On September 6, 1989, a Chicago police officer named Betty Woods was sitting in an unmarked car outside a building on the city's South Side, in plain clothes, working alone. Woods was assigned to the division of the department that provided services to senior citizens, and she knew what had happened inside that building six weeks earlier. The arrest that followed was not the end of a manhunt. It was an officer who worked with old people waiting where the crimes against them had been committed.
Mary Harris was ninety-seven and lived in senior housing run by the Chicago Housing Authority. On July 25, 1989, Dorothy Williams came into her apartment and talked with her for about ten minutes, and Harris asked her to go to the store and handed her two dollars for it. As Harris turned away, Williams grabbed her. Harris was strangled, and a component stereo set was gone from the apartment when her body was found.
Williams was born on December 12, 1954, and was addicted to heroin; the money she took paid for it. Her robberies were concentrated in that building and in similar housing nearby, and the people she went to were frail and elderly and opened their own doors.
Two of them had already died. Lonnie Laws was seventy-nine when she strangled him with his own belt on December 5, 1987. Caesar Zuell was sixty-four when she stabbed him in the first weeks of December 1988. Both men were slight. Autopsy findings in both cases matched the accounts she later gave police.
Four more survived, and the state named them at her sentencing (one later account counts five surviving robbery victims): Jasper Irving, robbed in January and again on April 4, 1989; Martha Foster, the same April day; Clyde Simmons on July 1; Frederick Adamson on July 4, three weeks before Harris died.
She gave three court-reported confessions to three separate killings. The one about Harris was made on September 7, 1989, the day after her arrest, and it was read to the jury at her trial.
That trial concerned Mary Harris alone. Williams argued that she had been arrested without probable cause and that everything flowing from the arrest, her statement included, should be suppressed; the motion failed. The Illinois Supreme Court later described the evidence of guilt as overwhelming. The jury convicted her of the robbery and the murder.
Then she waived a jury for the sentencing, which is the decision the case turns on. One judge heard the aggravation: the two dead men, the four surviving robbery victims, and an incident in November 1989 in which she threatened a correctional officer while awaiting trial. He found her eligible for the death penalty, found no mitigating factor sufficient to preclude it, and on April 18, 1991 sentenced her to die. She was thirty-six, and the second woman then on Illinois death row. The prosecutor, John McNerney, called her a reverse Robin Hood who stole from people who had nothing.
The other two killings were still only charges at that point. She pleaded guilty to both at a later hearing, so the sentence of death rested on the single conviction the jury had returned, with the rest weighing as aggravation rather than as verdicts.
The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on September 22, 1994, in an opinion by Justice Harrison, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case the following year. An execution date was set for 1995. Her post-conviction petition was remanded for an evidentiary hearing in June 2002, and it was still unresolved when the question was taken out of the courts altogether.
In January 2003, Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in Illinois, and hers became life without parole. She had been held at the Dwight Correctional Center, which closed a decade later, and she served the rest of her sentence at the Logan Correctional Center. Illinois abolished capital punishment in 2011. She died in custody on December 19, 2020, a week after her sixty-sixth birthday.
Two details are not settled. The court gave Mary Harris's age as ninety-seven and at least one later account gives ninety-nine, and Caesar Zuell appears as sixty-four in the court record and sixty-three elsewhere; his surname is also misspelled Zurell in some material.