Black White Blue by William Swanson

Author:William Swanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-87351-871-0
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2012-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

1Reed later told the author he had in fact paid his respects at the funeral home.

4

By the beginning of 2004, the task force investigation had developed a momentum that justified Jeanette Sackett’s confidence. Despite confronting many more dead ends than open doors, Dunaski, Mead, and Duff were slowly making friends and developing sources who would direct them to additional sources, some of whom would likewise become friends and direct them to others.

Their task was to build a roster of credible witnesses who could put Reed and Clark at the center of a conspiracy to kill a police officer. If additional conspirators could be implicated, well and good, but, based on what the detectives were learning, that seemed unlikely. Kelly Day may have been one of the conspirators, but Day was now beyond prosecution. Eddie Garrett’s complicity was not out of the question, yet based on what the team’s sources were telling them and their own intuition, he was not a likely suspect. Both logic and experience told the detectives that the more people who were directly involved, the greater the chances that someone would have either accidentally or on purpose gone public with probative information during the previous three and a half decades. There was a conspiracy, they believed, but it had been a small one.

The task force was reminded, among other things, that the line between revolution as it was preached in 1970 and the street crimes perpetrated by “revolutionaries” and their associates was often thin or nonexistent. Focusing on a loose group that hung around the Selby Avenue pool halls and the Inner City Youth League, for instance, the detectives found all manner of “interesting” people. “You got a crew of revolutionaries, you got a crew of wannabes, and you got a crew of stickup men, burglars, pimps, and gangsters who kind of floated in and out and used [the sites] as cover,” Dunaski explained. “There was a lot of that back then—where they’d go out and pillage, then come back and hang out and shoot a little stick.” Then there were the neighborhood business owners who often lived in tonier parts of town and occasionally hired young men to light a fire or set off an explosive—arson and insurance scams in the guise of social upheaval.

Dunaski, with thirty-plus years on the job, knew many of the now middle-aged men and women whose names emerged from the files and interviews. “Some of them, like the pimps and prostitutes, I might have had some involvement with when I was working vice,” he said later. “Some guys I put away on drug charges years ago. Jane would read the names, and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I know that one.’ And, ‘Yeah, I know that one, too.’” A few of the individuals were still in prison, where Dunaski had put them ten or fifteen years earlier. They would all, of course, be called on and talked to and, more often than not, revisited again and again. The investigation had become, in Dunaski’s words, “gumshoe police work.

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