An Honest FBI Man

The autumn leaves lay wet on the ground in late October when Robert Zimmers, the FBI’s most senior and respected firearms examiner, came to Chicago. I met him at his hotel room on Lincoln Park West, across from the zoo. Zimmers had already told the federal grand jury that only one shot could have come from the Panthers. He would be a key witness for us.

Zimmers was a smallish man in his sixties with a short crew cut, and he appeared to be a by-the-books kind of guy. But he was more personable than I expected. He opened his briefcase to pull out his notes and we got to work. Two things stood out as we discussed his findings. One was his objectivity in examining and testing the physical evidence and stating his conclusions. The other was his disdain for the sloppy work and false reports of the Chicago Police Crime Lab. We would later write in our appellate brief, “Of the government officers to become involved in this case, only Zimmers firmly placed his obligation to the truth above his fealty to ‘Law Enforcement.’”

He showed me that Sadunas’s false matching of the two shotgun shells found in the apartment to Brenda Harris’s weapon could not have been an honest mistake. He compared the firing pin marks on those shells with the marks on shells he had test-fired from the shotgun the police claimed Brenda was holding. He put one of the shells found at the apartment under one side of a double-lens microscope and the shell he test-fired from Brenda’s weapon under the other. He pulled out photos of the hammer marks. They were totally dissimilar. “Sadunas was experienced enough to see the difference. He must have yielded to pressure.”

We spent that evening and the next going over his examinations, test-firings, and each of his conclusions. By the time I put him on the stand, I was confident he knew his stuff and, just as important, I actually understood it. Zimmers was a thirty-year veteran of the FBI, and he’d been selected to work on the Kennedy assassination. His credentials and impartiality would be difficult for government lawyers to challenge. Nevertheless, they had objected to his using the scale model he’d prepared for the federal grand jury until he’d gone back to Washington with the scale model and redrilled several of the holes he had not originally made himself. To stall more, the defendants refused to stipulate that the weapons examined by Zimmers were the ones carried by the cops.

A point of contention throughout the trial had been whether to refer to the events of December 4 as a “raid,” as we would have it, or as “the service of a search warrant,” the terms the defendants wanted. They often objected when we labeled the incident a “raid,” but the defendants’ attorneys often slipped and called it a “raid” themselves.

On November 1, 1976, the defendants agreed to a stipulation that the shotgun Zimmers had examined and marked as RZ#51 was the one carried by Officer Jones “on the raid.” Two days later when I correctly quoted the same stipulation, Coghlan protested to Judge Perry that I misread the stipulation in a “deliberate, willful, and intentional attempt to prejudice the jury.”

Flint said we could clear up the matter quickly if we had access to the transcript. (We had no transcript because we could not afford the three dollars per page being charged for daily copy.)

Taylor: “Judge, we want the transcript brought here.” Perry had his own copy.

Perry: “Keep quiet. I will fine you right now if you don’t keep quiet.”

Taylor: “You are going to make [an] error.”

Judge Perry: “Shut up and bring the jury. Be seated ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Haas has deliberately and willfully misread a statement. I direct that you read that statement, that stipulation, correctly.”

Because I had in fact read it correctly, I explained to the judge that he was mistaken.

Coghlan falsely stated the stipulation contained the words “the service of the search warrant.”

Judge Perry: “Now that is it.”

Taylor: “That is not the stipulation, Your Honor, I object to that.”

Judge Perry [with the jury still present]: “Just a minute. Shut up. Now that is the correct stipulation.”

I couldn’t read the real stipulation without being held in contempt. I wasn’t going to lie and repeat Coghlan’s incorrect stipulation. The next question I asked Zimmers ducked the issue and referred to the sawed-off shotgun as “the weapon carried by Officer Jones.”

Two days later Flint and I went to the offices of Claude Youker, Perry’s court reporter, to purchase the transcript. Youker ushered us into a side office. He said he feared “being bugged.”

Youker was well aware of the controversy around the stipulation. Before the trial he had agreed to provide us transcripts on a “pay when you can” basis but had stopped suddenly in February.

Youker found his stenographic notes. “You’re right. The words ‘weapon carried on the raid’ were what they stipulated to.”

“There’s something else,” he said, looking down. “The reason I told you that daily copy was three dollars per page was because Coghlan told me he and the other defendants’ lawyers would pay me that rate for each copy if I charged you the same. Normally the three dollar fee would be split among all the lawyers. You should be paying less than one dollar.” Youker told us we’d been cut off because Coghlan found out he was giving us the transcript for less and he threatened to stop paying the extra. Youker also said Coghlan warned him “to keep our deal a secret,” and that he had been contacting him consistently to make sure we weren’t getting transcripts.

Not only had the higher fee kept us from daily copy, the city, county, and feds were paying tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars extra so we couldn’t afford it.

I asked Youker if he would include what he told us in an affidavit. To my surprise, he said he would.

When we returned to the office, we agreed Flint would write the transcript motion, and I’d write the one asking Perry to correct his nasty remarks. The first one asked that the defendants’ lawyers be held in contempt and that we receive past transcripts at the cost of five cents per page. It further sought to inform the city council and county board that Coghlan’s deal had already cost taxpayers more than one hundred thousand dollars and that Coghlan and Volini’s legal bill already exceeded $1.2 million. The other motion asked Perry to correct his “grossly prejudicial and erroneous remarks,” and declare a mistrial. We charged that Coghlan had read “an imaginary stipulation,” and Judge Perry had “accepted it as the gospel.” We tipped off the press to Coghlan’s secret transcript deal and gave them copies of our motions. The headlines the following day were “Charge Transcript Fee Gouge in Panther Case,” and “New Rip-off Charge at the Panther Trial.”

As we argued the motions, Perry sat stone-faced. He ignored my entreaty that every day his prejudicial remarks went uncorrected, their harm was amplified. He gave the defendants ten days to respond to our motions, told Flint and me to “shut up and stop arguing,” and ordered me to proceed with Zimmers’s testimony.

I was beyond pissed off. As we returned from the lectern, Flint hurled his notebook and papers onto our counsel table. “Something like a handball serve,” is the way one reporter described it. His papers slid across the table and hit a water pitcher, which fell to the carpet in front of the empty jury box. The glass lining broke and the water spilled. Judge Perry looked up.

Perry: “All right, let the record show the conduct of both counsel in throwing papers around and one of them—what is it that is broken over there.”

Coghlan [ever the snitch]: “Sir, there is a broken glass pitcher.”

Perry: “All right. Mr. Taylor, you did that, and you are now held in contempt and the court now orders you committed into the custody of the attorney general of the United States for a period of twenty-four hours and orders the marshal to take you into custody forthwith. Court is in recess,” said Perry as he left the courtroom.

Flint stood there in shock, looking at the empty bench. The marshals let him gather his papers before they escorted him toward the lock-up.

It wasn’t over. Out bounced Perry.

As I went to pick up the pieces of the water pitcher, Perry ordered me to stop and sit down. He then demanded that the jury be brought back into the courtroom to observe the broken pitcher. When they had been marched in and out, with puzzled faces, as no explanation was given, Perry allowed a recess for Volini to photograph the debris. Looking for a way around the ban on the press taking photographs in the courtroom, Perry told Volini the press “may have a copy of the picture that is taken,” but to make sure they “pay you for whatever it costs.” Coghlan’s phony accusation about us misstating the stipulation had paid off big time.

Nevertheless, Zimmers’s testimony continued, protracted but unshaken. He explained that when he visited the apartment he had seen an indentation containing gunpowder in the foyer. Zimmers testified that a shotgun blast fired toward the apartment from just outside and to the left of the front door would make the impression he saw and that the powder and wadding found in the impression were consistent with #8 shot, the type loaded only into Officer Jones’s weapon. Zimmers had labeled Jones’s shot number 1 on his diagram.

Zimmers testified that Groth fired through the front door into the living room when the door was opening and the door was also open when Clark’s shot was fired. The shot from Mark Clark’s shotgun was at a substantial upward angle, consistent with his weapon going off as Clark fell to the floor behind the door. Zimmers also stated unequivocally that the two shotgun shells Sadunas had identified as coming from a Panther weapon actually were fired by Officer Ciszewski, one of the raiders.

Zimmers explained that if Truelock had fired a pump rifle when he was running down the hall, as his statement claimed, there would have to be resulting impact points and expended shells. There were none. And of course there was no pump rifle found. Similarly, if Fred Hampton had fired from the back bedroom, as Officer Carmody claimed, there would have to be expended shells in the bedroom and impact points in the kitchen and there were none.

I had Zimmers come down from the witness stand and walk over to his three-dimensional scale model of the apartment set up in front of the jury. He had constructed the model at FBI Headquarters from his observation of the bullet holes he’d seen, measured, and photographed in the apartment. With a pointer, he demonstrated the absence of any impact points on the west side of the apartment or at the back door. These were the locations where the police had entered. It is where the Panther shots would have struck if they’d fired at the police.

Zimmers resumed the witness stand. He matched the .30-caliber bullet removed from Fred’s superficial chest wound to Gloves’s carbine. The two fatal entry and exit wounds in Fred’s head could have come from a handgun or Gloves’s carbine. Zimmers testified that if Fred was lying with his head toward the bedroom door, as everyone had placed him, then the two trajectories were consistent with him being shot at point-blank range from above and at the head of the bed or the doorway. The fatal shots did not come through the wall.

Zimmers refused to give credence to the raiders’ implausible theories about bullets and shotgun blasts disappearing out windows, doors, and into thin air, leaving no impact points or shells behind. He was so clear and unyielding in refuting Coghlan’s hypothetical scenarios, Judge Perry intervened to tell Zimmers “not to argue the plaintiffs’ case,” and even told the jury Zimmers “clearly did not want to admit a mistake.”

After a particularly difficult Zimmers day, I noticed a tall, thirtyish woman with long brown hair and pale blue eyes sitting on our side of the spectator section. I had seen her a couple times before. I introduced myself. She said her name was Maggie Roche.

“I see they’re giving you and Flint a rough time,” she said.

“That’s a bit of an understatement,” I replied. “What brings you here?” I asked.

“I was out of town when I heard Fred Hampton was killed. I’ve been angry ever since that nothing was done to Hanrahan or the cops. If Hampton were white, they never would have killed him. Their smiles make me sick.”

By this time we were walking outside in the hall. Maggie asked me when the informant was due to testify.

“In a couple weeks,” I said. “If you give me your number, I’ll call and let you know when O’Neal, that’s his name, hits the stand.”

The next day I called her, and we went out to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. Over dinner I learned that Maggie was a public school teacher working with children with special needs.

“That’s got to be about as tough as this job,” I said.

“It can be, but I chose it over teaching the gifted.”

She said that she had devoted her teaching career to working with those most in need and constantly had to fight against the racist policies of the Chicago school board. Fighting racism was something we had in common.

After a couple months of dating, I moved into Maggie’s apartment. Although she came from the same Irish Catholic background as Hanrahan and his lawyer Coghlan, she despised their attitudes toward blacks and had rebelled against similar prejudices in her own family. For eleven months my life had been the trial day and night. Other than yoga and swimming, my world had become court and the office. I was lucky to get an afternoon on a weekend to spend outside. It was a comfort and a relief to have someone to be with and talk to about the frustrations of court.