In the seven years since the bodies of seven workers were found at Brown’s Chicken & Pasta in Palatine, the investigation has drawn scorn and praise, built reputations and ruined others. Lawsuits have come and gone, as have police chiefs, investigators, leads and memories.
The latest chapter was written Tuesday with the release of a 48-page report that offered some vindication for Palatine police by discrediting an earlier study that ridiculed the investigation as a parade of mistakes by police agencies consumed with ego and outside interests.
But the dueling reports leave open the most pressing questions: Who fired the 20 or more shots on Jan. 8, 1993, and why haven’t police been able to track the killer? Alsounclear is whether the resources poured into investigating the investigation shed any real light on the case.
James Bell, head of the police investigation, refused Tuesday to discuss the studies’ merits, but said that watching “Monday morning quarterbacks” try to dissect the case and fix blame “just comes with this job.”
“Seven and a half years later, we have a tremendous amount of information that in day two or three they didn’t have,” Bell said. “People expect results overnight. It’s like being in a cloud. You don’t know if you’re going straight, forward, backward or upside down, and one day the cloud clears and hopefully you’re on the right path. That’s what these things are like.”
As expected, the report released Tuesday by a team of lawyers and police officials appointed by the Illinois State Crime Commission defended police and decried the earlier critical report by the Better Government Association.
“We found the Palatine Police Department and the other law enforcement agencies worked properly; they had harmony,” team chairman Aldo Botti said. “A superb, investigative, follow-through job. We have no criticism.”
Assessment team members acknowledged they did not try to solve the crime itself, but suggested the lack of an arrest was understandable.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “some crimes never get solved.”
The new report, which was released more than two years after it was initially expected, refutes virtually all the early study’s allegations.
Where the BGA found slipshod efforts to collect and analyze evidence, the new group described a methodical effort to preserve the crime scene, take fingerprints, canvass the neighborhood and analyze the physical evidence.
And where the BGA alleged that Palatine police officials’ pride and inexperience compromised the case, the assessment team saw “a dedicated, experienced, professionally operated investigation.”
The new report acknowledges, though, that it was “most unfortunate” that a Palatine officer didn’t try harder to get into the restaurant when sent to check on a worker there two hours before the bodies were found. The officer concluded the doors were locked when one was actually unlocked.
In sum, Botti said, the BGA report was “95 percent baseless,” correct only about some details like dates and times.
BGA executive director J. Terrence Bruner responded: “We’ve got a document or a memo or an interview to back up everything in our report.”
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The latest report was requested by Palatine Mayor Rita Mullins, who on Tuesday said, “…the report speaks for itself.”
The need for such investigations depends on whether “there’s some prima facie evidence that there was a problem, evidence of corruption, racism or incompetence,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston. “Just the fact that this is not solved is not evidence of a problem. It may be evidence that the killers were particularly skillful or cunning, not that the cops were incompetent.”
There is a need to lash out at somebody when so heinous a crime is committed. “When a case is unsolved, there’s nowhere to vent our anger and sometimes we scapegoat the cops,” Fox said.
Since the initial flurry, the police investigation has proceeded in fits and starts. In a short statement Tuesday, Palatine Chief Jack McGregor said new leads still come in, albeit at a much slower pace, and that the department remains “committed to bringing those responsible for this heinous crime to justice.”
Earlier this year, investigators took DNA samples from former suspects and others connected to the case to compare to DNA evidence isolated on a chicken meal. So far, the tests have yielded no positive results, but police remain confident they now possess the killer’s genetic profile.