 ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Moerler and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode. Ruthie Mae McCoy was the type who talked to herself and cursed strangers on the street, which she called 911 to report that someone was coming through the medicine cabinet of her Abbott Holmes apartment she might have been hallucinating, but she wasn't. Who was the mysterious woman who spoke a language no one could understand? What was inside the box she held in her hands? What was the meaning of the markings on the round metal object she arrived in? Those are just some of the questions that no one has been able to answer about a strange encounter near Tokyo in 1803. In a well-known area of southwest Texas that many believe to already be haunted, a woman dies in childbirth, but when she's found, her baby is missing and wolf prints are everywhere, and that is when sightings of the wolf girl of Devil's River began. But first, throughout the early 1800s in Delaware and Maryland, Patty Cannon and her gang kidnapped as many as 3,000 black Americans to sell into bondage in the South, and they would often murder those slaves and those that sold them. We begin with that story. If you're new here, welcome to the show, and if you're already a member of this weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com where you can find the show on Facebook and Twitter, and you can also join the Weird Darkness Weirdo's Facebook group. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. As a slave trader and murderer, Patty Cannon terrorized black Americans in the early 19th century. Cannon and her gang, which included her own family members, committed unspeakable crimes including selling, kidnapping, and murdering freed slaves. Ultimately, Patty Cannon died in jail while awaiting trial for her crimes. Her notoriety, although seldom discussed, is the stuff of American infamy. Little is known about Cannon's early life. Records indicate that Cannon was born either Martha or Lucretia Patricia Hanley around 1760. Throughout her life, Cannon remained secretive about her past. Some sources say she was actually born in Canada and moved to Delaware at age 16. She married local farmer Jesse Cannon. They had two children and lived near the present-day town of Reliance, Maryland, close to the border of Delaware. Jesse Cannon died under mysterious circumstances, and it was later rumored that Patty had poisoned him to death. Cannon reportedly worked as a bar mate. Later, as a prostitute, she even made plans to open her own brothel. Cannon, who was known for her unpleasant demeanor, was not successful with this endeavor. Due to her sour disposition, Cannon was having trouble attracting Johns by the age of 24. With her dreams of becoming a madame crushed, she opened a tavern that would later become a central location for her criminal activities. Cannon's daughter married a man named Henry Brereton, who apparently introduced the Cannon family to a new type of crime. Brereton was a blacksmith who engaged in the illegal slave trade. Some accounts claim that he introduced the Cannon clan to the practice of illegal slave trading while other accounts assert that Cannon herself learned about the illegal slave trade from patrons at her tavern. The illegal slave trade allowed women to take control of their own criminal enterprises and make their mark in an era when most of these fields were dominated by men. According to historian Richard Bell, the illegal slave trade gave women the opportunity to leverage familial relations with male conductors and station agents on this reverse underground railroad in order to secure their own passage through an otherwise treacherous and decidedly homosocial world. In 1811, Brereton was arrested and began serving a prison sentence for kidnapping slaves, but that same year he escaped from the jail in Georgetown, Delaware. After his escape, Cannon, Griffith and Brereton conspired to ambush the carriage of a patron at Cannon's bar, a slave trader known only as Rijell. Full of booms supplied by the bar, Rijell was ambushed by Cannon and her cohorts. Rijell later died of a gunshot wound from the fight. Brereton and another associate named Joseph Griffith were captured for the murder and hanged around noon on April 13, 1813. After Brereton's death, Cannon's daughter married again, this time to a man named Joe Johnson, who would become Cannon's number one accomplice. With Joe Johnson, Cannon's gang continued its activities for several years. History has recorded various accounts of the horrors they inflicted. When slavery was legal, the illegal slave trade was a booming part of the criminal underworld in the United States. Now known as the Reverse Underground Railroad, it involved the kidnapping of freed slaves, free African Americans and escaped slaves in free border states. Men, women and children were all kidnapped as part of the trade. They were then transported to southern slaveholding states and sold to plantation owners and slave auctions. The illegal slave trade dates back to the 1780s and it only ended after the Civil War in 1865. Cities like New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Louisville were hot spots for kidnappers. The proximity to rivers made these cities an ideal location for illegal slave trading via the waterways. The Maryland and Delaware regions as well as Pennsylvania all had large populations of free African Americans and former slaves. Patty Cannon and her gang took advantage of this population boom and began their kidnapping ring. The closeness to the southern states and the Mason Dixon line also added fuel to the fire that allowed the cannon gang to commit its crimes. Along with the kidnapping of freed former slaves and African Americans, current slaves were also taken from one plantation to another in different states and sold. These illegal slave traders used several methods to lure their victims. Often direct threats of violence or physical harm were employed, but some kidnappers used bribery and offered money, alcohol or the promise of work. Children were especially vulnerable and kidnappers would lure them with candy. Slaves could be sold for up to $200 or $300 each, which would be several thousand dollars in today's money. In 1808, the U.S. Congress banned the importation of slaves. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution was supposed to limit the number of slaves in the country, but instead it accidentally led to the underground slave trade. Along with being responsible for the deaths of an unknown number of slaves, Cannon, Johnson and other gang members were also believed to have murdered several wealthy guests at her tavern, often slave traders themselves before stealing their money and horses. The cannon gang would shackle captives together in a chain gang and threaten them if they talked to strangers while being transported. Reports show the cannon's tavern contained hidden rooms built specially for holding captives, similar to the attic of horrors created by Delphine LaLaurie. Cannon and her gang also easily slipped across state lines whenever it appeared that local police might be picking up on their trail. Their crimes went on for about 20 years. Much written about the cannon gang is believed to be exaggerated as some accounts of the gang differ. Some claim the gang had 50 to 60 members who were responsible for more than 3,000 kidnappings, committed 30 murders and even had buried treasure. In 1822, certain members of the cannon gang were finally caught and tried for their crimes, including Joe Johnson. Johnson was the only one brought to court where he was charged with kidnapping. As punishment, he was given 39 lashes and placed in the pillory or stocks. Johnson and his brother Ebenezer, who was also a member of the gang, fled after his punishment to either Alabama or Mississippi. In 1829, a tenant farmer working cannon's farmland discovered a blue chest filled with human bones, believed to be the remains of a slave trader who had gone missing in 1820. After this discovery, a key witness against the cannon gang was caught and questioned. Cyrus James, a mixed-race slave who had been purchased by cannon when he was seven years old, was often used as a decoy to lure others into being kidnapped. It was his testimony that finally landed cannon in jail. James, who was wanted by authorities for his involvement in the gang, was captured in Delaware in 1829. There, he turned on Patty Cannon and confessed his own involvement. James told authorities about several bodies buried on cannon's property and that she had murdered a child. Cyrus recalled the child was injured and crying. According to James, cannon took a black child, not yet dead, out in her apron, but that it never returned. James took authorities to cannon's property. There, they found the remains of three children. Cannon was arrested in April 1829 and convicted of four counts of murder. A few weeks later, on May 11, 1829, Cannon was found dead in her cell of a suspected suicide by poison around three weeks before her scheduled hanging. It is believed she was 70 years old at the time of her death. She was buried outside of the Sussex County Courthouse in Delaware. Her remains were removed in 1907. The courthouse employee took her skull and later became a family heirloom. In 1961, a skull purported to be cannons was donated to the Dover Library, but it is now on a long-term loan to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Today, Patty Cannon represents just one example of the many horrors that arose from the slave trade in America. Centuries later, her story remains just as terrifying. Coming up, in a well-known area of southwest Texas that many believe to already be haunted, a woman dies in childbirth. But when she is found, her baby is missing. And wolf prints are everywhere. And that's when sightings of the Wolf Girl of Devil's River began. But first, who was the mysterious woman who spoke a language no one could understand? What was inside the box she held in her hands? What was the meaning of the markings on the round metal object she arrived in? Those are just some of the questions no one has been able to answer about a strange encounter near Tokyo in 1803. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Are you a member of the Darkness Syndicate? The Darkness Syndicate is a private membership where you receive commercial-free episodes of the Weird Darkness podcast and radio show. Behind the scenes, video updates about future projects and events I'm working on. You can share your own opinions on ideas to help me decide upon Weird Darkness contests and events. You can hear audiobooks I'm narrating before even the publishers or authors get to hear them. You also receive bonus audio of other projects I'm working on outside of Weird Darkness. You get all of these benefits and more starting at only $5 per month. Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate at WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. An intriguing document called Hayarushu Kishu, translated as Tales of Castaways, is kept at the Owasi Banco Depository Library in Japan. The document tells an intriguing story of an encounter with an extraterrestrial being near the village of Harashagahama or, according to some sources, Harayadori near Tokyo. On February 22, 1803, the event took place when a saucer-shaped ship of iron and glass allegedly washed ashore on the coast. The object was six meters wide and carried a young woman with very white skin. The event created a stir in the village and people rushed down to see the unusual object. This object became later known as Utsurobuna or Hollow Ship. Several people approached this curious round object in their own boats and managed to tow it to the beach. In the book, Wonders in the Sky, Unexplain Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, Jacques Vallée and Chris Obbeck write the upper half of the object was composed of glass-fitted windows with lattice shielded by a kind of putty and the lower hemisphere consisted of metal plates. Through the glass dome, the witnesses could see letters written in an unknown language and a bottle containing liquid, perhaps water. The girl inside was 1.5 meters tall and her dress was strange, made of an unknown material. She spoke to the astonished crowds in a language they could not interpret. She also had a strange cup of design unknown to the witnesses. People estimated her age to be around 18-20 years old. The timber box she held was 60 centimeters in length. It appeared as though the box was very special to the young woman and she did not allow people to touch it. The villagers arrested the girl and tried to decide what to do with her. One of the villagers, who had heard of a similar case that had happened at another beach not far from there, suggested that the woman was possibly a foreign princess, exiled by her father because of an extramarital love affair. The box, he said, may even contain her lover's head. If this was so, it would be a political problem and that would imply some sort of cost. We may be ordered to spend a lot of money to investigate this woman in boat. Since there is a precedent for casting this boat out to sea, we better put her inside the boat and send it away. From a humanitarian viewpoint, this treatment would be cruel to her destiny. Backing their decision with such straightforward logic, they forced the visitor back into the doomed object, pushed it out, and drifted it out of sight. There were two books published regarding this incident. One book is Toan Shōwasetsu, published in 1825. The other book is Uma no Shiri, published in 1844. Both books pre-date modern UFO sightings. Other than the accounts in these various books, no records of the mysterious incident have been found in official documents in Japan. Who was this alien visitor? Where did the woman come from? These are the questions we cannot answer. Yet perhaps the story described in the books could be based on a real UFO experience in Japan in 1803. In 1835, a group of American colonists led by Dr. Charles Beale were camped at Lake Espintosa, a renowned, haunted location near what is now Carrizo Springs in southwest Texas. Half a mile away from the Beale group, John Dent and his pregnant wife, Molly Pertle Dent, both from Georgia, had built a brush cabin. Dent had come to trap Beaver in the Devil's River area, north of the present-day Del Rio, but was also on the run from the law for the murder of a fellow trapper in Georgia. The Dent's were to prove fortunate in their choice of a sight distant from the lake. A band of Comanches raided the main Beale camp and massacred most of the inhabitants, afterwards throwing the bodies of the victims and their carts into the lake. Apparently, even at this time, Espintosa Lake had acquired a reputation throughout this part of Texas for ghostly goings-on. This incident adding to the store of ill luck and sorrow centering on what to this day Mexicans consider a haunted location. The name Espintosa meaning frightful. A mysterious ghostly fog, a lake monster and a spectral headless rider are some of the ghosts that have been recorded at this supposedly haunted location. As Molly was approaching the end of her pregnancy, the couple were reluctant to travel despite the danger of hostile Indians. One night in May 1835 there was a severe thunderstorm and Molly went into labor. Without the help of modern medicine or the aid of a nurse or doctor, Molly was having problems with the birth and Dent needed to do something about it, so he decided to ride westward for help. He arrived at a Mexican goat ranch on the Pecos Canyon and told them desperately about his wife's condition, begging for someone to ride back with him. But as the Mexicans prepared their horses to leave, there was a furious crash of thunder and a bolt of lightning struck Dent from his horse, killing him instantly. After a considerable delay, the goat herders mounted up and followed Dent's directions. However, darkness fell before they had got over the divide to Devil's River, thus delaying the search. Finally, at sunrise the next morning, they located the Dent's isolated cabin. But what they found outside the cabin in an open brush arbor was Molly Dent, lying dead, alone. She had apparently died in childbirth, but there was no trace of the baby anywhere. The child was never found, but fang marks on the woman's body and numerous wolf tracks over the area made the goat herders naturally assume that the infant had been either devoured or carried off by lobo wolves. But this was just the beginning of the story. Ten years later, in 1845, a boy living at San Felipe Springs, Del Rio, reportedly saw a creature with long hair covering its features that looked like a naked girl attacking a herd of goats in the company of a pack of lobo wolves. The story was ridiculed by many, but still managed to spread back among the settlements. Around a year after this incident, a Mexican woman at San Felipe claimed she had seen two large wolves and an unclothed young girl devouring a freshly killed goat. She approached close to the group, she said, before they saw her and ran off. The woman noticed that the girl ran initially on all fours, but then rose up and ran on two feet, keeping close to the wolves. The woman was in no doubt about what she had seen, and the scattering of people in the Devil's River country began to keep a sharp watch for the girl. There were similar reports by others in the region of Texas during the following year, and Apache stories told of a child's footprints, sometimes accompanied by handprints having been found among the wolf tracks in sandy places along the river. A hunt was organized to capture the lobo or wolf girl of Devil's River as she had now become known. On the third day of the hunt, the naked girl was sighted near Espinatoza Lake, running with a pack of wolves. The cowboys managed to separate the girl from her wolf companions and cornered her in a canyon where she fought like a wildcat, clawing and biting frantically to keep her freedom. They finally managed to lasso her to keep her still, but while they were tying her up, she began to make a frightening unearthly sound somewhere between the scream of a woman and the howl of a wolf. As she howled, the monster he wolf from whom she had been separated appeared and rushed at her captors. Fortunately, one of the cowboys reacted quickly and shot it dead with a pistol, at which the wolf girl fell into a faint. Securely bound, the men were now able to examine the girl and noted that despite a body covered in hair and her wild mannerisms, she appeared to be human. Her hands and arms were well muscled, but not out of proportion, and she lacked the ability to speak, only making deep growling noises. She moved smoothly on all fours, but was rather awkward when made to stand up straight. The girl was put on a horse and taken to the nearest ranch, an isolated, two-roomed shack amid the desert wilderness. She was put in one of the rooms and unbound, the cowboys offering her a covering for her body and food and water, but she refused, cowering in the darkest corner. They then left her alone for the night, locking the door and posting a guard outside. The only other opening in the room was a small, boarded-up window, but as night fell, the cowboys heard terrifying howls coming from the wolf girl's room. The strange cries carried through the still night air, unsettling her captors and soon finding answers from among the wolf pack in the wilderness beyond the shack. Soon there were long, deep howls coming from all sides as the pack drew closer to the house and occasionally strange howling screams from the girl answering them from inside her dark room. Suddenly the large pack of wolves charged into the corrals, attacking the goats, cows and horses, and bringing the cowboys outside shooting and yelling to drive them away. In all the confusion the wolf girl managed to tear the planks from the window and escape into the night. The howls soon abated and the wolves crept back into the wilderness. The next day, not a trace of the girl could be found. Though there were a few unverified reports in the following years of a young, hair-covered girl being seen with a wolf pack in the area, no one ever came in close contact with her. Meanwhile, gold had been discovered in California, and westward travel had increased significantly. In 1852, a surveying party of frontiersmen searching for a new route to El Paso were riding down to the Rio Grande at a bend far above the mouth of Devil's River. They were almost at the water's edge when they saw at close range, sitting on a sandbar, a young woman, suckling two wolf cubs. Suddenly she saw them, quickly grabbed the pups and dashed into the breaks at such a rate that it was impossible for the horsemen to follow. The girl would have been 17 years old that year. After that, she disappeared into the wilderness forever. It's impossible now to know what became of Molly Dent's daughter, presuming that's who the wolf girl was. There were subsequent reports of human-faced wolves in the area right up until the 1930s, and L.D. Bertillion wrote in 1937, during the past 40 years, I have in the western country met more than one wolf face strongly marked with human characteristics. The story of the wolf girl of Devil's River reads more like a Texas folk tale than a real, feral child case, and the large amount of evidence for what happened is all anecdotal. She does however seem to live on in a more subtle form. Her ghost has apparently been seen in the old San Felipe Springs area beside the banks of Devil's River. In 1974, the hunter in this area claimed to have seen her again in the form of a white apparition which vanished before his eyes. Back in the autumn of 1835, when John and Molly Dent had newly arrived in Texas, Molly wrote her mother an odd letter. It said merely, Dear Mother, the Devil has a river in Texas that is all his own, and it is made only for those who are grown. Yours with love, Molly. Coming up on Weird Darkness, Ruthie Mae McCoy was the type who talked to herself and cursed strangers on the street. When she called 911 to report that someone was coming through the medicine cabinet of her Abbott Holmes apartment, she probably was hallucinating, right? Well, she wasn't. That story is up next. Nothing goes better with chocolate than vanilla, and nothing goes better with the darkness than vampires. So we have combined all of them into a new blend of weird dark roast coffee called Very Vampilla. This bloody good blend combines a medium dark roast coffee with hints of chocolate, vanilla, and just a tad bit of dried cherry too. So good, you'll want to sink your fangs into the fresh roasted bag itself. Weird Dark Roast Very Vampilla, the only thing at steak—sorry, not sorry, bad pun—is your dissatisfaction with your old coffee. Sip it while the sun is down if you're one of the undead, or when the sun is up if you just feel dead and need a bit of a boost. Get your Weird Dark Roast Very Vampilla at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. The story I'm about to share was written September 3, 1987. It's important to know this, as many dates are referred to within years and phrases like last year or this year will only make sense if you know the time period this took place in. Also, the story contains some graphic language. I've decided to leave it in to preserve the integrity of the story, using the actual quotes from those interviewed. Ruthie Mae McCoy was terrified. Someone has threatened my life, she gasped to the woman next to her. They were riding in a van that was taking them home from an outpatient psychiatric center at Mount Sinai Hospital. The woman urged McCoy to relate her fears to a staff member at the clinic, but McCoy said she didn't want to get anyone else involved. McCoy, 52, went through much of her life afraid. She was hounded by paranoia. Her fears were not soothed by her dwelling place the last four years, a high-rise building in a near-south-side Chicago Housing Authority project known as ABLA, where the van dropped her off this Wednesday afternoon, April 22. She lived in one of the seven 15-story, brown, Y-shaped towers named the Grace Abbot Homes, the most dangerous buildings in ABLA. The claustrophobe and a closet might be more at ease than a paranoid-like McCoy in an Abbot high-rise. The buildings feature dark, malfunctioning elevators, pitch-black stairwells, and cocaine and PCP addicts on nearly every floor. Themes really are lurking in the shadows here. In these towers, you're crazy if you're not always looking over your shoulder. McCoy lived at the end of a corridor on the 11th floor of the building at 1440 West 13th Street. At a quarter to nine this April evening, Chicago police got a 911 call from McCoy. I'm the resident at 1440 West 13th Street and some people next door are totally tearing this down, you know, the frantic voice began. What are they doing, ma'am? asked the dispatcher. McCoy's response is unintelligible on tape, but apparently the dispatcher caught her gist. They want to break in, he asked. Yeah, they threw the cabinet down. From where? I mean, the projects. I'm on the other side. You can reach my bathroom. They want to come through the bathroom. All right, ma'am, at what address? 1440 West 13th Street, apartment 1109. The elevator's working. 1109. All right. What's your name, ma'am? Ruth McCoy. All right, I'll send you the police. The dispatcher wasn't certain what McCoy had been trying to report. What could she have meant by they throwed the cabinet down and they want to come through the bathroom? Nevertheless, he closed the phone call in order to send a beat car on its way. He assigned a 12th district car to answer a disturbance with a neighbor complaint at 1440 West 13th Street, apartment 1109. That he didn't report the call as a break-in attempt may explain why police had not yet arrived at McCoy's door at 902 when another 911 call came in concerning apartment 1109. This one was from a woman who said that she had been walking through the hallway and heard gunshots from the apartment. At 904, another neighbor called to report gunshots and hollering from 1109. Two more police cars headed to the scene. Four officers apparently arrived at McCoy's door around 10 minutes after nine. They pounded on the door, announced their presence, called for McCoy. No answer. They asked the dispatcher to call McCoy on her phone. We think somebody may be in there holding somebody, an officer told the dispatcher over the radio. The officers listened to the phone ring and ring. There were two more officers downstairs and they drove over to the project office, a block away on Loomis, to get the key to 1109. But the key didn't fit McCoy's lock. This left the officers wondering what to do. Should they break into the apartment? Talking with neighbors didn't help much. Nobody answered across the hall. The apartment next door was vacant and the neighbors in the apartment down the hall said, no, they hadn't heard or seen a thing. Other neighbors on the floor said an elderly woman lived in 1109. They say that she always answers her door. One of the officers told the dispatcher in a hesitant voice. And there's no answer. So I don't know if maybe she answered to the wrong person or what. The officers contacted the project office again, but the janitor there said he had no other key for 1109. And so at 948, the police left McCoy's building and the project. The following evening, police got a call from Deborah Lasley, an 11th floor neighbor of McCoy's. Lasley said McCoy normally stopped by her apartment on her way out of the building every morning and upon her return in the afternoon. But this day, she had not stopped by at all. Lasley had seen police at McCoy's door the night before and was buried. About a half dozen police officers and four or five Chicago Housing Authority security guards or CHA guards arrived on the scene. Their knocks and calls from McCoy went unanswered. Most of the police officers thought they ought to break down the door, neighbors say, but the security guards discouraged them. One of them raised the possibility of the tenant suing as the police broke in. And if you bust down the door, the security guards told the police officers, you'll have to get someone up here to secure it. The police officers shrugged and left. The next day, Lasley notified the project office of her concerns. At about 1pm, a project official arrived at McCoy's door with a carpenter who drilled through the lock. They found McCoy in the bedroom, lying on her side in a pool of blood, a hand over her chest, one shoe on and one off. Papers, magazines, and coins were strewn around her on the floor. When police later turned McCoy slightly, the faint smell of rotting flesh rose through the apartment. She had been shot four times, probably with a gun of medium caliber, according to the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, Dr. Utli Choi. One bullet passed through her left shoulder, another passed through her left thigh. A third entered the right side of her abdomen, pierced the liver and exited the left side of the abdomen. The fourth and fatal bullet passed through her right upper arm, then entered her chest and severed the pulmonary vein. Choi listed the cause of death as internal bleeding. McCoy probably didn't die immediately, Choi says, but because of the injury to the pulmonary vein, a principal vessel in the lung, he doubts that she lasted long. She probably wouldn't have survived even if she had been taken quickly to a hospital, he says. She was pronounced dead at Cook County Hospital at 4.35pm Friday, April 24th. Unless there's something extraordinary about it, or unless there's a news hole needing plugging, a murder in a Chicago Housing Authority project isn't going to make the Sun Times or Chicago Tribune. Project killings just aren't news ordinarily. Chicago Housing Authority residents are blown away, knifed and kicked to death almost every week, two or three times a week in warmer weather. McCoy was only one of three Abla residents murdered in the waning days of April. Two days after her body was found, unknown assailants used a stick in their hands and feet to beat to death the 40-year-old man who lived in an Abla-Roe house. The killing occurred on a street just two blocks east of McCoy's building. Three days after that, a 25-year-old female resident of one Abbot high-rise ended an argument with a 20-year-old resident of McCoy's building by plunging a knife into her chest. That killing took place just outside of McCoy's building. The murder of a middle-aged, mentally ill CHA tenant merited coverage soon afterward only in the black-owned Defender newspaper. McCoy probably knew her attacker or attackers, police said in the Defender story, because there was no indication that they had forced their way in. The Chicago Tribune did run a brief story on the McCoy murder on June 10th after a second suspect had been arrested and indicted. The killing apparently had been made newsworthy by a new fact. Detectives had determined, and the Tribune reported in the story's lead, that McCoy's killers had entered her apartment through her medicine cabinet. They removed the cabinet in the adjacent apartment, broke through McCoy's cabinet, and climbed through the wall into her apartment, according to the story. The article also noted that McCoy had heard the intruders attempting to break in and called 911. That someone else also called 911 and reported gunshots from the apartment, but that when police arrived, they knocked on the door, got no answer, and left. Her body was discovered two days later, the story said. The facts disclosed in the Tribune article raised some intriguing questions. What kind of place is it where a person can get killed by people coming through her medicine cabinet? And how could police having received those 911 calls neglect to enter McCoy's apartment that first night? But these angles apparently did not captivate news editors. The Tribune article, which ran deep in its Chicagoland section, would be the last story on the killing in any Chicago daily, the defender included. The editor's indifference was understandable. In CHA towers, babies have been tossed out of windows and teenagers shoved down elevator shoots, and intruders sometimes bust right through apartment walls to rape and murder tenants. So what's so unusual about a medicine cabinet murder? News of who got killed and how had quickly buzzed through the Abbott high-rises long before the Tribune story. Not many were shocked, says an Abbott janitor. He prefers anonymity. We'll just call him simply the janitor. You get desensitized by what goes on here every day, the janitor says. It's animalism over here. That's the prevailing life condition of the people. Animalism, where you worry about those who are stronger and you care nothing about those who are weaker. The motive entry didn't startle residents of the high-rises. Abbott intruders have been breaking into their apartments through medicine cabinets for at least a year. Even the dullest youth here knows that you can slither from one apartment to the adjacent one through the pipe chase about two and a half feet across between the cabinets. The cabinets themselves, secured by only six nails, are no obstacle. In some areas of the building, you can even climb vertically in the pipe chase to an apartment above or below the one you start in. It's the way to go from one apartment to the next, even if you're not killing anybody, the janitor says. Gangbangers who take over a pair of adjacent vacant apartments now often link them by taking down the medicine cabinets, providing an escape route should security or police enter one of the apartments. This escape hatch is particularly effective, says area 4 detective Ray Looser, who investigated the McCoy murder, because the medicine cabinet opening is small, only about a foot and a half wide, and there are pipes to squirm past. A lot of policemen would not be able to make it through there, Looser says. I think I wouldn't be able to make it through. As for the police officer's failure to enter McCoy's apartment, well, some 911 stories are just more significant than others. The death of Nancy Clay, a white suburban white-collar worker in a loop high-rise blaze in May and indications that the 911 system had failed her prompted weeks of media coverage, a city council investigation, a council hearing featuring testimony by the fire commissioner, broadcast live on public radio, and several proposed ordinances. The performance of the police in the McCoy case didn't even merit a departmental investigation. A police department spokesperson said that she could not discuss the officer's actions in the McCoy case because a full-scale investigation was in progress. Everyone would be interviewed, she said, the officers, the security guards, neighbors. When inquired later about the progress of the investigation, the spokesperson said that she'd been mistaken there really was no investigation, nor a need for one. Captain Raymond Risely, an assistant to the superintendent, said an informal check he conducted to answer queries satisfied him that the officers had acted properly in not breaking into McCoy's apartment, though their decision was a tough call, a coin toss. Had the 911 calls come from somewhere other than a housing project, the officers perhaps would have forcibly entered the apartment to check on the resident, Risely says, but so many 911 calls from the projects are hoaxes, he says, and officers have to consider that when choosing their course of action. No neighbors or security guards were contacted for his inquiry. The department would not disclose the identities of the responding officers. But then, in Abbott Homes where elevators sit out of order for days and burned out light bulbs in the corridors and stairwells aren't replaced for weeks and apartments remain vacant for months, finding a body in a day and a half is pretty efficient. Like other CHA projects made up mainly of high-rises, Abbott Homes is characterized mostly by its stagnancy. Bounded by Roosevelt and 15th, Loomis and Ashland, it's a little island with no through streets. The project's designers thought that by eliminating the streets, they could give residents more recreational space and a heightened sense of community. Today, Abbott's open spaces are seldom used, save by residents trying to get home before they get jumped. The lack of through streets has helped isolate the project from the rest of the world. No one can even drive through the development. For Abbott residents, there's no need for streets. Most of them aren't going anywhere. Fear of crime keeps them pinned to their apartments day in, day out. Something harder to understand welds many residents to this place for generations. They have kids and grandkids down the hall. Beneath the more sensational details of the McCoy murder is the story of Ruthie May herself, a mentally ill woman trying to survive in a CHA project. Miss May, as she was known at Abbott, used to dress like a bag lady, curse strangers and wave a stick at teens in her path. But she had turned over a new leaf in the months before her death, neighbors say. She was dressing decently. She was less ornery, often even pleasant. She left the project early in most weekday mornings, said she was going to school. Mentally ill residents of Chicago Housing Projects face a double struggle. They have demons inside them to battle as well as the ones around them. But McCoy was on the verge of escaping the project madness also. Two months before her death, with the help of a Social Security Field Representative and staff members at the Mount Sinai Psychiatric Center, McCoy had gotten approved to receive Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, Federal Aid for the Physically and Mentally Disabled. This raised her monthly income from the $154 she had been receiving from General Assistance to $340. SSI is paid retroactive to the date of application and McCoy applied in September, so the first check she was sent, dated February 10, was a big one for $1,979. McCoy intended to use most of her windfall to get out of public housing, but she also bought a few things, a plain winter coat, a few other clothes, some inexpensive household items. People in the project, very observant, noticed. Detectives think the killers invaded her apartment because they figured she had a tidy sum stashed there. The money she planned to use to get out of Abbott Homes got her killed instead. McCoy's killers weren't the only ones after her money. I'm not kidding about loving you, a Baptist preacher from Fort Lauderdale wrote her. I feel like you are part of my actual family. Yes, I do. We look into your pocketbook and give Jesus a beautiful love offering of the largest bill you have, or maybe you want to ride a nice check. An Ohio minister offered to center a special personal bottle of water from the River Jordan in exchange for a donation. A New York minister sent her a piece of sacred anointed wood that she was to knock on three times and sleep on for one night only, then return in the mail with a donation of $18. Solicitations from fundamentalists predominated among the papers still scattered across McCoy's bedroom floor more than a month after her murder. Directives from public agencies relating to her welfare grants comprised most of the remainder of her papers. There was also a math workbook and civics worksheets which McCoy had been using in general educational development or GED courses at Mount Sinai in pursuit of a high school equivalent degree. Her daughter, Vernita McCoy, 25, hated to see Ruthie May send any of her few dollars to preachers. Don't you understand it's just a big con, she would tell her mother? Ruthie May would respond, You don't have any faith. You don't believe in anything. It's not that I don't believe in anything, Vernita would say. I just know a con when I see one. But Ruthie May would send the money anyway. She had a mind of her own, Vernita says. The apartment was nearly bare otherwise. Relatives had come weeks before to pick up her belongings. Through the opening in her bathroom wall, where the medicine cabinet ought to have been, you could see the pipes that her killers wriggled past, and beyond that, the bathroom of 1108. The medicine cabinet in 1108 was confiscated by the state's attorney's office as evidence. McCoy's cabinet was never found, and it's not known whether it was in place before the intruders came through the wall. Vernita maintains that burglars broke into her mother's apartment through the medicine cabinet once before, last year, and that although Ruthie May reported the break in, no one from CHA ever re-secured the cabinet. Margaret Burrish, Ruthie May's next door neighbor, until she moved out in early April, says she recalls seeing the cabinet, leaning against the tub in the bathroom earlier that year. There's no record in McCoy's housing file of her ever reporting a break in, or problem of any sort with her medicine cabinet. Still taped to McCoy's white cinder block bathroom wall, on either side of the space for the medicine cabinet, were pages from religious magazines describing miracles. God will be your dentist, declared the clip on the left. Under that banner was a photograph of a young girl, mouth agape, a finger on the teeth that God had filled with silver according to the accompanying story. On the other side at the opening was a story from the power of the Holy Ghost magazine. Thyroid condition vanishes, disclosing how the bulges in a woman's neck disappeared during Holy Week. The woman had discovered that the lumps were gone, the story said, when her husband who had taken the bathroom mirror down to wallpaper put it back up. A spooky clip to see, knowing what happened to McCoy, was she waiting for some similar redemption to come through her bathroom mirror? A few relatives attended the church service held for her on the south side on April 30th. She was buried in Homewood that afternoon. Life was hard for Ruthie Mae, noted the bulletin distributed at the service. She was born in Hughes, Arkansas, one of eight children. When she was small, her family, like numerous southern black families then, moved Chicago's south side, looking for a more prosperous life. But the promise of the big city was sweeter than the reality. Just scraping along was a challenge for a large family in the teeming black belt. Ruthie Mae's father, now 87 and still living on the south side, loaded coal onto wagons in various yards, earning a meager wage. Ruthie Mae attended Phillips High School for a little more than a year. Signs of mental illness began appearing when she was in her twenties. Her relatives say that they don't know the exact nature of her illness and offer only hazy accounts of how it showed itself. She talked to herself. She burst with anger unexpectedly. Her mother, a devout Baptist, chased us into church and taught us the way of the Lord, says a brother, Haywood McCoy. Now her siblings propose mainly scriptural explanations for what went wrong with Ruthie Mae. They're such a thing as a devil, you know, says Beatrice Gilbert, a sister. Haywood believes Ruthie Mae's problems began when she got out of God. A street preacher who says that he can heal the sick and cast out devils, Haywood prayed for his sister. But you see, people have got to want help. Ruthie Mae never married. She was 27 when Vernita, her only child, was born at Cook County Hospital. The father didn't stick around long and his desertion left Ruthie Mae bitter at men in general. Vernita had to stay with relatives off and on as a child because her mother was institutionalized several times. She managed okay when she was taking her medication, but when she wasn't, she talked to herself and sometimes swore at strangers on the street. I'd say, Mama, why are you cussing these people? You don't know them, you might get hurt, Vernita recalls. Ruthie Mae's hulking frame may have discouraged others from retaliating. She was 251 pounds, 5 feet 11 inches at her death. She worked somenial jobs, laundromat attendant, housekeeper, but her mental problems prevented her from holding a job for more than a month or two, and she spent most of her adult life on aid. She and Vernita lived in Dearborn Homes, a southside housing project during Vernita's early years, and then in cramped ghetto apartments on the south and west sides. Vernita spent some time in Cook County Jail in 1983 after being convicted of aggravated battery, the circumstances of which she would rather not discuss. Ruthie Mae took care of Vernita's one-year-old while Vernita was in Cook County Jail. When her basement apartment in Humboldt Park flooded, Ruthie Mae applied for emergency Chicago Housing Authority housing. She asked in one letter to the CHA to be placed in Wentworth Gardens on the south side near relatives. In another letter, she asked specifically not to be placed in a high-rise, but beggars can't be choosers. She was offered an 11th floor unit in the Abbott Homes. In May of 1983, she moved in to apartment 1109. Coming up on Weird Darkness, we'll continue with Ruthie Mae McCoy's horrifying story. He is young and intelligent and highly trained. He is Eric Banfeld, shipwrecked on a long-forgotten colony world where brawn and brute strength are more valued than knowledge, physically untrained and emotionally unprepared in the barest skills of survival. He seems compelled to spend a short and very unpleasant life as a half-naked savage worked like a beast of burden on a world so sunk into barbarism that its inhabitants have no concept of the wheel. It's either that or die. His only possible chance, his only hope of becoming one with the folk, is to become a singer or teller of stories. But in Eric Banfeld's case, he must be a singer of lies. Singer of Lies, a science fantasy novel by Michael R. Collings. You're a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. From her fifth floor apartment in an Abbott High Rise, Pat, 32, a client at the Mount Sinai Psychiatric Center, has a view of all the action. I hear shooting. I'm looking out the window and I see police coming. I say, I wonder who done got shot now. I see him coming out of 1440 with two bodies covered up and I say, what happened, buddy? I found someone dead in an apartment. What happened to the other one? Oh, he got shot. Do you know that woman over there in the other building got shot earlier today, I say? What's wrong with everybody? You think all that don't make people nervous? I better stay crazy. The place Ruthie May was offered by CHA, her home of last resort, percolates with violence. Children here are raised amid the tumult and grow accustomed to it. I was discussing McCoy's murder one morning with a young man in the lobby of her building when a young woman walked by, a toddler in tow. She asked to speak to the man. Soon as I finished my business, he told her. I don't give a fuck about your motherfucking business. She screamed at him. You give him my motherfucking money. The toddler didn't even look up. When I first came here, I used to feel so sorry for the children that I would almost cry, the janitor says, just to know the terror they see. But they are so animalistic in their own right. In the games they play, I see little kids throwing bricks and bottles at each other. This is their game. I get mad. Damn these little bastards. About 3,600 people live in the Abbott homes, all of them black, most of them younger than 18. Except for a few top drug pushers, everybody is poor. The average family in this census tract was pulling in a cool $4,527 a year, the 1980 census found, and times certainly haven't improved around here since. About 85% of the families are headed by females. The lucky few, about 580 people, reside in 33 two-story-row houses. Everyone else is in the seven high-rises. Residents of Abla are beaten, raped and murdered more than twice as often as they are city-wide. 47.8 violent crimes per 1,000 Abla residents in 1986, compared with 22.9 per 1,000 residents city-wide. There are no crime figures specifically for the Abbott high-rises, but the rate in those buildings, Abla's most hazardous, is undoubtedly far worse. Even my public housing project standards, the place is bad news. Abla ranks fifth among CHA developments in violent crime. Its rate significantly worse than that of Cabrini Green, 37.9 violent crimes per 1,000 residents last year. But you don't hear anywhere near as much about this near-southside project as you do about Cabrini Green, which sits not far from the Gold Coast, the lakefront and downtown. The news media's offices are closer to Cabrini. It's easy to drive over there, Area 4 Detective Looser says. They never come over here. They might call on the phone, but they never come. Abbot Holmes' layout is a gangbanger's dream, designed as if to facilitate crime. In a 1972 study of New York City high-rises, renowned housing expert Oscar Newman found that crime rates increased with the height of the buildings, the size of the projects and the distance of the buildings from the streets. Superblocks of high-rise buildings like Abbot Holmes were, in terms of crime, the worst possible combination for public housing. Newman wrote in a 72-book Defensible Space Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. The high-rises promote anonymous living, making it less likely that residents will look out for their neighbors. The lack of streets isolates the project and makes routine police surveillance difficult. Writing specifically about the Abbot high-rises, Devereux Bowley Jr. echoed these sentiments in The Poor House, his 1978 book on Chicago Public Housing. More than any project built in Chicago to that date, 1955, the overall feeling of Abbot Holmes is forbidding and a human scale completely lost. Unfortunately, Abbot Holmes was the precursor of the towering slum-site developments built in Chicago in the late 50s and early 60s. Cabrini Green, Robert Taylor Holmes, Stateway Gardens and Rockwell Gardens, projects boldly called an unfortunate legacy of Elizabeth Woods' years as Executive Secretary at the CHA. Indeed, Wood directed the CHA in the late 40s and early 50s when most of these massive slum-like projects were conceived. But she proposed such developments only after the city council blocked her attempts to build smaller projects in various neighborhoods, many of them white throughout the city. In no project will you find stairwells darker or more forbidding than those in the Abbot towers. Other projects have screened-in ramps, allowing some natural light to filter into the stairwells, but Abbot's corridors are completely enclosed, so when the light bulbs are burned out or missing in the stairwells, it is pitch black there and the light bulbs are burned out or missing most of the time. There used to be three janitors per high-rise at Abbot, the janitor says. Now there is usually just one. You got too much work to do to keep going over to the supply room to get light bulbs, he says. And then when you go, there is not any light bulbs, or they give you five or six, and then you put the bulbs in and the tenants steal them. Spiraling drug addiction in Abla has of late made the high-rises even more hazardous, say a residence on others whose work takes them into the project. A year ago, we hardly ever had anyone involved in Coke here, says Sandy Siegel, clinical coordinator of the Mount Sinai Hospital Community Psychiatric Center, which serves mainly Abla residents. You had people doing reefer and PCP and some heroin junkies, but cocaine addiction is rampant in those buildings now, and so the need for money is soared. You put that on top of an already bad situation and it is a nightmare. Major drug dealers have operated out of Alba for years, says Detective Looser, who has worked in and around the project since 1970. Before, though, drug dealing was limited mainly to young males. Today, many women in Abla supplement their welfare checks by selling cocaine and marijuana. Even elderly residents are dealing drugs now, looser says, though the seniors usually only sell marijuana. In the early 70s, the typical call for police service at Abla was for drunk and disorderly disturbance involving husband and wife. Now, the calls are often for drug-related shootings and stabbings. The chief drug sellers at Abla are a group of Black gangsta disciples who call themselves the paymasters. They walk through the buildings saying, we got what you want, we got what you need, Siegel says. They tend to wear new clothes and lots of jewelry and carry hulking radios, the benefits of their trade thus on display for Abla youth, many of whom serve gladly as bootlickers for the gang. Grown-ups in Abla are terrified of the paymasters, to the extent that most of the residents would not discuss even anonymously anything about the gang's operations. A 26-year-old Abla resident was shot to death in May, apparently for selling drugs in paymaster territory. Suffice it to say, you can get narcotics in Abla a lot quicker than you can get light bulbs. The drugs are out there 24 hours, four o'clock in the morning you can find something, since a 28-year-old Abla resident and Mount Sinai center client will call him Tony. A recovering cocaine addict, Tony used to buy at least five nickel bags, $5 each of Coke a day. But when his SSI check came, he'd blow almost the whole $340 on one day's high. He says he never stole from strangers to support his habit, he was too frightened of jail, but he did rip off family members incessantly, taking cash and marketable goods from their homes. Most junkies he knew though had already progressed to burglaries and street stickups. Near Abla he says you can't walk down the street without somebody asking you for money or trying to rob you to support their habit. Tony and other addicts would often get high in one of the numerous vacant apartments in Abla that have been commandeered by the pushers. Apartments are supposed to be boarded whenever they are expected to be vacant more than a few days, but because of the shortage of supplies and because there are so many other pressing jobs, janitors don't always get around to it quickly, the janitor says. And even when an apartment does get boarded, if the pushers really want to use it, they'll get in. They kick the whole frame of the door in, the janitor said. Boarded up doesn't mean a damn thing, you gotta put somebody a legal tenant in there. That's easier said than done, the janitor acknowledges. Tenants descend on vacant unboarded apartments like piranhas, stripping them in no time of everything of value. Sinks, cabinets, doorknobs, light bulbs, then there's not adequate time or supplies to make the place habitable again. In the building where McCoy lived, 42 of the 148 units are vacant. The pushers also reside illegally in many other apartments whose least tenants have sublet their units, though this is not allowed by the CHA. Like if you move, you sell your apartment to one of these peoples around here and they sell dope out of it, says Viola Good, an 11th floor resident to the building McCoy lived in. You're still on the lease, but they pay the rent on it. Housing don't know who's staying in there, they don't come check these apartments. The rise in drug addiction and desperation, along with the increase in vacant and illegally-tenanted apartments, made almost inevitable this latest project discovery. That tunnels between medicine cabinets can be used to loot neighbors. The bathroom break-ins began occurring a year to a year and a half ago, Abbott residents say. Four of ten apartments on every floor are vulnerable. The pairs at the end of each floor's two main corridors, the other apartments don't have the back-to-back medicine cabinets. If you live at the end of the hall and the adjacent apartment is vacant or housing some unsavory squatters, you're easy prey. It's real scary, the idea that locking your door might not be enough, says Lena Elberton, a resident of McCoy's building. Her apartment is at the end of a floor and the adjacent unit is vacant and not even locked, it lacks a doorknob. But even if the adjacent apartment isn't vacant, there's a cause for worry. Alice Johnson, not her real name, who lives on the fifth floor of the building in which McCoy lived, was watching TV one February evening with a friend when she saw a figure dart out of her bathroom and race out the front door. Noises in the bathroom alerted her to a second intruder, a 13-year-old boy whose girth slowed him as he attempted to squirm out of the opening where Johnson's medicine cabinet had been until the first intruder removed it. Johnson's friend held the 13-year-old while Johnson called the police. The 13-year-old confessed that he and the first boy had climbed up the pipes in the chase from a vacant apartment below and that the two boys had been behind him in the wall, but he retreated. For several months, Johnson tied a rope to the bathroom door at bedtime, pulled the door shut, and tied the other end to her kid's bunk bed. She put out a pail of water for her kids to use as a nighttime toilet. Other Abbott residents positioned furniture in front of their bathroom doors before going to bed. The buildings are designed with the pipe chases behind the medicine cabinets to provide easy access to the plumbing. If something leaking, janitors simply have to remove the medicine cabinet to check the pipes. It's hard to fault the architects, as the janitor says. They probably weren't thinking that people were going to be totally animalistic. Deborah Beverly, president of Abla's advisory council, says the medicine cabinet break-ins only show that if people are poor enough and need something enough, they will figure out a way. For first two years in Abbott Holmes, Ruthie Bay shared her two-bedroom apartment with Vernita, who completed her jail sentence in mid-83. Vernita's two young children, she had a second in June of that year and Vernita's boyfriend, Louis Butler. Ruthie May and Butler didn't see eye to eye. At first she liked me, but then she started comparing me with Vernita's father, Butler says. The way Vernita's father had deserted, Butler says, was Ruthie May's favorite subject. She thought black men was all no good. All they wanted to do was flirt and run around. In 85, largely because of the tension between Butler and Ruthie May, Vernita Butler and the kids moved out. Vernita's departure depressed Ruthie May, neighbors say. She especially missed seeing her grandchildren daily. She grew more ornery toward people in the project, especially the kids. She gave no quarter to those who blasted their radios in the hallways, threatening them with a stick that she carried with her. They in turn threatened and ridiculed her. Police had to intervene several times when Ruthie May got into a scrape. By the time he got on the scene, it was hard to tell who started what, says area four detective Anthony Manina, who later would investigate McCoy's murder, but who then worked in 12th District Patrol. I wouldn't say she was a violent person, but she was a little argumentative, Manina says. He thinks she mainly tried to stay to herself. She lived in constant fear of being mugged or burglarized. She had her lock changed by the CHA at least twice according to her housing records. She seemed obsessed with locks. Several neighbors described how she sometimes toured the 11th floor hallway, turning doorknobs, lecturing tenants whose doors she found unlocked. If you heard a car alarm blaring near Abbott Homes, chances were it wasn't a real thief, but Ruthie May trying to lock a car door. Living alone aggravated Ruthie May's fears and intensified her mental problems. She began eating irregularly and her weight dropped quickly. Her behavior was becoming more bizarre. Neighbors informed for need of when she visited Abla in the winter, she was seen lying in the snow near the building, spreading her arms and legs and making angels. In on hot summer days, she wore a winter coat and several pairs of pants. On August 10, 1986, Ruthie May arrived at the emergency room of Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center with Farnita's older child, four-year-old Bobby. The child had deep cuts on his face, arms and legs. Ruthie May said that she had been sitting for him and that he had fallen down some stairs. Apparently, Ruthie May was acting somewhat peculiarly and someone in the emergency room wondered if she had pushed the child down the steps. The Department of Children and Family Services, DCFS, was called. When Ruthie May got wind of this, she went berserk. She had to be put in leather restraints. The hospital was able to reach Farnita, who came to pick up Bobby and signed the commitment papers for Ruthie May. She was taken to the nearby Illinois State Psychiatric Institute, ISPI. DCFS has no record of ever investigating to see if Ruthie May actually had abused her grandchild. Farnita says she saw no signs of abuse by Ruthie May. On her worst days, neighbors say Ruthie May could be a little hard on her grandchildren, hollering at them, pulling them roughly by an arm. Most times, though, she was warm and caring toward them. She was diagnosed at ISPI as a residual-type schizophrenic. Residual-type schizophrenia is characterized by an absence of prominent behavioral problems but continuing evidence of some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, such as marked social isolation, distinctly peculiar behavior, talking to oneself in public, collecting garbage, vague or digressive speech, or odd beliefs, superstitiousness, belief in clairvoyance. Ruthie May was discharged on September 18th with a recommendation that she get follow-up care at the Mount Sinai Psychiatric Center. The vast majority of the clients at the non-profit state-funded center are Abla residents. Some are not suffering from mental illness, as it is traditionally defined, clinical coordinator Siegel says, but are caught up in deprivation and stress of life in the project. Clients can participate in group therapy sessions, GED classes, arts and crafts projects and community meals. The center provides a social network for clients and somewhere to go outside of the project. We strive to make it a place where people can trust each other, Siegel says. There isn't much trust in Abla, Siegel says, nor reason for it. One way of surviving there is not to be too friendly, stay to yourself. You don't want people to know your business because that can cause you trouble and if you get to know people you're liable to get mixed up in something negative like drugs. Ruthie May came to the center of her own accord on September 23rd. The psychiatrist who interviewed her found indications of schizophrenia but not enough to make it clear she was suffering from that illness. She definitely was not beyond the pale, Siegel says. She integrated quickly, her hygiene was good, her communication skills were good. But she was also extremely frightened and distrustful, wary of the other clients, Siegel says. She'd say, can I trust so and so to get my lunch and bring me my change? And we tell her, hey, you can trust anybody here, they're not going to take advantage of you like they do in the project, even though these people are from the projects they don't act that way here. Ruthie May would get frustrated and upset by some of the business that she had to attend to in order to run her life, Siegel says. She'd get a letter in the mail from some agency and she wouldn't know what the heck it said and she'd get in a panic, think her welfare money was going to get cut off. She wasn't illiterate but some of these letters are so complex anyone would have trouble reading them. So she'd bring in letters and I'd interpret them for her and help her with follow-up, write a letter if necessary. This way she knew we were looking out for her, that we would take care of her. Shown this kind of help, Ruthie May warmed up very quickly, Siegel says. By the beginning of this year she was coming to the center three times weekly and participating in the GED classes, the crafts projects and the group therapy sessions. Because of Ruthie May's age, the GED teacher Linda Norman was skeptical when she signed up for the classes. Ruthie May scored at only the seventh grade level on the placement test but she proved to be an alert, bright student, Norman says, as well as a dependable one. She rarely missed any of the three weekly sessions. By April she was up to the ninth grade level, six months more, Norman says and she would probably have earned her GED certificate. She was assertive and opinionated, Norman says, a mother figure for the younger women, offering them advice on parenting. If she got into a debate with somebody else, she would stand her ground, Norman says. She wasn't one to turn and run or be meek and quiet about it. Others here respected her. Ruthie May would always go on the men when they flirted with the women. She told them that was no good, says Mack Hill, who leads group sessions in which clients discuss problems and relationships. She regularly advised the women to be leery of men in the projects, Hill says. There's this project mentality a lot of guys have that they have to get over, it's a hustle life, don't respect anybody, get what you can, if it's money, if it's closed, if it's stealing, if I could take a woman to bed without responsibility, if you can get away with it, go. Ruthie May really detested this attitude, Hill says. A younger woman might say, I'm living with a guy, I give him money, I want him to stay around, and she'd say, I've seen men like this before and they're no good. Stay away from him. You may think you love him, but let him go. She wouldn't talk about her personal relationships, but I assumed that in her past, she probably had guys who misused her. She managed to offer these opinions without alienating others. The staff and clients at Mount Sinai saw little evidence of the belligerence Ruthie May was known for at Abla. She was warm and considerate and very well liked, Siegel says. She talked about religion occasionally, which was nothing surprising to Siegel. Most of the center's clients, she says, particularly the older women, followed the TV preachers. But religion wasn't something she obsessed about at the center. Her progress was unquestionable, Siegel says. An adjustment in her medicine helped, but Siegel thinks the main thing was the opportunity the center gave Ruthie May to just sit and talk with others. She'd gotten really isolated in the project because she was so afraid to leave her house. The center gave her a feeling of being more connected to the people around her. She was learning to trust people here, come to them with her troubles. I'm not saying Ruthie didn't have problems, but she was doing things to conquer those problems. Neighbors in her building noticed the changes. Deborah Lassley, the 11th floor neighbor who would alert police and CHA officials that Ruthie May had not been seen, noted Ruthie May had gained weight and was dressing and acting more appropriately. Her contentiousness surfaced less and less frequently. For the first time, she seemed enthusiastic about her life. Before she mainly talked about how much she missed her daughter and her grandbaby, Lassley says, but of late, she had begun discussing her own future. She said she wanted to be a nurse. She said, when I get my GED, I'm going to get me a job, get myself together. She was getting back on track. But what she talked about most to neighbors and to clients and staff members at the center was how dreadful she continued to find life in Abbott Homes. She said, people are coming into my house and taking my money, says Rosie, 32, a client at the center. She was afraid to stay there by herself. She used to say, I wish somebody had come and lived with me. We'll hear the rest of Ruthie May McCoy's story when Weird Darkness returns. Do you keep a journal or diary? If not, maybe you should consider it. It's been shown that journaling can help you reduce stress, help relieve depression, builds self-confidence, it boosts your emotional intelligence, helps with achieving goals, inspires creativity and more. In fact, my friend, S. N. Lenees, has created a Weird Darkness-themed journal just for you. Full of blank pages for you to use as a diary, make notes for class or office meetings, jot down ideas for that novel you want to write. Use it for keeping a mileage log if you travel for business, whatever you want. In fact, she has numerous styles of journals to choose from. Along with the Weird Darkness journal, there is one for dealing with grief or teachers' notes, for medical residencies, keeping track of your meds or health routine, and several others. Journals make a great gift for others, but it's also a great gift for yourself and your own mental health. No matter what you might want a journal for, my friend Anne has it, and you can see all of her journals, including the one for Weird Darkness on the sponsors and friends page at WeirdDarkness.com. If she had to be in the project, she at least wanted to be on a lower floor or in a row house. She asked CHA officials several times for a transfer, Siegel says. Siegel wrote one of the letters herself for Ruthie May. Because Ruthie May had high blood pressure and heart problems, as well as her mental disability, Siegel thought such a transfer was more than reasonable. But Ruthie May's request was never granted. The CHA spokesperson says she's not sure why. Ruthie May realized, Siegel says, that what she really needed was to get out of the project altogether, but she couldn't afford to leave. Her CHA apartment cost her just $46 a month, and on a general assistance grant of $154 a month, she couldn't pay for anything better. When she started receiving SSI in February, Siegel says she started planning her move out of the project. What kind of person would murder someone like Ruthie, Siegel wonders? How disturbed must someone be to kill her for a little money, somebody who probably looked like their mother or auntie? When I grew up doing something to somebody else's mother was totally taboo, Lewis Butler says, but these guys today are a different breed. They knew she had mental problems. They knew she lived alone. They saw they had the advantage and they used the advantage. Project criminals often prey on the mentally ill, Detective Loser says, because they know that even if they get caught, their victim will make a poor witness, one whose credibility will be questioned by a judge or jury. The two defendants in the McCoy case were charged with murder, home invasion, armed robbery, armed violence and residential burglary. The home invasion charge indicates the state believes the killer's new McCoy was home when they broke in. Butler thinks the killers wanted McCoy there, so she could tell them where she had her money stashed. She didn't flee when she heard the noises in the bathroom. Butler speculates that she probably figured if they're coming in the bathroom, they waiting outside the door too, so she's sitting there, don't know which way to go, so she got on the telephone. That's the only security she had to try to use the telephone to get the police there. The phone was one of the last three items stolen from McCoy's apartment. Detectives don't know whether money was also stolen, but only change was found in the apartment. Police recovered a television and a rocking chair that belonged to McCoy in the home of one of the defendants' friends. The phone has not been found. The fact the phone was taken is intriguing. Remember that the dispatcher called her number the night she was shot and the police officers outside her door heard the phone ring, so the phone had to be stolen after police left that night. It also means Detective Looser acknowledges that the killers might still have been on the 11th floor when police arrived, hiding out in the apartment, perhaps the adjacent one. Possibly they were still in McCoy's apartment. Criticism of the officers for not entering McCoy's apartment is unfair second guessing, says assistant to the police superintendent, Risely. You have all this information ex post facto. You know that a person has been killed as a result of somebody breaking through a medicine cabinet. It is much more difficult for you to see this thing dispassionately. Police officers can only break into an apartment without a warrant under certain circumstances, Risely says. They have to believe a crime is in progress or be in fresh pursuit of a criminal. We live in a litigious society, he says, and people are much more willing to seek redress in courts when they believe police have improperly entered their apartment. Says Detective Looser, 10 years ago we would have knocked the door down, never even thought about it, but today it is entirely different. You are not supposed to do this, you are not supposed to do that. At first, Risely put the blame on the CHA for not coming up with a key to McCoy's apartment the first night and for their security guards opposing the police officer's desire to break into the apartment the second night. We can't answer for the CHA, Risely said. A CHA spokesperson said McCoy apparently had her lock changed on her own against CHA rules and didn't give the project officer a key. Tenants can get their lock changed by the CHA under certain circumstances, say if they have a curse snatched and file a police report. But because it takes the CHA weeks to get around to the job, tenants often have the job done themselves, rather than worry about a thief who might be walking around with a key to their apartment. Bernita McCoy believes her mother never had the lock changed herself but that the CHA just failed to file the key or mis-filed it when it last changed Ruthie May's lock in 86. That certainly is a possibility, the janitor says. We got just three carpenters and Abla for 3790 apartments, so every key cannot get labeled, every key cannot get put in its proper place. A reporter called the security firm, Guardian Security Services, to ask why the guards were adamant about police not breaking in. Operations manager Les Lam referred them to Winston Moore, director of CHA security. Well, I don't have any answers, Moore said. He told me to call Guardian. It was pointed out to him, though, that whether the guards opposed the idea or not, the police still had the authority to enter the apartment. He acknowledged this but said two other factors weighed against breaking in the first night as well as the second night. At some 11th floor neighbors told the responding officers the first night that they had not heard gunshots or seen anything suspicious, and that the 911 calls had come from a housing project, from which prank calls are the rule, not the exception. The neighbors had to hear the gunshots, Bernita McCoy says. Those walls are so thin, if you drop a pan, everyone hears it. Nobody is going to get shot four times and the neighbors don't hear anything. They might have been afraid to talk about it. This seems particularly plausible considering the killers may still have been on the 11th floor when police arrived. You have to be skeptical anytime a resident says that he has seen and heard nothing. Cops who have worked in the projects will tell you that, given how rampant intimidation is, police looking for witnesses here often find that no one knows nothing about nothing. If you get labeled an informant over there, you got to move, says Perry Smith, who lived on McCoy's floor until last year when he and his family moved out of the project. I've seen people who talk to police get gasoline poured on their apartment door and set on fire, and you know, there is no back door, just the windows. The numerous charred front doors and the abut high rise attests to this. Besides McCoy's apartment and the one across the hall from which the killers came, only one apartment in that wing of the floor was occupied. The elderly woman and her two grown daughters who live there apparently were the ones who told police they had not heard any gunshots. They stuck to that story when interviewed. They had not heard or seen a thing. But would they have told the police if they had heard gunshots? Probably not. The risk of retaliation would be too great. A high proportion of hoax calls the police department receives from housing projects is something an officer has to consider in determining what his appropriate action is, Risely says. It bases his assertion that 911 calls from projects are more likely to be unfounded, not on a study the department has conducted, but on empirical evidence, the experience of the officers who regularly worked those beats. We could drag that stuff out in a study, but it would be kind of expensive. Jim Butlespacher, chair of the 911 Committee of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officers, a national organization, says he knows of no study indicating that calls from housing projects or poor neighborhoods are more likely to be unfounded. There are, on the other hand, several studies indicating that police officers are unduly distrustful of reports of crime from the poor and the black. And housing projects residents have their own notions, also supported only by empirical evidence about how police tend to respond to their calls. It's poor peoples in there. They're not concerned with poor peoples, says one resident of McCoy's floor. Maybe they don't care, or maybe they're afraid to. Margaret Barrage, McCoy's former next door neighbor, says she used to call police frequently when she heard fights in the halls or sounds like someone was trying to break into an apartment. After a while, I didn't bother no more. They wouldn't never come up. I think then police is scared of that building just as well as we are. Says former resident Perry Smith, they'll come, find out the elevator's not working, they go back out the door. They're not walking up those stairs. It's probably because of this belief, widely subscribed to in the project, and McCoy made a point of saying the elevator was working when she called 911. The two men arrested by police and the McCoy murder both were residents of the Abla. Edward Turner, 19, was arrested in his row house apartment a few days after the killing. Unemployed, Turner has no convictions, but had been out on bond on a charge of unlawful use of a weapon. On June 9, police caught up with the other suspects that they were seeking, 25-year-old John Hondras, after getting a tip that he was in a ninth floor apartment of an Abbott high-rise block from the one McCoy lived in. Officers found him hiding under a bed. Also unemployed, Hondras has previous convictions for robbery and possession of a stolen vehicle. Apartment 1108, the one from which the killers came, was leased and the rent had been paid on it through May, but Loser says that its tenants were not the leases. Addicts were frequenting the apartment. Detectives found no drug paraphernalia in 1108, but they had two days to remove any stuff, Loser said. They knew the police were going to come sooner or later. The residents of 1108 included relatives of Hondras. When Loser inspected McCoy's apartment after her body was found, he noted the opening in the bathroom wall where the medicine cabinet ought to have been. Beyond the pipes, he could see the back of the medicine cabinet in 1108. When he was in that apartment interviewing its residents, he went to their bathroom and tugged on the medicine cabinet. It seemed secure. But after repeated interviews by Loser and his partner, Detective Manina, several residents of the building fingered Hondras and Turner, saying they had used the medicine cabinet route into McCoy's apartment. Sometime after killing McCoy, and before she was found Friday, they nailed the cabinet in 1108 back in place, the witnesses alleged. This mode of entering an apartment was new to Loser, but after 17 years of working in Abla, nothing surprises. Someone comes up with a new crime technique, he says, and they spread the good news to all the others. The case against Hondras and Turner is in its pre-trial stages. Neither defendant has yet entered a plea. It would be nice to report that McCoy's death has at least prompted the CHA to resolve the medicine cabinet dilemma. They usually wait until someone dies, then they jump, Butler says. Indeed, the agency took no steps toward remedying the problem before McCoy's death, even though several such break-ins had been reported to it. But it doesn't appear the CHA is doing much even now. CHA Public Affairs Director Helene Colvin minimized the extent of the medicine cabinet problem when I spoke with her in July. The agency had received only isolated reports of such break-ins, fewer than 10, probably only seven in the last 18 months. But even just half a dozen reports of such break-ins in 18 months indicates a serious problem, says James Marr, commander of Area 4 Detectives. At least three times as many such break-ins as have been reported have probably occurred, Marr says, because of how often crimes and housing projects go unreported. Employees at Abla consider Marr's estimate conservative. Colvin in July said that the agency had begun securing medicine cabinets and apartments where there is potential risk. Colvin wouldn't say how the cabinets were being secured or how she defined potential risk. A month later, I spoke with numerous residents of McCoy's building and other Abbott high-rises who live in apartments at the end of the halls. These included six tenants whose apartments are adjacent to vacant ones. None had had a CHA carpenter or janitor even look at their medicine cabinets. My subsequent phone calls to Colvin seeking an explanation were not returned. Burnita McCoy's considering suing the CHA over her mother's death. While landlords in Illinois have no special obligation to safeguard tenants from criminal acts, they have been held liable for crimes that were directly related to the condition of the premises when such crimes were foreseeable. The CHA's paucity of funds prevents it from providing better security for residents, according to Colvin. This agency desperately wants to provide even better security than is provided in the private market, but we are hampered by the extraordinary deferred maintenance costs that we have inherited. As we can, we will begin to address these problems step by step. We obviously cannot address a $750 million problem in one year. As with everything else in this beleaguered agency, the Public Affairs Department is in disarray. After receiving a highly critical performance review, Colvin recently quit as director. The janitor says the medicine cabinets could be bolted together and attached to the masonry, so they could be removed only with a power tool. This would make it more difficult for janitors and plumbers to check the pipes, but at least it would stop the break-ins, he says. It'd be fairly simple and inexpensive, so why isn't it being done? Come on, the janitor says, laughing, we can't even get wood to put over the openings. Siegel and the janitor marvel at the grip of a project, how firmly it hangs on to residents, how it squeezes the life from them. People living in them become hopeless and helpless, Siegel says. They stop dreaming. They don't even have a concept of what it would be like not to be there. Nobody enjoys being there, but it's like the abused child. They're more comfortable, at least they know what to expect. The janitor said, they call this the abla development? It's the abla settlement. It's a place to keep people out of the mainstream. The system really doesn't intend for these people to go anywhere. It's put them here and keep them here. High-rise projects are no place for the healthy, let alone the mentally ill, Siegel says. If we could just move our clients to a decent place where they weren't surrounded by crime and drugs, most of them would do okay. Had McCoy been able to leave her hellhole, Siegel believes her outlook would have been good. She pictures Ruthie May continuing to visit the center, completing her GED courses, perhaps getting a simple part-time job and managing even enjoying her life. She was headed in that direction. I need help now getting an apartment somewhere else. I gotta get out of here, Ruthie May told Siegel on Wednesday, April 22, not long before she got in the van that took her back to her high-rise home. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. And you can find the show on Facebook and Twitter, including the show's Weirdos Facebook group on the Contact social page at WeirdDarkness.com. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, click on Tell Your Story. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. Patty Cannon, the slave-trading serial killer, was written by Emily Stringer for all that's interesting. The Alien Woman in the Hollow Ship is by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages. The Wolf Girl of Devil's River is by Ryan Houghton. And They Came Through the Mirror is by Stephen Bogera for Chicago Reader. Again, you can find links to all of these stories in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Matthew 11, verse 28, come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. And a final thought from Richard L. Evans, your direction is more important than your speed. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. A slave trader known only as Ridgel. Full of booze supplied by the bar, Ridgel was ambushed by Cannon at her aim. This escape hatch is particularly effective, says Area 4 Detective Ray Lois. This escape hatch is particularly effective, says Area 4 This escape hatch is particularly effective, says Area 4 Detective Ray Lois, Ray Loser. A 26-year-old Abla resident was shot to death in May, apparently for selling drugs in Paymaster at Terror. Grownups in Abla are terrified of the Paymasters. To the extent that most of the residents, along with the increase in vacant and illegally tenanted but of late, she had begun discussing her own future. She said she wanted to be a nurse. But of late, she had begun discussing she had begun discussing.