Chicago: An Old Affirmative Action Story About Many Well-to-Do Whites Who Trusted a Young Black Man from the Projects Implicitly, and How He Paid Them Back with a String of Burglaries… and Murder (A Black History Month Moment)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

How many times have I heard stories of whites trusting a black who later turned on them?

This is one of those stories that could not be written today. Either no follow-up article at all would be written, or the racial angle, which is central to this one, would be disappeared, thereby making the article worthless as journalism.

Note that serial burglar-murderer Maurice Hunley very nearly got away with, even after giving himself away, by going to a store he’d burgled the night before, and trying to sell the owner back the shotgun he’d just stolen from him. His first murder trial ended with a hung jury, with seven jurors voting to acquit. Was black jury nullification at work? Soft-headed white females? Even after he’d been confessed and been convicted beyond a reasonable (really, a shadow of a) doubt, one of the local white businesswomen who’d dealt with him still refused to admit he was a burglar-murderer:

Jeweler Ellie Saliba said, ``When he killed that girl, if [?!] he killed that girl, I don`t think it was something that he set out to do. I guess I`m not willing to believe that all that time I didn`t know Maurice at all.``

Hunley almost beat the rap a second time, save for dumb luck or divine providence: The night before the jury voted to convict, someone burgled the hotel rooms of four jurors while they slept.

I thank the reader who told me about this story.
 

A Question Of Trust
Everyone Knew The Guy Who Fixed The Locks--or Did They?
July 02, 1987|By Bonita Brodt.
Chicago Tribune

Truth, as the saying goes, is often stranger than fiction--riddled with complexities and ironies and little twists that make people question what they believe in, who they believe in, and why they even believed in the first place. No one likes to think they`ve been taken advantage of. No one likes to think they`ve been a poor judge of character.

No one likes to think it was Maurice.

For if the people who thought they knew Maurice Hunley think of him as a murderer, then they have to think about the unsettling stretch of 26 months that passed before anyone made a connection between the neighborhood locksmith and the murder of a young woman on this fashionable stretch of Clark Street. Or about how they had considered him a friend, having him into their homes and their businesses to do lock work, blind to the fact that he may have been an attacker who had let himself in with a key.


Or how, had it not been for a peculiar misstep on his part, Cook`s Hardware might still be in business and Maurice Hunley might be still be working there, not 40 steps from the apartment building where Lisa Tyson was stabbed to death and perhaps never implicated in her killing at all.

A jury recently convicted him of the murder. He is now serving a 40-year sentence for the crime.

But Maurice Hunley is not the only one who is paying a price.

So are the people who thought they knew him, like Marty Nevel, who employed him at Cook`s Hardware and considered Hunley his friend. Though Nevel declined to be interviewed once the case was over, he talked at length after Hunley`s arrest. The sentiment he expressed then is still echoed along Clark Street today.
``Maurice has made fools out of us,`` Nevel remarked. ``Perfect fools.``

Cook`s Hardware was a small neighborhood store with an antique tin ceiling, bare wooden floors and the charms of a ma-and-pa business in the center of a shopping district where the specialties are coffee beans, sushi and croissants.
For eight years, Maurice Hunley tended the store.

He was 15 and still in high school when he hopped on his bicycle and pedaled to the bustling business strip on Clark Street, asking shopkeepers if they could use his help.

``Maurice was the baby of the family,`` his mother, Louise Hunley, explained not long after her son`s arrest. ``The youngest of my six children. His daddy worked all his life and I think that when he passed away, Maurice felt like he should take some of the responsibility, find a job and become a man.``

Though it was not something he often mentioned, Maurice was raised in a much different neighborhood than this affluent section of Lincoln Park, in the Cabrini-Green public-housing project. Louise Hunley said she considered herself lucky never to have trouble with him. ``He was an average kid,`` she explained. ``He never gave me any real problems, no gangbanging or any of that.``

Matthew Cook, whose father had opened the store in the 1920s, had just sold his $200,000-a-year business when the young Hunley was hired. Cook, having stayed on to work there, helped teach Hunley his skills.

``I found him to be honest, very willing,`` Cook recalled. ``We eventually let him go to the bank for us, we trusted him that much. He learned quickly.``

Because of its location at 2342 N. Clark St., in the heart of one of the city`s trendiest neighborhoods, Cook`s handled much of the area`s lock work, including many apartment-building accounts.

``We did a big lock business, and naturally, as Maurice got to know more he learned lock work,`` Cook recalled. ``He learned how to fit keys, change locks, make passkeys. The works.``

By the time he was 23, Maurice had worked his way up from broom sweeper to handyman to manager of the store.

Lock work was his specialty.

To the people with whom he did business, he was the friendly young man at the hardware store. ``Maurice,`` they called him, or just plain ``Mo.``

``In the time I`ve known Mo,`` recalled Elbert Wade, a packer at Reebie Storage Co., across the street, ``we`ve moved two times. My wife wouldn`t let anyone else change our locks. She would say, `Now you make sure you go to Cook`s and have that young fella come. We know we can trust him.` ``

Or so everyone believed.

The stabbing death of Lisa Tyson, a pretty, 25-year-old stockbroker, was one of those bleak urban mysteries that make headlines and then fade into memory, unresolved.

She was killed in her third-floor walkup apartment on Nov. 18, 1983. There was no sign of forced entry. Detectives theorized that she had surprised a burglar who panicked. A struggle took place. Her telephone cord was yanked from the wall.

She died after being stabbed seven times.

Neighbors heard screams shortly before 7 that night and one came face-to- face with a black man wearing a green army jacket walking briskly out of her apartment. He saw a bloody knife in the man`s hand. It appeared that her attacker knew the neighborhood by the way he made his escape. Witnesses saw him run down the stairs, bound out of the building, turn left, hop over a small fence, turn left again, scale a 10-foot iron gate and then immediately turn left as soon as he ran into the alley.

Had he turned right, he would have run smack into a dead end.

A man fitting his description was spotted getting into a cab a few blocks away. A suspicious motorist who had tracked him gave the cab`s number to police.

The cab was found near Cabrini, but by the time police caught up with it, the passenger was no longer inside. However, there were two black men wearing green army jackets in the vicinity. Police nabbed one, who later was released when the witness said it was the wrong man. The other man was seen running through a field a good distance away.

Two years later, according to prosecutors, police learned that he was running near the Cabrini building where Hunley, his wife and three children lived.

Nevel, who owned Cook`s Hardware at the time, was one of the few in the area who knew Hunley lived in Cabrini. He remembered joking with him the morning after Tyson was killed. Nevel had just read about the crime.

``Hey, Maurice,`` Nevel remembered saying, ``the papers say they are looking for a guy from Cabrini. Maybe he`s one of your friends.``

``Yeah,`` came Maurice`s reply. ``I might just even know the guy.``

``Mo?`` Nevel remembered asking when the police phoned him with the news. ``Are you sure you have the right guy?``

On Jan. 6, 1986, 26 months after the murder, there was a burglary at Abba`s Video, a movie-rental store just south of Cook`s on Clark Street. Stolen were a shotgun and five shells. There was no forced entry. The owners and the police drew one conclusion: The intruder had to have had a key.

Because Hunley frequently rented movies at Abba`s, it aroused no particular suspicion when he came in on the afternoon after the burglary. But his behavior did. He was carrying a cardboard box labeled ``ironing board`` that was taped shut at one end. The son of the store`s owner, who asked not to be identified by name, said Hunley was acting ``strange,`` asking workers if anyone wanted to buy what he had in the box.

His words piqued the curiosity of Harry McKenna, an off-duty Chicago police detective who was at the store to provide his sister, the store`s owner, with added security. McKenna became suspicious when he learned Hunley was the locksmith who recently had worked on the store`s locks. According to the account he gave investigators, McKenna said he stopped Hunley outside the store and was amazed when he found an ironing board and the missing shotgun, with its barrel sawed off, inside the box.

Unable to believe that it was Hunley, Nevel said he walked to the video store later that day and was stunned to discover for himself the same key that unlocked Abba`s Video worked in the back door of his hardware store.

Word of the burglary and of the connection that Nevel made between the two locks traveled swiftly. A number of building managers immediately closed their accounts at Cook`s. Among them was Margie Cohen, part-owner and manager of the building where Lisa Tyson was killed.

In an interview after Hunley`s arrest, Cohen said she had never hired Hunley to do lock work inside of her building. But she said her janitor often had taken lock tumblers down the street to Cook`s when tenants moved in so pins could be changed and keys made.

``At one time or another, I`m sure Maurice worked on every lock in this building,`` Cohen said.

Her tenants had reported two burglaries recent months; there was no sign of forced entry in either case.

``When I heard Maurice was charged with a burglary committed with a key, I was furious,`` Cohen recalled. ``I called Nevel and said, `How could you?` I closed my account with Cook`s, but not before I asked questions, I was so mad. I said, `All right, what`s Maurice`s last name? Where does he live?``

She jotted down his answers. One aroused her curiosity. ``I kept looking at the address, the numbers. It was 939 N. Hudson, and I said to myself, `Why, that`s Cabrini-Green.`

``Look, I liked Maurice,`` Cohen continued, a bit defensive of the connection she had made between an act of violence and an address in Cabrini- Green. ``He was my friend. He would make a big to-do out of waving at me from the sidewalk and I would always wave back.``

But it was Cohen`s hunch that paved the way for detectives John Turney and Edward Louis, who were investigating the Abba`s burglary, to link Hunley to a two-year-old unsolved homicide.

On the night Lisa Tyson was murdered, a palmprint had been carefully lifted from inside of the inner vestibule door of her building. Though it had been compared with dozens of palmprints since the murder, none had matched.

That is, until Cohen made a phone call to Turney and Louis and told them a fact they did not know: That a young woman had been killed in her building two years earlier, possibly by an intruder who could have had a key.

It was nearing 3 a.m. when the two detectives stood patiently in the police evidence lab as a print specialist compared Maurice Hunley`s palmprint to the one taken from the door.

``Fellas,`` the specialist finally announced, ``you got a winner here.``

Though he later claimed some of his admissions were beaten out of him by police, Hunley`s spoken confession to Lisa Tyson`s murder was later used against him in court.

His words provided a glimpse of a Maurice Hunley that most of the people on Clark Street said they did not know.

He told police he had a $300-a-week cocaine habit, which was about $50 more than he made at the hardware store. Behind in payments to his supplier, he said he was out to commit a burglary that night, looking for items he could turn into cash on the streets.

He said he listened at doorways in her building, climbing the stairs to the third floor before he found one that was silent inside. He was going through Tyson`s apartment with a flashlight, he said, when she found him there. He chased her into the kitchen, and said he attacked her when she grabbed a knife from a dish drainer. She was stabbed seven times, though Hunley admitted stabbing her only twice.

Though authorities say it was probably the case, it remains a mystery whether Maurice Hunley actually let himself in with his own set of keys. No keys were ever recovered. The murder weapon was never found.

The news that Hunley had a cocaine habit and lived a secret life ruled by the desperation that often goes along with it has provided an explanation for some who are still trying to understand this strange turn of events.

``He could have had a bright future,`` said Ed Kalin, the owner of Raven`s, a neighborhood bar where Maurice often socialized. ``If you knew Maurice, it was hard to fit him with a stabbing, but then when somebody is on drugs, they can do crazy things.``

Nevel said he has learned what he called a ``most humiliating lesson``:
Never trust anyone too much.

``I thought I was giving him the opportunity of his life,`` Nevel explained. ``I thought I was giving a young, uneducated kid from the projects a chance to better himself. I believed in Maurice, I even had plans to take him with me in a new business I was working on. Can you believe that?``

Nevel said he spent little time at the store, concentrating instead on new business ventures, and blamed himself for giving Hunley too much authority. When he compared his inventory to his receipts after Hunley`s arrest, Nevel said he suspected Maurice had been stealing from him for a long time because he came up $10,000 short. Nevel shook his head as he recalled how he had even fired Hunley a couple of times for problems that he should have taken more seriously, such as coming in late or failing to return to the store after lunch. Yet, he said he needed Maurice to run the business and always took him back.

How can the people who thought they knew Maurice make the connection between him and the intruder who had committed a brutal crime? Most of them can`t.
``I cannot relate the Maurice I knew to the man who killed her,`` said Jane Jacobs, a Lincoln Park therapist who said she talked with Maurice often. She had even invited him into her home to do lock work on her doors. ``I have to see them as two separate Maurices. I have tried to put the Maurice I knew in that apartment, and I saw this caged animal panicking when he got caught.

``But that image bothers me just as much,`` she continued, ``because not everyone would have reacted to that situation with an instinct to kill.``

There had been signs before Hunley`s arrest that his facade was beginning to crack. But no one saw them at the time. There was his habit of borrowing money, $10 to $40 at a time.

``I suppose that was for the drugs,`` Rich Ropele, the owner of Mickey`s, a neighborhood tavern, theorized. What he knows now, he said, would have been useful then. Hunley would come into the tavern every afternoon to play the video games and buy a bottle of Michelob to take with him when he left. Beside the cash register, Ropele keeps a copy of the police report from his burglary in 1985.

``Cleaned me out,`` he said. ``Took a couple thousand dollars worth of liquor and took it out with my hand-truck because that was gone, too.`` There had been no sign of forced entry. Though no one was ever arrested, Ropele said he has decided who to blame.

Two months earlier, he said, Hunley changed his locks.

``How well do you know anybody?`` asked Ellie Saliba, owner of the Gold Cartel jewelry store on Clark Street.

She, too, lent him money and laughed nervously when she explained how he paid her back once with $20 and a bottle of wine. ``I told him he didn`t have to do that--the wine--and he said, `Don`t worry. I didn`t have to pay for it.` Now I have to wonder if it came from Mickey`s.``

Saliba remembers the day when she had locked herself out of the store and how she held the ladder while Hunley took only a few seconds to slip the overhead lock. Despite the betrayal she feels and despite his murder conviction, she, like other people on Clark Street, still felt strongly enough about Hunley that she wrote a letter on his behalf to the judge in his case.

``When he killed that girl, if [?!] he killed that girl, I don`t think it was something that he set out to do,`` Saliba explained. ``I guess I`m not willing to believe that all that time I didn`t know Maurice at all.``

Few knew about Hunley`s three prior arrests for battery and one for possession of a controlled substance. Some people on Clark Street wonder if he might have had trouble reconciling differences between the lures of the affluent neighborhood where he worked and the poverty where he lived. Members of his family wonder about that, too.

``He mentioned it once,`` his cousin, Johnny Hunley, said shortly after his arrest.
``We talked about the pressure of working in such a fancy area and how when you come back here it makes you frustrated because you want things and you can`t get at them. You feel bad.``

The first jury to hear Hunley`s case could not agree upon a verdict. A mistrial was declared.

The second jury convicted him of murder, but only after each juror was quizzed by Criminal Court Judge James M. Bailey. The night before they reached their verdict, a burglar broke into the hotel rooms of four of the jurors and stole valuables while they slept.

``What I find most ironic,`` said Margaret Stanton, the chief prosecutor in his case, ``is how, when he was continuing to work in the neighborhood, he must have had to think of the murder on a daily basis, walking past that building several times a day.``

Though Maurice Hunley is serving a 40-year sentence, he could be paroled in half that time.

But he can never return to Cook`s Hardware. His arrest killed the store. In its place is a Thai restaurant with a new floor, a tiled ceiling, and a bright orange awning over the front.

Its name is Bangkok Smiles.