The day he committed murder, Larry Mack wore a feather in his hat and the look of a man who thinks he knows how to rob a bank.
At first, he did seem to know his business when he strode into the West Pullman United Savings Bank that day after Thanksgiving in 1979. Brandishing a handgun, Mack walked straight up to the only other armed man in the room, the portly security guard. When the guard tried to grab Mack’s gun, the gun discharged, wounding the guard — it is unclear exactly in what part of his body.
Mack stood over the man, in a corner next to the bank’s windows, and fired off another shot in what looked to a frightened bank officer like an execution-style killing. Then, in movements captured by the bank’s security camera, Mack strutted around the room wielding a gun in each hand as his two accomplices filled bags with $19,000 in cash, leapt over the counters and bolted for their brown sedan parked around the corner.
That’s where it became apparent that, despite experience in the field of robbery, Larry Mack wasn’t an expert criminal. As he and his friends sprinted out the door loaded down with their cash, police officers in a passing patrol car thought they looked suspicious and promptly arrested them.
Mere minutes after the bank camera recorded Mack running out the door, a passerby with a video camera captured the image of a handcuffed Mack getting into the squad car. His hat was still intact. His air of confidence was not.
“I am guilty of murder,” says Larry Mack today. “I admit to my actions. It’s something I have to live with for the rest of my life.”
“My client is undoubtedly guilty of murder,” agrees John Stainthorp, Mack’s current attorney. “There was no question that he was the person with the gun and that he had, in fact, shot the gun twice.”
A Cook County judge would have no doubt, either.
Two years after the bank robbery, Mack was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the killing of security guard Joseph Kolar, a father of five who used to leave love notes for his wife before departing for work every morning.
Mack was shipped off to state prison to await his appointment with the death chamber. The trial evidence was boxed up and sent off to county storage. And business returned to normal at the South Side bank, as if the entire matter had been settled.
But it had not.
Because buried in the floor of the bank were the shards of a spent bullet, covered by thin layers of duct tape and blue carpeting, that would raise serious questions about what happened in the corner where witnesses thought they saw a cold-blooded execution.
It would require the passage of 20 years, a flood of legal appeals and the discovery of a crucial typographical error. But eventually, a lawyer and his paralegal would find their way to the scene of the crime, and to evidence challenging whether Mack really meant to kill Joseph Kolar, or simply to incapacitate or intimidate him.
The legal distinction is a fine one, but important. It means Mack could go free one day soon.
“I can’t believe it,” said Joan Corey, Kolar’s daughter. “This man murdered my father, everyone knows it, and he could actually go free anyway.”
That’s because Illinois law has strict requirements for prosecutors who want to impose the ultimate punishment. Simply participating in a robbery where someone is slain is enough to convict a defendant of murder. But, in order to get the court to impose the death penalty, the state also has to show that the killer possessed the intent to kill — or, at least, knowledge that his actions would probably result in that end.
“He meant to kill my father,” Corey said. “No one doubted that 20 years ago.”
Accidentally discharged
Of course, Larry Mack argues that he disputed it 20 years ago, advancing the convenient explanation that his gun accidentally discharged twice — once during the initial tussle and again by the windows.
But he also contends he said something else that no one had any reason to believe back then: that the shot next to the windows, the apparent execution-style round that made his murderous intent so clear, did not actually hit the victim but rather went into the floor.
“I was trying to explain I didn’t believe it hit him,” Mack said in a recent telephone interview from the Cook County Correction Center. “I would have realized it if I had deliberately shot him a second time.”
Mack said he was just trying to intimidate Kolar when he initially placed the barrel of his weapon on the guard’s shoulder. When Kolar then reached for the gun and pulled it, Mack claims, the force of his own pull in the opposite direction caused the weapon to discharge.
As for the second shot, Mack said the gun fired accidentally as he bent over to take Kolar’s revolver away from him. In fact, he said, he doesn’t remember the gun going off in his own hand, but later learned from medical and police reports that he had discharged his weapon a second time.
“I heard a pop sound,” Mack said during the interview. “I didn’t realize until later that [my] gun had gone off. I never thought he had been shot [in the corner by the windows.]”
Indeed, the grainy, freeze-frame photographs of the bank’s old-fashioned security camera — snapping images at a rate of three per second — don’t clearly show Mack actually firing a shot into Kolar at that point.
But witnesses said they saw Mack standing over Kolar and then heard gunfire. The official autopsy showed that Kolar had been wounded both in the arm and in the chest — and everyone assumed therefore that Kolar had been shot in the arm during the initial tussle for the weapon and in the chest during the presumed execution-style killing that seemed to have taken place in that split-second between pictures.
The judge found Mack guilty and, after his sentencing hearing, a jury decided that he deserved the death penalty.
“Larry Mack killed Joseph Kolar in the course of an armed robbery,” they agreed in a statement on the verdict form, supplied to them for their description of the aggravating factor that made Mack legally eligible for the death penalty in 1981. But the wording on the form lacked any reference to intent, a deficit prosecutors would later call a “typo.”
For the next 20 years, Mack and the trial evidence would sit under lock and key while the case took a long and complicated journey through the Illinois Supreme Court, to the U.S. Supreme Court and back again. Those courts repeatedly batted down Mack’s complaints throughout the 1980s.
But then in 1990, the case was assigned to an appellate defense attorney working for the People’s Law Office in Chicago. And when the attorney, John Stainthorp, perused the trial records looking for any reason for appeal that hadn’t yet been exhausted, he came across the yellowed verdict form.
“I see there’s something missing. There’s no jury verdict that finds his intent or knowledge,” said Stainthorp, then a 10-year veteran of the criminal justice system who had never handled a death penalty case before.
“I bring it to the trial judge, who looks at it and said, `I think you’re right. There’s no verdict that finds him eligible.”‘
Rescinded the death sentence
The judge granted Mack relief from his death sentence and the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the decision in 1995, setting the stage for a hearing everyone assumed would end up proving intent anyway. A cold-blooded execution clearly satisfies the demands of the law.
Then the paralegal found the bullets.
Stainthorp had sent the paralegal, Allison Forker, back to the bank in September of 2000, after peering in the window himself and noticing that the aging tight-weave carpet looked like what he’d seen in old pictures of the crime scene. The bank was empty and the owners were trying to sell it, but Forker slipped a guard $100 to let her in.
When she looked in the corner where Joseph Kolar lay bleeding 20 autumns before, she found a strip of duct tape the size of her fist. Beneath the tape was a hole in the carpet.
“I looked underneath and there was a divot in the concrete,” Forker recalls. “I was pretty certain that’s where the bullet had struck the ground.” Sure enough, there were about a dozen metal fragments within the hole. And when a forensic expert hired by Stainthorp took a look at them, one thing was obvious to him.
“It was clear right away that this bullet hadn’t gone through any part of the human body,” said the expert, Peter De Forest, a professor of criminology at John Jay College in New York City. He believed the bullet had shattered far too much to have pierced through flesh first. He was pretty certain it had gone straight through the carpeting and into the concrete underneath.
Re-creating the scene
To test his theory, De Forest decided to try to re-create the second shot that Mack fired in the corner. He took the gun Mack used in the killing, and loaded the chamber with the same kind of bullet.
First, De Forest fired a bullet directly through the carpet and into the concrete. The bullet shattered into pieces like the one Forker had found at the crime scene.
Then, he fired the weapon through a piece of fresh meat about two inches thick, to see what would happen to such a bullet when fired through the human body. The bullet fragments looked different, he reported; the second bullet, he said, broke into larger pieces that bore little resemblance to those from the first bullet.
“The experiments showed that the [second] bullet had been stopped more or less abruptly,” he said.
Meanwhile, Robert Kirschner, a former Cook County assistant medical examiner also hired by Stainthorp, looked through the autopsy report and agreed with the corollary of Mack’s story: that Kolar had only been shot one time.
The autopsy found that there were four wounds in Kolar’s body: two entry wounds and two exit wounds. One entry wound was in his left chest, and one was in the inside of his right arm. The cause of death appeared to have been a ruptured aorta. No bullets were found in his body, though a spent bullet was found on a nearby table.
Once these autopsy findings had seemed unambiguous, but suddenly they were open to two different interpretations. Each interpretation presupposed a different bullet trajectory, and therefore a different explanation of what happened.
The prosecution theory is that there were two shots, one hitting Kolar in the inside of his right arm and the other in his left chest. Both of these shots, the prosecution argues, were through-and-through shots, that is, they exited the body.
The defense, on the other hand, thinks only one bullet hit Kolar, the one from the first gunshot that occurred during the tussle. This single bullet, it is argued, went into Kolar’s left chest, out of his right chest, into his right arm and then all the way through it.
Kirschner, now a clinical associate in the Departments of Pathology and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago, said it would be hard to believe otherwise based on trajectory. “It would have been a very unusual angle for a gunshot to go through his arm, high in the bicep region, [without having traveled] through his chest,” he said. “As a forensic pathologist, I’ve seen many gunshot wounds of this type. In the overwhelming proportion of the cases, when we see this, it’s because the bullet has passed through the arm and the chest.”
So Stainthorp offered up a new take on the tragic event for jurors: The initial shot during the tussle for Mack’s gun was accidental and hit Kolar in the left chest, exited, and then pierced his right arm. And so, said Stainthorp, Mack did not possess the all-important intent when he inflicted the deadly wound.
“If he’d wanted to shoot Mr. Kolar in the corner, he obviously could have done it,” Stainthorp said. “It was a point-blank shot. He shot the carpet.”
The crucial bullet
After listening to the new evidence at a hearing in October, a jury determined that the state had not proven intent or knowledge — and therefore found that Mack was not eligible for the death penalty. Two of the three jurors who held out against the death penalty said the discovery of the bullet fragments was crucial to their decision. The third could not be reached for this article.
The first shot is not captured on film because the camera didn’t start rolling in time, and so, jurors say, they weren’t sure Mack meant to fire the first shot. And the bullet fragments convinced them that he either missed or never meant to fire the second one.
Mack said: “It was never my intention to kill anyone. That’s the God’s truth. It was just a thought of having a weapon. It wasn’t to harm anybody. I never thought it would come to that.”
Echoes Stainthorp, “My client has always said, `It was wrong, I shouldn’t have done it. But I was going in to rob the bank, not to kill anyone.'”
Prosecutors consider the defense’s key testimony preposterous — and the bullet shards irrelevant. Mack’s intent to fire both shots is obvious to anyone who looks at the evidence, they say. For one thing, the gun he was using required five pounds or more of pressure to fire.
The state’s own expert witness — Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue — said there’s no way to tell what the bullet went through before hitting the floor because there are too many unknown variables. The state assailed Forker’s collection of the evidence as unreliable, and De Forest’s re-creation of the crime scene as unscientific. Prosecutors say it is impossible to get the same bullets today that were available 20 years ago.
“He put a piece of fresh pork on the carpet to re-create human flesh and fired through it,” said Cook County Asst. State’s Atty. Laura Morask.
“Then he said, `This bullet was not fired through human flesh.’ I think it was total baloney.”
Passage of time
Even though jurors say the newly discovered evidence played an important role, Morask is convinced it was really the passage of time that swayed them.
“They thought since 22 years had passed, that nobody cared about this case,” Morask said. “We weren’t allowed to tell them he had been sentenced to death. I think it had nothing to do with the evidence.”
Kolar’s family is outraged by the turn of events. They have lived without their father and husband for 20 years, resolutely steeling themselves for every court hearing, oral argument and opinion over the course of two decades.
The testimony of one eyewitness at the October hearing rings in their ears. He said it looked to him as if, when Mack fired the first shot, he had very surely and intently cocked his gun and aimed it first. If all of the jurors had believed that testimony, it would have established Mack’s intent to fire the first shot, and made irrelevant the question of whether Kolar was shot a second time. But the Kolars believe the passage of 20 years and the deaths of two other eyewitnesses blurred things for the jurors.
“My father is not here to say, `He stood over me, lifted up the collar of my shirt and shot me in my heart,'” said Corey, who was in her early 30s when her father was murdered. “We have to believe the video and the eyewitnesses. And they make things pretty clear.”
Persuasive as the state’s theory is to the Kolars, though, jurors didn’t believe it beyond a reasonable doubt. Juror Carl Thomas said the bullet fragments — and the expert testimony they inspired — raised serious questions in his mind. Another juror who voted against the death penalty also said the evidence was significant enough to raise reasonable doubt in her mind.
“The prosecutors said he was shot in that corner,” said Thomas. “I wasn’t 100 percent sure.”
As a result of the October verdict, Mack is expected to receive a new sentence in February. Prosecutors will seek a term of natural life, which will keep him behind bars permanently. But the defense will argue hard for a much more lenient sentence — one that could amount to as little as 20 years.
With 22 years served in the state prison system — which credits inmates with day-for-day good time — Larry Mack could go free in the very near future.
