Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  As a defense, Danny and Billy claimed that they’d been friends with the man, who lured them to the apartment for sex. When the schoolteacher had made a move, they attacked him, stole his keys, and ran away.

  Given the prejudices of the 1970s, this ploy worked. The original charges of home invasion, armed robbery, car theft, and attempted murder were knocked down to one case of robbery. While this was still a felony conviction, it was an enormous stroke of luck and privilege that two young White boys were able to get their charges reduced so significantly. It’s more than likely homophobia played into the case as well, with a gay complainant living at a time of severe discrimination.

  But the sentences for the boys diverged. Danny’s ace lawyer made the case successfully that he was just the accomplice. As a result, Danny was sentenced to sixty days of jail time and four years of felony probation. Billy, the “ringleader” and the perpetrator of the assault with the butcher knife, got the same probation but ninety days in jail.

  Both boys had spent time in jail before for minor offenses, though never for any real length of time. Now, they sat inside their respective cells in the Bridewell, a prison facility for short-stay sentences near downtown.

  During their sentences, it became apparent that their friendship had been altered by the events. Both boys struck up friendships with different “cliques.”

  “His friends didn’t get along with my friends,” Danny said. “So we didn’t talk anymore.”

  At the end of his sixty days, Danny left jail and went back to the neighborhood. And while he and Billy would still spend time together, something had changed in his best friend.

  “He never came back to Kenmore,” Danny said. “We’d all go to jail, we’d get into some stuff, get in a fight, steal a car or something and we’d go spend a couple weeks away and we come back and end up on Kenmore with all your pals.… But this time Billy never came back.”

  Phil Couillard’s time in Chicago had come to an end. Or so it seemed when his father got a new job in Pennsylvania working on a council for alcohol and drug abuse. The family packed up and moved east.

  Despite his work in the field of substance abuse rehabilitation, Phil’s father continued drinking heavily, and he and Phil clashed inside the new home. “I wanted to hang out with my friends,” Phil said.

  He started running away to Chicago, hitchhiking or stealing cars just to get back. He’d stay with his grandparents or his mother or sometimes even with Dale. But it was during one of these returns that he found things had changed back home. “It’s like all of a sudden my friends are into pot, LSD, mescaline, and pills,” Phil remarked. “One friend of mine was into serial burglary.”

  While Phil and Dale had dabbled, now it seemed, as the kids got older, things had escalated. And while they both tried to stay out of it, they didn’t exactly turn away from it either. With some other friends, Phil recalled, “we’d go out just about every day after lunch and burgle houses all over Uptown.” Though he himself never went in with his friends, he would watch as they carried around “pillowcases full of crap like Santa Claus.”

  Dale, too, had been with some guys when they decided to rob a 7-11 at gunpoint. Dale hadn’t known what was about to happen, but he’d been present, and he’d come back to tell Phil all about it.

  In Uptown one day, Phil came upon a ’64 Chevy Impala parked along the street. Phil’s mother had had a similar car, so he knew when drivers forgot to turn the ignition to “lock,” instead of “off,” it was easy to start the car without the actual key simply by turning the keyholder.

  Phil drove the Impala to Dale’s apartment and picked him up. By then, Dale and his family had moved into a house on Marshfield Avenue in Lake View. They didn’t have a place to go necessarily, but sometimes a joy ride around the North Side could fill the time, listening to music with the windows rolled down.

  When they’d had enough driving, they decided they’d ditch the car somewhere on Dale’s street. Dale was driving by then, and when they reached the corner near his house, they noticed a set of wooden barricades for roadwork.

  Of course, the boys crashed through the barricade, sending wood into the air and under the car, creating a terrific noise on the quiet street. Dale pumped the brakes, bringing the car to a dead stop, where he and Phil quickly abandoned it and ran through the neighborhood to the Landingin house.

  Francisco Sr. was not in the mood for Dale and his friends that evening, and quickly sent Phil home. Dale insisted he stay, and an argument broke out. On the sly, Dale told Phil just to go upstairs and hide in the attic.

  Out on the street, though, police had shown up at the stolen car, asking neighbors if they had seen anything. Inevitably, the short trail led them to the front door of the Landingin house.

  Francisco met the officers at the door. Either in an effort to cover for his son, or simply because he legitimately believed his son’s innocence, Francisco Sr. told them Dale had been home all evening. When police pressed him, adding that neighbors had seen another boy with Dale, Francisco admitted his son’s friend had left about thirty minutes prior. Going where, he didn’t know.

  But the cops knew they were close, so they insisted on taking a look around inside. Francisco Sr. stepped aside to let them in.

  Upstairs, Phil could hear the heavy footfalls thudding up the stairwell. As they got closer, he could even hear radios squawking over the airwaves about two kids and a stolen car.

  The police got as close as the doorway of the attic before they decided to give up and head back downstairs. Phil relaxed as he heard them retreat, and Dale too, as he watched the officers step out the front door of his home.

  They weren’t always so lucky with the cops.

  Dale and Phil found themselves in handcuffs one day in Evanston, the suburb immediately north of Chicago and home to Northwestern University, where they had had their veritable pick of high-class bicycles parked all over campus. A man down in Uptown known only as “George,” would resell them and split the profits. During one of their trips north, cops saw the two suspicious kids lurking around the bikes and quickly moved in to arrest them.

  On another campus, Phil and Dale found a different kind of opportunity for money. “It was the middle of the ’70s,” Phil explained. “Jobs were scarce. You needed money to do everything.”

  Along the edges of Loyola University in Rogers Park, two neighborhoods north of Uptown, Dale, Phil, and his brother Bryan were picked up one evening by a student near the El stop. He took them back to an apartment close by.

  For the job, the boys had decided Bryan would be the one to go inside the bedroom with the guy, at least as a distraction. Meanwhile, Phil and Dale would case the place and snatch up any valuables.

  Much like they had for Billy Kindred and Danny Jockell, things did not go as planned.

  Dale and Phil had hardly found anything of any value before they heard Bryan yelling from the other room. When they entered the bedroom, they found Bryan pinned to the ground by the student. Together, they hurried into the room to pull him off.

  Eventually, after freeing Bryan, the boys made it to the door and out the stairs. On the way down, an older man who had heard the commotion asked the kids what was going on. “That guy tried to molest us!” they yelled as they went out the building.

  But things had started catching up to Phil and Dale more often than not. In Uptown one day, police arrested Phil for grabbing a woman’s purse through an apartment window. His mother refused to bail him out.

  Instead, Phil’s father drove all the way to Chicago to get him out and bring him all the way back to Pennsylvania. Phil had just turned seventeen. “I was actually starting to really understand my dad more,” Phil said.

  Around that time, Phil’s father had tried to get another job, after the substance abuse council hadn’t panned out. During a physical for the new job, the doctor diagnosed Phil’s father with aggressive lung cancer. “You just never think you’re gonna die when you’re a teenager,” Phil said. “You n
ever think your mom or dad’s gonna die.”

  The illness put a strain on the family. Weak and unable to fend for himself, Phil’s father would make various requests of his kids and their stepmother. He continued to drink too. At one point, a fight broke out when Phil’s brother attacked their father as he lay in bed. Phil grabbed a knife, while their mother grabbed an old machete that had been hanging on a wall. There was no real intention of using either of them, but Phil’s brother took off.

  Phil had had enough too, and he left for Chicago again in March 1976.

  “Before I ran away, he was looking a little weird,” Phil said of his father. “His eyes were glassy.”

  In Chicago he spent time with his friends, especially Dale, who had a line on a job selling classified ads for community newspapers. They’d had a lot of good times together. They’d fought other boys and at times, each other. They’d made a lot of mistakes too, but maybe there was hope of going straight. From Lake Villa to Stockton to Uptown, they’d seen it all together.

  In fact, it was Dale, his best friend, who was sitting beside him that day when a phone call came through from Milwaukee. It was Phil’s mother, calling to tell him his father had died. They’d seen it all together. And now they would have to try to find a way to grow up.

  Much later, after she and Dale Landingin had cooled off, Cindy Carrera found herself working at the Sheridan Plaza Hotel in Uptown. Like other places in the neighborhood, in recent years it had been badly burned in a series of fires, including one that claimed the lives of two elderly women.

  When it reopened, Cindy was hired as a waitress in the hotel’s restaurant and bar.

  The job was uneventful, though sometimes various characters wandered in, either from the apartments upstairs or the streets outside.

  She remembered a mother coming into the restaurant every now and then in an emotional state. Sometimes the mother came by herself, and sometimes she came with her daughter. But every time she came with the same purpose and the same photograph cradled in her hands. It was a photo of her son. “Her boy was missing,” Cindy said.

  He’d been gone for months, and she’d been walking everywhere to find him. She asked the staff, asked the patrons, even asked the residents hanging around. But no one had seen her son.

  For a time, Cindy continued to see the woman wandering through the neighborhood, still searching for her missing son, asking anyone she encountered if they had seen the young man in the picture. She never learned the name of the mother or her son, but years later, she’d recall this episode and wonder if he’d ever been found. Or if he’d been part of something far more sinister.

  Boys were going missing from the neighborhood, and though no one had tied the disappearances together, they’d left behind a gaping absence in the lives of those who loved them.

  * This is a fictional name.

  4

  ALL HAPPY FAMILIES

  DOROTHY LANDINGIN WOKE HER children sometime in the middle of the night. This was back in Brooklyn, in the ’60s, when the family lived in a little two-bedroom apartment on Hopkinson Avenue, and when she had three children to take care of.

  Denise was very young, the middle child, in between her older sister and her young brother, Dale, but she remembers her mother gathering them in the kitchen and speaking to them all as if they were adults in between puffs of her cigarette. Their mother was a young woman herself, only around twenty or twenty-one, with three children under the age of four.

  As calmly as she could, Dorothy told her kids they were leaving, that they were going to sneak out of the apartment and get on a bus to go visit their grandmother all the way down in South Carolina. But they had to be quiet. Their father, Francisco Sr., would not be joining them. And though he was a heavy sleeper, they had to be quiet so as not to wake him.

  The memory of the family’s flight from Brooklyn still replays itself in Denise Landingin’s mind, even though she herself was only around three. Based on what had happened before and what occurred next, it’s only possible to pinpoint a range of time for their midnight escape.

  When all their things had been gathered, Dorothy and the children headed out into the street and made their way by bus to the Greyhound station not far from the apartment. How they got there, who might have helped, is unclear to Denise. As far as she knew, her mother undertook the entire plan herself. And as far as anyone knew, Francisco had slept through the whole thing.

  Before long, Dorothy and her children were in Greenville, South Carolina, climbing up the big hill that led to their grandmother’s home, no more than a wooden shack so typical of that corner of Appalachia—the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Their grandmother, Lucille, had raised their mother in a threadbare existence with little means and scant education. Her husband—Dorothy’s father—had been divorced from Lucille for a while, replaced by a man named Johnny, who was kind to Dorothy and her kids.

  Together, Lucille and Johnny occupied a small home filled with few possessions: two rickety twin beds, a kitchen table with two chairs, and little else. Lucille cooked on an electric skillet, and the children bathed in a large aluminum basin in the yard. There was no TV, no record player.

  Although this lifestyle might have seemed drab for the Landingin kids, they found a different kind of freedom in the land around their grandmother’s house. They walked barefoot on unpaved roads sizzling in the Carolina sun, then soothed their feet on the red clay earth surrounding the house. In the evenings when the air cooled, they caught fireflies in jars. Sometimes Lucille and Johnny took them to the drive-in for a movie.

  Their grandmother was loving and kind, often protective, and always generous despite her limited means. During their stay, she scrounged up enough money for a pot roast that Denise can still taste in her memory.

  In part because of their grandmother’s love and attention, the Landingin children stopped noticing their mother’s frequent absences from the house. Denise is not sure where exactly her mother was going, but at twenty-one, it’s possible she was reaching back for the teenage freedom she’d missed.

  As the months passed, the new baby in Dorothy’s womb began to show. With Francisco all the way back in Brooklyn, she eventually revealed to her mother that the father was a man she’d met during her evenings in town. But it was clear early on that the man would have nothing to do with Dorothy or her unborn child; he was the son of an executive at a prominent candy manufacturing company on the east coast, and his family wanted no such scandal in their lives.

  In May of 1961, Dorothy’s next daughter was born.

  With Lucille getting older, the children now multiplying, and nothing changing in their circumstances, Dorothy Landingin reached back out to the only help she knew: her husband, Francisco Sr.

  It took him only a few days to make his way down in the family’s Volkswagen Beetle to Greenville and up the big hill to the house. He knew the area well; he’d been living down there himself when he met Dorothy back in the 1950s.

  Dorothy and the children packed up their things and loaded them into the car.

  But Francisco had one stipulation: Dorothy would have to leave her new daughter in South Carolina. He couldn’t bear to have her living among his children. Dorothy had no other choice, so she agreed.

  Lucille had previously taken in their older sister for a time, so it was no matter for her to take on a different grandchild. But she was reluctant to give up her daughter and her grandchildren to Francisco. He had deceived her before, and her daughter had left him for good reason.

  Denise was sad to leave her grandmother, who gave her and her siblings attention, love, and what little food she could put together for their little bellies. But she did not necessarily fear going back to Brooklyn.

  It wasn’t until they were in the car, somewhere along the 700-mile journey back to Brooklyn, that Denise felt cold as she watched her father turn to her mother—looking meek in her passenger seat—and mutter, “I’m gonna make you pay for this.”

  From then
on, it only got worse.

  From an early age, Francisco Landingin Sr. had made a practice of lying. Even his age was often suspect, since he would claim three different birth years over the course of his life.

  As a young man living in the Philippines after World War II, he’d lied his way onto an American service boat. Onboard, he’d found work as a cook, arriving in New York City sometime in the late 1940s, though because he was essentially a stowaway, no accurate documentation has been found.

  Throughout his life in America, Francisco Landingin would allude to life back on the islands in the Pacific.

  Years after, living in Uptown, Denise would make friends of all ethnicities, sometimes inviting them over to her house. As she and a Japanese girl danced to Motown records one afternoon, Denise looked up to see her father watching them. Francisco Sr. walked over to his daughter and said in an exacting tone, “You know, I watched my people, mothers and children, lined up and shot by the Japanese. I’m allowing you to bring this Japanese girl into my house.” He turned and left the room. The Japanese girl never came back.

  Alone in America, Francisco roamed New York, until other relatives arrived, finding homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. His uncle Pablo, naturalized as a US citizen in 1947, was married to a Jewish woman and living in Chicago with their four kids.

  For the next decade, with a growing familial safety net and a crop of opportunities blooming in the postwar economy, Francisco bounced from place to place, finding work wherever he could. On the East Coast, he helped break in racehorses, even helping one to victory in 1956 at a seven-furlong event in Atlantic City.

  Francisco, it seemed, had everything he needed to start his new life right.

  In February 1953 Francisco was in Chicago, living on Briar Avenue in the Lake View neighborhood, when he was arrested on charges of rape of a seventeen-year-old girl. According to the Chicago Tribune, which gave his age as nineteen, Francisco and two other men had met the girl with “a companion” at the Riverview Roller Rink on Belmont Avenue. When the girl and her friend had finished at the rink, the men offered them a ride home.