Anticipation grew over William O’Neal’s imminent appearance. Those of us close to the Panthers wanted to see how this cocky, streetwise Judas would conduct himself in the courtroom. To my surprise and delight, my mother came up from Atlanta to watch me question him. She too had been following the trial.
Spectators and press filled the courtroom on November 30 as O’Neal, dressed in a dark conservative suit, took the witness stand. Low murmurs of “pig” emanated from our side of the spectator section. The defendants had convinced Perry to provide extra security for O’Neal, and a marshal was stationed next to the door where the jurors entered and exited. At Montgomery’s insistence, the marshal was moved out of the jury’s path.
O’Neal was calm, polite, and showed little emotion as he answered my preliminary questions with “yes, sir,” or “no, sir.” The FBI had prepped him well. “I joined the FBI because I believed in law enforcement,” O’Neal told the jury, even though I confronted him with his deposition testimony that he had “no other reason than money” for becoming an informant. He also had conveniently forgotten that Mitchell had arranged for criminal charges in his car theft case to be dropped.
When I confronted O’Neal about his building an electric chair and wiring the office to electrocute intruders, he claimed these were done at the urging of Hampton and Rush. He admitted taking the Panthers out for target practice at a friends’ farm in Michigan, but glibly added, “Better they shoot at trees than police officers.” He denied entirely a plan to construct an airplane armed with explosives to drop on City Hall, and the many burglaries he carried out with Panthers Robert Bruce and Nathaniel Junior. Other provocative and illegal acts he didn’t “remember at this time, sir.”
O’Neal admitted meeting with Mitchell in November and testified that Mitchell brought with him “gruesome” photos of the two police officers slain that day in a shootout with former Panther Jake Winters. He said Mitchell requested information about the layout of Hampton’s apartment, but O’Neal claimed he “didn’t know why” Mitchell wanted it. Concerning his next meeting with Mitchell, O’Neal testified, “I don’t recall providing him with a floor plan, no sir.”
I pulled the large cardboard blow-up of the floor plan out from under the counsel table and put it on an easel in front of O’Neal, where the jury could see it. I pointed to each table, bed, desk, lamp, and dresser and asked O’Neal who provided the location for each item on the blow-up. He admitted it all came from him. “And you provided Mitchell with the information that this was the bed that Fred Hampton and Deborah Johnson slept in when they were there, didn’t you?”
“I did,” he testified, reluctantly. By the time I had shown him every room, it was clear he could not have recalled so many details without sketching the plan himself while he was at 2337 or shortly thereafter. He would not have done this without Mitchell’s request and he must have brought his sketch to their meeting. I asked O’Neal if later he had been concerned that his floor plan led to Fred’s death. “I was curious but not concerned,” he said. “I think at some point I was curious, and that was about the extent of it.”
After expressing such nonchalance over his responsibility for Fred’s death, I was surprised when O’Neal admitted approaching Fred’s parents asking to serve as a pallbearer. “It was something I did, sir. I don’t recall exactly what my motivation was other than an act of condolence. Yes, I felt sorry. I don’t like to see anyone killed. I didn’t particularly appreciate that he was killed, but it did not make me feel bad.”
This ambivalent response made me more determined to probe his motivation. I had always been puzzled why O’Neal had cried more after Fred died than anyone in the Party, and why he had volunteered to be a pallbearer. O’Neal stuck with his claim that being a pallbearer was a genuine act of condolence. His ability to get into the roles and even the feelings of both the informant-provocateur as well as the enthusiastic Panther is what made him so effective and so hard to recognize—a moral eunuch and a schizophrenic.
I probed O’Neal’s strange psyche and lack of memory for several court days. December 4 went by with a larger-than-usual gathering at the Hampton home but with no acknowledgment of the day’s significance in the courtroom. After the noon recess on Wednesday, December 8, we returned to court, but there was no O’Neal. “A serious problem has arisen concerning the health of a member of the witness’s family, who is now hospitalized. It has been necessary to allow the witness to return home for the serious matter,” U.S. Attorney Kanter reported.
Perry accepted Kanter’s representations without challenge and told the jury a sudden emergency “not connected to our case” had caused the witness to be unavailable.
“I think O’Neal is holding them up for more money,” I said to Flint after O’Neal’s third day as a no-show.
“He’s already been getting eleven hundred dollars per month, plus another eighty-five hundred since July for what they call ‘trial attendance,’” Flint said. “How much does he want?”
“Enough to have a new suit to wear every day on the witness stand,” I replied. O’Neal had worn seven different suits, all well tailored, dark, conservative, and expensive. “He makes you look pretty shabby.”
“Just ‘cause your mother’s in town and bought you a new suit doesn’t exactly make you a clothes horse,” Flint shot back. Indeed, when O’Neal had failed to appear on Wednesday, my mother took me across State Street to Marshall Field’s and bought me a charcoal suit. “Your outfit shouldn’t detract from your cross-examination,” she said. My mother had attended two years of law school and was both sharp and critical. I accepted her comment as a compliment to my legal skills.
By Monday my mother had returned to Atlanta. I was wearing the charcoal suit when O’Neal reappeared. We demanded written proof of O’Neal’s emergency, and Kanter became more vague in his explanations of O’Neal’s absence and refused. Ultimately, Perry denied us the documentation and ordered me not to question O’Neal on the reason for his absence.
O’Neal was on the witness stand for another week. He came back more prepared, probably wealthier as well. He admitted meeting with Kanter and Coghlan and speaking with Mitchell during his absence, furthering our suspicions that he wanted more money.
O’Neal insisted that Mitchell convinced him he had no role in setting up the raid.
“Wasn’t what Mitchell told you a lie?” I asked.
After a pause O’Neal responded, “That is possible.” He admitted he “may have heard that [Mitchell passed the floor plan on to the raiders] before today.” When I asked him what other uses a floor plan would serve besides facilitating a raid, he answered, “The building department used them.”
The most emotion O’Neal showed was when he whispered “fuck you” to Flint and me after he descended from the witness stand and walked past our table.