Murder in Canaryville Page 6

  There was another sheet with a handwritten note that said a July 1975 lineup photo had been ordered printed. That was the wrong year, but the photo was not included anyway.

  The file, already notably odd, was not improving as Sherlock kept going through it. The next sheet included a photo of a car that CPD apparently looked at in connection with the murder. It had been driven to the Ninth District from a garage on South Emerald because “this auto answers the description of one used in homicide 15 May 76.”

  It was logged two months after the killing, in July. There it was in a photo. Sherlock held it for a close look. It was sitting on a city street. But there was one big problem. It was blue and had a black vinyl top. No one had given a description of a car that included those colors.

  Finally, there was one more sheet in the file on a different car, and this was much more promising. Someone had processed a vehicle later the Saturday of the shooting. It was a green 1972 Chevrolet. Someone had taken three photos of it, but those weren’t in the file.

  Wow, Sherlock thought, that’s a clue. Where had this car come from? How did police find it? Who owned it? The officer who processed the car noted that he had arrived to do the job at 6:20 in the evening and was done by 6:50. But, of course, the other pertinent information was not in the report. There was a line available for someone to fill in the location where the Chevy had been found.

  “NONE,” someone had written.

  Sherlock knew that to get his FBI bosses to bite and approve him going forward full throttle in their name, he would need to bring them at least the start of a case. It didn’t have to be much. He first needed to convince himself that there was at least a nugget of truth—just enough to pick at and see if another run at the same evidence could support a new investigation. And then he needed to use it to convince the FBI that this would be worth his time.

  If he had to reduce the case to one interview, Sherlock knew what that meant. He had one lead to work with. He needed to talk to Mary Mestrovic, who had been in the park and who had been so sure of seeing “Horse” roll by in the Chevrolet. Furmanek had told the FBI about her in 2005, and she was mentioned in the few reports Sherlock had. Maybe there was a reason police and prosecutors had seemingly buried her account. Maybe they had, for some reason, discredited her testimony and hadn’t ignored what seemed like a compelling eyewitness account from a frightened teenager who knew what she had seen.

  Sherlock was a skilled interviewer. He would be able to tell if she hadn’t really seen what she said she did, or if she was mentally unstable and a crummy witness. Talking to Mestrovic was the quickest way to an immediate thumbs-up or thumbs-down ruling on the case. She was in many ways the hinge it would swing on.

  Because of his own police background, he still had doubts that respectable police officers could have shoved something like this into a hiding place where it had stayed for decades. Reading the case file, however, Sherlock’s instincts told him that Mestrovic had correctly identified Costello. She knew him. Why would she lie? There had to be a reason officers hadn’t pursued him. “Something must be wrong with her,” he said to himself.

  Mestrovic was not hard to find. She was a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher, and she still lived in Bridgeport, where she had been her whole life. He parked outside her simple brick home, almost literally in the shadow of the White Sox ballpark, and walked up the steps.

  Mary greeted him at the door, and they went inside to have coffee at the kitchen table. She was unassuming, looking like many women in the neighborhood. She wasn’t flashy and was clearly not one to put on airs. She had a quiet personality, and she spoke slowly and steadily. She was also thoughtful, Sherlock noticed, seemingly not wanting to say an unnecessary word. His instant impression was that she wished none of this had come to her. She certainly wasn’t seeking attention, and although Sherlock found himself at ease around her, she hadn’t been eager to meet with him in the first place.

  Almost instantly, even before they got into the meat of the conversation Sherlock wanted to have, a feeling crawled into his stomach as he looked at her. Call it a detective’s senses, but Sherlock knew. He had half expected to need to find an excuse to leave after realizing Mestrovic was a crackpot with a bad story. Instead the opposite was happening. The feeling in his gut was not that there was a problem with Mary but that something was very wrong with the police work that had taken place in 1976.

  Just talking to her, all his truth detectors went off at once. It was his own voice in his own head. She’s legit.

  In fact, Sherlock quickly realized it was Mestrovic who doubted him, not the other way around. She had been trying to do the right thing since day one, and nothing ever came of it. Every few years, another officer or investigator would appear out of the blue and ask her questions yet again, and then disappear just as quickly. To her, Sherlock was just another guy who would look at the Hughes case and go away with hardly a whisper.

  That was fair, Sherlock told her. “But I’m not going away,” he said. “I’m going to do something. Whatever I can.”

  He explained to her the issues with bringing someone to justice. It was many decades after the shooting. There was little physical evidence at the time, let alone after so much time had passed. Ultimately, it would be what detectives called a “statement case.” Someone who had been involved in the shooting would have to tell the story of what had happened, and that was an uphill battle for any investigator.

  Adding to her credibility, Mestrovic was immediately apologetic for what she didn’t remember. There were only so many details she could pull back from a night that had in some ways altered her as a teenager and stolen a measure of peace from her forever. Sherlock was reassuring. In every sense, Mestrovic had been an innocent bystander. She had said hello to Costello from just a few feet away, not knowing she was about to witness a shocking murder. “It wasn’t like you were waiting for a shot to be fired,” he told her.

  And in many ways, that vulnerability only made Mestrovic more believable. She was not going to embellish her memory. And if she had seemingly only memorized a rigid set of facts from forty years earlier, it would have made Sherlock more doubtful of the story. Instead, her thoughts and recollections were organic, and gave Sherlock confidence that he could rely on her.

  Even just after the killing, Mestrovic had been reluctant, she remembered. It was her mother who had cajoled her into talking to officers. Hughes had been her friend, and it was the right thing to do. Her mother had been right, she told Sherlock—she had to do it, and from then on she had been as helpful as she could.

  And so in her quiet way, she repeated her story to Sherlock. She had been at the party on Throop Street, and recalled the arguing among “the boys” from McGuane Park and their counterparts from Boyce Field, choosing to describe them by the centers of their social world instead of by neighborhood. She had wound up back at Boyce herself after the party became uncomfortable, remembering being there with at least twenty to thirty people. She then walked Sherlock through seeing “Horse” go by in the green car and the shot coming from it moments later.

  Within a couple of days, she said, she was picked up from school and taken to the Ninth District police station. An officer named John Haberkorn had been the one to ask her about what happened, she recalled, not knowing his rank but definitely realizing he was a boss. Sherlock knew he was actually the district commander and that him doing the interview at all would have been highly unusual.

  Mestrovic specifically remembered viewing two lineups. One had Costello in it. She knew him, and again, had no difficulty pointing him out to police. She was then showed a second lineup, she said, and that one had no one in it whom she recognized. This version of events further troubled Sherlock, who knew the official police record only mentioned a single, negative lineup.

  What Mestrovic said next was even more worrisome. After she told police and a top prosecutor what she saw, she had overheard some of them dismissing and mocking her. She had become confuse
d and upset, not really knowing what was going on. One mimicked her voice and accused her of being drunk in the park and made her cry.

  As she described what had happened, Sherlock realized he had stopped taking notes. He was dumbfounded and simply listening. What in the world had happened?

  Mestrovic said she was still later brought before a grand jury and had told the exact same story. It had been a month later, but she still knew she had seen Costello in the car that had rolled by her, stopped at the corner, and had a gunshot fired from it. Sherlock had no doubt that if a grand jury had heard a teenaged Mary tell them what she saw with the kind of clarity she still had years later, they would have returned a true bill allowing the case to proceed.

  But that only joined the list of problems he had found. There was no record anywhere in the files that Mestrovic had testified to a grand jury. No transcript or sheet advising that such an appearance had taken place at all. It had been tossed completely.

  He closed his report on the conversation with Mestrovic’s own memory corroborating a meeting at the Coral Key. “A short time after the incident at Boyce Park, Mestrovic stated her mother, Rita Mestrovic, who was a waitress at the Coral Key restaurant, witnessed a Chicago police sergeant Dave Cuomo and other unknown Chicago police brass talking with the Bridgeport group who were involved in the Hughes incident,” he wrote for his FBI file. “This event took place in a basement room of the restaurant. Metrovic’s mother told her that she heard Cuomo telling the boys not to cooperate with police and to stay quiet.

  “Investigation continues,” Sherlock wrote.

  Sherlock wanted to speak as soon as he could to Ellen Hughes Morrissey. She was the sister of John Hughes, and Sherlock wanted to inform her that he and the FBI had taken interest in her brother’s death. He wasn’t necessarily looking for a blessing, but a strongly negative family reaction might have made him think twice about wading back into a case that was going to be thorny as it was.

  The first time they made contact was on the phone. Sherlock told her that the task force he was a part of, CE-6, made up of detectives, agents and prosecutors, would be doing a top-to-bottom review. He logged her response in plain language for his next report. “Morrissey welcomed the news, however, warned there have been investigative attempts in the past by the Chicago Police Department, private investigators, and private attorneys that have been thwarted by unknown individuals,” he wrote. “Morrissey stated that she and her family believe corrupt police officers were working in unison with members of organized crime to keep those responsible for the death of her brother out of jail.”

  Sherlock was quickly starting to agree that could very well be the case. Morrissey told him one private investigator the family hired had returned to their home less than a week after taking on the job. He was so rattled, he took her parents into the backyard, fearing their house could be bugged. He was no longer interested in helping them, he said, and it might be best for them to move on as well.

  That was certainly unusual, Sherlock thought. But something else Morrissey said intrigued him more. A man named Jimmy Gorman, who had since died, was a Chicago police officer at the time her brother was shot. He had performed his own sort of shadow investigation years later and had been in contact with members of the Hughes family. Unlike some private investigators, Gorman originally could have had access to paperwork from inside the police department. It was possible that some of Sherlock’s missing reports and files might still exist; Gorman could have spirited them out of the records without anyone knowing. It was a lead worth tracking down.

  Within a few weeks, Sherlock was talking to Gorman’s daughter in West Beverly on the city’s far South Side, very near to his own home. Her father had been a policeman in the Ninth District when the shooting took place, but she didn’t know why he had gotten so involved seemingly on his own. Gorman had eventually left the department and become a firefighter, and then left that job to finish law school and become an assistant Cook County state’s attorney and later go into private practice. He, too, had gone to the FBI with what he knew in 2005, Sherlock learned, possibly later convincing Furmanek to step forward.

  Gorman’s daughter remembered the Hughes name and, much more important, remembered seeing a file box on the case in the storage area of her father’s law office, which she and Sherlock were standing in that day.

  Sherlock laughed to himself and shook his head. He had grown up around Seventy-First and Kedzie, in Marquette Park, but had moved to West Beverly more than twenty years earlier, virtually around the corner. When Ellen Hughes had mentioned a Jimmy Gorman who had become a lawyer, something had fired in Sherlock’s mind. He knew a lawyer by that name, he thought. That’s because Gorman’s name was still hanging on a sign outside the office where he was now talking to Gorman’s daughter. One of Sherlock’s favorite bars, Barney Callaghan’s on Western Avenue, was almost next door, so he had walked by this place many times.

  “I’ll get the file box for you,” Gorman’s daughter told him. It might take a little digging around, so Sherlock asked her to give him a ring when it turned up.

  Except that it didn’t. For some reason, the file Gorman’s daughter had seen so many times was no longer there, and she couldn’t explain it. She was the new senior partner at the firm, so nothing should have been removed or destroyed without her knowledge.

  Unbelievable, Sherlock thought. Every time he thought he was getting a break, this case seemed to move ahead of him, staying just out of his grasp.

  Pat Bovenizer and John Hughes had almost considered themselves brothers. Their mothers were first cousins, and beyond the relation, they were very good friends. Bovenizer was often in the crew that hung out with Hughes at Boyce Field, though he wasn’t present on May 15, 1976. He had always felt a sense of guilt, for some reason, that he wasn’t there the night John died. It wasn’t like he could have done much about it, but there the guilt was, just the same.

  The rumor that Sherlock was looking under rocks for information on the murder came to Bovenizer through neighborhood channels. There was a certain buzz that this time things might be different. Bovenizer wanted to be helpful, so when someone passed him the cell number Sherlock was leaving around, Bovenizer texted him, and soon they spoke.

  Bovenizer didn’t think he could be that helpful, as he hadn’t witnessed anything himself. But he thought Sherlock should know something. He had a second cousin named Brian Gilmartin, who was the son of a man named Chuck Gilmartin, who was Bovenizer’s uncle and Hughes’s uncle. Chuck Gilmartin was also the man who had identified Hughes’ body at the morgue. David Gilmartin, the good friend of John Hughes and Larry Raddatz, was another of Chuck’s nephews.

  As the murder investigation was floundering, Chuck Gilmartin, who was a lawyer himself, had done some investigating on his own. He had done what he could for the family at the time, including trying to get a civil case off the ground and helping to talk to Mestrovic before she went to the grand jury.

  There was a file of what had been quietly collected, Bovenizer told Sherlock. Another lawyer named Jimmy Gorman had given Brian Gilmartin a copy of it just months before Gorman died, and Gilmartin still had it. Did Sherlock maybe want to look at it?

  “Wait, what?” Sherlock said, not believing his good fortune.

  When he got Brian Gilmartin on the phone, he learned it was true. Gorman had passed him a copy of the file in December 2015, maybe knowing that his health was failing and wanting it preserved in the event anyone ever needed it. Gilmartin had taken it to his workplace, an asset management company on Clark Street, and had never even looked at it. The collection of old paperwork was still sitting there.

  Gorman had never really said why he wanted Gilmartin to be the one to have the papers. Maybe because he knew Gilmartin’s father also had investigated the Hughes case. He had only made one request: “Just keep it.”

  Soon it was in Sherlock’s hands. It was stuffed with reports that had never been included in the CPD master file for the Hughes case,
and how Jimmy Gorman or Chuck Gilmartin had gotten them mattered little. Sherlock inventoried the file, restoring much of the paperwork to the official record, and it felt good. Whoever had whitewashed it before was no longer going to have that victory. Inventory #14352738 was back where it belonged.

  “The Gorman file,” as Sherlock came to call it, was enough paper to fill a large legal accordion folder, and included a mishmash of actual police reports, supporting documents, detective notes, Gorman’s handwritten updates, and newspaper clippings. Sherlock’s attention was immediately drawn to the police documents, mostly because they were in the file at all. Much of what he saw had either never made it to the official Hughes file or apparently been purged later.

  One sheet slipped among the first dozen or so pages carried a date of May 17, 1976, just two days after Hughes was killed. RELEASE PRISONER was the title of the form, right at the top. The document stated that a seventeen-year-old by the name of Nick Costello had been arrested by officer John Furmanek, confirming part of what Furmanek had told the FBI in 2005.

  “Above arrested for investigation into the fatal shooting of John Hughes which occurred at Root & Lowe on 15 May 1976,” it continued, in typed letters. “Insufficient evidence to place any charges at this time.”

  And beneath that, another interesting note. The form had space for someone to type witness names beneath the heading “Persons who viewed subject.” And someone in fact had typed a name there: “Mary F. Mestrovic.”

  So someone in the Ninth District had made a record of Mestrovic positively identifying Costello as being in the car the shot was fired from.

  The form requested that the subject, Costello, be released immediately. It was signed by Lieutenant Joseph Curtin, one of the ranking leaders, along with Townsend and Haberkorn, who—per Furmanek’s version of events—had gone off to meet by themselves after Mestrovic identified Costello. According to the sheet, Costello had been arrested at 4:17 PM and was out by 9:15 PM.