Authors: Steve Bogira
After shooting François, McGee jumped out of the car and fled, Nolan continues—and then spent the next few hours drinking and playing pool at a lounge. “That’s how she mourned the death of Jean François.”
Nolan has also been looking forward to this trial because he gets to do battle with Marijane Placek of the public defenders’ Homicide Task Force. A trial is never boring with Placek in the mix. A PD more than twenty years, she’s a formidable opponent and, at least in her attire, the most flamboyant lawyer at 26th Street. McGee isn’t the only one at the defense table dressed for effect today. Placek has on an admiral’s shirt, navy with gold stripes and buttons. A gold horse pendant hangs from her neck. She’s platinum blond this morning. She changes the color of her hair, and the tint of her contact lenses, to suit her mood (or, she claims, the needs of a case). Now Placek, who’s fiftyish and has knees that always ache, pushes herself to her feet and hobbles to the lectern. In the well of a courtroom she’s in her favorite place, the center of attention. “We’re all actors,” she says of lawyers, “but we’re too egotistical to say someone else’s lines.”
Nolan, thirty-four, has been a prosecutor for eight years. The main thing he’s learned is that “everybody lies.” Defendants, witnesses, defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, cops—“we all have our own agenda. It’s part of the game, I guess.” It bothers him at times.
It never bothers Placek. One judge dubbed her the “Queen of Obfuscation,” to her delight. She freely acknowledges being “sharp and manipulative.” The only trouble with being manipulative, she says, is that sometimes it doesn’t work. “Certain people you just don’t lie to, you don’t even practice on,” she says. “Everyone else is fair game.” Are the courts fair game? “Of course,” she says. “That’s where you play the most important game in the world.”
Placek hates to lose—“it’s ashes in my mouth.” Winning causes no ambivalence. After she won a rape case for a client, she got a letter in the mail signed by “A Rape Victim.” “I hope that what happened to me happens to you,” the letter read. “And when it does, I hope you come up against a public defender just like you.” Placek proudly pinned the note above her desk. Despite her wish to win them all, she prefers cases such as this one, with the odds stacked against her. “It’s like Henry V said at Agin-court—‘So much greater the victory.’ ”
In her opening statement, she doesn’t deny that McGee shot François. Instead she glares at Nolan and tells the jurors that the prosecutor “forgot to tell you” that McGee was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder when she encountered François. She developed the disorder after she was abducted at gunpoint a year earlier—an abduction that culminated in police finding her “running naked from her captors who had had her for several days.” Placek says she isn’t looking for sympathy for McGee because of this ordeal—although the girl clearly hasn’t been the same since, she adds. She says the point is that McGee’s behavior in the cab was
understandable given what she’d been through a year before. François’s actions revived her terrifying memories of her earlier abduction, and that was why she shot him. PTSD can also induce bouts of amnesia, Placek says, which explains why McGee went partying after the shooting: “She had at that time blotted the killing from her mind.”
THE FRANÇOIS CASE
was misleading from the start. On that March evening, shortly after nine, neighbors flagged down a squad car and directed it to the scene of a car accident at 51st and Aberdeen. The officers found François inside a crumpled Chevy on the sidewalk. He was unconscious, covered with blood, and sprawled across the front seat. A mangled Ford sat nearby, sideways in the street. Neighbors said they’d heard the collision but hadn’t seen it, and that the Ford had been parked before the accident. The officers, and the paramedics who took François away, assumed the crash caused his injuries. He was pronounced dead at Cook County Hospital shortly after his arrival. The officers were back at their station, completing the paperwork about the accident, when they got a call from a worker at the morgue who’d discovered a bullet hole in François’s cheek. The autopsy later attributed his death to the bullet found in his brain.
François’s Chevy looked like it might have served as a taxi—its hood and trunk were painted red, the rest of the car white. A business card in his pocket led detectives to his employer, a livery service at 79th and Colfax. A driver there, a friend of François’s, told detectives he’d seen François on the evening he was killed, parked near the livery office, with a woman in the front seat. François had borrowed $10 from the friend, saying he planned to take the woman to a nearby motel, the Skyview, and that he was a few dollars short of what he needed for a room. The friend said he hadn’t seen the woman’s face.
At the Skyview, detectives learned that François had indeed checked in on the evening of his death, at 6:20, renting a room for four hours for $26. He registered alone, but a clerk saw a female in his Chevy in the parking lot when he checked out at eight.
Detectives still didn’t have a suspect when, in the predawn hours two days after François was killed, police got a call reporting a girl with a gun to her head on East 75th Street. This was McGee. She was pacing the sidewalk, holding a blue steel .357 revolver in her mouth and against her temple. She was distraught. “I’m scared and I just want to die,” she told the officers who arrived, according to their reports. “I killed my boyfriend—I shot him in the face at 51st and Aberdeen.” One of the officers, Sergeant Linda Szefc, asked her why she shot her boyfriend, and McGee said because he’d been beating her. Szefc changed the subject, gradually
calmed McGee down, and, after two hours, finally convinced McGee to toss the gun away. She was taken to Jackson Park Hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
At the hospital, Sergeant Szefc asked McGee again about who she’d shot. This time McGee said it was a cabdriver who had asked her for sex as payment for a ride, and who grabbed her breast. After he also struck her in the head, McGee pulled out the gun and shot him, according to Szefc’s report. McGee told Szefc she stole the gun from her father, intending to shoot her boyfriend because he’d been beating her.
Police realized the cabbie McGee was talking about was François. Detectives headed to the hospital and found McGee in restraints on a gurney in the emergency room, her mother at her side. She’d been at the hospital only about half an hour. When hospital personnel refused to release her to police, a detective pulled out a knife and cut the restraints. Then McGee and her mother were driven to the detectives’ headquarters. Four hours later authorities had her court-reported confession.
According to that confession, McGee had taken the gun from her father’s home, intending to shoot her ex-boyfriend “Melvin”—not because he’d been beating her, but because they’d broken up and McGee had seen him with another girl. François was just an unknown cabbie who offered her a free ride but who then molested her when she refused his advances. She shot him, but not until after he ordered her out of the car. Still in drive, the car lurched forward after the shooting, and McGee jumped out and ran.
The detectives, and the assistant state’s attorney who took her confession, had little reason to doubt that McGee shot François. But they had good cause for disbelieving her assertion that she didn’t know him, considering that she first told police that she’d killed her boyfriend, and given her admission that she’d taken the gun intending to shoot her ex-boyfriend. Detectives also knew that François had had a female in his car at a motel just over an hour before McGee shot him. And they knew that McGee and François had been neighbors: McGee’s home was at 80th and Colfax; the livery service François worked for was at 79th and Colfax; and up until two months before the shooting, François had been staying with another woman at 81st and Colfax.
McGee’s account in the confession of her actions after the shooting also had a fishy odor. She said she left the gun next to a garbage can in an alley, then ran to Halsted, a busy street three blocks away. Another stranger honked at her, offering her a ride, which she accepted. She told this stranger—“Mike”—about the shooting. They drove to the Why Not lounge at 109th and Michigan, where she drank, shot pool, and danced. She began worrying about her fingerprints on the gun and told Mike she needed to
retrieve it. They drove the eight miles back to near the shooting scene, she picked up the gun, and they drove back to the lounge. She took the gun into the lounge in a bag. She drank, shot pool, and danced some more. Mike left, and McGee’s ex-boyfriend—who at this point in the confession she called not “Melvin” but “Man”—happened into the lounge. “Man” wanted to reconcile with her. So they left and spent the night together.
The confession, with its soap-opera flavor, cried out for scrutiny, especially considering the age of its author. Instead, Kari Mason, the assistant state’s attorney who put the questions to McGee during the confession, stepped lightly over the story’s soft spots. Mason didn’t ask McGee why she first told police the man she shot was her boyfriend; or why she told François “God bless you” and kissed him on the cheek before shooting him; or why she didn’t just get out of the car when François ordered her to. She didn’t ask McGee for the complete name of “Melvin”/“Man,” so detectives could talk with him (or determine if he even existed); nor did she send detectives to the Why Not lounge to see if McGee had been there.
But then, from a prosecutor’s point of view, it was a solid confession. McGee had admitted shooting François. Her statement that François ordered her out of the car would make it hard for her to claim later that her only option was shooting him. Her tale about partying afterward wouldn’t win her points with a jury. If it remained a mystery why she shot François, well, that was hardly important. The law doesn’t require police and prosecutors to get to the bottom of a matter; halfway in is close enough. After McGee signed the confession, Mason’s supervisor approved a first-degree murder charge.
FRANÇOIS
’
S COMMON-LAW WIFE
, Elizabeth August, leads off for the state. She tells the jury she and François had lived together off and on since 1988, and that their children are aged nine, eight, and seven. She saw François three days before he was killed, and the next time she saw him was at the morgue. Her brief testimony is unemotional.
While she’s on the stand, her sister-in-law, Lisa Hampton, complains in the gallery that McGee’s confession unfairly maligns François. “They’re full of shit, that lawyer and that girl,” Hampton says, gesturing at the defense table. François liked to play around, she says, but he wouldn’t have tried to force sex on anyone the way McGee claims he did. She says that after François was killed, the word in the small south-side Haitian American community was that McGee and François had been involved for months. She guesses François was breaking off the relationship and that McGee shot him because she couldn’t accept it.
August joins us on the bench when her testimony is over. She tells me
she knew François fooled around, but that she appreciated that he “didn’t do it in my face.” About once a month he’d precipitate an argument with her, then stalk out of their apartment and stay out all night. This happened the last time she saw François. He got angry because his dinner wasn’t ready when he arrived home, and he stormed out.
August says other Haitians did indeed inform her after his death that he’d been seeing a young woman, who she presumes was McGee. She says she told Nolan about this, “but he said he could convict her on what he had.”
Nolan says later he didn’t feel obliged to check out what August told him, or to inform McGee’s lawyer, Placek, of it, because it was “just rumor and innuendo” and because it wouldn’t make McGee less culpable if she and François were in fact involved. He says he wouldn’t doubt that they had a relationship, though, “because it doesn’t make sense that after a ten-minute cab ride, she kisses him on the cheek and then shoots him.”
Evidence of a prior relationship could have strengthened his case in one way, he says—along with McGee’s admission that she’d taken the gun to shoot her boyfriend, it would have indicated that the killing was premeditated. But it also would have muddled things for the jury, he says, because it would have contradicted McGee’s confession. “You usually don’t want to put in evidence that doesn’t coincide with what’s in the defendant’s statement, because then it makes the statement seem unreliable.”
Had Nolan investigated what August told him, another issue might have surfaced: this could have become a battered-woman case.
In recent years jurors have occasionally acquitted women, or found them guilty of lesser charges, after they’ve killed their batterers. Placek could have maintained that McGee’s first statement to police was the truth: she’d shot the boyfriend who’d been beating her—François—when he attacked her once again. Then, panicking about the potential repercussions, she concocted a story she thought made her less culpable, the story about the unknown cabbie.
Though only McGee knows for sure, this defense might have had the added benefit of actually being true. According to August, François was indeed a batterer. He was a good father to their children, August says, but short-tempered with her, sometimes slapping her around in the middle of arguments. “I picked up the phone and called police I don’t remember how many times,” she says, although when police arrived she invariably chose not to press charges.
Based on the police reports about the shooting, Placek says she suspected that McGee and François
had
known each other. But Placek had her own reasons for not pursuing this angle. While the battered-woman defense succeeds occasionally, Placek knows it usually doesn’t, and she wanted to steer clear of anything that suggested a premeditated killing.
This image of the shooting that Placek and Nolan are presenting to the jury may well be mostly a mirage, Placek will allow later. But that’s not unusual in a criminal trial, she’ll say, and it doesn’t trouble her at all. The truth is a nebulous thing, hard to determine under the best of circumstances: “How do I feel about the fact that the truth never comes out in court? The truth never comes out in
life
.”