Bear Child

Chapter 1

The murder occurred sometime during the early fall of the year according to soil and insect forensic evidence on the body at the burial site, (drainage ditch) according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's office. The deceased was described as an adult male, possibly in his fifties, who at one time suffered a fracture of his jaw and of his left clavicle. These were old injuries and not related to the cause of his death. The apparent cause of death was one 9mm shot to the chest and two 9mm shots to the forehead area. Three 9 mm shell casings were located at the scene.

The second body was discovered in an underground parking garage in Chicago. Apparently, the body had been wedged between two parked vehicles. The victim was the owner of one of the vehicles while the other car was registered to a long-term parker who used the garage while in Europe seven months out of the year. Badly decayed but maintained throughout the cold Chicago winter. Cause of death was one 9mm gunshot wound to the chest and one 9mm wound to the frontal lobe of the head. Two 9 mm shell casings were recovered at the scene.

The third body was discovered in the entryway of the victim’s home. An estranged wife discovered the body during a welfare check on the victim. The body was on its back.

A cardboard pizza container was on the victim’s chest with a baked pizza inside. The victim’s telephone records indicated the last call placed by a caller using the victim’s phone was to a local pizza shop thirty days prior to the discovery of the body. The cause of death was a 9 mm gunshot wound to the facial area of the victim. One shell casing was located at the scene.

Due to the addresses of the victims and the locations of the shootings, the three cases were investigated by three different geographical police units of the Chicago Police Department. This may have contributed to linkage blindness due to a lack of shared information by those units or lack of interest by those units. Another factor was that no one had tried to link the spent cartridge casings recovered at the scenes. There was an obvious reason for this; Chicago was averaging well over three hundred gunshot deaths per year for several years straight. Because of drive-by shootings and other gang-related gun deaths, the Chicago police were swamped with forensic ballistic examination requests.

The examiner normally would fire the suspect weapon into a tank of water or forensic fiber to collect the spent round. This round would then be matched to other recovered rounds from a victim or victims. In this case, there was no weapon recovered as of a year after the three murders. No weapon or matching rounds. The weapon of choice for most gang shooters is a 9 mm due to low cost and ease of ownership or possession. During most gang shootings dozens of 9 mm shells are fired. Thus, dozens of shell casings per shooting. The shell casings in the three murders were another matter. They could have been matched if they had been compared to each other. An extractor on a semi-automatic weapon would normally leave identical marks on each shell casing. The problem was one of forensic manpower and linkage blindness. During that passing year, nobody had compared the shell casings in the three murders.

Eventually the Chicago P.D. did link the three homicide victims as serial killings. After many months of research and interviews, the three victims were identified as Mr. Ira Stover, Mr. Edward Shelf and Mr. John Terry. A brief computer check placed all three as City of Chicago employees on leave from city services and participants in a contract behavior therapy group for anger management. All three victims were under city human resource mandated participation. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) privacy rules made investigation inquiries difficult at best. HIPPA mandated that patient names, patient treatment information, diagnoses, medication, medical histories, and corresponding physicians be kept private. Barrier after bureaucratic barrier delayed and prevented vital information to flow into the investigative channel. However, HIPPA is a federal law, and fingerprinting is a federal investigative tool. Submission of fingerprints go directly to the FBI, so it is only natural that the FBI are the first to get fingerprint results. This was important in this case.

The fact is, normally it would have been finally determined that all three were ordered into anger management sessions by their employer, the City of Chicago, and all three had surviving spouses who would bring wrongful death suits against the city for placing their spouse directly in harm’s way ultimately causing their deaths. They would have collected millions of dollars in settlement agreements. All three families would have retained by the same law firm. Normally - but these three men who were killed around the same time never had family members who came forward to bring any lawsuit against the city. The families did not become monetized, and yet this did not raise eyebrows.

It was discovered by the FBI that the three sets of fingerprints belonged to three people who were already on the FBI radar and who had been using their spouses’ last names to conceal their identities. Regular old-fashioned fingerprinting of the three victims taken postmortem helped to make the identification, well partial identification anyway, until the determination that the men had misspelled and/or reversed spelling of their three spouses’ names, Revotos, (A.K.A. Stover) Fleahs, (A.K.A. Shelf) and Yeret, (A.K.A. Terry) revealed the fraud. With a little more help from the FBI, it became apparent that all three men were important members of three Mexican cartel crime families and were living in the United States while dealing in human trafficking trade, drug smuggling, and money laundering in a real barn-raising spirit.

The most interesting fact was that none of this information was immediately shared with the Chicago Police Department; in fact, it was never shared with them. Some federal investigations are considered too sensitive for even limited information sharing such as local law enforcement murder investigations. This would fall under the heading of “Concealed Intelligence.” This information would not be shared for several reasons. Federal drug-interdiction funding for major drug investigations should be given to federal agents which was seen as more important than providing smaller drug investigations with federal funds. Smaller as in police and sheriff departments also referred to by federal agents as “Whack-a-mole” in the war on drugs approach.