It was a West Side murder, and the few news stories written about it were sparse and superficial.
In the early hours of March 31, 1984, Linda Cain, 37, was robbed, raped and beaten by attackers who set her hair on fire and left her comatose and naked at the bottom of an alley stairwell at 246 N. Hamlin Ave.
For almost two weeks, she lay unconscious and unidentified at Cook County Hospital until family members came forward and told police who she was. She died 19 days later.
Two men who lived in the apartment building where Cain was found were arrested and charged with murder. The two–James Nowden and Michael Jones, both in their early 20s–were convicted of the slaying last May. In June, they were sentenced to life in prison.
But behind those bald facts is a complex story of three West Side lives
–of a book-smart woman who could not cope with the streets, of a henpecked stick-up artist and of a hulking Don Juan who couldn`t hold his liquor.
It is also a story of life in the West Sides of America, in the decaying urban neighborhoods throughout the nation where poverty, crime, broken homes and broken hopes combine to create a tenuous and dangerous existence.
Cain, of course, was not born to be a murder victim, just as Nowden and Jones were not born to be her killers.
But one early morning the paths of their lives converged in an alley stairwell for a single hour of horrible violence beyond reason.
— — —
For Linda Cain, 1963 was a year filled with hopes.
Three years earlier, her large family had moved to Chicago from Mississippi, and Linda was adapting well to city life. She was a 16-year-old A student at Farragut High School and was filled with dreams.
”She always wanted to be a designer,” recalled her sister, Terry Bolton, 31. ”She loved fashion, and she dressed the part–from head to toe. You`d think you were looking at a movie star.
”All of us were bright in school. She was exceptional. Everything she started out to do, it was perfect.
”She was smart in books, but she was weak,” Bolton said. ”She had a very sensitive attitude.”
A year later, Linda`s hopes of a career evaporated when she learned she was pregnant. Her parents, staunch Christians, forced her to drop out of school and marry Gordia Cain, her child`s father. A son was born later that year, and a daughter, a year later.
”She was a country girl and lived in a fantasy world. But her husband was a street person,” Bolton said.
Gordia Cain worked, and Linda found it easy to land good-paying factory jobs and to save money to get what she wanted.
She filled the young family`s home on Kildare Avenue with expensive furniture and beautiful things, but she was unable to save her marriage, which ended in 1968.
It was about that time, elsewhere on the West Side, that James Nowden and Michael Jones met in kindergarten.
Nowden, who turned 5 early in 1968, lived at 314 N. Hamlin Ave. in a two- flat that his grandmother and mother had bought with the help of fellow churchgoers at St. Stephen AME Church, 2000 W. Washington Blvd.
He had two older brothers and a younger sister. The family, which did not include his father, was dominated by his iron-willed grandmother, Gaither Mae Pledger, who worked long hours as a domestic.
”James would come to church and sit with his grandmother through the service. He was very quiet,” said Rev. Wildred Reid, pastor of St. Stephen.
Out of respect for his grandmother, Nowden attended Sunday school and was an altar boy, Rev. Reid said.
Over the years, the minister would ask Nowden about his future, but the boy would give noncommittal answers. ”I`m not too sure he knew himself where he was going,” Rev. Reid said
Meanwhile, Jones, who turned 6 in 1968, was growing up on the West Side, the sixth of eight children.
”We used to play cowboys and Indians,” a family member recalled. ”We would play saloons. A pitcher of hot water was the hard liquor. A pitcher of cold water was the beer. We had guns all over the house.”
Jones was a good student until he joined the football team at Waller High School (now Lincoln Park).
”He wanted to go to college on a football scholarship,” a relative said. ”He used to always tell me, `You`re going to see me on TV playing football.` ”
But Jones never got a football scholarship. He graduated from Waller in 1979, but it wasn`t long before he was in trouble with the police.
In 1981 and 1982, he was convicted of contributing to the sexual delinquency of a 12-year-old girl and of battery and burglary in other cases, and he served a total of 175 days in County Jail.
But during this time he worked a number of jobs, and late in 1983 he obtained a $2,500 bank loan and a $1,800 federal grant to go to a West Side beauty school to become a hairdresser.
Jones began classes on Jan. 14, 1984, the day Nowden turned 21, and it was at about this time that Jones and Nowden resumed their friendship from kindergarten. Nowden was just finishing a prison term for two robberies.
Released from state custody three days after his birthday, Nowden moved back in with his longtime girlfriend, Barbara Henderson, and her mother, Willie Mae Loyd, in the first-floor apartment at 260 N. Hamlin Ave, a large apartment building west of Garfield Park.
Elsewhere in the building, Henderson`s brother, Jerry Loyd, lived in a second-floor apartment at 246 N. Hamlin Ave., and one of her sisters, Pauline, lived on the first floor.
The two-flat in which Nowden grew up was less than a block north.
In the late 1970s, Nowden`s older brothers left the West Garfield Park neighborhood for successful careers in the military, and in the early 1980s his mother, Maer Lee Ann Nowden, moved to California.
But Nowden stayed on, getting by with money from odd jobs, welfare, gifts from his girlfriend and her family and occasional strong-arm robberies.
Still, Nowden did well as a laborer at Acme Barrel Co., 2300 W. 13th St., while in a prison work-release program in 1983.
At home, Nowden was something of a family man, and a henpecked one at that.
”My sister,” Pauline Loyd said, ”she used to hit him. He would just stand up and let Barbara treat him like a dog.”
Nowden preferred to watch baseball on television, play cards for hours and take care of his baby daughter, Ebony Lyshay.
On Feb. 29, 1984, when Ebony was born, an overjoyed Nowden ran coatless through the snow to Garfield Park Hospital to be with Henderson and the baby. Though Nowden and Jones had renewed their friendship, they had little in common and apparently spent little time together.
Both were strong men who had built up their bodies by lifting weights, but, unlike Nowden, Jones often drank and got into fights, according to relatives and acquaintances.
Jones, who fathered four children by as many mothers, ”was a ladies`
man,” a relative said. The relative called Jones ”Mr. Macho Man,” but noted, ”He used to get beat up a lot.”
In the winter of 1984, Jones moved in with Jerry Loyd in the Hamlin Avenue building.
Loyd was somewhat cowed by Jones. ”He used to get mad at Jerry all the time,” said Pauline Loyd. ”He used to pick him up, like a butterfly, and drop him on the ground.”
Nonetheless, with his job and his schoolwork, Jones ”had something going for him,” said Maurice Hughes, then a security guard at the One Stop Liquor Store, 3956 W. Lake St.
But if Jones seemed to be prospering in that West Side neighborhood, Linda Cain was at the end of a slow downward spiral.
After the break-up of her first marriage, she remarried, but a year later her second husband ran off with another woman, said Bolton.
Cain still did well at work, but in her personal life she alternated between periods of withdrawal and flamboyant living on West Side streets. In 1973, she moved in with Charles Davis, a meat truck worker.
”Her children stayed with my mother,” Bolton said. ”She said she didn`t trust herself.”
One night in the late 1970s, as Cain was walking home, she was attacked, struck on the head and suffered brain damage. After that, she refused to work and took to wandering the streets, drinking and making friends.
”She had no initiative,” Bolton said. ”She was a very lost person. People would take advantage of her.”
Early in 1983, Davis was murdered, and Cain`s mother told her, ”You`re not going to last a year out there without him.”
”We all knew it was coming,” Bolton said, ”but not like this.”
— — —
The fatal beating of Linda Cain occurred shortly after 2 a.m. on March 31, 1984. The main source of information about the beating is numerous confessions that Nowden and Jones gave police.
The confessions conflicted on many details. Nowden said he acted as a lookout while Jones did the beating. Jones said he acted as the lookout while Nowden did the beating.
According to Nowden`s confessions, he had gone to borrow money from his father for disposable diapers and milk and was on his way home when he met Jones at Lake Street and Avers Avenue. Jones said he was on his way home from work.
Cain apparently was out on one of her frequent, aimless middle-of-the-night walks when she met or was accosted by the two men. It appears the two did not know her by name, though a number of the residents in the Hamlin Avenue building were acquainted with her.
No one has been found who witnessed the start of the crime, but a neighborhood man, who was parking on Avers Avenue, saw Nowden come out of the alley just north of Lake Street carrying a coat and purse, according to Assistant State`s Atty. William Hibbler.
Nowden looked both ways, and then Jones came out of the alley holding a woman in a headlock, Hibbler said.
The witness saw the two men and the woman in the headlock walk down a number of alleys to the rear of the Hamlin Avenue building. He then went home but didn`t call police.
The rape and beating took place in the basement stairwell of 246 N. Hamlin Ave. Pauline Loyd lived one flight up. Two flights up was the apartment where Jones lived with Jerry Loyd.
Cain put up no fight. Yet, she was beaten so harshly that her right ear was ”ripped as though torn,” Hibbler said. Her left ankle was broken so that ”the foot was literally ripped off to the side.” Five ribs were broken and her Adam`s apple was fractured. Finally, her hair was set on fire.
When it was over, Jones and Nowden walked up two flights of stairs to Jerry Loyd`s apartment and went to sleep directly above Cain`s comatose body.
