The last time Paul Crump walked the streets a free man, Dwight Eisenhower had recently been elected president. Hollywood had invented 3-D movies. Josef Stalin had just died. A new polio vaccine was being tested by Dr. Jonas Salk. March 20, 1953, was also the last day Theodore Zukowski walked the streets. On that day, Crump shot and killed Zukowski as Crump fled down a staircase after a $20,000 payroll robbery with four accomplices at the Libby, McNeill & Libby plant in the Chicago stockyards, where he had worked.
Zukowski, 46, the chief plant guard, left a widow and four children, one a bedridden 12-year-old boy with cerebral palsy.
Crump also hit a guard and four employees over the head with a sawed-off shotgun barrel to prevent them from sounding an alarm as he escaped.
He was convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. In 1962, Gov. Otto Kerner commuted the death sentence to 199 years without parole. In 1976, Gov. Dan Walker removed the prohibition of parole.
Crump, 22 at the time of the crime, is now a gray-haired, 61-year-old great-grandfather. He has been in prison 38 years, longer than any inmate in Illinois except William Heirens, who has been imprisoned for 45 years after confessing to three murders in 1946, including the decapitation and dismemberment of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan.
Unlike Heirens, who insists he is innocent, Crump admits his guilt. ”I`m asking for mercy, not justice,” he says. ”Show me mercy; give me another opportunity.”
He has seen the outside world once since 1953. In 1985 he walked from a car to U.S. District Court in Chicago to testify as part of a lawsuit in which he challenged his numerous parole denials. ”I saw the Sears Tower,” he said. ”I saw all the beautiful crowd at lunchtime, all the secretaries and the college students. I`ve never seen anything more exciting than that. I really wanted to be out there instead of in handcuffs and leg irons.”
Since Crump`s death sentence was commuted in 1962, Chicago lawyer Elmer Gertz, a nationally known defender of civil liberties, has volunteered his services to free him from prison. Gertz was joined in 1976 by Oak Park lawyer Donald Rothschild.
”It`s not that we think what he did was great,” Rothschild says. ”But enough is enough. The circumstances in his case cry out for relief.”
The lawyers say they do not believe Crump will ever win parole, and plan to ask Gov. Jim Edgar before the first of the year to commute his sentence to the time served.
They point to murderers paroled after serving far less time than Crump has, such as William Witherspoon, who, like Crump, was sentenced to death but was paroled after serving 20 years for murdering a Chicago police officer.
”I`ve gotten parole for those who served less than 10 years,” Gertz says.
A vicious circle
Crump, however, faces a special hurdle. Sane by all accounts at the time of the murder, he began slipping into periodic episodes of psychosis in 1965, three years after he ended his nine-year sojourn on Death Row, a period in which he missed 15 dates with the electric chair.
He has spent the last 15 years at Menard Psychiatric Center, the state`s maximum-security prison for the mentally ill. His psychiatrist testified in the 1985 trial that Crump is a chronic paranoid schizophrenic.
”Sometimes you just want to go out to the beach, go fishing, go for a walk in the park,” Crump says. ”You can`t do those things, so you act it out.”
And therein lies his trap, his attorneys say: He is mentally ill because he is in prison. But he cannot get out of prison because he is mentally ill.
”He is being punished for having had psychiatric problems,” Rothschild says.
Paul Crump ”suffers from a dangerous personality disorder, potentially violent, which is in remission only because of drug treatment,” the Illinois Prisoner Review Board wrote in March, providing a rationale for its 11th denial of parole for Crump.
Crump does not believe he needs medication, the board continued, and could become violent if he refused medication while on parole.
Crump acknowledges that he does not think he needs medication. He takes Haldol, a major tranquilizer used to treat psychosis, which he says causes his hands to shake and makes him restless and sluggish. He sometimes refuses to take it, and occasionally has had to be injected in his cell. But, he says, he would take it if that were a condition of parole.
Even if Crump did not take his medication, he would not become violent, Rothschild says.
”When he gets sick, he doesn`t commit murder or crimes,” he says. ”He becomes loud and obnoxious and a bit unruly.”
”Usually he`s very funny,” says Almeda Ball, a social worker at Menard Psychiatric Center and Crump`s counselor since 1985, who has seen him go off medication three times.
”He`ll wear two belts around his waist. He`ll put a feather on his cap. He`ll write things on his cap like `bow wow.` He had a problem this year in February; he was wearing a chicken bone in his ear. But he`s never tried to hurt anybody.”
While off his medication, he has, however, thrown hot coffee at a corrections officer, burned holes in his bedsheet and flooded his cell, according to testimony in the 1985 trial.
Gertz says that Menard officials considered those incidents so minor that they did not discipline Crump. Crump says he threw medication, not coffee, at the officer.
In the 1985 case, U.S. District Judge Paul Plunkett ruled in favor of a Prisoner Review Board decision to deny Crump parole. Crump was again denied parole in 1987. He sued again and lost again, though Plunkett did order the board to rewrite its rationale for denying him parole, which it did last March.
Rothschild contends that Crump has never committed an act of violence in prison, though he has worked for more than 20 years as head steam table man in the dietary department, with full access to knives and forks.
Crump`s attorneys in 1985 presented a parole plan that called for him to be sent to a locked psychiatric wing of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Medical Center, and to receive follow-up psychiatric care from that institution`s Isaac Ray Center, a clinical program that serves mentally ill offenders.
A similar plan could be devised today, Rothschild says. And taking medication could be a condition of Crump`s parole.
Film director William Friedkin, who made a documentary about Crump in 1962, has offered to pay any costs of his rehabilitation. Crump`s sister Maxine Spells, a cashier at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says she is eager for Crump to come live with her, her husband and another sister in the South Side home the family owns.
His second wife, Maureen, whom he married in 1976 while in prison, says that Crump is welcome to live with her in New York and that she would also consider moving to Chicago if he were paroled.
And he remains in touch with his two daughters-one by his first wife, who divorced him, and one by Maureen Crump, who had been his girlfriend before his first marriage.
”Most prisoners in Illinois are released with $100 gate money and two suits of clothes, and sent out into the community and told to make it,”
Rothschild says. ”The chances of Paul Crump making it are so much greater than those of the average individual.”
Also in his favor, Rothschild says, is that he is 61: ”People that age simply, as a whole, do not commit violent crime.”
Working through Nietzsche
Crump`s case has been an extraordinary odyssey. He is the only person in the history of Illinois and, his attorneys believe, the nation to have a death sentence commuted because he had been rehabilitated.
The 1962 hearing over his request for commutation was a highly publicized event in which Crump`s attorney, prominent New York lawyer Louis Nizer, presented Crump as a young thug who had committed an atrocious crime but who had become a new man in prison.
On Death Row, which was then at Cook County Jail, he had encountered a reform-minded warden named Jack Johnson. Johnson appointed him barn boss of a tier of chronically ill prisoners. Nizer used affidavits from jail officials to describe Crump`s behavior there in his 1966 book, ”The Jury Returns.”
Crump bathed elderly prisoners. He made sure no one stole food from those who were blind. When a determinedly suicidal man was sent to his tier, he organized shifts of inmates to watch him. He foiled an escape attempt by warning a guard and fighting the instigators until other officers arrived. When a guard`s infant cousin was born with a heart defect, Crump got 50 inmates to donate blood.
And he began to read. He started with a copy of ”Moby Dick” given to him by Assistant Warden Hans Mattick, a University of Chicago graduate and lecturer on criminology.
”He told me, `I`ll let you have this book on one condition-that you write me an essay on what you read,` ” Crump recalls.
He moved on to the Greek philosophers, Thomas Wolfe (his personal favorite), Kafka, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (”I labored my way through, and understood some of it,” he said of the more dense philosophers), Carl Sandburg and Jack Kerouac.
The warden got him a typewriter, and Crump wrote a novel. ”Burn, Killer, Burn!” a story of a man who commits suicide rather than be executed for murder, was published in 1962 by Johnson Publishing Co.
”I used the dictionary a lot,” Crump says. ”I was a self-educated dude.”
Crump used the proceeds from the book`s sales to pay off the mortgage on his mother`s house in the Morgan Park neighborhood of the South Side.
By the time of the hearing in which he pleaded for his death sentence to be commuted, Crump was a cause celebre. William Friedkin, who went on to direct ”The French Connection” and ”The Exorcist,” made a documentary about the case in which Crump claimed to be innocent.
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, singer Mahalia Jackson, evangelist Billy Graham and various civic groups including the Independent Voters of Illinois pleaded for his life. Jail officials, guards, doctors, nurses and chaplains provided 200 pages of affidavits in Crump`s support.
Arguing on behalf of the state that Crump should be put to death was a young assistant state`s attorney named James Thompson, who later, as governor, appointed the members of the Prisoner Review Board.
Thirty-six hours before Crump was to die in the electric chair, Kerner commuted the sentence. ”The record is virtually unanimous,” he wrote, ”that the embittered, distorted man who committed a vicious murder no longer exists.”
But Kerner also wrote, somewhat prophetically, that ”the real test for Paul Crump lies ahead. The years he must face in prison will serve as a true test of his willingness and ability to be a service to his fellow man.”
Destroying a symbol
The test has been a hard one. When he was transferred to the Pontiac Correctional Center after his death sentence was commuted, Crump encountered an administration unimpressed by his literary accomplishments.
”The warden called me over,” Crump says. ”He handed me one of my books. He said: `Did you write this book? Well, take a long look at it, because that`s as close as you`re going to get to it while you are in the Illinois State Penitentiary.` ”
Prison officials confiscated the new novel Crump had begun, claimed it was obscene and sent him to solitary confinement, Crump recalls.
”I was supposed to have been the perfect symbol of rehabilitation,”
Crump says. ”Symbols are made to be destroyed.”
He began to show signs of mental deterioration in 1965. He was sent from Pontiac to Menard Psychiatric Center for treatment nine times before he and his attorneys decided that he was better off staying at Menard, even if it might make him a less likely candidate for parole.
Thus far, it has.
”If he wasn`t mentally ill, he probably would have been out by now,”
says James Irving, chairman of the Prisoner Review Board from 1977 to 1981 and now assistant warden at Sheridan Correctional Center.
”The most successful parolees are murderers. The worst parole risks can be your thieves, drug abusers,” Irving says.
With Crump, however, ”the problem was, and always will be, that based upon his mental-health issues . . . no one could really guarantee or predict what his future behavior would be,” he says.
Irving, who recalls voting in favor of paroling Crump, remembers him as
”a pleasant, articulate man-very, very controlled, doing very, very well.”
”But you`ve got to remember, he was in a psychiatric unit. He had a lot of support there,” Irving adds. ”The problem the board members had is, what happens when you take him out of that setting?”
Parole hearings are gradually becoming extinct. Since 1978, Illinois law has required that sentences be of a specific length, at the end of which the prisoner is released. Only those inmates sentenced before 1978, such as Paul Crump, are subject to the Prisoner Review Board`s judgment.
Indeed, murderers with mental problems similar to Crump`s have been released from Menard at the end of their sentences, says Mary Flannigan, warden at the psychiatric center.
`Here we are-nothing`
The family of Crump`s victim suffered for decades. A year after Zukowski was killed, his disabled son died at 13. His widow, Veronica, took a job on an assembly line in a box company. After that, she worked as a nurse`s aide and as a clerk in the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles.
”Every time parole came up, we got a bunch of letters,” says Rudolph Zukowski, the oldest of the four sons, now an insurance salesman in Berwyn.
” `We know where you live. We know what kind of dog you have.` We called the police. But my mother wasn`t quite the same ever since.”
The family was stunned at the outpouring of support for Ted Zukowski`s murderer, he says.
”Books were written. People were raising money for him . . . and here we are-nothing.”
Yet Zukowski says this about Crump`s attempts to be freed:
”He`s getting old. He`s the same age as I am. If somebody wants to take care of him, and it won`t cost the taxpayers anything-I don`t think he could do too much damage to anyone anymore.
”You can only grieve so long,” Zukowski says. ”We`re all going to meet our makers. He might as well get the smell of the outside. I wouldn`t care. Let him go.”
At Menard, Crump does not get involved in prison activities. ”I try to do my time with people outside,” he says. ”I write to people every day.”
He does not read as much as he used to. ”My eyes are going,” he says.
Moreover, he adds, ”I`m tired of other people`s adventures. I feel that it should be getting about that time when I get involved in my own life in the free world.
”I`m 61 years old. Being a black American, you only get about 65 years of life. I`m pretty close to the graveyard.
”I tell myself every morning, `This is another day, a beautiful day. I`m in prison, but I`ve got to think-outside.` ”
