Crooked City
by Martin Preib
We are delighted to welcome crime writer Martin Preib to Omnimystery News today.
Martin's second second collection of connected essays (after The Wagon and Other Stories from the City) is Crooked City, which was published earlier this year in trade paperback and ebook formats.
We are pleased to introduce you to this book with an excerpt from it.
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Foot Patrol
I WATCH AS THE CITY WINDS ARRIVE in the early afternoon. The gusts stir the trash lingering in curbs and doorways along Devon Avenue in Chicago, most of it tossed by gangbangers the day before. The plastic bags, candy wrappers, and cigarette butts rise up in large circles, then resettle. At the same time, the Black P-Stone and Latin King gangbangers stir in their apartments. They emerge north and south of Devon and gather in small groups on the corners. They seem at ease in the street, as if it is theirs, not mine. The floating debris adds to this feeling. Tossed on the ground the day before, it now rises up all around them. As they set up for a day of dope dealing, taking positions for lookouts, runners, sellers, I fight off the feeling of my insignificance and lack of authority on the street.
The trash generally hits people in the lower legs, but some rises up on a swirling gust, as high as any building on the street, then settles onto a car windshield or hits some pedestrian or shop owner in the ear or side of the face. They swat it away, keeping their attention on their business. The Black P-Stones are the most prolific. They talk loudly on their cell phones, especially when I am around, shouting "motherfucker" and "bitch" over and over. Some break out into dances on the sidewalk, as if their criminality gives them unbearable joy, and their fellow bangers yell and laugh in encouragement. Others linger for a moment outside a liquor store munching on some chips, then dart back in, come outside again, and cross the street in the middle of traffic right in front of me, causing cars to stop. The men wear their pants halfway down, exposing their underwear. As the summer day grows warmer, they will remove their shirts and let them hang from the back of their pants. Their bare skin reveals tattoos announcing gang affiliations, former girlfriends, mothers, and criminal intentions. The women push baby strollers up and down the drug alley. Cops learn early in their careers to check these strollers in an arrest. Likely there is dope hidden there. In a moment these women will break out into a shouting match as a way of distracting me, so other gang members can conduct a quick transaction or lift a computer from an unlocked car. Younger gang members on bikes, generally runners, ride on the sidewalks and the wrong side of the street. They turn in front of traffic, toss bikes in the middle of the sidewalk, and run into the store. No pedestrians or shop owners dare confront them. No one honks at them when they block traffic. No one ever makes contact with them. The Indian and Pakistani store owners who own the restaurants and small retail shops give the bangers a wide berth on the sidewalks.
I strap on my helmet, push the start button on the ATV, and move across the street before parking again. I technically work a foot post, but on warm summer days I take the ATV. This section of Devon lingers on a precipice. It is filled with ethnic restaurants — Indian, Pakistani — along with clothing and electronics stores. It is often bustling. But then there is this gang intrusion. No one is really certain what will happen, which direction it will go. When I first took the foot post, I had this notion I could help move it in the right direction. There were many ethnic areas in the city that were tourist and nightlife destinations: Greektown, Little Italy, Chinatown. Devon Avenue could join them, I figured, but there were too many restaurants and store owners that weren't taking care of the appearance of their businesses. Some never swept their storefronts. I walked up and down the avenue, enforcing the ordinance calling on merchants to keep their storefront free from litter. The owners got nervous when I walked in. They had been there for years and never seen a uniformed cop walk in. Most of them began sweeping up right away after I asked them. Only a handful I had to threaten with a ticket. Within months, I had most of Devon looking spiffy. Many people commented on the new look, and I took pride in it. But I could never get this section of Devon cleaned up, from Western to Damen, where the gangs had control. The store owners would never come out onto the street to encounter them. I couldn't ask them to do it. It would be too dangerous.
The gang members are angry because I started up my ATV and moved across the street. They thought I was leaving and they could go back to work. It is a trick I often play with them. Whenever I fire up the ATV, there is a slight relaxation in them. Now I turn the engine off and sit back, my feet raised up a little. From the rack on the front of the ATV, I grab my Starbucks latte and lean back. It's important I stay here as long as I can, maintain my presence on the street. I pull out my cell phone and check messages, dial a few numbers and chat with friends. In response, the gangbangers increase their shouting, riding bikes recklessly, having arguments that border on fights. Things always seem to be near a breaking point on Devon. One of these days things will get out of hand. I finger my radio, check to make sure it is on the right channel if I have to call for help. When I decide to leave, I turn the engine button on and press the starter. The engine turns but doesn't start. It's been happening more and more lately. I turn it off, act as if it's no big deal, then try again. No good. I check the choke, fire one more time, and give it more gas, knowing it may be flooded already. The gangbangers are watching carefully and start gathering around me. I pretend as if I have a message on my cell phone to buy some time in case the ATV is flooded. The gangbangers have circled me now and are talking shit.
"That motherfucking scooter ain't worth shit, Mr. Policeman," one says. "Let me ride it."
As he says this, he reaches out to touch the handlebar. I grab his hand, push it away, and curse him, but the others are smiling. I'm looking like a fool, sitting on an ATV that won't start. This time I press the starter button and hold it, give it plenty of gas. It shakes and rattles, and I hold on. The bangers are laughing but slowly the engine catches, and finally, with a thick plume of exhaust, it turns. I give it more gas to keep it revving and to spew exhaust on them as much as possible. They back off, waving the exhaust from their faces, and I leave. Farther west on Devon, I come to a stop again.
Foot patrol is an assignment that many cops work an entire career, a sign that they gave up on promotion and advancement for the steady routine of a daily job in a single neighborhood, alone on a busy street. They can be among the most knowledgeable cops in a district or the most clueless, depending on how they work their beat. Some spend their time getting information, taking plate numbers down, running the information in the computers, and developing theories. Others sit in cafés and read newspapers, flirt with women.
What attracts me about foot patrol is the imaginative freedom, the ability to walk or ride somewhat aimlessly about Devon Avenue as I ruminate on crimes and gather information about them. I am free from most calls for service; I just emerge on the street every afternoon. Sometimes I meet the store owners, trying to catch some gossip or listening to their complaints about what is happening in the neighborhood. Sometimes I arrest gang members for petty offenses, bringing them into the station, where I take my time doing the paperwork, trying to start a conversation with them. They tell me who their friends are, where they hang out, and I can run the information gathered in the computer and get a clearer picture of what is going on. Other times I wait on roofs of buildings or in someone's apartment, watching the drug dealing, climbing up the back stairs of the buildings in the dark, making as little noise as possible. There is plenty of idle time, plenty of pausing and chatting with people.
There is a change in my imagination from when I first arrived in the city to now, working foot patrol. It has become important for me to sort it out. More and more I am guided by images arising from crimes. One crime in particular has moved to the forefront. It occurred in 1982, when I was flunking out of school in Kalamazoo, traveling to Chicago every weekend. It has unfolded all the years I have been in the city. It seems as if it did not become clear to me until I was ready for it, as if it waited for me. It came to me from a story in the Sunday paper, describing a crime in which the offender from a gruesome quadruple murder in 1982 had been convicted, released on appeal, then re-offended.
At the time of these murders, I lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was only eighteen, but I had taken my first few literature classes at Western Michigan University and they had set me on fire. I had friends in Chicago who called themselves writers, and I began hitchhiking into the city to meet them and hang out. This exposure to writers initiated my own first vague designs toward literature. After my first semester, I gave up on my classes, instead reading writers that interested me and those that my friends in Chicago talked about, the modernist writers like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I had this image of myself as becoming a university professor, attending conferences, writing papers, and traveling frequently to Europe, of writing poems that began with quotes in Latin or Greek. Yet in reality I was slowly dropping out of college, failing classes. There was a disconnect between my imagination and my circumstances. In those days, I never could have imagined that I would I become a police officer in Chicago, that I would one day be cruising city neighborhoods in a squad car.
One thing was true from those early years in Chicago until now: I gravitated toward writers who captured a specific place. They were called regional writers. In them there was a long germination before they finally found the images that gave life to a place. Then suddenly, the images were all around them. They had just failed to see them before. I look back at this murder case and see it slowly coming toward me, pushing away other things until it came to the forefront and took over everything else.
I pieced the story of this quadruple murder together from newspaper accounts, oftentimes pulling out the clippings from a folder I carried between my vest and shirt while on duty, taking notes and writing down questions. I would tell friends and coworkers about it as we stood at various corners of Devon or took a break in a café, asking their point of view, their interpretation. Then, after almost a year, I could not get away from it. I finally headed to the county court archives. I sat on the fourth floor in a building between the county jail and courthouses, entering the building with my police ID, but veering left instead of right, where most of the cops go to testify in felony trials. When I handed the clerk my police ID as the required deposit, she looked at me strangely, then handed over the cardboard box filled with transcripts and documents. The room was filled with offenders, their lawyers, or their relatives asking about documents related to their cases: bond slips, case reports, certificates. Very rarely had a cop come in to wade through transcripts in the corner of a room for several days. When I handed her the ID, I could feel her puzzlement as she looked at me. What was an off-duty patrolman doing looking into a case more than two decades old? If she asked me, what would I say? I hardly knew myself. I took the box, went to the corner, and began reading.
Even with these transcripts and the police reports, I had to reconstruct much of what happened that day. I had to use what knowledge I had of crime scenes. As best as I could piece it together, in August 1982 a cop arrived at the Rockwell Gardens, a housing project on the West Side of the city. At the building he met with paramedics assigned to an ambulance. They all proceeded to the Parker family's apartment on the seventh floor. Outside the apartment, a crowd had gathered. The officer entered and found the bodies of four Parkers dead inside, all apparently strangled to death: one female, Mary Ann Parker, fifteen, lying face-up in the bathroom with her feet on the toilet; a three-year-old boy, Jontae Parker, also in the bathroom, on his left side, facedown; another female, Cora Jean Parker, thirteen, facedown in a closet; and one female, pregnant, Christine Parker, thirty-three, lying in the bedroom face-up. Murders were common enough in those days, especially on the West Side. Crack cocaine had made its way into the city. I imagine the cop cursing to himself when the call of a death investigation came over the air, because any dead body could mean mandatory overtime. Since the door was open and the murders reported some time ago — the call came out as a death investigation — the officer was probably not too worried that the offender was still on scene, the way he would in an in-progress call. But no doubt he walked through each room carefully while the paramedics checked the bodies. As he found them one by one, he didn't know what the final tally would be. He also didn't know if he would find one still alive, gasping for breath, the eyes of a victim following him as he walked into the room.
I imagine the cop cursing again when he discovered the first body, overtime now certain. Perhaps he thought it was another gang or dope murder or a burglary gone bad. But when he discovered the other bodies, he knew he was into a much higher game, particularly when he saw a little boy, lying in his own pool of blood. Whoever did this must be caught, and he knew that his initial decisions and his report writing could have a bearing on this person's — or these persons' — capture and conviction. From the way he wrote the case report, I can tell he was a veteran officer. He knew that good report writing is based on the philosophy of less is more. The more he wrote, the more he left himself open on the stand to a defense lawyer. They pore over police reports looking for any contradiction, any factual error, and exploit it.
Shortly after the officer secured the crime scene, I imagine how the entrance of the apartment was filled with official sounds for many hours, the radios from cops and fire department officials, crime lab investigators, bosses arriving on scene and other cops. They remained at the entrance to preserve the crime scene for evidence. The responding officer was constantly interrupted, jotting down notes, facts, times, and phone numbers, before two wagons arrive and load the bodies for the morgue, two in each wagon. This was long before cell phones, so the responding officer likely had to use the phone in a nearby apartment. By then the entire scene would have been photographed, dusted for prints, and officers would have finished canvassing, knocking on doors throughout the complex to ask residents if they saw or heard anything. The canvass would come up negative, and the investigation would then fall upon the detectives. At some point it would have been made clear to all the cops at the scene that three-year-old Jontae had not only been strangled to death, but he had also been anally raped.
There was no sign of forced entry in the apartment, no kicked-out door or window frames that might lead to a theory about gangbangers stealing dope or valuables. Whoever had committed the crimes was welcomed there. This was the first lead for police. They later learned that five young men frequented the apartment, often late at night. These young men, they were told, arrived because the Parkers subscribed to a pay television station called ON TV, a precursor to cable television. Detectives divided up the names of the five regular visitors to the Parker household and began interviewing them, one by one. Four of them checked out. They all had alibis. When they arrived at the apartment of James Ealy, seventeen, the last one to be interviewed, he was playing basketball in front of the complex. They asked his younger brother to go get him. In the meantime, they spoke with his mother about James's activities in and around the time of the murders.
At this point in their investigation, James held no official status. He could be a witness, an offender, or nothing at all. But the detectives did learn that he once had a relationship with one of the Parkers, fifteen-year-old Mary Ann, who was found dead in the bathroom. The detectives talked with James's mother until James got there. When James arrived, the police asked him if he would come down to the station so they could interview him. James claimed he had a date that night, and the detectives assured him that he would be back in time for it. He agreed and left with them. At the station they asked James to give an account of his whereabouts at the time of the murders. His account conflicted with the story his mother had given, and they pointed this out to him. They asked his mother, who had arrived at the station, to speak to him, but, they said, James refused to talk to her.
In the hallway outside the interview room, another detective approached the two detectives conducting the interview. This new detective held the copy of a case report against James for first-degree rape six months earlier. That rape resembled the Parker crime scene so much that it almost looked like a prelude to the Parker murders. It held the same themes of violence with a sexual lust in it, strangling and humiliation of the victim. In the rape, Ealy had followed a woman up a flight of stairs from the eighth floor, grabbed her, and knocked her to the ground. He then dragged her to a stairway on the twelfth floor, where he began beating and choking her. Ealy dragged her again to the thirteenth floor and raped her as he choked her until she passed out. The woman's screams compelled a neighbor to call the police. There was a police unit in the building who responded. They gave chase to Ealy and apprehended him. Ealy was locked up for the crime, but was eventually granted bond and released.
This bond would be the first, strange instance of Ealy's liberation from his crimes. The bond was paid by Catholic Charities, an organization that often provided legal services to poor offenders. Catholic Charities also hired a prominent law firm to represent Ealy on the rape charge. Without this bond on the rape, Ealy would never have been free the night the Parkers were murdered. Why Catholic Charities had bonded out Ealy, why they didn't find the circumstances of the rape disturbing enough to leave him in custody, was never explained. At least one reporter covering the case seemed puzzled by this and wrote a story, confronting Catholic Charities. But the spokesperson was evasive. Nevertheless, many cops were shocked when they found out. They canceled their payroll deductions that gave money to the organization.
With this new information about the rape in hand, the detectives reentered the interview room and read Ealy his rights.
At the request of the detectives, James signed a consent-to-search form. Two detectives just starting their shift then went to Ealy's apartment to search his bedroom. Under his bed, they found several items, including lengths of material tied with knots in it, and a knife handle. They retrieved some of these and went to the home of another detective who had been at the crime scene. This detective told them that the material tied in knots resembled material around the neck of Mary Ann Parker, Ealy's former girlfriend. The detectives reentered the Parker apartment and matched the material to a raincoat where the belt was missing.
Confronting Ealy with the evidence back at the station, he changed his story, claiming he had seen a large black male leave the Parkers' apartment and drop the bundle. James said he picked it up and entered the Parkers' apartment and saw the bodies, checked their pulses to confirm they were dead, then returned home with the bundle, which he put under his bed. James would eventually claim he had played basketball with the bundle as he walked down the stairs, shooting it into trash cans on each floor. When asked why he didn't call the police, Ealy could not answer. The detectives asked James to sign another consent-to-search form, then returned to his apartment to gather the rest of the items in the bundle. When they got back to the interview room, they told James his story didn't hold up. At this point a vein in James's forehead was trembling, and he finally stated he would tell the truth. He confessed to the detectives, then to a state's attorney, who took his official statement. There is a picture of him in the court transcripts, sitting at the table where he signed the confession.
In his confession, Ealy claimed he had been drinking wine with friends all day, then told them he was going home, but instead headed to the Parkers' apartment. Cora Jean Parker, thirteen, and her mother, Christine, began teasing James about his red eyes, calling James a wine-head. James got mad, told them "not to worry about it," but Cora kept on teasing him, then slapped James on the back when she walked by him. James swung back and hit her. The mother, Christine, shouted from the bedroom for them to keep quiet. While James was watching TV, Cora Jean came into the room and continued teasing him. James chased her to the bedroom where Christine was.
"She was laughing. She thought I was playing," he said in his confession. "I guess you want to die or something," James said to her.
In Ealy's confession, he said that Cora Jean, unaware of the rage that was rising in Ealy's six-foot-one, muscular 205-pound frame, kept laughing. James grabbed Cora Jean in the bedroom and pushed her to the floor. He told her to put her head underneath the bed. He went and got the belt from the closet. He told Christine, who was still in the bedroom, to get on her knees facing away from him and wrapped the belt around her neck, forcing her to beg for her life before he strangled her to death. After she was dead, he placed her body on the bed. With some red socks, Ealy tied up Cora Jean, all the while kneeling on top of her to remain in control. Ealy claims someone knocked on the front door and Mary Ann, fifteen, his former girlfriend, got up from the couch in the living room to answer it. Perhaps hearing the commotion, Mary Ann walked toward the bedroom. Ealy slapped her, threw her down on the bed, and wrapped a belt around her neck, then led her into the bathroom. There he made her get on her knees and strangled her. Somehow part of the khaki material she was wearing was also used to strangle her. The cords around Mary Ann's neck were so tight that Ealy had to cut them off, but some of the khaki material remained. Ealy closed the door to the bathroom, saying he did not want Cora Jean to see Mary Ann's body. James claims three-year-old Jontae woke up in the living room and went toward the bedroom. This made him a witness, Ealy claims, and so he strangled the little boy near the entrance of the bathroom. He returned to Cora, still tied up in the bedroom, and strangled her, then threw her body into the closet.
I often reconsider the details of the murders, the sounds, the images. I think about Mary Ann found in the perverse position of her body on the floor but her legs draped over the toilet. The image betrays an intense, violent struggle, much flailing and kicking. Were any of the women alive to hear Jontae raped? What sounds does a three-year-old boy being raped and strangled make?
In his confession, Ealy never admitted raping Jontae, who hemorrhaged from his anus and lay in his blood in the bathroom. In the perverse logic of the criminal world, raping a child was the least manly crime imaginable, lower than the murders. Ealy wouldn't want a child rape hanging over his head in prison, and he probably would not want his mother to know what he had done to the boy. But how does the rape fit in among the other murders? Did Ealy truly rape Jontae after killing Christine and tying Cora Jean up in the bedroom? It seems strange to kill, then rape, then kill again. Why didn't he rape one of the women instead, especially Cora Jean while she was tied up? Perhaps he enjoyed making Cora Jean hear and see the other murders and the rape as a way to increase her terror and humiliation for teasing him. Surely after the other murders and the rape of Jontae, Cora Jean knew she would die as well. Inflicting that level of terror no doubt gave Ealy intense pleasure, just as he enjoyed beating and dragging from one destination to another the woman he raped six months earlier.
What I couldn't understand was how Ealy controlled the entire situation, how he murdered all four so brutally without more signs of struggle or without anyone fleeing the apartment. How did Ealy murder Christine while leaning on Cora Jean? Was Cora Jean, were all the Parkers, so paralyzed in terror that Ealy had his way with them? Why no screams from the bedroom by Christine or Cora Jean to alert Mary Ann in the living room what was happening, allowing Mary Ann to flee and call for help? I cannot get my mind around the crime scene. Criminals lie even when they don't have to. It's a way of maintaining some kind of control even when there is no point to it. Ealy's confession reeks of this, so much so that no one will likely ever know exactly what happened in the Parker apartment, a fact that probably still pleases Ealy.
I wonder if something else happened, if Ealy came to the house to have sex with Mary Ann but she refused. Perhaps this was the real source of his rage. Or perhaps he raped Jontae first. Then, as the Parker women discovered what he was doing, he killed them one by one. Maybe he came to the apartment from the outset to rape and murder. This makes great sense to me. I can see the hours of drinking wine awaking his sociopathic rage. He lied to his friends about going home, then sneaked over to the Parkers' apartment. The rape arrest six months earlier was still hanging over his head. The trial was approaching. He tasted the first ecstasy of raping the woman in the stairwell. How many more chances would he get in life? A long prison term was likely from the rape arrest. How many years? I can imagine Ealy came to the apartment drunk, with nothing more to lose, hell-bent on rape and murder from the outset.
I turn over Ealy's crimes again in my mind. After the slaughter of the Parkers, I could imagine Ealy was exhausted. I've reconstructed enough crime scenes to know this. He must have been breathing hard and dripping sweat. It was a hot August night. It's not easy to strangle four victims, adding a rape into the slaughter. No doubt the sweat from the victims mingled with Ealy's sweat as he murdered and raped. At some point he stood in the Parker apartment surveying his work. He had wrapped many incriminating items, including the belts, together in a sheet, then wiped the apartment down for fingerprints. For some reason, it seems important for me to know whether he turned the television off at some point. I have this image that he wanted some quiet after the deed. He had to pause and make sure he covered up everything. How silent the apartment must have seemed. What a moment of self-insight for Ealy. He was only seventeen and had just murdered a family of four; Christine, the mother; Cora Jean, thirteen; Mary Ann, fifteen, and her son, Jontae, three.
Ealy told detectives that he picked up the phone and called his mother in their apartment three floors below. His mother would later corroborate the phone call. Ealy told the detectives he made the call because he didn't have his apartment key and he didn't want to be stuck outside in the hallway holding the bundle of evidence, waiting. He said he made the phone call from a downstairs pay phone, but I believe that was another lie. I think he made the call from the Parkers' apartment. He would not make the call from a public place carrying a bundle of evidence from the murders. Even so, calling his apartment from the crime scene only increased the evidence against him. It provided more proof that he was at the crime scene. I could see a prosecuting attorney confronting him with the evidence of the call.
"We have records, James, that someone made a phone call to your apartment from the Parkers' around the time of the murders . . ."
Ealy should never have taken the evidence into his apartment to begin with. He should have gotten rid of it right away. He could have thrown it down the trash chute, tossed it into a dumpster somewhere, set it on fire in a trash can. But it was clear to me it was some kind of trophy for him now. I know from some research into killers like Ealy, ones who kill with a sexual lust, that such trophies are a way to relive the murders in their sexual fantasies. I think about the phone call to his mother. I think he needed to hear her voice. What a moment in his life to clutch the phone tightly to his cheek while he waited for his mother to answer, standing among the four Parker bodies. He never broke down and confessed to her in the phone call. He did not sob or ask for her forgiveness.
After the call, Ealy carried the bundle home, lied to his mother about what it was, and placed it under his bed. Then he reviewed his witless alibi throughout the night.
With the evidence and the confessions, Ealy was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. Because he was only seventeen, he could not receive the death penalty. During the trial, his attorneys slowly paved the way for the appeal. There was so much evidence against him, including his confession, that there was little else they could argue. They tested out the theories of their appeal on the judge, submitting motions that Ealy was unlawfully arrested. The trial judge refused all of it and upheld the prosecutor's case. The trial went forward. Ealy was convicted for all the murders. Ealy was only one month shy of his eighteenth birthday at the time of the murders, a certain death sentence if the murders had occurred one month later. After his trial, Ealy's lawyers went forward with their appeal, arguing that the police had acted unlawfully when they came to his apartment and asked him to come to the station so they could talk to him. They claimed that this constituted an arrest and, at that point in their investigation, the detectives lacked probable cause to arrest Ealy. Ealy also argued that he was tortured into confessing, saying that police came into the interview room and beat him until he agreed to confess. Such claims of torture would become common in Ealy's era. But why would the detectives torture him when they had recovered so much evidence right under his bed? There was no evidence of torture at all, no marks, no complaints, nothing. The torture accusations went nowhere. But the claim that the cops had no probable cause was upheld. As a result, all evidence they had gathered as a result of that interview, including the confessions and the bundle of sheets under his bed, was tossed, and Ealy was remanded for another trial. The cops, prosecutors, and trial judge were furious. The same judge and lawyers met to retry Ealy, but the prosecutor said that without the evidence they had no case and could not move forward. The judge made an impassioned speech, saying that the criminal justice system had completely failed and that billboards should be constructed throughout the city announcing that a predator would soon be roaming free. He then dismissed the case. Ealy wasn't let loose right away. He was sentenced to twenty-three years on the rape charge against the woman in the stairwell six months earlier, but was out after ten years, free again.
As I recall the Ealy murders that day and many others while working on Devon Avenue, I conclude that crimes hold a special power in Chicago. It is through them, and only them, that the city fuses the fantastic and the mundane. These crimes are variously crafted in their patterns of deceit, compelling in their arrangement. They tie the city together and give life to its mysteries. Without them, little exists with which to imagine the city. Without them, all metaphors falter, then fall away. Alone, on foot patrol, I conclude that a vast imaginative life is rooted in city crimes. I do not believe they have had their proper say, their proper perspective. I hold out hope that, when arranged appropriately, these crimes will serve a higher purpose, that the deceptions, lies, and brutality in them will rise to something akin to the power of art: that they will suddenly, as Picasso says, "enable us to see the truth." I believe the city is desperate for the illumination they can provide. In saying so, I am aware of my own responsibility, that there is a preparatory condition of mind, without which it is useless to imagine them. I hold out some fading hope that, in this right state of mind, these crimes will hold some deliverance in them.
What proves inevitable in this preparation is a picking and choosing of crimes for their illuminative power, the mysterious ways they touch upon one's own life, in one's own time and place, so that even the most forgotten crime — and Ealy's story was certainly forgotten, buried in the city's judicial archives until he himself brought them back to life — can suddenly take on a heightened significance, rising to the level of metaphor, allegory, paradigm, or worldview. What is required is confronting that which seems compelling in these crimes, sensing that what arises might hold a larger value, be the stuff of a better vision. In doing so, one is free to wander through them in one's own way, according to their own meaning, and there, for a moment, is the first tantalizing liberation in them. This, I tell myself on foot patrol, is the reason the Parker murders call out to me.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Martin Preib
Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Crooked City
Martin Preib
A Collection of Connected Essays
Chicago cop Martin Preib takes on seemingly unrelated murder cases, all dating from one year, 1982, including some in which offenders were released as part of the wrongful conviction movement.
This book shatters reader assumptions — about the workings of justice, the objectivity of the media, and the role of the police in the city of Chicago, even calling into question allegations of police torture in the notorious cases against Jon Burge. Told in the gripping tension of a crime novel, Preib strives for the highest language as he wanders these brutal, controversial killings.
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