Palos Hills man lost a lot more than just the woman he loved in a brutal 1998 murder
By Lauren FitzPatrick
Staff writer
Barry McCarthy lost his lady love, his reputation and his future in one fell swoop.
Back in 1998, police found him spattered with his dead girlfriend’s blood, and they believed Juliet Chinn left tell-tale evidence on McCarthy’s clothes as she lay dying in her Frankfort condo.
McCarthy’s protests of innocence — he insisted a random burglar must have beaten, stabbed and choked the life out of Chinn — didn’t persuade police. An evidence technician was convinced the blood on McCarthy’s clothes was aspirated from Chinn as she lay dying.
McCarthy was charged with murder.
A year later, prosecutors dropped the charges. Their minds were changed by the views of a new blood expert.
Still, the Palos Hills man remained under a cloud of suspicion.
“Everybody thought I was still guilty, that I had gotten away with something,” he said.
McCarthy would live with that suspicion for years. In 2005, however, a convicted murderer would help wipe away the doubt that clung to McCarthy’s reputation.
McCarthy never went to prison, but the pangs of Anthony Brescia’s conscience helped set McCarthy free.
A few months ago, Brescia finally pleaded guilty to Chinn’s murder. Now McCarthy is ready to tell his story.
Their last weekend together
McCarthy met a lovely Juliet Chinn at Oak Forest Hospital. The two pharmacists worked the night shift. A romance began between them. Twice a year during their nine-year relationship, unbeknownst to their colleagues, they’d take a vacation together.
“When you work with someone 40 hours a week for 17 years, you get to know each other,” McCarthy said.
The pair had a standing Saturday night date for dinner or a movie. McCarthy would spend the night and most of Sunday with Chinn in her condo.
Chinn spent her final days with McCarthy. The mundane details stick in his mind. On Saturday night, they saw a movie and ate dinner. On Sunday, they did laundry. That night, they ate carryout in front of the TV, watching “X-Files” and “The Rockford Files.” She ate meatloaf, and he had chicken-fried steak from Baker’s Square. By 11 p.m., McCarthy was heading home. He bought $11 of gas at a Mokena station on the way.
The next day, Monday, May 18, 1998, was lottery day at the hospital. Chinn didn’t show up at 3 p.m. for her shift, so McCarthy chipped in for her ticket. By 5 p.m., she still hadn’t called. A supervisor coaxed McCarthy to drive out to Frankfort to check on her at home.
McCarthy found garbage strewn on the steps, unusual for a woman so paranoid about germs she ran the washing machine empty between laundry loads. And she wouldn’t share her upstairs bathroom with anyone. McCarthy found her grocery bags still unpacked.
Then he found her.
Chinn’s bloody body lay at the bottom of the condo’s entry stairs, wrapped in a small rug.
Her eyes were open — such a bad sign, he thought.
“I picked up the rug and looked. My first inclination was to call 911. I start to go up the stairs. I thought, wait a second, she might need some help. I knew she was in really bad shape. Not thinking, I bent over her. I tried to move her and gave her a couple of compressions,” McCarthy said.
Then he called 911.
“I have someone, uh, seriously hurt at 613 Johnson in Frankfort,” the call began, according to a transcript.
“How are they hurt?”
“They’re — I don’t know, I just got here. They just … it looks like they might have fallen down the stairs or somebody broke in, I can’t tell.”
“OK. What’s the last name there?”
“Uh, Chinn.”
Paramedics tried in vain to save Chinn. Later, they estimated she had been dead for a few hours. Her death was ruled a homicide, the first in Frankfort since a constable was killed in 1924.
Frankfort and Glasgow respond
Chinn, 48, was beaten, stabbed several times in the chest and neck, then strangled with hands and a cord, according to her autopsy. She was dressed, so police didn’t think she had been sexually assaulted. The house wasn’t ransacked. Nothing valuable was missing.
Frankfort police called in help from the Illinois State Police and went to work, canvassing the area and questioning people close to Chinn.
They immediately focused on McCarthy, who had small spatterings of blood on his shirtfront and near the cuffs of his pants.
Evidence technician Dexter Bartlett, a recognized forensics expert, determined the blood to have been aspirated, meaning Chinn breathed it out before dying.
Darrell Sanders, police chief at the time, sent a letter to residents assuring them all was well. He urged the people of Frankfort to rely on his 19 years’ experience as their chief to keep them safe, and he assured them no murderer was on the loose.
“Please know that there is absolutely no evidence of any kind to suggest that this was just a random act of violence,” read the letter, which was not dated. “We have reason to believe that she was killed by someone she knows. However, we cannot rule out anything.”
Sanders, who has moved downstate to work in corrections, could not be reached for comment. Police Chief Rob Piscia said Sanders relayed a message he did not want to talk about the case.
His letter continued, “I have been your Police Chief for 19 years and … my very first concern is this community and I would not hesitate to broadcast information that I believe you need to know to protect yourself. However, I am absolutely constrained by the legal situation in what I am allowed to tell you, so I must ask that you trust me and you judge me by
my past performance.
“We hope to bring this to a swift conclusion and then be able to share with you the facts that lead me to believe you have nothing to be concerned with,” the letter concluded.
McCarthy, a lifelong Southlander with a college education and no criminal background, was questioned extensively, confronted with evidence and then charged with first-degree murder in July 1998. He scraped together $100,000 bail money, hired a lawyer and spent another $100,000 defending himself over the next 13 months.
But as McCarthy’s attorney, Michael D. Monico, and prosecutors assembled their cases, both looked to outside experts.
Tom Bevel, an expert on blood spatter patterns, took a hard look at the blood evidence on the condo walls and McCarthy’s clothes for Will County State’s Attorney Jim Glasgow.
“As we were provided with more information surrounding circumstances, (Bevel’s) eventual conclusion was he would not be able to testify that was aspirated blood,” Glasgow said. “It was possible her arm fell post mortem.”
Glasgow dropped the charges in August 1991, saying he could no longer prove beyond a reasonable doubt Chinn was still alive when blood spattered on McCarthy.
“After the dismissal, we were not actively pursuing the case against Mr. McCarthy,” Glasgow said. “The sad part was I couldn’t absolutely clear him under the circumstances either.”
Police weren’t as quick to let McCarthy go as a suspect.
“Naturally, Sanders, the police chief in Frankfort, had a news conference the next day and said, ‘As far as we’re concerned, he was the right guy. This case is closed,’ ” McCarthy said. “Now as far as I’m concerned, I’m still a suspect even though they declined to prosecute.”
Relieved the charges were dropped, McCarthy hardly felt vindicated. Murder has no statute of limitations, so he never shook the feeling he remained the prime suspect. And he lost his 19-year job at Oak Forest Hospital. The county offered him part of his pension.
Glasgow has tried to help McCarthy recover his full pension and is aiding him in expunging the murder indictment from his record.
“If Brescia had not come forward, we never would have resolved this,” Glasgow said.
Brescia’s confession
Four months after Chinn was killed, an 83-year-old man named William Hoekstra fell victim to a killer who burglarized Hoekstra’s Palos Park townhome and stabbed the old man twice in the chest and neck with a kitchen knife.
McCarthy saw the story in the paper the next day and immediately called his attorney.
“I was afraid (police) would come knocking on my door,” he said. “It never occurred to me it was the same guy.
“(Sanders) swore up and down to the people of Frankfort that there was no crazed killer on the loose — and actually there was,” McCarthy continued, raising his voice to punctuate his next point. “Hoekstra didn’t have to die.”
Anthony Brescia, a junkie from Dixmoor with a long rap sheet, was quickly apprehended for the murder by Palos Park and Illinois State Police. Brescia was a seasoned criminal, a “daylight burglar” who was strung out on cocaine and looking for quick cash to fuel his habit.
He sported a “Love Mom And Dad” tattoo on his upper left arm. He’d been convicted of 10 burglaries in Orland Park, Alsip and Tinley Park between 1991 and 1998, mostly townhomes. Paroled in March 1998, he was living with his mother in a trailer in Dixmoor when he attacked Chinn.
He returned to prison in 1999 to serve a 45-year sentence after pleading guilty to Hoekstra’s murder.
While he was in prison, Brescia’s mother died in April 2005. She knew her son had taken Hoekstra’s life. As long as she was alive, Brescia couldn’t bring himself to confess that wasn’t the only killing he had done.
After his mom died, Brescia spilled details of the unsolved Frankfort murder to a department of corrections investigator. He wrote out a confession. And on Dec. 21, 2005, Brescia sat in the Pontiac Correctional Center with Frankfort detectives Kevin Keegan and Will Dowding and offered a videotaped confession to Chinn’s murder.
He knew about McCarthy’s arrest.
“Man, this guy’s locked up for this and he didn’t do it,” he told detectives. “I always told myself, when my mother dies, I’m gonna come clear my conscience and … at least give some closure to the family.”
He told the police how he broke into Chinn’s condo to look for cash to fuel his cocaine habit. When he found her at home, he ran out the door. But she chased him and hollered out the license number of his mother’s car, so he followed her back into the condo. By that time, Chinn had grabbed a knife from the kitchen, a knife he turned on her after punching her.
Brescia told investigators he had to kill Chinn once she had identified his car because he couldn’t leave any witnesses.
“I couldn’t stand another bust. I knew it was either natural life or whatever if I got another residential burglary,” Brescia said. “She should have never died. She should have stayed in the house and called police.”
No one noticed that $50 or $60 in cash was missing from Chinn’s condo.
Brescia would tell police he preferred townhomes because they had similar layouts and only had one door to break into.
He was boggled authorities never made the connection between Chinn’s killing and Hoeksra’s themselves.
“It was the same situation, the same M.O. — that’s why I couldn’t figure it out — I’m waiting for someone to put two and two together,” he told detectives. “I’m thinking at anytime they’re going to put two and two together especially after the one that happened in Palos.”
‘He’s not whole’
McCarthy sat in court with his sister, Debbie Bailey, and watched Brescia plead guilty to murdering Chinn. He was sentenced to natural life in prison in February.
McCarthy felt a burden lifted from him.
All his original protests of innocence turned out to be true.
Bailey — who helped her brother scrounge up bail money — wishes he could have some of his old life back.
“He’s not whole. I want my brother to be made whole,” She said. “If Frankfort did its job, Mr. Hoekstra would still be alive. Nobody saved Juliet, but if investigated, that (elderly) man and his family could have been spared.”
The pharmacist who depleted his savings on his defense has not worked since his arrest.
He doesn’t trust police.
He feels cheated out of justice and out of his full pension.
He’ll never again go alone to someone’s aid.
And he lost the woman he loved.
“Even if I got what I’m supposed to get, she’s still dead, and my life still is going to be terrible. I don’t feel that I was treated fairly,” he said. “I can understand why I should have been looked at as a suspect — but my life shouldn’t have been ruined.”
Published in the Daily Southtown, June 24, 2007.
PDF 2007-06-24 Vindication doesn’t come easy for wrongfully accused || The Daily Southtown
