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Ruthie May McCoy was murdered in Spring of 1987 in her apartment and the circumstances around her killing didn't
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make sense from the very [Music] beginning Ruthie May tried to explain the break-in during the 911 call but the
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dispatcher didn't seem to grasp what she was really saying they want to break in
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yeah they they throw the cabinet down she said they threw down her cabinet Ruthie May was likely trying to tell the
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dispatcher that Intruders were coming in through her bathroom mirror which to be
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fair does sound absurd the dispatcher might have been confused I wondered if that was the reason they didn't take
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Ruthie May's 911 call more seriously you know you lock your front door somebody could still try to break in but you feel
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some sense of security reporter Steve begira discovered that even though Ruthie May might have been the first
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person murdered this way at least that we know about this was not the first time criminals
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entered through a bathroom mirror in the Chicago projects there had been numerous
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burglaries some residents even said they caught a few thieves red-handed one person told me that she
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was watching TV with a friend and all of a sudden a kid runs out of her bathroom
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through her apartment and out the door and she goes into the bathroom and there's another kid stuck in the pipe
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chase the second kid who was a little bit heavier was having a hard time getting through so they caught him and
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called police and he confessed that um yeah they were trying to sneak in the apartment that way believe it or not the
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fact that the medicine cabinet could come off the wall wasn't by accident this was by
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Design the Grace Abbott homes opened in 1955 during the planning of this build building The Architects added a space
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called a pipe chase this space was just wide enough for a person the adjacent Apartments had medicine cabinets that
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were backto back with a pipe Chase in between that is an area where janitors could work on the plumbing if they took
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down the medicine cabinet that was the upside for a janitor the problem is it will become the perfect entry point for
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criminals and a potential nightmare man for residents why didn't the Chicago Housing
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Authority do anything to stop these break-ins in the80s what responsibility did they have for Ruthie May's
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murder I'm domati Pungo from 48 hours this is Candyman the true story behind the bathroom mirror
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murder episode two deadly design when 911 gets a call they've got to decide how urgent a situation is that
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April night A desperate grandmother was reporting that strangers had broken into
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her home but the dispatcher logged Ruthie May's call as a disturbance with a neighbor later much later the police
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would acknowledge that if the call had been labeled a robbery they would have likely responded differently journalist
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Steve begera questioned the Chicago Police Department at the time and asked why Ruthie call for help didn't generate
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a faster police response well at the very least convinced cops that they had to break down her door to help her this
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is what they told him there are a lot of calls to 911 from the projects that are
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hoax calls phony calls they get to the project and they check into it and nothing's happening Steve said that
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after so many false alarms officers approach calls with a little skepticism they maintain that this it had to be a
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uh factor that the responding officers took into account when they decided not to break into Ruthie May's apartment to
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see what was going on that was the official response there haven't been any studies showing that calls from the
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projects are more likely to be hoaxes now if you asked the residents they said that police are afraid of the projects
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just like we are and the residents also said please police just don't care about
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people here we're all poor why should they care about us so that was the feeling that they had about why police
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responded the way they did to Ruthie May Steve couldn't find much to back up the official explanation he wondered if
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some of the hoax calls were actually complaints made by residents who then backtracked because they were scared it
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probably didn't want people knowing that they were talking to the police back in 1987 the police
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department would let Steve speak to the officers who actually responded to the call in the past few months we've
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reached out to those who are still alive but haven't heard back Steve said he did
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talk to the Police Superintendent at the time of the murder and said that he defended his officer's decision not to
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enter Ruthie May's apartment he at least acknowledged it was a close call as he put it it was a coin flip that maybe
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they should have gone in but he said you you have this information in hindsight you know that somebody got killed there
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these officers didn't know that they didn't hear anything they had uh at least one household on the 11th floor
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who said they hadn't heard anything Steve still didn't think that seemed like a good enough reason not to
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break in and I thought that was more of a an excuse than a a valid reason and again I did I felt it was like is this
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how you would respond if it was a white middle class neighborhood where a woman called and reported that somebody had
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broken in on her in any form would you get there and knock and if nobody answered just leave especially when you
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had other calls reporting gunshots would police just leave because it might be a
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hoax that's just not just policing it's not fair Steve quickly figured out that that
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response time wasn't the only way that the police and the Chicago Housing Authority or cha might have neglected
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Ruthie May well according to Ruthie May's daughter Ruthie may had had one attempted Breakin through the medicine
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cabinet route the previous year and had reported it and Cha had done nothing about it when Steve asked about it the
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cha claimed that they had no record of this complaint so Steve started digging I started hearing about these Breakin
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that people were doing and these break-ins had been reported to the Chicago Housing
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Authority the cha tried to minimize how many there were it turns out other residents complained to the Cha about
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break-ins through their medicine cabinets I remember the spokesperson told me in the 18 months before Ruthie
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May was killed they got reports of at most 10 probably only seven break-ins via medicine cabinets
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seven break-ins through bathroom mirrors sounds like a lot to me but Steve says that he was told that that count is
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still probably too low the police commander in the district said well you have to Triple whatever the reports are
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because so many break-ins don't even get reported to us so if you take the police
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Commander's advice and triple the number of Breakin there was between 21 and 30 in the 18 months before Ru May was
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killed and what had the Chicago Housing Authority done about this nothing and the longer this security problem went
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unchecked the more common place these break-ins will become if you're in your apartment you take down the medicine
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cabinet Crawl Through the pipe Chase kick in the other medicine cabinet and do the burglary and that's the route
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that apparently was not uncommon in 1987 Steve wondered what do would take to fix these medicine cabinets to
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protect residents a janitor I spoke with in the project said it wouldn't be hard
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to secure these you'd have to bolt the cabinets to each other it would make it harder for plumbers to work on the
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plumbing but at least people would be safe from that kind of an intrusion the cha didn't do that the janitor said well
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I'm not surprised we can't even get light bulbs from the agency we have so many backed up toilets and crumbling
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ceilings and there's been so much deferred maintenance that they're not going to work on a problem with undo
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haste Steve questioned how the Housing Authority could let these conditions go on for so long knowing that their
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neglect made it easier for drug dealers to deal out of apartments and for intruders to run rampant throughout the
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building why wouldn't the cha protect its own residence the Chicago Housing Authority was not anymore committed to
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keeping the projects open they were eager for their demise I think so they weren't in a rush to get a legal tenant
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into these [Music] apartments Ruthie May McCoy never even wanted to live it AB it she asked
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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
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high-rise because she didn't want to have to walk up so many stairs she only moved in after her apartment and another
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project flooded she got a response that there's this apartment available to you on the 11th floor of a highrise the
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Abbott Holmes that's all that was available Chicago public housing is offered to low-income residents she was
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on welfare which then paid $140 or $150 a month the project apartment would cost
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$46 a month she simply couldn't afford anything else which was why she moved into the Avid
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homes this is when she met Deborah lassley who said she moved on to the 11th floor with her kids she had a total
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of seven Deborah moved in about 6 months before Ruthie May for a heartbreaking reason my husband had committed
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suicide I left my home I could stand there no more both Deborah and Ruthie May felt public housing was their only
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choice in fact the day Deborah moved in the elevator broke so me and my kids had
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to walk our stff up now I wasn't used to that but we made it maintenance in the building was so
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slow to respond that Deborah taught herself how to fix the plumbing I didn't know how to do it at first but every
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time you would call them and say the toilet stopped up or whatever might be a month before they come and do it I mean
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come on a month to fix a toilet two years after Ruthie May was killed 48 Hours gave viewers a firsthand
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look at these poor conditions the Chicago Housing Authority has been such a notorious failure that in 1987 the US
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Department of Housing and Urban Development currently swept up by its own scandals threatened an outright
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takeover Harold da was the reporter covering the story the scale and precision is that of a military
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operation but this is Chicago and these cops are launching an attack on one of the city's own housing developments I'm
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in a police state now you think look like a bunch of happy campers here it's called operation sweep and it's
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Chicago's high-powered high-profile approach to cleaning up public housing he even got gang members to agree to be
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interviewed what uh what kind of drugs does your gang sell here uh C Joe is a high-ranking member of the king cobras
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he's been in the gang for 20 years you a gang heavily armed mhm what kind of weapons do you guys automatics revolvers
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the whole work the baddest game out today is the dope game brothers killing brothers over you know over
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drugs the original goal of public housing wasn't to turn into this nightmare but how were these problems
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allowed to persist finding that answer involved turning to people who know Chicago's history I reached out to
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Sherman Thomas or as everyone calls him Dilla hello here for the tour y off for board great thank you yep
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yeah Dilla is an urban historian who posts popular videos online he's got over 100,000 followers on Tik Tok and
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offers bus tours of the city through his Company Mahogany they we're going to go
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to a very proud Mexican American American neighborhood called Psy Dill is well aware of Ruthie May's
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story she was living in something that was rushed to be built she was living in something that wasn't structurally sound
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the horrible conditions he and the residents describe are actually the opposite of the vision laid out by the
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Chicago Housing Authority for these projects the Chicago Housing Authority was supposed to provide a real quality
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housing for those who just needed a stepping stone the Chicago Housing Authority
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opened its doors in 1938 to mostly low-income white people that was before the war before the mass migration of
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rural Negroes from the south then the racial pattern of the city changed and so did the kind of public housing that
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was built this is Chicago solution for the poor the early units built in the first half of the 20th century weren't
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high-risers they were built with green space and mine right so they had these big huge Courtyard yards and each each
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unit had a backyard where you'd be able to plant your own garden and your own vegetables in fact when I'm going
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through newspaper archives both of those housing projects would win the Citywide
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Garden competitions Dill said things started to change in the 1950s as Chicago's
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African-American population grew segregation is literally etched in the fabric of Chicago right like how we
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Define our 77 neighborhoods what what separates Fuller Park from Bridgeport is the fact that black folks couldn't pass
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that particular street from 1910 until the 1970s nearly 6 million African-Americans had moved North in
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what is referred to as the Great Migration I think there was a lot of push back of a lot of black families
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moving into Chicago hadn't been there before that is Sue Popkin Popkin has written four books about Chicago public
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housing and understands the system like the back of her hand I mean at one point
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she had information no one else in city government had access to for a while I had the only list of uh addresses that
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housing Au already had she's now at a think tank called the urban Institute and still studies you guessed it Chicago
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public housing she said the government began funding housing projects during the Great
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[Music] Depression but these architectural dreams were met with the realities of
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funding and the realities of the Chicago political machine man-made jungles of concrete conceived and administered not
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by people who live in them but by political appointees most of whom live elsewhere again here's the historian
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Dilla that was built rushed right with shoty material and with cheapness in mind and so as it relates to Plumbing
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sometime if you have a plumbing issue plumbers got to come in cut a hole in your wall and then put a whole new wall
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wall up well cha didn't want to have to go through that and be spending money on
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drywall of all things right or plaster Hopkins said that funding started to dry up after World War II when the federal
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government provided fewer subsidies for public housing while funding was an issue she said that in Chicago
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corruption played a part in cheapening the buildings from the very start they were built very badly there were all
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kinds of deals with the unions despite the infamous winners in the city she said there were highrises where they
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didn't even enclose the hallways which then almost immediately created a hazard both the danger of people falling and
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people throwing things off of them and so then they enclosed those with Gates basically with fencing so they look like
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prisons free people living in housing that looked like a prison it was a lot [Music]
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the mayor of Chicago Jane burn is causing quite a stir with her latest move the move from one apartment to
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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
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apartment to a housing project known mainly for crime and gang Warfare in 1981 Chicago's mayor at the time Jane
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burn moved herself and her husband into Cabrini Green for 3 weeks in hopes of drawing attention to the conditions I am
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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
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to stimulate that with the people that live there if people want to say that it's vote getting or whatever they want
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to say then I would suggest that whoever says it take the next Department some called it a brave move While others
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called it a publicity stunt well not long after her move in the Chicago Housing Authority did get more national
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attention the then chairman of the cha Charles swel who was also a major fundraiser for the mayor was accused by
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the US Department of Housing and Urban Development of corruption here's Su Popkin again Charles SEL who uh took the
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money that was supposed to go for maintenance and funneled it through the flat janitors Union and used it to build
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Marina city which is a luxury highrise along the river the US Department of Housing and Urban Development
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or HUD accused Charles swell of making deals that benefited people he dealt with in his private real estate Ventures
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instead of prioritizing the needs of the cha in fact HUD threatened to withhold millions of dollars unless he was
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removed SW Bell never admitted any wrongdoing and was never found guilty of crimes connected to the cha he resigned
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from his chairmanship after 19 years and died in 1990 Popkin said said whether the money
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was lost due to policy decisions or corruption the residents on the receiving end got the message loud and
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clear I think that it was never about what was good for the tenants or the families right a lot of that robbed us
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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
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the Chicago projects when she was growing up you know don't have access for people into our homes through our
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medicine cabinets Fox is now the Cook County State's Attorney the Chicago area's top prosecutor before she ever
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became part of law enforcement Fox grew up in Cabrini Green while Robert Taylor Holmes was the largest project Cabrini
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Green is the most famous thanks in large part to TV and movies it was a highrise
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not much different Abbot Holmes and it was used in the opening credits of the TV show Good Times and would later be
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used to horrify audiences in [Music] Candyman did you see Candyman when it first came out in
00:20:43
92 I did do do you remember going to the show to see it and what what your thoughts
00:20:50
were the fact that it said was said kabini I will tell you I initially was like what's this right like what what is
00:20:59
this I wasn't enthused about the backdrop yeah like and and that the backdrop to a horror
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film to horror she was in college at the time in another part of Illinois and this film was her friend's introduction
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to where she grew up and so I felt I'm gonna be honest I felt some kind of way and you're about to equate my childhood
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with horror and this is now gonna be what you at a cocktail party the first thing you say was it like that Kim did
00:21:28
you know were you scared like that instead Kim prefers to talk about the folks who lived in Cabrini Green the
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people were amazing where we were living was not Fox lived there in the 1970s and
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1980s and even when she moved much of her family remained you were trained as a young girl not to get on elevators
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with just with men by yourself or darkened elevators and so many times you know we'd have to walk up eight flight
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stairs or 10 flights of stairs that there would be literally feal like that be in Corners in in the stairwells that
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presence of like disgust physically was there she talked about how the building was in disrepair like how the
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incinerators on each floor couldn't even burn the trash you'd have the smell of trash or it would catch fire um and you
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would have the smell of fire it probably comes as no surprise that growing up in
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that kind of environment takes its toll on you when it is baked into every layer
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of your existence like not built in physically built into the architecture of your existence that we will find ways
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to make you vulnerable and know it and do nothing about it that hardening is survival that's Survival that's survival
00:22:53
Instinct the need to take care of yourself because the authorities won't help is what led Deborah to fix her own
00:23:00
plumbing and it's likely why Ruthie May used a bucket as a toilet Fox wasn't surprised that the Chicago Housing
00:23:07
Authority ignored Ruthie May's complaint about the bathroom mirror she said none
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of the residents thought the cha or the police would be helpful and so it was just this weird dynamic like people
00:23:19
didn't rock with the police and people were also scared people were also wanting to be safe but there was never a
00:23:28
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
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for Ruthie may my cousin like became a really good electrician we were building [Music]
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Carpenters reporter Steve begira did what he could to hold the cha accountable after he written his story
00:23:49
about Ruthie may he kept asking about the medicine cabinets I was still calling them asking what they were doing
00:23:57
and there's spokesperson said yeah we've got it on the agenda to secure these medicine
00:24:06
cabinets but I knew some of the residents who lived in these apartments at the end of the hall where they had a
00:24:14
vacant apartment next to them and and so I could check with them you know have they done anything
00:24:20
yet Steve's first story about Ruthie May came out September 3rd 1987 sometime after that they fixed the problem
00:24:29
while Steve was asking questions about policy police were focused on building a case who could have been in that vacant
00:24:35
apartment next to Ruthie Mays who did investigators suspect came through that bathroom
00:24:42
mirror when Steve went to visit Ruthie May McCoy's apartment he walked into her bathroom and could see a hole where the
00:24:49
medicine cabinet would normally be I could see that route through the pipe chase that the that the killers
00:24:54
apparently had taken he could poke his head through and see the n a walkway Steve said they never found Ruthie May's
00:25:01
medicine cabinet but they did find the one in the adjacent Department according to the police crime lab technicians
00:25:08
dusted that one for Prince and inventor the cabinet into evidence during his visit to Abbott other residents told
00:25:14
Steve that they will put things up against their bathroom doors to protect themselves at night this woman told me
00:25:20
about somebody running out of her bathroom one night and after that she was putting furniture in front of the
00:25:27
bathroom door at night when she went to bed and I heard that from other tenants as well people who wanted to make sure
00:25:33
nobody if they broke into their bathroom they wouldn't get any further than that the police interviewed Deborah
00:25:40
lassley and Ruthie May's daughter Vita who would have been in her mid 20s in 1987 during their investigation the
00:25:48
police asked verita if her mom was having problems with the neighbors and she told them she didn't know police
00:25:54
noted that Vita told them that Ruthie may had two 19in TVs but on the scene they only found one her rocking chair
00:26:03
was also stolen police found one bullet casing from a 9mm cartridge behind the bedroom
00:26:10
door detectives talked to Ruthie May's neighbors and interviewed residents in the building I'm sure they were hearing
00:26:16
dozens of stories about how this crime had occurred Ruthie May's autopsy revealed brutal details of what happened
00:26:25
Ruthie May according to the medical examiner had been shot four times the medical examiner wrote that
00:26:32
Ruthie May was shot in her arms her chest abdomen and leg investigators took photos blood samples and recovered one
00:26:41
spent Bullet at the scene one of the bullets had severed her pulmonary artery so he didn't believe she would have
00:26:49
lived long maybe if police came in right away there was nothing they could do for
00:26:55
her anyway we'll never know if you asked Deborah withy May's neighbor her friend's murder was
00:27:06
preventable I was lucky that's why I kept telling my mother I'm lucky Deborah's apartment was not at the end
00:27:13
of the hall which meant it couldn't be accessed through the bathroom mirror but after Ruthie May's death she still told
00:27:20
her kids that they needed to move understandably she was spooked how can they come through a mirror and go in
00:27:28
there do that kids in the building nicknamed Deborah Mother Teresa both because she'd give food away but also
00:27:35
cuz 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
00:27:42
music that they don't like but I didn't care Deborah was cautious about living in the projects so she never took the
00:27:49
time to get to know many of her neighbors on the floor she kept to herself that's why she didn't stop and
00:27:54
think about the group of boys who would be going in and out of the apartment next to Ruthie Mays the people Deborah
00:28:01
saw or heard in that hallway the ones that she scared away using loud music might have been customers stopping at
00:28:08
apartment 11:08 to buy drugs so there were people in and out and the night before there was a lot of
00:28:20
this traffic as well reporter Steve bagira said that the police wanted to identify any of the people seen coming
00:28:26
and going from that apartment cops said they asked a lot of residents and they all gave the same names hondras and
00:28:34
Turner were the only names that kept coming up police heard the names John hondras and Edward Turner from residents
00:28:42
hress was 25 Turner was 19 both were young black men who had been seen spending time in the apartment that
00:28:48
could connect to Ruthie Mays the police had found key witness who claimed he saw
00:28:54
both of them go into her apartment and they believe they discovered a reason Ruthie May might have been a Target
00:29:02
there was the impression that word had gotten out that Ruthie may had a little money in that
00:29:15
apartment from 48 hours this is Candyman the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder I'm your host and
00:29:23
co-executive producer domati Pungo Judy igard is the executive producer of 48 Hours Jamie Benson is the senior
00:29:32
producer for Paramount audio and Mora walls is the senior story editor development by 48 Hours field producer
00:29:40
Morgan KY recording assistance from Marlin polyart special thanks to Paramount podcast vice president Megan Marcus
00:29:50
Candyman the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder is produced by Sony Music Entertainment it was reported
00:29:57
written and produced by Alex Schuman our executive producers are Katherine St Louis and Jonathan hirs our associate
00:30:06
producer is summer tamod theme and original music composed by Cedric Wilson he sound designed to
00:30:14
mix the episodes we also use music from APM fle fton is our fact Checker our production manager is Tama balance
00:30:25
kassi special thanks to Arian coach for playing Ruthie may she also played Trina
00:30:30
in the 2021 Candyman we'll be back next week with another episode of Candyman the true
00:30:37
story behind the bathroom mirror murder in the meantime leave us a rating and review to let us know what you think of
00:30:43
the podcast