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Ruthie Mae McCoy was murdered in spring of 1987 in her apartment, and the circumstances around her killing didn't make sense from the very beginning.
Ruthie Mae tried to explain the break-in during the 911 call, but the dispatcher didn't seem to grasp what she was really saying.
She said they threw down her cabinet,
Ruthie Mae was likely trying to tell the dispatcher that intruders were coming in through her bathroom mirror, which to be fair, does sound absurd.The dispatcher might've been confused.
I wondered if that was the reason they didn't take Ruthie Mae's 911 call more seriously.
You know, you lock your front door, somebody could still try to break in, but you feel some sense of security.
Reporter Steve Bagheera discovered that even though Ruthie Mae might have been the first person murdered this way, at least that we know about, this was not the first time criminals entered through a bathroom mirror in the Chicago projects.
There had been numerous burglaries.Some residents even said they caught a few thieves red-handed.
One person told me that she was watching TV with a friend and all of a sudden a kid runs out of her bathroom through her apartment and out the door.And she goes into the bathroom and there's another kid stuck in the pipe chase.
The second kid who was a little bit heavier was having a hard time getting through.So they caught him and called police and he confessed that, yeah, they were trying to sneak in the apartment that way.
Believe it or not, the fact that the medicine cabinet could come off the wall wasn't by accident.This was by design.The Grace Abbott Homes opened in 1955.During the planning of this building, the architects added a space called a pipe chase.
This space was just wide enough for a person.
The adjacent apartments had medicine cabinets that were back to back with a pipe chase in between.That is an area where janitors could work on the plumbing if they took down the medicine cabinet.
That was the upside for a janitor.The problem is it will become the perfect entry point for criminals and a potential nightmare for residents.Why didn't the Chicago Housing Authority do anything to stop these break-ins in the 80s?
What responsibility did they have for Ruthie Mae's murder?I'm Dometi Pongo.From 48 Hours, this is Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder.Episode 2, Deadly Design.
When 911 gets a call, they've got to decide how urgent the situation is.That April night, A desperate grandmother was reporting that strangers had broken into her home.But the dispatcher logged Ruthie Mae's call as a disturbance with a neighbor.
Later, much later, the police would acknowledge that if the call had been labeled a robbery, they would have likely responded differently.
Journalist Steve Magiera questioned the Chicago Police Department at the time and asked why Ruthie Mae's call for help didn't generate a faster police response, or at the very least, convince cops that they had to break down her door to help her.
This is what they told him.
There are a lot of calls to 911 from the projects that are hoax calls, phony calls.They get to the project and they check into it and nothing's happening.
Steve said that after so many false alarms, officers approach calls with a little skepticism.
They maintain that this had to be a factor that the responding officers took into account when they decided not to break into Ruthie Mae's apartment to see what was going on.That was the official response.
There haven't been any studies showing that calls from the projects are more likely to be hoaxes.Now, if you ask the residents, they said that police are afraid of the projects just like we are.
And the residents also said police just don't care about people here.We're all poor.Why should they care about us? So that was the feeling that they had about why police responded the way they did to Ruthie Mae.
Steve couldn't find much to back up the official explanation.He wondered if some of the hoax calls were actually complaints made by residents, who then backtracked because they were scared.
They probably didn't want people knowing that they were talking to the police.Back in 1987, the police department wouldn't let Steve speak to the officers who actually responded to the call.
In the past few months, we've reached out to those who are still alive, but haven't heard back.
Steve said he did talk to the police superintendent at the time of the murder, and said that he defended his officer's decision not to enter Ruthie Mae's apartment.
He at least acknowledged it was a close call, as he put it.It was a coin flip. that maybe they should have gone in.But he said, you have this information, and in hindsight, you know that somebody got killed there.These officers didn't know that.
They didn't hear anything.They had at least one household on the 11th floor who said they hadn't heard anything.
Steve still didn't think that seemed like a good enough reason not to break in.
I thought that was more of an excuse than a valid reason.And again, I felt it was like, is this how you would respond if it was a white middle class neighborhood where a woman called and reported that somebody had broken in on her in any form?
Would you get there and knock and if nobody answered, just leave? especially when you had other calls reporting gunshots, would police just leave because it might be a hoax?That's just not just policing.It's not fair.
Steve quickly figured out that that response time wasn't the only way that the police and the Chicago Housing Authority, or CHA, might've neglected Ruthie Mae.
Well, according to Ruthie Mae's daughter, Ruthie Mae had had one attempted break-in through the medicine cabinet route the previous year and had reported it, and CHA had done nothing about it.
When Steve asked about it, the CHA claimed that they had no record of this complaint.So, Steve started digging.
I started hearing about these break-ins that people were doing. These break-ins had been reported to the Chicago Housing Authority.The CHA tried to minimize how many there were.
It turns out other residents complained to the CHA about break-ins through their medicine cabinets.
I remember the spokesperson told me in the 18 months before Ruthie Mae was killed, they got reports of at most 10, probably only seven break-ins via medicine cabinets.
Seven break-ins.Through bathroom mirrors.Sounds like a lot to me.But Steve says that he was told that that count is still probably too low.
The police commander in the district said, well, you have to triple whatever the reports are because so many break-ins don't even get reported to us.
So if you take the police commander's advice and triple the number of break-ins... It was between 21 and 30 in the 18 months before Ruthie Mae was killed. And what had the Chicago Housing Authority done about this?Nothing.
And the longer this security problem went unchecked, the more commonplace these break-ins would become.
If you're in your apartment, you take down the medicine cabinet, crawl through the pipe chase, kick in the other medicine cabinet, and do the burglary.And that's the route that apparently was not uncommon in 1987.
Steve wondered what it would take to fix these medicine cabinets to protect residents.A janitor I spoke with in the project said it wouldn't be hard to secure these.You'd have to bolt the cabinets to each other.
It would make it harder for plumbers to work on the plumbing, but at least people would be safe from that kind of an intrusion.The CHA didn't do that.The janitor said, well, I'm not surprised.We can't even get light bulbs from the agency.
We have so many backed up toilets and crumbling ceilings and there's been so much deferred maintenance that they're not going to work on a problem with undue haste.
Steve questioned how the Housing Authority could let these conditions go on for so long, knowing that their neglect made it easier for drug dealers to deal out of apartments and for intruders to run rampant throughout the building.
why wouldn't the CHA protect its own residents?
The Chicago Housing Authority was not any more committed to keeping the projects open.They were eager for their demise, I think, so they weren't in a rush to get a legal tenant into these apartments.
Ruthie Mae McCoy never even wanted to live at Abbott.
She asked specifically in a letter. to the CHA that it not be in a high-rise project.
Steve said that she asked not to be in a high-rise because she didn't want to have to walk up so many stairs.She only moved in after her apartment in another project flooded.
She got a response that there's this apartment available to you on the 11th floor of a high-rise, the Abbott Homes.
That's all that was available.Chicago Public Housing is offered to low-income residents.
She was on welfare, which then paid $140 or $150 a month.The project apartment would cost $46 a month.She simply couldn't afford anything else, which was why she moved into the Abbott homes.
This is when she met Deborah Lassley, who said she moved on to the 11th floor with her kids.She had a total of seven.Deborah moved in about six months before Ruthie Mae for a heartbreaking reason.
My husband had committed suicide. I left my home.I couldn't stay there no more.
Both Debra and Ruthie Mae felt public housing was their only choice.In fact, the day Debra moved in, the elevator broke.
So me and my kids had to walk our stuff up.I wasn't used to that, but we made it.
Maintenance in the building was so slow to respond that Debra taught herself how to fix the plumbing.
I didn't know how to do it at first, but every time you would call them and say the toilet stopped up or whatever, it might be a month before they come and do it.
I mean, come on, a month to fix a toilet?Two years after Ruthie Mae was killed, 48 Hours gave viewers a first-hand look at these poor conditions.
The Chicago Housing Authority has been such a notorious failure that in 1987, the U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Development, currently swept up by its own scandals, threatened an outright takeover.
Harold Dow was the reporter covering the story.
The scale and precision is that of a military operation.But this is Chicago, and these cops are launching an attack on one of the city's own housing developments.
I'm in a police state now.
It's called Operation Sweep, and it's Chicago's high-powered, high-profile approach to cleaning up public housing.
He even got gang members to agree to be interviewed.
What kind of drugs does your gang sell here?Cocaine.Joe is a high-ranking member of the King Cobras.He's been in the gang for 20 years.You're a gang, heavily armed? What kind of weapons do you guys have?Automatics, revolvers, the whole works.
The baddest game out today is the dope game.Brothers killing brothers over drugs.
The original goal of public housing wasn't to turn into this nightmare.But how were these problems allowed to persist?Finding that answer involved turning to people who know Chicago's history,
I reached out to Sherman Thomas, or as everyone calls him, Dilla.
Hello, here for the tour?Hop aboard.Great, thank you.
Dilla is an urban historian who posts popular videos online.He's got over 100,000 followers on TikTok and offers bus tours of the city through his company, Mahogany.
Today we're going to go to a very proud Mexican-American neighborhood called Gilson.
Illa is well aware of Ruthie Mae's story.
She was living in something that was rushed to be built.She was living in something that wasn't structurally sound.
The horrible conditions he and the residents describe are actually the opposite of the vision laid out by the Chicago Housing Authority for these projects.
The Chicago Housing Authority was supposed to provide a real quality housing for those who just needed a stepping stone.
The Chicago Housing Authority opened its doors in 1938 to mostly low-income white people.
That was before the war, before the mass migration of rural Negroes from the South. Then, the racial pattern of the city changed, and so did the kind of public housing that was built.
This is Chicago's solution for the poor.The early units, built in the first half of the 20th century, weren't high-risers.
They were built with green space in mind, right?So they had these big, huge courtyards, and each unit had a backyard where you'd be able to plant your own garden and your own vegetables.
In fact, when I'm going through newspaper archives, both of those housing projects would win the citywide garden competitions.
Dilla said things started to change in the 1950s as Chicago's African-American population grew.
Segregation is literally etched in the fabric of Chicago, right?Like how we define our 77 neighborhoods.What separates Fuller Park from Bridgeport is the fact that Black folks couldn't pass that particular street.
From 1910 until the 1970s, nearly six million African-Americans had moved north in what is referred to as the Great Migration.
I think there was a lot of pushback about a lot of Black families moving into Chicago who hadn't been there before.
That is Sue Popkin.Popkin has written four books about Chicago public housing and understands the system like the back of her hand.I mean, at one point she had information no one else in city government had access to.
For a while, I had the only list of addresses that the Housing Authority had.
She's now at a think tank called the Urban Institute and still studies, you guessed it, Chicago public housing.She said the government began funding housing projects during the Great Depression.
But these architectural dreams were met with the realities of funding and the realities of the Chicago political machine.
man-made jungles of concrete, conceived and administered not by people who live in them, but by political appointees, most of whom live elsewhere.
Again, here's the historian, Dilla.
It was built rushed, right, with shoddy material and with cheapness in mind.And so, as it relates to plumbing, sometimes if you have a plumbing issue, plumbers got to come in, cut a hole in your wall, and then put a whole new wall up.
Well, CHA didn't want to have to go through that and be spending money on drywall, of all things, right, or plaster.
Hopkins said that funding started to dry up after World War II, when the federal government provided fewer subsidies for public housing.
And while funding was an issue, she said that in Chicago, corruption played a part in cheapening the buildings from the very start.
They were built very badly.There were all kinds of deals with the unions.
Despite the infamous winters in the city, she said there were high rises where they didn't even enclose the hallways.
Which then almost immediately created a hazard, both the danger of people falling and people throwing things off of them.And so then they enclosed those with gates, basically, with fencing.So they looked like prisons.
Free people living in housing that looked like a prison.It was a lot.
The mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, is causing quite a stir with her latest move, the move from one apartment to another, an apartment 10 blocks from her present one.
But it isn't how far the mayor's moving, it's where, from a luxury apartment to a housing project known mainly for crime and gang warfare.
In 1981, Chicago's mayor at the time, Jane Byrne, moved herself and her husband into Cabrini-Green for three weeks in hopes of drawing attention to the conditions.
I'm really not afraid over there at all.And I think what you have to prove is that you don't have to be afraid.And I'd like to stimulate that with the people that live there.
If people want to say that it's vote-getting or whatever they want to say, then I would suggest that whoever says it take the next apartment.
Some called it a brave move, while others called it a publicity stunt.Well, not long after her move in, the Chicago Housing Authority did get more national attention.
The then chairman of the CHA, Charles Schweibel, who was also a major fundraiser for the mayor, was accused by the U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Development of corruption.Here's Sue Popkin again.
Charles Swibel, who took the money that was supposed to go for maintenance, funneled it through the flat janitor's union and used it to build Marina City, which is a luxury high-rise along the river.
The U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, accused Charles Schweibel of making deals that benefited people he dealt with in his private real estate ventures, instead of prioritizing the needs of the CHA.
In fact, HUD threatened to withhold millions of dollars unless he was removed.Schweibel never admitted any wrongdoing and was never found guilty of crimes connected to the CHA.He resigned from his chairmanship after 19 years and died in 1990.
Popkin said whether the money was lost due to policy decisions or corruption, the residents on the receiving end got the message loud and clear.
I think that it was never about what was good for the tenants or the families, right?
A lot of that robbed us of our sense of deserving of nurture, of kindness, of the minimal that you could give us to make us safe.
Kim Fox lived in the Chicago projects when she was growing up.
You know, don't have access for people into our homes through our medicine cabinets.
Fox is now the Cook County State's Attorney, the Chicago area's top prosecutor.Before she ever became part of law enforcement, Fox grew up in Cabrini-Green.
While Robert Taylor Holmes was the largest project, Cabrini-Green is the most famous, thanks in large part to TV and movies.
It was a high rise, not much different than Abbott Homes, and it was used in the opening credits of the TV show Good Times, and would later be used to horrify audiences in Candyman.Did you see Candyman when it first came out in 92?
Do you remember going to the show to see it and what your thoughts were?
The fact that it was saying Cabrini, I will tell you, I initially was like, what's this?What is this?I wasn't enthused about the backdrop.And that the backdrop to a horror film, to horror.
She was in college at the time in another part of Illinois.And this film was her friend's introduction to where she grew up.
And so I felt, I'm going to be honest, I felt some kind of way.
and you're about to equate my childhood with horror, and this is not going to be what you at a cocktail party, the first thing you say.
Was it like that, Kim?Did, you know, were you scared like that?
Instead, Kim prefers to talk about the folks who lived in Cabrini-Green.
The people were amazing.Where we were living was not.
Fox lived there in the 1970s and 1980s. And even when she moved, much of her family remained.
You were trained as a young girl not to get on elevators with just, with men by yourself or darkened elevators.
And so many times, you know, we'd have to walk up eight flights of stairs or 10 flights of stairs that there would be literally fecal, like, there'd be s*** in the corners, in the stairwells.That presence of, like, disgust physically was there.
She talked about how the building was in disrepair, like how the incinerators on each floor couldn't even burn the trash.
You'd have the smell of trash or it would catch fire and you would have the smell of fire.
And it probably comes as no surprise that growing up in that kind of environment takes its toll on you.
when it is baked into every layer of your existence, like built in, physically built into the architecture of your existence, that we will find ways to make you vulnerable and know it and do nothing about it, that hardening is survival.
That's survival instinct. The need to take care of yourself because the authorities won't help is what led Deborah to fix her own plumbing.And it's likely why Ruthie Mae used a bucket as a toilet.
Fox wasn't surprised that the Chicago Housing Authority ignored Ruthie Mae's complaint about the bathroom mirror.She said none of the residents thought the CHA or the police would be helpful.
And so it was just this weird dynamic, like people didn't rock with the police and people were also scared.People were also wanting to be safe, but there was never a sense that we had that the police were going to do that for us.Never.
She said you had to rely on your crew, like Deborah did for Ruthie Mae.
My cousin became a really good electrician.We were building carpenters.
Reporter Steve Bagheera did what he could to hold the CHA accountable.After he'd written his story about Ruthie Mae, he kept asking about the medicine cabinets.
I was still calling them, asking what they were doing. Their spokesperson said, yeah, we've got it on the agenda to secure these medicine cabinets.
But I knew some of the residents who lived in these apartments at the end of the hall where they had a vacant apartment next to them.And so I could check with them, you know, have they done anything yet?
Steve's first story about Ruthie Mae came out September 3rd, 1987.Sometime after that, they fixed the problem. While Steve was asking questions about policy, police were focused on building a case.
Who could have been in that vacant apartment next to Ruthie Mae's?Who did investigators suspect came through that bathroom mirror?
When Steve went to visit Ruthie Mae McCoy's apartment, he walked into her bathroom and could see a hole where the medicine cabinet would normally be.I could see that route through the pipe chase that the killers apparently had taken.
He could poke his head through and see the narrow walkway.Steve said they never found Ruthie Mae's medicine cabinet, but they did find the one in the adjacent apartment.
According to the police, crime lab technicians dusted that one for prints and inventoried the cabinet into evidence.
During his visit to Abbott, other residents told Steve that they will put things up against their bathroom doors to protect themselves at night.
This woman told me about somebody running out of her bathroom one night.And after that, she was putting furniture in front of the bathroom door at night when she went to bed.And I heard that from other tenants as well.
People who wanted to make sure nobody, if they broke into their bathroom, they wouldn't get any further than that.
The police interviewed Deborah Lassley and Ruthie Mae's daughter, Vernita, who would have been in her mid-20s in 1987.
During their investigation, the police asked Vernita if her mom was having problems with the neighbors, and she told them she didn't know.Police noted that Vernita told them that Ruthie Mae had two 19-inch TVs, but on the scene, they only found one.
Her rocking chair was also stolen. Police found one bullet casing from a 9mm cartridge behind the bedroom door.Detectives talked to Ruthie Mae's neighbors and interviewed residents in the building.
I'm sure they were hearing dozens of stories about how this crime had occurred.Ruthie Mae's autopsy revealed brutal details of what happened.Ruthie Mae, according to the medical examiner, had been shot four times.
The medical examiner wrote that Ruthie Mae was shot in her arms, her chest, abdomen, and leg.Investigators took photos, blood samples, and recovered one spent bullet at the scene.
One of the bullets had severed her pulmonary artery, so he didn't believe she would have lived long.Maybe if police came in right away, there was nothing they could do for her anyway.We'll never know.
If you ask Debra, Ruthie Mae's neighbor, her friend's murder was preventable.
I was lucky.That's why I kept telling my mother, I'm lucky.
Debra's apartment was not at the end of the hall, which meant it couldn't be accessed through the bathroom mirror.But after Ruthie Mae's death, she still told her kids that they needed to move.Understandably, she was spooked.
How can they come through a mirror and go in there and do that?
Kids in the building nicknamed Debra, Mother Teresa, both because she'd give food away, but also because she would blare gospel music as a way to keep teens from wanting to hang out on the 11th floor.
You play a lot of music that they don't like, but I didn't care.
Debra was cautious about living in the projects, so she never took the time to get to know many of her neighbors on the floor.She kept to herself.
That's why she didn't stop and think about the group of boys who would be going in and out of the apartment next to Ruthie Mays.
The people Deborah saw or heard in that hallway, the ones that she scared away using loud music, might have been customers stopping at apartment 1108 to buy drugs.
So there were people in and out, and the night before, there was a lot of this traffic as well.
Reporter Steve Bagheera said that the police wanted to identify any of the people seen coming and going from that apartment. Cops said they asked a lot of residents, and they all gave the same names.
Hondress and Turner were the only names that kept coming up.Police heard the names John Hondress and Edward Turner from residents.Hondress was 25.Turner was 19.
Both were young black men who had been seen spending time in the apartment that could connect to Ruthie Mays.The police had found a key witness who claimed he saw both of them go into her apartment.
And they believe they discovered a reason Ruthie Mae might've been a target.
There was the impression that word had gotten out that Ruthie Mae had a little money in that apartment.
From 48 Hours, this is Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder.I'm your host and co-executive producer, Dometi Pongo. Judy Teigard is the executive producer of 48 Hours.Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio.
And Maura Walls is the senior story editor.Development by 48 Hours field producer, Morgan Canty.Recording assistance from Marlon Policarp.Special thanks to Paramount Podcast vice president, Megan Marcus.
Candyman The True Story Behind the Bathroom Mirror Murder is produced by Sony Music Entertainment.It was reported, written, and produced by Alex Schumann.Our executive producers are Catherine St.Louis and Jonathan Hirsch.
Our associate producer is Summer Tamad.Theme and original music composed by Cedric Wilson.He sound designed and mixed the episodes.We also use music from APM. Fendel Fulton is our fact checker.Our production manager is Tamika Balance-Kalasney.
Special thanks to Ariane Roach for playing Ruthie Mae.She also played Trina in the 2021 Candyman.We'll be back next week with another episode of Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder.
In the meantime, leave us a rating and review to let us know what you think of the podcast.
If you like Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, you can listen to the next episode one week early and ad-free by joining 48 Hours Plus on Apple Podcasts or Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.
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