Courtroom 302 (28 page)

IN THE EARLY MORNING
hours of May 4, 1981, on Chicago’s far south side, twelve-year-old Sheila Pointer and her ten-year-old brother Purvy were bludgeoned in their beds.

Their parents, Doris and Purvy Pointer Sr., had left Sheila and Purvy and their four-year-old sister, Tiaa, sleeping at home and driven to a hospital in the middle of the night because Doris was having stomach pains, they told police. They said they left for the hospital at about three-thirty
A.M
. and returned home at six-thirty
A.M
., after Doris was treated in an emergency
room. That’s when they found Sheila and Purvy blood-spattered and motionless in the bedroom they shared. Tiaa, who’d been sleeping in her parents’ bedroom, was unharmed. Purvy, unconscious, was rushed to a hospital with multiple skull fractures. Sheila was dead. She was on her back across the width of her bed, her legs dangling off the edge, a woman’s wool coat rolled up under her hips. She was naked from the waist down, and her red terry-cloth top was pulled up above her breasts. The autopsy revealed no vaginal injury, but a lab test found semen in her vagina.

The parents told police that a window at the rear of the house, in the kitchen, had been slightly ajar when they left for the hospital but wide open on their return, and the screen was gone. A friend of the Pointers found the screen down the alley and directed police to it. Near the screen the police also found a small TV taken from the parents’ bedroom, and a bloodstained steel pipe—the weapon with which the children were bludgeoned. The pipe belonged to Purvy Pointer Sr.; he used it to work on cars and kept it in the house.

Pointer was the detectives’ initial suspect. His whereabouts between four and six
A.M
. couldn’t be confirmed. Both he and his wife said he’d driven her to the hospital, nine miles away, but he hadn’t gone inside; he dropped Doris off at the emergency room entrance, they said, and waited in his car until she returned. Something an evidence technician noticed about the open window in the Pointers’ kitchen also provoked suspicions. The technician found an undisturbed line of dirt running the length of the windowsill, suggesting that no one had really come in through the window.

Detectives questioned Pointer at their station much of that first day. They brought him downtown early in the afternoon for a lie detector test. Pointer engaged in “purposeful noncooperation” during the test, the polygraph examiner wrote in his report. The examiner recommended he be retested at a later date. Detectives released him that evening.

The only lead that first day came from a woman who lived around the corner from the Pointers. She told police she’d seen a male youth in the alley behind the Pointer home at 6:10
A.M
. She described the youth as about seventeen, slender, clean-shaven, and “clean-looking.”

Purvy Junior remained in a coma for four days and lapsed in and out of consciousness for most of the rest of the first week after the attack. Detectives questioned him for the first time seven days after the attack—almost immediately after a breathing tube was removed from the youngster’s throat. Area 2 detectives James Houtsma and Victor Tosello asked Purvy if the offender had been a family member. Purvy said no. The detectives asked if he knew who’d attacked him. Purvy whispered something that sounded like “George.” Because nurses told the detectives it was probably
painful for Purvy to talk, Detective Houtsma held the youngster’s hand and instructed him to squeeze it, once for yes and twice for no, in response to other questions. According to the memo Detective Tosello wrote after the brief interview, Purvy communicated that “George” was a teenage gangbanger, lighter complected than Purvy was, and that he lived near the Pointer house.

Police soon learned of an eighteen-year-old named George Jones who lived around the corner from the Pointers. Jones was in school when detectives came by his house. They got a photo of him from his father, who himself was a Chicago police officer. The photo was a color shot of Jones dressed in a suit—the picture taken in anticipation of Jones’s graduation from Fenger High School, where he was a senior. The photo showed Jones to be darker complected than Purvy. Jones also wasn’t a gangbanger, as detectives later learned. He was the editor of his high school newspaper, a hurdler on the track team, an above-average student known to his classmates as “Bookworm,” and a junior deacon at his church. He’d never been in trouble with the law.

That evening two other detectives showed Jones’s photo to Purvy at the hospital. Purvy indicated he recognized the person in the photo but “gave no response when asked if he were the offender,” according to the detectives’ memo about the visit. Purvy also “kept trying to say a last name” for the offender—a last name that “sounded like Anderson–Henderson–Harrison,” according to the memo.

The next day, May 12, Detectives Houtsma and Tosello took Jones’s photo to the hospital and showed it again to Purvy. As soon as Purvy saw it, he “began to cry and stated that was the man who had come in his house and hit him and his sister on the head,” Houtsma and Tosello would write in their official report about the investigation.

Houtsma and three other detectives went to Fenger High School, arrested Jones, and took him to Area 2. Jones told detectives he’d gone to bed around nine
P.M
. on May 3 and awakened around seven-fifteen the following morning. His parents, likewise, said he was at home in bed during those hours.

Two detectives brought a photo array to the home of the neighbor who’d said she’d seen a “clean-looking” youth in the alley behind the Pointer house the morning of the crime. The photo array consisted of Jones’s color graduation picture and black-and-white mug shots of six other young men. The neighbor identified Jones as the man she saw.

That afternoon assistant state’s attorney Bryan Schultz decided that Jones would be taken from Area 2 to Purvy’s hospital room for a “show-up,” a one-on-one identification procedure. Schultz worked for felony
review, the unit that decides whether felony suspects should be charged and with what offenses. Schultz told Jones’s lawyer, Peter Schmiedel, that he could be present for the show-up—a concession Schmiedel believed was made because Jones’s father was a police officer.
Show-ups are generally considered more suggestive and less reliable than lineups, since the viewer is presented with only one subject. Besides Schmiedel and Schultz, two nurses were in Purvy’s hospital room when Detective Houtsma brought Jones in.

Jones was ushered to Purvy’s bedside, and Schultz asked Purvy if this was the man who’d hit him. Everyone in the room would later agree that Purvy first said no. But there’d be little agreement beyond that regarding what happened during the show-up.

According to Houtsma and Tosello’s official report, Purvy at first “said no, but at this time the overhead lights were off and the offender was wearing dark horn-rimmed glasses. The offender was then asked to remove his glasses and the overhead lights were turned on. At this point, without conversation from anyone else, [Purvy] stated, ‘That’s him,’ and pointed at the offender. Purvy Jr. was shaking at this time.”

According to later testimony from Schmiedel, Purvy first “said, ‘No, that is not the man, no, no, no, that is not the man.’ ” After Jones’s glasses were removed and Purvy was asked again, “Purvy responded, ‘Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.’ ”

Liwayway Hilario, one of the two nurses, would testify that when Purvy was asked if Jones was the offender, he first said, “No,” then said, “Yes.” Then Detective Houtsma “asked him, ‘What is it, Purvy? Is it no, or is it yes?’ and Purvy said ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ ” emphatically. Hilario didn’t recall any lights being turned on between the two identification attempts. The room was already brightly lit, she’d say—it was afternoon and the curtains were open.

The other nurse, Dorothy Harvey, would remember Purvy first saying, “No, no, yes,” and then, after Jones took his glasses off, saying, “Yes, yes, yes, no, no.” Purvy “was confused” and “appeared to not know what was going on,” Harvey would testify.

Assistant state’s attorney Schultz was the only person in the room who would later contend that Purvy’s identification of Jones was unambiguous. Even Purvy’s initial negative response was really an identification, Schultz would testify. “Purvy reacted in fear, exclaiming, ‘No, no, no,’ ” Schultz would say. In Schultz’s mind, this was Purvy’s “first confrontation with the man that he had seen beat his sister and beat him and … his reaction was terror.”

Schultz’s account not only didn’t jibe with the detectives’ report—it
also conflicted with the account Purvy himself would offer of what happened in the show-up. At Jones’s trial, Purvy would testify that he first said, “No, no, no,” because “I didn’t know who he [Jones] was.” But then “they cut on the lights and he took off his glasses, and I started crying and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ ”

A federal appeals court would ultimately conclude that the show-up identification of Jones—“
equivocal, made in suggestive circumstances by a child with a severe head injury”—had been “worthless.”

But it wasn’t worthless to the person with the power to charge. After the show-up in the hospital room, “I said, ‘There’s my murderer,’ ” Schultz would testify.

The neighbor-witness was brought to Area 2, where she viewed a lineup and identified the person whose photo she’d identified—Jones—as the youth she saw in the alley. Schultz approved murder and aggravated battery charges against Jones. Rape and other charges were added later.

The following morning, May 13, Jones was taken from the Area 2 lockup to 26th Street for his bond hearing. A prosecutor cited the evidence against Jones, relying on Detectives Houtsma and Tosello’s report—a report “
full of falsehoods” and omissions, the federal appeals panel would later say. Judge Joseph Urso set bond at $250,000. Jones’s parents didn’t have the $25,000 needed to keep their son out of jail.

“
STUDENT WHO
‘
HAD IT ALL
’ charged in rape slaying,” read the headline of the front-page story in the
Chicago Tribune
on May 18, 1981, five days after Jones was jailed.

The morning the article ran, Purvy’s mother called police to report she’d found two pairs of panty hose behind a radiator in the bedroom in which the attack had occurred. The hose weren’t hers and hadn’t been her daughter’s, she said, and the legs were knotted in a way that suggested they’d been used as masks.

Detectives Houtsma and Tosello were unavailable, and so Detectives Frank Laverty and Thomas Bennett were assigned to pick up the stockings and reinterview Purvy at the hospital.

This time Purvy told the detectives there’d been not one but two offenders, both of whom had worn stocking masks, and one of whom had had a gun. The man without the gun was the “George” who’d beaten him and his sister. George had taken off his mask during the attack, Purvy told the detectives, had punched him in the eye, and had asked him where the jewelry was. But Purvy kept calling this attacker “George Anderson.” George Anderson wore a cap with a P on it, Purvy said, and was the leader of a gang that lurked near West Pullman Elementary School. Other children
had warned him to watch out for George Anderson, he told the detectives. Whenever Purvy said “George Anderson,” an aunt who was present for the interview would correct him. “You mean George Jones,” she’d tell Purvy, showing him the photo of Jones in the morning’s
Tribune
. Purvy would agree with the aunt but soon would be talking about George Anderson again.

The interview left Detective Laverty with “serious doubts” about Purvy’s trustworthiness as a witness, he’d later testify. Aside from the details Purvy had given during the interview that didn’t match Jones, there was the basic problem that Purvy was now saying there were two attackers. Laverty didn’t think a murder case should hinge on a witness who “can’t count the difference between one offender and two offenders,” he’d later say.

Laverty told his boss at Area 2, Commander Milton Deas, about the interview and about his doubts regarding the charges against Jones. Deas would later testify that although he found it “very significant” that Purvy was now saying there were two offenders, and that the youngster was now describing an offender who didn’t sound like Jones, he didn’t find it significant enough to direct the lead detectives on the case, Houtsma and Tosello, to reopen their investigation. Nor did he inform the state’s attorney’s office about the development. According to the commander’s own later testimony, he told Laverty that “our hands were tied” because Jones had already been charged. Deas put the responsibility for any further investigation in Laverty’s lap. “I told Laverty that if he thought George Jones was not the proper party to have been charged with the homicide, and he thought someone else was, and he had information who it was, or he had leads, I told him to follow it up.”

Meanwhile, Jones remained in jail. On June 11 Schmiedel persuaded Judge William Cousins, to whom the case had been assigned, to lower Jones’s bond to $60,000. Jones’s parents took out a second mortgage on their house and posted the necessary $6,000. Their son came home on June 18, after thirty-six days in jail.

ONE DAY THAT JULY
, two months after the Pointer attack, Laverty heard that a man named Lester Pigue was in custody at Area 2, having just confessed to murdering a twenty-one-year-old woman three blocks from the Pointer home. The woman, Sharon Hudson, had been sexually assaulted and bludgeoned with a brick. In his initial statements to police, Pigue blamed Hudson’s murder on two men he called “Big Black” and “King George,” but in his confession he said “that was just some bullshit I made up.” Laverty speculated that “King George” might be the “George”
Purvy had said was an offender, and that he might have committed the Pointer crime with Lester Pigue. Laverty decided to question Pigue. According to the memo Laverty later wrote about the interview, when he asked Pigue whether he’d been involved in the Pointer crime, Pigue said he didn’t know because he sometimes did things in fits of rage and then forgot what it was he’d done. According to Laverty, Pigue also correctly “guessed” that the weapon used to bludgeon Sheila and Purvy had been a pipe and indicated with his hands a pipe the approximate length and diameter of the one that had been used. And Pigue also said “he remembered something about a little boy and girl … and a screen being out of a window, but could not or would not elaborate,” according to Laverty’s memo. Laverty didn’t ascertain from Pigue whether “King George” really existed.