Harry’s parents threw a shower for her at the Union League Club. “It wasn’t like stuffy or anything, but they did everything really nicely,” she said. The wedding, for around two hundred guests, was at the Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Palos Hills. The church is large, with a lot of white and gold. The reception afterward was at the Drake Hotel in Oak Brook. It was a traditional Greek wedding, with the usual boisterousness and dancing. Harry loved it. “He was somebody you could put anywhere and he’d have a good time and everybody would love him,” Pam said. They honeymooned in Hawaii, at the Hotel Hana Maui.
Harry and Pam quickly settled into married life. They lived in the shadow of Wrigley Field, in a rented apartment on West Eddy Street. Harry was an associate at Jenner & Block; Pam was a graphic designer for a menswear manufacturer. They were typical young urban professionals, and seemed to be enjoying every minute of it. After a few years, Jenner & Block asked Harry to open a new office for the firm in Lake Forest, a wealthy suburb north of Chicago. They were in their mid-twenties and didn’t want to move out of Chicago, and Harry didn’t want to commute from Chicago to Lake Forest. He told Jenner & Block he wouldn’t do it.
Instead, Harry moved to Jenner’s Chicago rival, Winston & Strawn, where he continued his legal practice focused on tax and tax-related issues on behalf of corporations, municipalities, and individuals. He was becoming a tax expert, and a well-regarded one. On schedule, he and Pam moved out of their Wrigleyville rental and bought a fourth-floor, six-room walk-up condominium in a prewar building on Lake Shore Drive, overlooking Lake Michigan, off Waveland Avenue. It had a sunroom in the front and windows on three sides. They could see both the lake and park from the apartment. “When I looked at the pictures [from back then],” Pam said, “we looked like we were fifty when we were thirty.” On September 4, 1991, Harry and Pam had their first child, Madeline Francis Bull, known as Maddie. Pam decided to leave her job to be both a full-time mother and a part-time freelancer.
Harry did well at Winston & Strawn, and advanced quickly. “His reputation here was very good, as a very smart guy, a very careful guy, and a very analytical guy,” explained George Lombardi, a Winston partner who knew Harry well. “Just a top-flight tax lawyer. What made him a little unusual … Harry always had a mischievous sense of humor. He wasn’t the stereotypical guy you would find in a tax department.” He was doing a bunch of complicated airplane leasing deals, which had a complex tax component, making Harry nearly indispensable.
In 1993, Winston asked Harry to move to New York City to be part of its burgeoning office there. The implied promise was that if he moved to Winston in New York, and continued to perform as well as he had in Chicago, he would be on the two-year fast track to partner. “Harry would not have been asked to go out there had it not been in the works that he would become a partner,” Lombardi said. “I don’t know the specifics of that conversation but they wouldn’t take somebody who wasn’t [a] highly-thought-of attorney and ask him to go out to New York.” Harry took the deal. They moved to Rye, New York, a Westchester County suburb, and rented a house. Harry commuted each day to Winston’s downtown Manhattan office. “He went from the frying pan into the fire,” Pam said. “It was big-time deals and it was hard.” As they were thinking about the move to New York, Harry conceded he wanted to make partner but that he been practicing law long enough and maybe was ready for a change. Pam said that longer-term, Harry wanted to teach English or history at a place like Andover: “That was really what he wanted to do.”
Pam joined the Newcomers Club in Rye, and she and Maddie joined a playgroup. “We made friends right away with little kids,” Pam said. “A lot of our life was kid stuff.” Harry joined a sailing club in Rye, on Long Island Sound, and he would go sailing there nearly every weekend. They also took trips into the Hudson Valley. Each Wednesday, Pam took an art class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. She and Harry would then have dinner in the city. “It was actually kind of fun,” she said. Within months of moving to Rye, in October 1993, the Bulls’ second daughter—Alexandra Lois Bull, known as Lexi—was born.
But it was not exactly home. The commute was hard on Harry, as was the daily grind. Pam had friends but not like the ones she had in Chicago. Will Iselin and his (then) wife and daughters used to visit Harry and Pam in Rye. Iselin recalled that Harry “was not all that happy” working at Winston & Strawn. He didn’t love going back and forth from Rye to Manhattan each day. Pam didn’t want to live in the city, and they probably couldn’t have afforded to live there in any event. Iselin thought, in the end, neither Harry nor Pam loved living in Rye, but for different reasons. Pam, he believed, was homesick and wanted to return to Chicago, while Harry felt “suffocated” living in the suburbs.
On September 1, 1994, Harry made partner at Winston & Strawn, some nine years after graduating from law school. That day, Dick Bull called Pam to see whether Harry had made it. When she said that, yes, he had been promoted, he called his son. “How ’bout you come back and work at Bradner?” he asked. His father offered him the job of general counsel, working for Terence Shea, the chairman and CEO. Pam said it was a “tough decision” because they were increasingly comfortable in New York. “But I think his dad really wanted him to come home and run this company,” she said. It seemed it was what Harry wanted to do, too. He had achieved his goal of making partner in a major law firm. But he was tired of practicing tax law, tired of the daily commute. He was eager to return to Chicago (as was Pam) and to raise his family in a more traditional, and familiar, environment. On some level, he recognized that working at Bradner, with the understanding that he would one day run the business (once he had learned what it was all about), was his birthright, and what his father needed (and wanted) him to do. “When I look back at the pictures, he wasn’t looking healthy,” Pam said. “You know? I mean, it was a stressful job. He had gained weight. It probably was, looking back at it, a relief. I’m sure his dad meant to give him an easier lifestyle.” Giles McNamee said there was little doubt that he would return home to run Bradner. “He respected his father more than anybody else on the face of the earth,” he said, “and so if his father asked him to do something, he would do it. No questions asked.” It may have seemed odd that Harry quit Winston & Strawn on the day he made partner—very few people would do such a thing. But for Harry, the chance to return home and raise his growing family, to know that he would one day take over the family business and that he could more easily enjoy the good life—sailing on Lake Michigan, hanging out at the family’s cabin on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—proved irresistible.
The Bulls moved back into their condo on Lake Shore Drive. Maddie went to preschool in Chicago. Harry moved up quickly at Bradner. In short order he was named the company’s secretary and vice chairman, and then, in 1998, he was named chairman and CEO. His brother, who also worked at the company, said Harry was “an unbelievable administrator” and had the ability to make “logical leaps.” The company did well in those years, although it was clear the demand for paper and paper products was beginning to decrease as the internet era unfolded. After a few years, when it came time for Maddie to go to school, the Bulls decided to sell the condo downtown and move back to Hinsdale, on Briargate Terrace. They lived five miles from Harry’s parents. On September 14, 1998—the same year Harry became Bradner’s CEO—his son, George Harry Calvin Bull, was born in Northwestern’s hospital.
Things were good. Harry enjoyed being a father. He impressed his kids’ friends by spelling Mississippi backward, or by playing guitar and singing with Maddie and Lexi. As for his new role at Bradner, Lombardi remembered that although the job of CEO was very different from that of corporate lawyer, Harry seemed to enjoy it. There was a lot more socializing to do than when Harry was a lawyer but the hours were much more genial, and he could control his own schedule in a way he couldn’t in New York as a partner in a major law firm. “At Bradner, the job was more taking clients to baseball games,” Pam said, h
alf joking. “I mean it was a business. He was a smart man and he ran a company, but it wasn’t like people forcing him [to do things]. It wasn’t the hours that he had. It was a nicer lifestyle.”
Whether in Long Island Sound, or in Lake Michigan, or at the family’s small cabin in Hayward, Wisconsin, Harry enjoyed sailing. “Wherever wind and water came together, you’d find Harry in a sailboat,” his brother said. Whenever they went on vacation to a warm-weather place, sailing was always a big part of how Harry, Rick, and their father spent their time. They saw it as fun, relaxing, and an escape. “Get away from the things of man,” Rick said. He called Harry “a fine sailor” and “a tough sailor,” noting that they had sailed together through a snowstorm. When Harry was at Northwestern, he had a little twelve-foot Butterfly that he would use to go sailing on Lake Michigan, in addition to the larger boat the family shared.
Pam said the whole “sailing thing” was a bit of a “thorn in our side.” She was not a particularly enthusiastic sailor—she would get seasick—and of course Harry could not get enough of it. Bottom line, Pam knew that sailing was an important part of Harry’s life. Harry had been sailing since he was two years old. “I knew he was sailing from way back,” she said. “His dad liked sailing. He liked sailing.” The Bull men would rent a sailboat in the Caribbean and go sailing for a week. “It was great,” said Karna Bull, Harry’s older sister. “It was fun to be out sailing with them, really.” Harry had enjoyed being part of the yacht club in Rye, allowing him to easily go sailing in the Long Island Sound. And of course, there was the sailing up on Round Lake, in Hayward. When Harry and Pam lived on Waveland Avenue, downtown, they were near Lake Michigan, and Harry would go sailing regularly. “For him it really was a passion,” Harry’s younger sister, Mary Ellen, said. “He loved it.… If you were golfer, you would try to golf if it was appropriate. Well, if there was an opportunity to sail he wanted to try to do that. So they would go out on that stupid boat.”
Harry’s love of sailing was something he wanted to share with his two daughters, Maddie and Lexi. He could always count on them wanting to join him on a sail on Lake Michigan, even though it was a bit of a trek—twenty-three miles—to get from Hinsdale to Monroe Harbor, on Lake Michigan. In August 1999, Harry wanted to take his two daughters on an overnight sailing trip on Lake Michigan. “It wasn’t unusual,” Pam said. “He had taken the girls sailing before.” He had even taken them on an overnight sailing trip. So far that summer, in fact, they had gone sailing together three times. But this was to be their first overnighter of the season. He liked to be with them and preferred having them with him alone rather than with other friends or relatives. It wasn’t for Pam. She had not sailed with Harry for two years. “I never liked it,” she said. Pam was not a big sailor and, in any event, George was less than a year old and a sailboat was no place for an infant. She would generally vote to stay with him at home, in Hinsdale, while Harry, Maddie, and Lexi headed to the sailboat.
That was the plan for Saturday, August 14, 1999. Harry packed up the family’s Lincoln and set off with Maddie and Lexi for Monroe Harbor. The idea was to sail overnight in the Semper Spero to Waukegan, Illinois—forty-seven miles up the coast—and sail back to Monroe Harbor on Sunday. Then the family was going to head up together to the cabin in Hayward for a week’s vacation. Harry had let his management team know he was going to be out of the office for two weeks. “I was to stay home with George, who was a baby, and I was going to pack,” Pam said.
Harry drove with his daughters to the harbor. When he got there on Saturday at around noon, Ilse Krause and her boyfriend, George Petkovic, were at the marina, too. They were hoping the regatta that day, the Verve Cup, would be taking place, although the wind was particularly strong. Krause spotted Maddie and Alexandra. She noticed Maddie was carrying her backpack, a life vest, a bag of gear, and a sleeping bag. Harry asked her if she could carry it all. Maddie said that she could, which made Krause smile. “It was such an endearing moment,” she recalled. Harry and his daughters took the launch out to the sailboat.
But Harry decided the water in Lake Michigan was too rough for a sail that day. The Verve Cup race was also postponed because of the inclement weather. “Harry is a very safe sailor,” Cele Bull, Rick’s wife, said later. So Harry turned around and drove back to the house in Hinsdale. They all stayed at home that night. But Harry was determined to go the next morning. “I really want to do this,” he told Pam. “I really want to go. I want to do this sail.” A cousin, in his late teens or early twenties, was supposed to join Harry and the girls on the trip. “At the last minute,” Pam said, “he didn’t go and Harry went anyway.”
The next morning, Harry and his daughters set off again in the Lincoln for Monroe Harbor. Harry had brought along three Playmate coolers filled with food and drinks, including some beer. As before, they were planning to be out on the lake for the next two days. At twenty-six feet long, the Semper Spero was nothing fancy, in keeping with the Bull family ethos: It was a 1973 Grampian with a mainsail, a jib, a small cabin, two small benches facing each other, with cushions, for people to sit on, the tiller, and a small, 9.9-horsepower outboard motor, designed to get the boat into a harbor and to a mooring after a day of sailing. The Bulls had bought the boat about ten years earlier, and the three Bull men shared in its ownership and its use. At around nine Sunday morning, Harry called his brother and told him that he and the girls would be either sailing northeast, to St. Joe’s or Benton Harbor across the lake in Michigan, or sailing north along the Illinois side of the lake to North Point Marina, right on the border between Illinois and Wisconsin, in Winthrop Harbor.
Krause and Petkovic were back at the marina, too. Again, Krause noticed the two girls. They rode together on the tender. “I was quite taken with how pretty and sweet the girls were,” she recalled. “I think it was the little one, ‘Lexi’ that had her hair in pigtails that morning. Her hair was goldish brown, a gold color that comes from sun and water. Mattie [sic] was more blonde, and may have had a cap on. I remember one of them had incredibly long eyelashes.… I thought of how perfect and unfreckled their arms and legs were. The older girl’s blond hair on her legs reminded me of mine when I was a little girl. Both girls were wearing matching birkenstockish sandals with a print that had a lot of green and yellow. They were wearing their blue life vests. They were so good on the tender—looking around, looking at me, absorbing everything that was going on.” She remembered Harry commenting to Maddie that the weather was much better on Sunday than it had been the day before. “He got a big nod out of her,” Krause continued. “The father seemed so connected with the girls. I was impressed with the casual, comfortable way he spoke. I thought to myself, what lucky parents.” The temperature was in the upper seventies to low eighties, and the wind was light. The sun was shining. “We could clearly see Indiana,” Krause remembered. “The water was a lovely, light greenish translucent color. It was warm and wonderful.”
At about noon, Colleen D’Agostion, at Monroe Harbor, took Harry and the girls to mooring 31. She dropped Krause and Petkovic at their boat first. Krause recalled she had observed “a unique harmony between the girls and their father, and that was beautiful.” On the way out in the tender boat, Harry told D’Agostion they were going to have “a sleepover,” either at St. Joe’s or North Point Marina or possibly Michigan City, Indiana (southeast of Chicago), or New Buffalo, Michigan (due east of Chicago). “The girls just [want] to swim at a nice beach,” he told her. He also said they would be returning sometime on Monday “after the journey.” She reported they appeared to be in “good health and good spirits.”
Although the wind that day was blowing predominantly from the north toward the southeast, Harry decided to sail in that direction, which would have made the sail a bit of a slog, given that it would be a close haul just off the wind and with the sails tightly trimmed. Pam thought they were headed to Lake Forest, Illinois, some thirty-five miles north of Chicago. At around seven thirty Sunday night—an hour or so
before sunset—Sara Pederson, from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was “powering back” from Chicago to Racine, Wisconsin, when she saw a “white and blue sailboat” about seven miles east of Waukegan, Illinois, with “two young girls sitting on the bow,” heading “in an easterly direction.” She remembered that the temperature was in the low sixties—she was wearing a jacket—and the wind was blowing at about fifteen knots, in a southeasterly direction. She said she saw Harry in the stern of the boat. She seemed to think it was a bit odd that the Bulls were heading east at that time of the day, when most people around then are heading west into a harbor for the night. She didn’t think much of it at the time, though. As the two boats passed, she waved. “The girls waved back,” she recalled.
* * *
USUALLY, HARRY WOULD CALL PAM “a lot,” she said, when he and the girls were out sailing. He had his cell phone with him but he didn’t call her that Sunday. Even though he was not supposed to be back in Chicago until the next day, she was worried enough about not hearing from him that she called Rick. “Don’t worry,” he told her. The battery in his cell phone had probably died. “I’m sure when he docks, you’ll hear from him,” she recalled him telling her. “But I thought, Isn’t it weird? He would’ve called me from somewhere, at the marina or something.” They both agreed not to worry about the fact that Harry had not called Pam on Sunday night. Harry’s mother came over to stay with Pam. “I did think something was wrong,” she said. “I was very worried.” Harry’s father tried to comfort her. “Look,” he told her, “I’ve had a lot of situations in my life like this and they’ve all turned out okay.”
But on Monday, when Pam still had not heard from Harry, she got increasingly concerned. She called her brother, Tom, himself an ardent sailor who had sailed with Harry. “Monday morning when they hadn’t checked in was when she really panicked,” he remembered. “When she called me it was almost one of those calls where we were not wanting to believe the gravity of the situation. She didn’t really communicate a huge level of concern. It was more [like] something weird is happening: ‘Harry and the girls aren’t home and I haven’t heard from them. What do you think?’ And it was a beautiful sunny day and I remember probably saying something like, ‘Well, maybe they’re just in the doldrums out there and the batteries are dead, everything will be fine. Call me as soon as you know something,’ and that was that, and I hung up.” Tom went to a meeting at his law firm but couldn’t concentrate as he began to process in his mind what may have happened. After about twenty minutes, he left the meeting, got in his car, and drove the three hours from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Chicago. “I remember driving ninety miles an hour the whole way there,” he said.
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