On Palm Sunday 1990, the choir of Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church was waiting in the back of the church, anticipating the 6:30 AM service, when the church secretary approached, pulled Jeanne Bishop aside, and told her that she had received a phone call. Bishop, her mind on the impending performance, asked the secretary to take a message. The secretary suggested that this was not that kind of phone call. Bishop followed the secretary back to an office, thinking that her father might have had a heart attack.
“There was no one there, just me and the secretary. I think it took me ten minutes to start crying. I just refused to believe it. She is just 25 years old. You get the sobs that come from so deep. The secretary kept getting me Kleenex.
It did not take long for the Winnetka police to rule out the ax as the murder weapon. The Langerts had been shot with a .357 Magnum. Nothing of value had been taken, and there was money strewn around the floor, so the police also ruled out robbery as a motive. Two days after the murder, they seemed ready to believe that the victims must have been guilty of something to deserve such a cruel fate. Lieutenant Joe Sumner speculated before television cameras: “Did they get in debt and owe money? Were they involved in narcotics? These are things that we have to find out now.”
Jeanne Bishop first heard from the FBI on November 1, 1989, five months before the Winnetka murders. At 8:30 AM on that date, FBI agent Patrick “Ed” Buckley called Bishop at her office at the law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt. (Buckley, who is notorious among Irish activists in Chicago, declined to be interviewed for this story, and spokesman Bob Long said it was FBI policy to decline to comment about specific cases unless doing so would “serve law enforcement purposes.” As a result, the FBI’s version of all of the events related here could not be determined.) Bishop says that in that initial phone call, Buckley said that he needed to speak with her in person about a threat against her life. Bishop, immediately suspicious, replied that she had a full day of meetings scheduled and that she would call the agent later that day. In the afternoon, Bishop sent a letter to Buckley’s office by messenger asking that all the details about the alleged threat be sent to her in writing.
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One of the reasons Bishop and Boyle were ready to dismiss the threat is that they knew what low esteem the FBI is held in by many Irish activists in the United States. Boyle, who does pro bono work for Irish immigrants, says it is not unusual for the FBI to threaten to deport Irish illegal immigrants unless they agree to inform on Irish Republican support groups. Colin Fagan, a spokesman for Noraid, a group that supports the dependents of IRA men serving time in prison, cites the case of one immigrant who was fired from his job because his employer did not like federal agents dropping by. Fagan also claims that Noraid is regularly harassed by the FBI; he cites as an example the 1989 arrest of a former IRA man who had been brought to Chicago from Belfast to speak at a Noraid banquet. Fagan says that the man’s speech was no secret, that it had been advertised on Irish radio stations, that the speaker was followed by the FBI for at least two weeks, and that he was arrested on the afternoon of the banquet simply to prevent him from speaking. In Northern Ireland he had been convicted of possessing ammunition and explosives in 1981, and he had not indicated this when he filled out his form for entry into the United States. He was sent back to Belfast a few days after his arrest. Before the arrest, Fagan says he received several calls from an FBI agent pretending to be a Northwestern University journalism student seeking an interview with the speaker. In May 1991, the FBI’s New York office used a similar journalism-student ruse in arresting another former IRA man, also a visa violator, who worked in the Manhattan Noraid office.
As someone who was familiar with the FBI’s activity in the Chicago Irish community, attorney Jerome Boyle believed that the alleged death threat against Jeanne Bishop was fabricated from the start. He says he imagined a scenario in which the FBI, in the alleged interest of protecting Bishop, would ask her to provide the names of Irish activists in the United States and Ireland; those named in the United States would then be called upon by FBI agents, who would show up unannounced at people’s offices, flashing their badges and creating a sensation. The agents would then say, “Jeanne Bishop’s life has been threatened because the IRA thinks she is an FBI informant. Do you know anything about this?” Boyle argues that the result would be that everyone would wonder if Jeanne Bishop was indeed an FBI informant.
According to Bishop, the theory presented by FBI agents Ed Buckley and Jim Cicchini was that the IRA had meant to kill Jeanne and had killed Nancy by mistake. Bishop says she pointed out the theory’s flaws, which were enormous: No American has ever been killed in the Northern Irish conflict. The IRA publicly claims its killings, even its mistakes. If anyone in Northern Ireland had wanted to kill Jeanne Bishop, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to do so ten days earlier, when she was in Belfast. Furthermore, Bishop’s address was listed in the Chicago phone book; a hit man who had wanted to kill her would have no reason to expect to run into his intended victim at the town house where Nancy and Richard Langert lived. Also, Nancy and Jeanne could not have been mistaken for each other except by a blind man: Jeanne is blond, while Nancy had brown hair, and although in her wedding photographs Nancy Langert bears some resemblance to her sister, at the time of the murder Nancy was 50 pounds heavier than Jeanne. Finally Bishop pointed out that if anyone appeared to have been more of a target in the town house murders, it was Richard: he had been shot in the head and had died instantly; Nancy had been shot in the elbow, back, and abdomen, and was alive and conscious after the killer left (the trail of blood indicated that she had crawled first to Richard, then to a shelf, where she drew a heart and the letter U in her own blood, and then to the stairway, where she died).
