Trouble and pain, it seems, have been following Tyron and Aldwin McNeal since they were children, companions more constant than any the brothers have ever known.
As youngsters, spindly legged boys growing up in Milwaukee and Chicago, their lives were awash in misery and misfortune. Tyron’s father was never around, while Aldwin’s father injected heroin in front of the boys and forced their mother to prostitute for him.
Their stepfather belittled them, telling them and their mother that he should not have to care for them because they were not his children. He drank and abused them.
A relative raped them, then raped their younger sister. They were robbed and they robbed. They were assaulted and, seething with anger, they assaulted others.
“Those boys have had some hard times,” said their mother, Cynthia Taylor. “I guess they’ve had more troubles growing up than most people have in a lifetime.”
It took Tyron McNeal years to put all this behind him. He did a stint in the U.S. Army and earned his high school diploma. He joined the Lake County Sheriff’s department.
Aldwin McNeal never put it behind him. He earned his GED, but he did so while he was serving a 10-year sentence for armed robbery in a Wisconsin prison. When he got out, he and a friend robbed a Waukegan pizza parlor called Maude’s, killing two people.
Now, Aldwin McNeal is on death row, sentenced earlier this month by a jury in Lake County that deliberated for close to three hours before it decided his fate.
It was his brother who helped put him there.
– – –
Shuffling through years of photographs in her Zion home, Cynthia Taylor recalls the events they chronicled: family gatherings, outings to museums, the beginning of another school year. Tyron, older by a year, is almost always smiling. Aldwin seems glum, upset.
Tyron’s father was never around. His birth, according to Taylor, was the result of a one-night meeting.
But Aldwin’s father took Tyron as his own. Hertie Jones was a pimp, thief and drug addict who, the family said in court, was in and out of prison for months or years at a time. He was a good-natured man, according to Taylor, though completely taken by drugs.
He took the boys to the movies, played with them and even took them fishing. But he also shot himself with heroin in front of them, said Taylor, prompting young Aldwin to try to imitate him with a pen, a cup of water and a shoelace.
Jones often brought his prostitutes home, and even forced Taylor into prostitution when money got tight. He often was verbally and physically abusive.
“We knew that something was going on, the way she was dressed,” said Tyron. “It was just like his prostitutes.” Jones could not be reached for comment.
There was a string of other men in their lives, too, and times when there were no men at all. For the most part, Taylor held the family together. There is nothing to indicate that any social services agency intervened in the family’s problems or that the family sought help.
There were good times, of course. The children-Tyron, Aldwin and three others-spent summers in Youngstown, Ohio, where Taylor’s parents lived. They swam, played sports, went to church-it was as easy a time as they ever knew.
“Those children had some of their best times out here,” said Estella Bender, their grandmother. “It was probably one of the few times they were really happy.”
But mostly there was pain. Once, when the boys were left in the care of a 12-year-old relative, the relative raped the boys. Later, he raped their younger sister.
The boys told Taylor about the assault, saying that they had been hurt. But, she said, she did not understand what had happened. In the end, she did nothing.
“I know they tried to tell me about it when they were smaller,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “But I guess I didn’t understand it. I just didn’t listen.”
Taylor divorced Jones in 1972 and moved the family to Chicago’s South Side. It was there that she set up house with her second husband, Carnell Taylor Sr. He was open in his disdain for her children, ridiculing them and telling them that he could not care for other men’s sons. Tyron has testified that his stepfather beat his mother in front of the boys, so badly on occasion that she had to be hospitalized.
But still, Tyron can say, “In between the battles and all the hell, there were some good times. But there were just so many bad times. It seemed like all it was was bad.”
– – –
In the weeks before the killings at Maude’s Pizza last spring, Aldwin McNeal, by then living in Zion, allegedly took part in several violent incidents. He put a gun to the head of a friend in Zion and demanded money. He put a sawed-off shotgun in a teenage girl’s mouth to force her to rob a restaurant with him. He held up a doughnut shop. Authorities brought charges against McNeal for the incidents, but dismissed them after he received the death sentence.
Prosecutors summed it all up by saying McNeal had led a “life of violence.”
McNeal does not disagree. Sitting in the Lake County Jail, awaiting a transfer to Death Row, the 29-year-old McNeal is a baleful presence.
“Everything that I learned growing up was wrong,” he said. “We grew up in a criminal environment. Everything around us was criminal. The people. The houses we lived in. The beds we slept in. Them, too. They were used for the prostitution.”
Aldwin McNeal learned to steal from his brother Tyron. The two used to get beaten up on their way to school, they say, so they began to do the same to other schoolchildren.
“We did everything together,” said Tyron. “There wasn’t nothing he did that I didn’t do-usually first. There wasn’t nothing that could come between us kids.”
But the crime got more serious as the boys got older. They began to carry guns and, so they said, they were not afraid to use them. They even hoped to use one on the relative who had raped them and their sister. The brothers made a pact to kill him.
They also used drugs. By both their accounts, they were smoking marijuana at age 12 and drinking and using harder drugs in their middle teens. They sold drugs too.
They dropped out of school about the same time-Tyron was a high school senior, Aldwin a junior-but for the first time they went separate ways. Tyron, at loose ends and sensing a need for discipline, joined the Army. He served in Germany and met a minister there who persuaded him to lead a more Christian life.
It was, he said, a way out. He completed his stint in the service. He got married and became a police officer. He was, in his words, “proclaimed a minister.”
“If I didn’t find God,” said Tyron, “I’d be in prison myself right now.”
Aldwin, who said the excitement and risk of committing crimes fueled his life, who was drawn to the danger of gin and fistfights and guns, did go off to prison.
He pleaded guilty in 1984 in Lake County to charges of robbery and residential burglary. About two years later, in Milwaukee, he was convicted of armed robbery.
He was sentenced to 10 years but was released in 1993 after serving less than seven. His partner in the robbery, James Woods, had won his release earlier.
Both Aldwin McNeal and Woods came to Zion, where Taylor was living. On April 7 of last year, McNeal and Woods held up Maude’s. During the robbery, McNeal forced the restaurant’s manager, Cory Gerlach, and Gerlach’s friend Perry Austin to the floor. McNeal then shot them in the head.
– – –
Cynthia Taylor often wonders how Aldwin turned out so different from Tyron. As a point of reference, she thinks of one of her sisters, who became a drug addict.
“We were raised alike,” she said. “How did I prevail?”
Little things come back now. Aldwin, she remembers, once told her that she did not praise him enough, while Tyron always stood on his own, was more independent.
But that, she says, is not enough to explain all of this. She wonders at times if it could be genetic. After all, the two boys had different fathers. But that, too, fails to settle the matter.
A psychologist at his trial diagnosed Aldwin as a paranoid schizophrenic with antisocial tendencies. He said that helped to explain why Aldwin acted inappropriately in court, making faces and appearing so uninterested. While he was in prison in Wisconsin, Aldwin was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs. He had suicidal thoughts.
But prison records show that prison mental health officials said Aldwin was not schizophrenic. In their opinion, he only displayed antisocial tendencies.
Some aspects of his behavior seemed to contradict a finding that he was mentally ill. Aldwin tutored other inmates and helped to prepare legal papers for them. He got his GED and a paralegal certificate while in prison. His IQ is 100. He is thoughtful and well-spoken, by all accounts a caring father who dotes on his children and his brother’s children.
“I thought a lot about what might have happened to make them so different,” said Valerie Ceckowski, one of Aldwin’s attorneys. “They both had the same kind of upbringing, in that same house. But they’re so different. It makes no sense.”
Lake County Assistant State’s Atty. George Strickland, who prosecuted the Maude’s Pizza murders, views the two brothers and their different paths in almost unforgiving terms.
“Aldwin was so dramatically bad. Tyron was raised in the same household and he turned out so dramatically different,” he said. “It seems to me that one of them made a choice to make something with his life and the other took the easy way out.”
Taylor has a hard time reconciling the differences between her two oldest boys, as does Tyron. Both recall an incident that may have pushed Aldwin over the edge.
That was the death, on Thanksgiving 1992, of Taylor’s youngest child, Alexis. He was 17 years old, in trouble in much the same way as his older brothers at that age. Even two years later, the details are sketchy. Authorities still do not know exactly what happened.
Alexis was at a house in Zion with friends when a gun went off. The bullet struck him in the head and killed him. An inquest by the Lake County coroner failed to come to a conclusion about the case. It was never determined if it was a homicide, a suicide or an accident.
Aldwin was in prison when Alexis died. When he was released, he went to his brother’s grave. According to his family, he pawed at the grave, as if he was trying to dig it up. Then he returned to his car and broke the rear-view mirror.
“I’ve always felt an anger, hatred, a bitterness growing on me,” said Aldwin. “My brother dying just added fuel to that. It wasn’t right what happened to him.”
Tyron said his youngest brother’s death was hard on him too. But he is not so sure that it fueled Aldwin’s rage or the crimes he committed after he left prison.
In his mind, it was the world they grew up in, the house and the people who lived there and the people they knew. Most of them, he said, are or have been in prison. It is as familiar to them as anything, the setting for their life.
“There’s no one thing that turned him bad,” Tyron said. “An accumulation of things did it. There was so much bad in our lives, especially his, it’s no wonder.”
– – –
In the days after the Maude’s Pizza killings, Aldwin McNeal went to Tyron for help. Tyron had always protected Aldwin. Tyron, a Lake County sheriff’s deputy asked Aldwin if he had been involved in the Maude’s killings.
Tyron already knew the answer; Aldwin only confirmed it.
Tyron gave his brother $500. More important, he said nothing to the officers investigating the Maude’s case about his brother. He said he extracted a promise from Aldwin to surrender, but that never happened. Investigators arrested Aldwin first.
Tyron eventually quit his job, though Lake County Sheriff officials said he had little choice. In court, Tyron reluctantly took the witness stand. He shielded his eyes from his brother’s gaze as he testified under a grant of immunity.
“Did you ask him if he was involved in the thing down at the pizza place?” the prosecutor asked Tyron.
“Yes,” Tyron. “He just kind of walked away.”
“When you asked him again if he was involved, what did he say?”
“Yes.”
Along with statements to police from Aldwin’s best friend, Woods, and testimony from his wife, Regina McNeal-both of whom turned on Aldwin-Tyron’s testimony helped the prosecutors win a conviction and obtain the death sentence.
In his Waukegan home, where he lives with his wife and three children, Tyron McNeal is trying to find work and put his life back together. He talks often with his mother about his future, about his brother and about how his family has so quickly unraveled.
But he has not talked much with his brother. For the first time, they are estranged. But in Tyron’s mind, it was the only way.
“If I hadn’t changed myself, I’d be sitting right there with him,” Tyron said. “There’s not that much different in the two of us. That could easily be me there.”
