Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  They dropped the girl’s friend off first at an apartment farther north in Edgewater. Then they drove south, back to Francisco’s apartment. Inside the car, the girl waited with one of the men while the other two went inside. As they waited, this man made an advance on the girl, punching her in the face when she resisted him. Eventually, he subdued her and forced her upstairs into the apartment, where the other two men attacked her and presumably raped her.

  When the men had finished, they drove her home, warning her not to tell anyone about the attack. But the marks left all over the girl’s body were impossible to cover up, and her mother promptly took her to the police station to make a report. The young girl was even able to lead police back to Francisco’s apartment.

  In those days, the accusation or even charge of rape was only a slight inconvenience to men, if victims even came forward at all. If Francisco and his friends were charged or even sentenced, it was an extremely light sentence. Only a few years later, he was recorded in Columbia, South Carolina.

  Around that time, he met Dorothy Brazell at a carhop, a drive-in diner with waitresses delivering food on roller skates. He bought her a root beer float.

  Denise believes her mother was only thirteen years old at the time. The time frame for Francisco’s life in Chicago and South Carolina is unclear, but whether Denise is precise in her estimates or not, Dorothy was still only a young teenager, possibly fifteen or sixteen, and now pregnant with her first child, Denise’s older sister, whom she gave birth to in South Carolina in 1956 and who remained with Lucille for a few years after.

  To persuade Lucille to let him marry her daughter, Francisco told them he was only three years older than Dorothy. Lucille herself had been thirteen when she gave birth to her first child.

  Francisco convinced them all. He would be the provider; he would take care of Dorothy and their child.

  But he was not three years older. He wasn’t even twenty-two, the age he would have been in 1956, if the 1953 Tribune story about rape was indeed correct. In fact, Francisco Landingin was twenty-nine years old.

  Denise, the second child, was born when her mother was eighteen. Dale, the third, was born the following year, thirteen months after his sister. By the age of nineteen, Dorothy Landingin had three children.

  By then, Francisco and Dorothy and their growing family lived in a mobile home somewhere in Delaware. Denise recalls a memory from that time, playing with dolls at one end of the home and hearing yelling from the other room. When she looked around the corner, she remembers seeing her father slap her mother in the face several times.

  The violent side that had flashed in Chicago in 1953 was now filtering into their family life, becoming part of their daily lives, especially when they moved to Brooklyn. “That’s really where all the horror took place,” Denise said.

  Not long after their return from South Carolina, Dorothy was pregnant for a fifth time. This time, just four days after the assassination of President Kennedy, she gave birth to yet another girl.

  But things were difficult for Dorothy after the birth of her last child, and Denise remembers her mother having frequent stays at the hospital, not because of injuries, but just to get away.

  A photo from the time, taken at Christmas, shows Dorothy and Francisco sitting on the sofa in their Brooklyn apartment. Dorothy wears a green dress with lace frills at the collar and sleeves, and a seasonal red bow pinned near her shoulder.

  Looking leisurely, Francisco wears a fine suit, his arm thrown back along the sofa. But there’s a noticeable space between them, into which Dorothy leans toward her husband, as if uncertain how to position herself. She looks off camera toward the floor, her expression is almost blank, vaguely uncomfortable. Francisco gazes dead ahead at the camera, but without any hint of a smile. For a Christmas photo, their entire appearance is unrelaxed and joyless, more like a hostage situation than anything else.

  While Dorothy attempted to shield her children, her attempts were often half-hearted and unsuccessful. Often left solely with their father, there was nothing to stand in the way of his brutality.

  Denise remembers her youngest sister crying from her crib. “My father walked into the room, and then I heard a big slap,” Denise said. “The biggest slap I’ve ever heard. There was just quiet. There was just not a sound from her. Not a sound.”

  Oftentimes, Francisco would pull out an old riding crop from his days breaking in horses and use it on his family. “He was very possessive of everyone,” Denise remarked. “He was always there, always in the middle. Didn’t want us to be alone with each other. We can’t go out the door, we can’t do anything.”

  Yet one day around the second or third grade, Denise remembers walking home from school for lunch and finding the apartment unusually quiet. None of her siblings nor her mother were home, which was odd on account of Francisco’s close watch over all of them.

  In the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, Denise found her father home from work and lying awake in bed. Before she could go back into the kitchen for lunch, her father stopped her. He began pulling away the covers, laughing to himself as he showed her his underwear, like some bizarre game only he knew the rules to. He waved her in to join him.

  Denise hurried away from the bedroom. She knew what her father had wanted. It had started not long ago—when specifically, she didn’t remember. All she remembered was the way her father touched her in ways she knew were wrong.

  There were nights when, her mother away during another stay at the hospital, Denise would wake up to a sound in her bedroom and, bleary-eyed, look up to see her father leaning over her sisters’ beds, sometimes even her own. He would bend over and scoop one of them up and carry her off into the darkness to his empty bedroom.

  It seemed so much like a dream that Denise wasn’t truly sure it even happened. It took years for her to come out of that dream and realize it had all been a reality. It was a part of their daily lives.

  Denise can still see her older sister appearing in the doorway of their bedroom after school one day toward the end of their time in Brooklyn. Her sister was in tears, muttering to herself, “I almost killed him, I almost killed him.”

  As she calmed down, she told the story to Denise.

  With his odd work hours, Francisco was often available to pick up the kids from extracurricular activities or school itself. Recently, he’d been renting a garage a few streets over to keep the car safe at night.

  That very afternoon, Francisco had picked up Denise’s older sister from school. But during the ride home, he’d started fondling his daughter once more as she sat in the passenger seat beside him. He’d done it all the way to the inside of the garage, where he briefly stepped out of the car as it continued to run with his daughter inside.

  For a fleeting moment, as she watched her father inside the garage, the car still puttering underneath her, a dark thought ran through her head—put the car in gear and step on the ignition, slam the car into her father and pin him against the garage wall, hopefully maybe even kill him.

  But something held her back. The thought remained a grim daydream.

  Now, sobbing in the small bedroom they shared, Denise’s oldest sister told her everything, expressing guilt that she had even considered killing their own father.

  Their mother appeared then, having overheard whispering and crying. She asked what had happened. Though her sister seemed hesitant, Denise urged her, “Tell Mom.”

  Eventually her sister came around and recounted the details to her mother, who listened, frozen, until the story was over. When Dorothy did finally move, it was, as Denise remembered, in “slow motion,” as her mother reached out and struck her sister across the face.

  Dorothy had once been in love with her husband, Francisco, and part of her might still have been, despite all the abuse. While she often made comments that she only stayed with him to ensure her children got fed and had a place to sleep, she also expressed jealousy when their predatory father gave them more attention than her. />
  Dale, too, received attention from their father, but to this day, Denise is uncertain whether Dale was ever sexually abused by him. As the only boy in the family, Dale was given a bit of leeway to get away with things. “But we don’t know if that was because he favored him sexually,” Denise explained.

  Dale slept in a different bed, so if their father ever came for him, she never knew. With her and her sister, she would feel the bedsprings move, as her sister’s side of the bed went slack, or she herself was carried off to her father’s bedroom. She would hear her sister mutter “Stop it!” in the dark.

  Dale was physically abused, though, and Denise is certain of that. He received his father’s blows whenever he was disobedient, or whenever he did anything against their father’s liking, despite being held to different standards.

  The family once got a black Labrador named Dahlia, though the dog was specifically for Dale. Denise believes it was the same evening they got the dog, that Dale tied Dahlia to the doorknob of the bedroom. The little dog made noise all evening, until Francisco stormed into the bedroom and began beating the poor animal. He was so enraged, that he dragged the dog down to the street and let it go.

  Perhaps it was for the best; at least someone would be able to get away from him.

  This behavior, this violence was of course traumatic to Dale and his siblings. After one particularly violent evening, police showed up at the Landingin apartment and found Dorothy bruised and bloody. Francisco had thrown her around the kitchen, into walls, using his fists, and yelling the entire time. They could offer little help to Dorothy except to tell her to take her husband to civil court.

  It was no different when Dorothy confronted her husband about what had occurred between him and their oldest daughter at the garage. From the bedroom, Denise, Dale, and their siblings, listened as their father blew up.

  “He beat her up,” Denise said. “I mean, he made her bloody.”

  They’d tried to escape before. There would be more attempts throughout their lives, mostly in the shape of Dorothy’s brief convalescent trips to the hospital or trips to South Carolina. The children would find their own way out, both physically and mentally. But for now, in Brooklyn—their compass pointing to Uptown—they were adrift together in a whirlpool of abuse and guilt, fighting against the current, but without anything to grab hold of and pull out of the spin. They were victims of their own time too, living in an era when abusers faced little consequence, and few safety nets (or sympathetic ears) even existed for those suffering any kind of abuse. At one point, Denise’s sister confided in a teacher about the abuse from her father. The teacher showed up at the apartment—“She looked like an Italian Amazon woman!” Denise recalled—and confronted Francisco, who stormed and yelled and ultimately threw the woman out of the apartment.

  Any time they reached out or even got away, or attempted to put a finger on the brutalizing force in their lives and call it for what it was, something drew them back in. He provided for them. They needed him. They loved him.

  For Dale in particular, with Francisco as his only male role model, the abuse would also start to shape his own mind, specifically how he interacted with women later in his short life.

  And yet, Francisco’s abuse, for as long as it continued, was still only part of the tragedy they’d eventually endure together as a family, fractured though they would become.

  There was one more boy on the graduation list for Stockton Upper Grade Center in Uptown on June 13, 1973. It was also the date of his older brother’s birthday, and exactly three years until the last day of his life.

  Most likely, Billy Carroll Jr. was not present that day to pick up his diploma. He was never much for school.

  Although it’s unknown if he knew or even interacted with his fellow classmates, Billy Kindred and Dale Landingin, Billy Carroll did know two other Stockton students: Samuel Stapleton and Randy Reffett.

  But while Billy was friendly and well known in the neighborhood, he could also keep his distance.

  “He was very secretive,” a friend, Rickey Kindgren, stated.

  The version of Billy Carroll they knew, the version that they were given, was jovial, kind, funny. A blond-haired kid with a handsome face dotted by a few freckles.

  “One of his favorite things to do was he’d just eat a stick of butter,” said another friend, Tom Thweatt, who met Billy back in McCutcheon Elementary School. “Just bite into it, and I would go, ‘Oh my God.’”

  Billy’s tastes went beyond the occasional stick of butter. “He’d eat all over damn Chicago,” noted Gene Anderson, who grew up with Billy, adding that one of his favorite things to eat was a francheezie, Chicago’s bacon-wrapped, deep-fried hot dog with cheese in the middle.

  When he was particularly flush, Billy took his friends out and paid for their meals. “He’d take everyone out to eat and buy them clothes,” Rickey said.

  His baseball mitt was $45. His pair of CCM Super Tacks ice skates ran around $120.

  This was one of the first mysteries about Billy Carroll: How was a poor kid from Eastwood Avenue able to afford such meals for himself, let alone clothes, shoes, and other things often out of reach for the ordinary teenager living in Uptown?

  When his friend Gene asked him about the skates, Billy replied, “Oh, I saved up for them.”

  It was odd for a kid in Uptown to so consistently have access to money, especially for Billy, whose circumstances seemed more dire than other boys of the neighborhood.

  From first grade to fourth, Mike Bowling considered Billy one of his best friends. In school, Billy struggled in several areas of learning, especially reading. “Well, what does that say?” Billy would often ask Mike of different words or sentences he encountered, and Mike would oblige. For a time, Billy was enrolled in Project Zero, a program for students with learning disabilities.

  But Mike and Billy often cut class, leading their local truant officer on a foot chase up Sheridan Road in Uptown one afternoon. Mike ducked into a three-flat at the corner of Winona, and as the officer came up the stairs, he jumped over a railing and got away. Billy, on the other hand, was not so lucky, and the officer took him back to school.

  Much as he did with school, Billy spent as little time at home as possible. The Carroll family lived on the thin border between poverty and mere survival. At one apartment, the family did not have a bathroom, using one outside the building. At another, they had no telephone.

  Mike Bowling remembered going over to one of the apartments the Carrolls lived in: “The house was always a disaster area.”

  Sometimes, Mike would invite Billy over to his family’s apartment for sleepovers. Comparing his own threadbare life to the plentiful food at Mike’s house, Billy would say mockingly to his parents, “Save me some milk, so I can pour it out.”

  “He was shy, but he tried to be funny all the time,” Mike said.

  Mike was one of the few friends who knew much about Billy’s life at home. Most of Billy’s friends and acquaintances knew he had a mother and a father and a brother, but it seemed to them that Billy existed solely on the streets, as if he’d just suddenly appeared one day in Uptown without a care in the world.

  “Billy would wander off,” said his childhood friend Gene Anderson. “He’d wander off to the park, wander off down the street …”

  What most of them didn’t realize was that to Billy, like so many other kids in the neighborhood, an existence on those streets was better than any existence and any time spent at home. He could find money, friendship, love, excitement, and belonging in the street.

  Perhaps in some ways, what he was stepping away from was just an echo of the trauma already embedded in his family. Billy’s father, William Sr., or “Huey,” had grown up along the Alabama-Florida border where, before he was born, his family had already buried one of his young brothers at the age of fourteen.

  Around the time Huey turned six, he lost another brother, only twenty, who’d been shot and killed by a Baptist preacher over a peanut sharec
rop. The Carroll family had had previous trouble with the reverend, who had taken issue with their mistreatment of some mules. The disagreements came to a head early one morning in 1932 as Huey’s brother and father prepared to take away a peanut haul.

  Seeing the Carrolls loading part of the crop, the reverend approached with both a shotgun and a pistol. As the argument unfolded, the reverend fired at the Carrolls, hitting Huey’s brother, Albert, in the neck and injuring an uncle who had run through the fields when he heard the altercation. Albert died at the scene.

  Within a month, the reverend was on trial for first-degree murder. Before he was found guilty and sentenced to a life term, the local newspapers reported how in court, “The mother of Albert Carroll sobbed quietly as prosecutors described the slaying of her son.”

  Sometime after the war, Huey moved north along with another brother, part of the long migration of southern farmers and workers who could no longer find prosperity at home.

  Violet Carroll, Billy’s mother, had been a Chicago girl, born and raised on the northwest side of the city. But she had her own pain; in 1957, her younger brother, Harold, shot himself in a parked car behind his home. The note he left behind stated, “I’m going to leave you for good.” Five months earlier, he’d separated from his young wife, only sixteen years old. He was seventeen.

  By this time, Violet and Huey had their own young man to worry about: Robert, or Bobby. In 1959 Billy was born, the middle child. His sister, Caroline, was born in 1962 with severe disabilities.

  Violet and Huey could not care for Caroline in their North Side apartment. Because of financial constraints, it was difficult for them to care for any children, let alone one with disabilities. By the 1970s they were living off Huey’s Social Security benefits checks.