Skip pushed open the door to the living room and Mike Gray turned on his camera as they entered the ransacked apartment. Skip and Rush cleared a pathway through the debris toward the rear. When they came to the back bedroom, they stopped. Skip leaned down and peeled a blood-soaked poster from a door lying unhinged on the floor. He looked at the coagulated pool of blood below him and pointed. “This is where the chairman must have died.”
Mike Gray’s camera captured the condition of each room and the bullet-pocked walls as well as the overturned dressers and clothes strewn throughout, exactly as the police had left them, just four hours earlier. Then, Skip went to work. Forensics had been his favorite course at Northwestern Law School and he had learned the art of evidence gathering and preservation from Fred Inbau, the legendary expert on police techniques. Mike Gray filmed each shell casing or bullet fragment as it was picked up. Skip described the object, the location where he found the object, and then placed it in an envelope that he marked “2337 apt, exhibit number 1, 2, 3, etc.” Jim Reed, a minister who also had come to the apartment at Skip’s urging, signed the outside of the envelope as a witness. Soon Flint, Seva, and Ray McClain, another law student from PLO joined Skip, and in the following days my wife, Mary, and Skip’s wife, Nancy Dempsey, helped pick up and mark bullet fragments and shell casings.
Viewing Mike Gray’s film later, as I have many times, I continue to be astounded at how Skip had the presence of mind and the self-control to react so calmly and methodically to Fred’s death. He appears so technical and matter-of-fact, standing there inserting each metal fragment into an evidence folder. He reacted professionally and clinically while the rest of us were trying to decide what we should do. Years later I asked Skip what he felt when he saw Fred’s body at the morgue that morning and how, an hour later, inside the apartment he was able to respond so methodically.
“My lawyer training came out,” he said. “Something from law school kicked in and I just automatically applied what I had learned about gathering evidence and the chain of custody.” He agreed that my characterization of him as “cold, calculating, and efficient” was probably accurate. He said he hadn’t thought about his feelings.
Skip and Rush were not sure when or if the police would come back to seal the apartment, so Skip worked pretty much around the clock for two days, gathering, identifying, and filming the physical evidence. That afternoon Rush directed Panthers to lead guided tours for the neighborhood residents gathered outside. The apartment was freezing cold even with the space heater in the living room on. It was also quite dark, until Mary and Nancy, Skip’s wife, brought in more lamps.
When I went to 2337 a couple of days after the raid, it was still freezing and the new lamps only partially illuminated the rooms. I knew there had been nine Panthers in the apartment at the time of the raid, and I was struck by how small the five rooms were, and the thinness of the walls, which looked as if they were made of cardboard. The run that Truelock and Harold Bell made from the living room to Fred’s bed was no more than ten feet. I walked to the back. The blood-soaked mattress took up most of the bedroom. The wall to my left, which separated the two bedrooms, was riddled with bullets holes coming from the living room.
The bloody door on which Fred’s body was dragged was lying in the doorway, plainly visible throughout the apartment. It indicated his executioners wanted to show off their “kill” to the other raiders as one might show off the carcass of a slain deer. A police photo showed Fred’s body on the door in polka dot underwear and a T-shirt, with blood pouring from his head wounds. Another photo showed the uniformed police officers carrying Fred’s body down the front steps on a stretcher. They smiled for the police photographer. Their grins reminded me of the spectators’ smiles in the lynching photos from the South, including the people photographed standing around the just-lynched body of Leo Frank.
The Panthers started leading tours through the apartment even before the physical evidence had been analyzed. These tours were compelling because there were almost one hundred bullet holes in the east walls of the apartment where the police had fired at the Panthers, and none on the west walls where shots would have impacted had the Panthers fired at the police. “People looked different after they walked through the apartment,” one of the Panthers who led the tours said. “They were angry.”
The Philadelphia chapter of the Panthers sent two members to Chicago to assess what happened. One of them, Mumia Abu-Jamal, described what he saw: “People were lined up in the bitter Chicago cold in a way that made the apartment building resemble a movie theater.” After the visit he wrote, “We had seen with our own eyes the walls cut through with cop machine gun fire. We had seen the mattress where Fred and his woman had lain, blood caked like tomato soup deep into the material.” He described the effect it had on Rosemary, the other person who came with him. “When Rosemary came out, something in her had changed. When she entered the apartment, she was a supporter of the BPP. When she left the building she was a Panther.”
An elderly woman touring the apartment shook her head and commented, “This was nuthin but a Northern lynching.”
Fred’s body was sent to the Rayner Funeral Home on Friday, December 5, after a very hurried autopsy by Dr. Constantinou, a Greek-born physician with a temporary Illinois medical license. His protocol showed he found two bullet wounds in Fred’s head. He did no analysis on the contents of Fred’s stomach or his blood. He determined that Mark Clark was struck and killed by a single bullet through the heart.
Not satisfied, Skip asked the Hamptons for permission to have an independent autopsy done at the Rayner Funeral Home. The Hamptons gave their consent.
On Saturday morning a second autopsy was done by Dr. Victor Levine, a former Cook County coroner, with two physicians and Skip present. Dr. Levine found that both head wounds came from bullets fired from the top right side of the head in a downward direction. One shot entered directly in front of the right ear and exited from the left side of the throat, and the other entered the right forehead and was probed to a point behind the left eye. They were consistent with two shots to the head at point blank range from the doorway to the south bedroom. The downward angles of the bullets were inconsistent with the horizontal shots that came through the wall from the front.
Dr. Eleanor Berman, the Cook County chemist retained by Dr. Levine, tested Fred’s blood. In two separate tests she found a high dosage of the barbiturate Seconal, enough to make him unconscious or very drowsy. The barbiturates explained why Fred never woke up. Fred did not use drugs, so the question was, how did the barbiturate get there?
On Saturday, December 6, Skip and Dennis asked Herbert MacDonnell, a prominent firearms expert in Corning, New York, to come to Chicago. Two days later MacDonnell examined, measured, and photographed the locations, directions, and diameters of the bullet holes throughout the apartment and gathered what remained of bullet fragments and shell casings.
MacDonnell determined that the upper panel of the living room door contained two bullet holes, not one, as the police found. The smaller hole on top indicated a shot fired in, and the larger one several inches below was made from a shot exiting. The smaller bullet hole was chest high and it lined up with a bullet found in the rear living room wall that matched Sergeant Groth’s handgun. The larger hole was made by a shotgun slug and matched up with a shotgun wad found high up in the ceiling of the anteroom. This type of ammunition matched that found in the shotgun attributed to Mark Clark.
MacDonnell measured the upward trajectory of the deer slug as seventeen degrees and determined it was fired from a place near the floor in such a manner as to strike the door at waist level and then impact high on the ceiling outside. The strange upward angle would be consistent with a shot being fired by Mark Clark as he was falling to the ground.
MacDonnell also measured the angles of both shots through the front door and concluded that the door was more open for Mark Clark’s shot than it was for Sergeant Groth’s. Thus, if the door was opening when the shots were fired, Groth’s shot came first.
Skip removed this panel to preserve what he recognized as a critical piece of evidence, one that might reveal who fired the first shot at the front. He stored the front door panel, together with the bloodstained mattress, at the home of Reverend Reed.
MacDonnell noted another entrance hole in the vestibule. A wad found inside the hole matched up with the ammunition in the shotgun carried by Officer Jones, who had entered the front. One of these three shots was the first one fired. Which came first cannot be conclusively proven from the physical evidence alone. We later concluded that the most likely scenario was that Jones’s shot, fired in the crowded entrance foyer either as a signal to the police at the rear or by accident, set off the other two.
MacDonnell showed Skip that a bullet makes a larger hole as it exits a wall than when it enters and the wood is splayed outward at the exit hole. Thus, we could look at the bullet holes in the apartment and determine the direction from which they had been fired. MacDonnell confirmed that except for one of the two bullet holes in the front door, all the eighty or more shots poured in from the direction of the police entering the apartment.