It was June 13, 1976, the nineteenth birthday of his brother Robert, and Billy Carroll, Jr. slept until mid-morning before rolling out of bed and pulling on a pair of blue jeans and a tight-fitting orange T-shirt. Officially it wasn't yet summer, but a few blocks away trees and shrubs along the lakeshore were splashed with green and vibrantly alive. People were lounging or strolling in cutoffs and bikinis or languidly lobbing tennis balls back and forth.
In the Carroll apartment it was stuffy and hot and the rooms were stifling. There was no breeze in Uptown and the air was moist and putrid, hanging heavily over the moldering streets where garbage and dog droppings sprang up as profusely as spring flowers might bloom in tidier, less soiled neighborhoods. Shadows cast by the streetlights were stealthily shifting in the early evening gloom by the time Billy slid into a seat in an old green car and rode away with three friends. He had promised his parents that he would be back in an hour. He never saw the apartment or his family again.
Billy Carroll, so far as any of those who knew him were able to ascertain, was heterosexual. But he knew the streets of Uptown and New Town and familiarized himself with their homosexual haunts and hangouts.
If there was anyone in his family who looked like a survivor, it was Billy. He had a fast, agile mind, and according to a truant officer and others who knew him, fingers that matched his brain in their swift stickiness. He was a child of the city and he learned early that a person, no matter how young, could survive if he was capable of approaching the streets on their own terms.
The lessons he learned best were not those that he learned in school. He attended school fitfully and once was ordered into special classes for truants. The lessons he most readily absorbed were those he learned on the streets. His brother and his parents, William Carroll, Sr. and Violet, are candid about Billy's talent for getting in trouble. He was an active, mischievous boy. At three years of age he fell from a moving car after pushing the back door open with his foot while the family was driving to North Florida to see his grandparents. Robert yelled that his little brother had fallen out, and when his father turned to look, Billy was rolling end over end down a grade. He was patched up in a hospital with a few stitches in his head. A few years later there was another visit to a Chicago hospital and more stitches in his head when he fell from a tree. He returned home from the doctor as recklessly adventuresome as before.
He was only nine years old when he snatched a purse and wound up in the juvenile home. His father recalled that his son was more fortunate another time and found himself three hundred or four hundred dollars richer after he reached out the window of a slow moving elevated train and grabbed a purse from a woman standing on the platform.
By the time he was eleven, Billy was in the bicycle business. A local Fagin had organized several of the young boys in the neighborhood, and when the man was finally caught by the police they used three patrol wagons and a squad car to move the bicycles and other loot he had accumulated in the fencing operation. Billy had been one of his most industrious and successful associates.
He had wisely left the wasteland of empty lots, broken bottles, and exhausted lives in Uptown and headed for the suburbs where he found English racers, shiny new Schwinns, and expensive ten-speeds from Holland, Germany, and Belgium. He traded one of the bicycles for a black and silver-haired puppy which he brought home and named King. Most of the bicycles he sold. Somehow Billy learned to make strip keys, which could be used to open almost any padlock. Eventually he acquired a collection of about twenty-five padlocks, which he tinkered with, experimenting and familiarizing himself with the action of the tumblers.
He was about fourteen or fifteen when he was caught with a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson automatic pistol. Friends told his father that he had been shooting it at people to scare them. He liked to watch them run.
When Billy wasn't roughhousing with King or on the street, he was exercising to build himself up physically. As a teenager he helped keep his body firm and evenly muscled by lifting weights, boxing, and wrestling. At sixteen he was a scrappy five-foot, nine-inches tall and as game as a fighting cock. Even his teeth were good and were marred by only two small fillings. He had his own boxing shorts and gloves and squared off in the Clarendon Park District's boxing program in matches against other youths in his weight class. Watching the 1972 Olympics on television interested him in wrestling.
The Parkway Cinema near the three-way intersection of Clark, Broadway, and Diversey probably shows as many kung-fu movies or action films starring Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Burt Reynolds as any other theater in Chicago. Billy and his friends sat through entire afternoons watching Bruce Lee and other heroes, sometimes seeing double features twice. His interest in the Oriental fighting styles stimulated by the movies, he bought books on kung-fu and karate and took a few lessons, earning an orange belt.
At other times he ice-skated or jogged around Graceland Cemetery a few blocks south of his Uptown home. He didn't smoke tobacco, but occasionally sipped from a bottle of wine—and, according to friends, shared a joint if someone was passing one around. But he cared too much about his body to move deeply into alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. He talked vaguely about keeping in good shape so that he could someday strike out on a cross-country bicycle trip.
He liked money and one of the places to find it was at the corner of Diversey, Broadway, and Clark. The corner is constantly crowded with urban commuters waiting for Chicago Transit Authority buses. A blind man who holds a tin cup and dangles a blaring transistor radio from his belt has taken over one spot on the corner, and a newspaper kiosk has another. Shops and stores offer snacks of pizza, ice cream, Cantonese rice and noodles, gyros, cocktails, Big Macs and Yankee Doodle Dandies.
To Billy and his friends, the intersection had other charms not confined to the shops, restaurants, and cinema. They knew they could make money if they hung around long enough. He met street hustlers, a boy named Jaimie, another named Jerry, and others who were less cautious than himself about climbing into cars with strangers when the price was right. Made conspicuous by their short haircuts, neckties and white shirts, the strangers cruised the streets with the driver's window rolled down until eye contact was made with the right person.
Billy knew what went on in the cars, and he sometimes parleyed at curbside with motorists or permitted someone to buy him a taco at a restaurant. But he never got in their cars. He arranged for other boys to go for rides, and when they returned he was waiting for a share of the money they brought with them. Billy Carroll's parents said that their son was too smart to voluntarily ride away in the car of a stranger, and he was too scrappy to be forced.
No one, police included, thought to put together the amazing string of disappearances of young boys from the north side of Chicago and adjoining suburbs. No one wondered at a possible connection between the disappearances of Randall Reffett, Samuel Dodd Stapleton, Michael Bonnin, Richard Johnston and Billy Carroll, in the space of less than three months. Most of the boys, of course, were not promptly reported missing. Billy's parents didn't make an immediate report to police, although neither his brother nor his friends had turned up any trace of him.
A girl he had been friendly with since they were both small children often wondered about him and said that she sometimes had disturbing dreams of Billy, of lights and of concrete. And when William Carroll, Sr. walked past the vacant lots, abandoned derelict cars and crumbling graffiti-covered graystones of Uptown, pulling his frayed gray overcoat closer about him to keep out the wind sweeping off the lake, he often found himself peering into the faces of young men he met or turning to stare at them after they passed. There was the merest chance that one of them might be the missing son he called "Sugar Pie—because he was such a sweet baby." William Carroll, Sr. is disabled and living on social security and a veteran's pension, so he had time for his walks. But the walks never turned up a trace of his missing son.