23 Hours

In the breathless heat, Chicago seemed to ache for the relief of violence. On a throbbing night, Detective Bill Murphy spotted Dickie Carpenter, 26, wanted for banditry, on a subway platform. When the policeman tried to arrest the thug, Carpenter killed Murphy with a .38 he packed under his loose sport shirt, fled on the crepe-soled shoes with which he had padded through more than 60 north and northwest side robberies since 1953.

For the next two days, his photograph on every front page, Carpenter slept in movie houses. Then Patrolman Clarence Kerr, leaving the Biltmore Theater with his wife, spotted Carpenter snoozing through the gunfire-crackling climax of a western thriller. Policeman Kerr fired five times in the darkness, but fell to the floor, critically wounded, as Carpenter dashed behind the screen and out a fire exit, trailing a spoor of blood from a slug in his right thigh. For the next 23 hours, 500 enraged detectives and 60 squads of patrolmen roamed the area, intent on getting Cop-Killer Carpenter. A helicopter watched the rooftops. Scores of radio and TV broadcasts told Chicagoans that one of the city's greatest manhunts was on.

House Guest. Five minutes after shooting Kerr, Carpenter lurched to the second-floor apartment of 31-year-old Leonard Powell, a burly (6 ft. 3 in., 210 lbs.) truck driver. Tottering, dripping blood, "looking crazy," Carpenter forced his way in at gunpoint, ordered Powell and his wife, Stella, into the living room. Diane, 3, was asleep. Robert, 7, came in to say goodnight. Powell stared silently at Carpenter, nodded at his pistol. Gunman Carpenter put it out of sight until the boy went to his bed. Stella helped make bedsheet bandages, obediently fed the guest bananas and milk as Carpenter sprawled on the couch, a shaky hand on his pistol. "We sat like that for hours," said Powell. "I kept thinking, if only he'd fall asleep I could jump him. I wanted to take him. I wanted to take him real bad. But the kids--I couldn't take a chance they'd get hurt."

At first, Carpenter "acted like a little god," boasted he was "smarter than the cops," who had mauled him a few years before. Then, slowly, he began describing the long night of his past: an opera-loving slum kid raised on a fading section of Chicago's Schiller Street, where there was no one to talk to about opera, but only "guns and crazy money," where he found only a day-to-day, dreamless darkness--then a dreary round of petty stickups, a dead cop, the final terror of sitting on a couch, holding an innocent family at bay. Now, despite "the grief I'm causin' Ma," there was no exit. "I wouldn't last four hours if I went out on the street. Those coppers wouldn't give me a chance."

"He may have been a killer," said Mrs. Powell later, "but in a way, he's a gentleman."

At 5:30 a.m. Carpenter told Powell: "Go to work like you always do. Otherwise they'll worry there, realize you live near the theater, and put two and two together. I'll stay here with your wife and kids--and don't try anything if you want them safe." Powell left. "I called home at 8 a.m. Stella was all right. He was there, with the gun on her. I called again in the afternoon. Everything was the same. All day I wanted to call the police. But I was so afraid something would happen to Stella and the kids. I worked like normal. I worked through."

In the apartment, Carpenter crouched in the front bedroom, listening to radio flashes about the manhunt. Unaware of his presence, Diane and Robert played peacefully outside. Helpless and terrified, Stella "just did my housework and cooked dinner and waited for Len." Overhead clattered the helicopter. In the streets, police paced, looking for Carpenter.

Release from Terror. Home after a harrowing day, Powell decided to act, told Carpenter: "My wife and kids always visit with her mother every evening. They'll think something's wrong if they don't." Carpenter agreed dazedly. Once outside, Powell told Stella to keep going. "When they were safe, I slipped into the gangway where he couldn't see me from the window, leaped a fence and ran to a cigar store to phone the police."

Moments later, police were pouring a barrage of tear gas and machine gun shells into a nearby apartment to which Carpenter fled when he heard the sirens. Sixteen minutes after Powell's call at 9:01 Thursday night, Carpenter staggered into the arms of four furious policemen, begging, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" Screamed sweating crowds in the street: "Kill him! Kill him!" Thoroughly bloodied from police punches, but still alive, Carpenter whispered with hoarse surprise: "They would have killed me if they could."

Later, in cell 37 at Cook County jail, Dickie Carpenter recalled again his love of music ("Caruso was the best, but Gigli is a genius"). And what had happened to the boy who loved their voices? "I guess I never felt I had something to give," he said. Then he began to cry.

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