“Life was hard for Ruthie Mae,” said the bulletin handed out at Ruthie Mae McCoy’s burial service, on April 30, 1987. Death didn’t give her any breaks, either: on the evening of April 22, 1987, the 52-year-old McCoy was shot four times and left to expire on her bedroom floor, on Chicago’s west side.
The following evening, a concerned neighbor phoned police and asked them to check on McCoy. A half dozen cops and several CHA security guards gathered outside McCoy’s door. This time the police wanted to force their way in, but the security guards talked them out of it: if you do break in, the tenant might sue, one guard warned. McCoy’s decomposing body finally was discovered the next afternoon, when the same neighbor called the project office and convinced a manager to enter the apartment.
Most of the benches in the courtroom’s gallery were empty throughout the trial. (More crowded by far was the courtroom across the hall, where a death-sentence hearing was held for a cop killer.) A handful of friends and relatives attended in support of the defendants. Only one person was there on behalf of the victim–her brother, Willie McCoy.
She never married. She was 27 when she gave birth to her only child, Vernita. Ruthie Mae functioned all right when she was taking her medicine–singing in church choirs, working occasionally as a laundromat attendant or housekeeper. Mostly, she subsisted on public aid in slum apartments, and occasionally she required institutionalization.
Toilets back up frequently in Abbott, ceilings and walls are crumbling, and the elevators work only occasionally. Almost as tangible is the widespread oblivion–the glassy eyes and listlessness of a population hooked on coke, PCP, and TV. A detective who investigated McCoy’s killing told me in ’87: “One of the most difficult parts of this case was that none of our witnesses were aware of what time things occurred. Since they don’t do anything all day and all night, they’re just not worried about what time it is.”
But the Paymasters weren’t the only concern of Abbott tenants in the mid-80s. Sometime in ’86, the medicine cabinet break-ins began. The pair of apartments at the end of each floor in the high rises have adjacent bathrooms, their medicine cabinets back-to-back, with only a pipe chase of about two and a half feet between them. Remove six screws from one medicine cabinet, pull the cabinet out of the wall, crawl through the pipe chase, and kick in the other cabinet, and you’re in the next apartment. People who live at the end of a corridor with a vacant apartment adjacent are particularly susceptible. (Nearly 30 percent of the 148 units in McCoy’s building were vacant in ’87.) After the bathroom break-ins began, some residents of the Abbott high rises took to pulling couches in front of their bathroom doors, or securing their bathroom doorknobs with rope, before turning in for the night.
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The defendants, both in dark suits, sat at either end of the defense table, four assistant public defenders between them. Edward Turner, 21, a medium-complected black, his hair closely cropped and his chin smoothly shaven, sat stiff and sober-faced; John Hondras, 25, a light-skinned black (nicknamed “Whiteboy”) with wire-rimmed glasses, a spare goatee, and a wisp of a ponytail, displayed a slight smile and a more confident air. The standard legal maneuvering, and the complications typical of a multiple-defender case that had delayed the trial, had tested the defendants’ patience at times, as they were stuck in County Jail in the interim. (No bond was set for Turner; Hondras’s was $10 million.)
