steepest of climbs. Even if he got someone to admit being in the car or to point the finger at a shooter, proving it at trial was unlikely. Such key missing paperwork in a cold case would likely sink it.
A good defense attorney would put Sherlock on the stand and simply ask, “Detective, are you confident you have all the reports in this case?’”
Well, no, he wasn’t. In fact, the opposite was true. Sherlock was almost completely confident he didn’t have all the evidence and reports. Even if he answered “I don’t know” on the witness stand, that was reasonable doubt right there. He couldn’t look the members of a jury in the eyes and tell them he knew for certain there wasn’t some other name on a police report that wasn’t in the record.
No one had thrown away a fingerprint or switched a DNA sample or swapped out a shell casing, but the damage was similar. Sherlock was happy he knew with confidence that reports had been dumped wholesale, but that wasn’t going to get him far enough.
After the Raddatz interview, he knew Nick Costello could be the only person to tell him enough to put an administrative close on the Hughes file. It might still be possible to finalize the case and know, for example, that LaMantia or someone else had fired the fatal shot. Still, one way or the other, Sherlock determined he would give Ellen Hughes and the rest of her family as much closure as he possibly could.
I can still tell the Hughes family, “This is what happened. Now all the rumors you’ve been hearing for the last forty-plus years are either proved or disproved,” he thought.
Sherlock caught up to John Russell the day after he interviewed Raddatz, though the meeting had taken some effort to put together. It took some convincing. Russell had been very close to Hughes as well, and he was even more emotional about what had happened. He and Hughes had a lot in common, including being leaders in student government at De La Salle. Even talking to someone as friendly as Sherlock was going to bring back some very painful memories. And Russell was even more suspicious of the police.
That’s because, according to Russell, there was a point in time when they had treated him as a suspect, either legitimately or to shift attention away from others. It had started soon after the shooting. Hughes was taken to Mercy Hospital in a police wagon, Russell remembered, because it had been one of the first emergency vehicles to make it to Boyce Field. Russell accompanied Hughes inside as it raced down dark city streets. When he was told that Hughes wasn’t going to make it, Russell said he punched the wall of the wagon in a rage, badly hurting his hand. His knuckles were visibly bleeding as police started trying to sort out who was who and which teen had been in which fight. The hand injury brought Russell the wrong kind of attention. He may have talked to police at the hospital, but his memories were foggy, he told Sherlock. He couldn’t recall exactly what he might have said.
As for his own memory of the park, it tracked with Sherlock’s other witnesses. He had started his night at the Throop party and had seen an actual fight there. He wasn’t at the subsequent fracas on Halsted, but had wound up at Boyce with his and Hughes’s other friends. He saw the green Chevrolet approach slowly and stop under the streetlight, just as the others said.
He too heard the insults and curses from the car, just as the others had described for Sherlock. Unlike them, however, Russell had run toward the vehicle almost directly behind Hughes, possibly giving him nearly the same view that Hughes had as he moved toward the car.
But because he was running and because of the lighting, he hadn’t gotten a good look at anyone. He saw someone on the passenger side, maybe in the rear passenger seat, who he thought had a “weak moustache,” and to him the person almost looked Hispanic.
“Russell stated as he was moving towards the vehicle he observed the front passenger slide down in the seat,” Sherlock
put in his report. “Russell stated as the passenger was in the process of sliding down he observed the arm of the driver pointing a handgun over the passenger (Russell stated he assumed it was the driver). Russell stated he never saw the face of the driver. Russell saw the weapon fire from the car then immediately saw Hughes fall to the ground.”
Russell’s irritation with the police kept up when they came to interview him several days later. He knew it was several days later, he said, because a couple of officers had actually appeared at his friend’s wake to bring Russell back to the police station. He thought that was in poor taste, he told Sherlock, clearly still bent out of shape about it years later.
And they continued to press him, he said, to the point of having him take a lie detector test like other suspects in the case. It had come back inconclusive.
Perhaps most interesting to Sherlock, though, was that Russell also had viewed a lineup. And like Raddatz, he disputed that it had taken place the night of the killing. Russell also was in police reports in which officers claimed that he had viewed a lineup with Costello in it and picked out no one. Sherlock showed him the photo of the lineup from the reports, the one with Costello in a yellow jacket.
Russell laughed. That definitely wasn’t the lineup he had seen, he told Sherlock. In fact, he always thought the lineup he was shown was weird. It had a bunch of guys in it that seemed too old to be high schoolers.
After the lineup Russell was sitting in the station for quite a while, he remembered. For so long, he felt like everyone there had forgotten about him. And some of them had, apparently. He said he started to notice that the younger-looking men who were walking around the station had been in the lineup he viewed. At least three were cops, he said, as they had put their sidearms back on.