Chapter 27

Kotlowitz considers a potentially unreliable source: Daniel Thornton, a convicted burglar who reached out to Reeves while an inmate at the county jail. Thornton, a gang-affiliated white man known to embellish the truth, claimed to have seen a white boy push Eric into the river after berating him for dancing with a white girl. The boy was a relative or friend of the white girl, he insisted, and more boys may have shown up once the first boy caught up with him. The girl, too, may have been Lisa Liedke, a known associate of Thornton’s.

Despite Thornton’s reputation, the author notes, some other stories and tips in the file do lend credibility to his version of events. In the hopes of learning more, Kotlowitz reaches out to Lisa Liedke but doesn’t get much new information. She seems, he notices, to want to put distance between herself and what happened to Eric McGinness.

Conversely, some details from Thornton’s assertion are demonstrably false. Thornton remembers Eric wearing a Bulls jersey, but he had on a green Task Force jacket when he disappeared. He also says The Club was packed on the night of the disappearance, but other accounts suggest that Eric left because the crowd was unusually sparse.

The body, Reeves concluded, also could not have drifted upstream from where Thornton says the altercation occurred. As Kotlowitz closes the chapter, he notes ominously that Reeves is mistaken.

Chapter 28

Kotlowitz elucidates the story of Marcus Cooley, a twenty-one-year-old Black man who died in police custody under mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. Tracing the stories of several other unjust and mishandled Black deaths, he notes how Cooley’s case exemplifies the region’s long history of inadequately addressing—and sometimes directly causing—the deaths of Black residents.

Cooley, arrested for stealing a car, was sent to the county jail but escaped during booking. He was apprehended and re-booked, and several hours later the sheriff was called in. Cooley had had purportedly died by suicide, hanging himself with a red necktie. Evidence that Cooley had actually hanged himself was scant.

When the papers reported a suicide, the community was furious. A skeptical Reverend E.B. Williams challenged the sheriff on the formal version of events, recalling that just eight years earlier, an official had warned away a gathered mob of nearly a thousand calling for the lynching of two Black men in custody. The precedent for extrajudicial violence had long since been established; the resulting divide only became more severe as the community’s concerns of a coverup were reified through further investigation.