Henry Brisbon Jr. was convicted of three murders committed in two places five years apart. On the night of June 3, 1973, he and three other men drove north on Interstate 57 toward Chicago, ramming cars from behind so the drivers would stop, then robbing them. Brisbon shot Dorothy Cerney and James Schmidt, a couple who were engaged to be married, as they lay on the grass beside the highway. A Cook County jury convicted him of their murders in 1977, and because Illinois had no valid death penalty for a crime committed in 1973, the judge gave him four concurrent terms of 1,000 to 3,000 years. On October 19, 1978, while he was held in the segregation unit at Stateville Penitentiary, he took a guard hostage with a homemade knife and, with two other inmates, killed a prisoner named Richard Morgan. For that murder a Will County jury sentenced him to death.
The case made Brisbon a fixture of the Illinois death penalty debate for three decades. One prosecutor called him a walking testimonial for the death penalty. The Illinois Supreme Court twice reviewed his death sentence, throwing out the first and upholding the second. In January 2003, Governor George Ryan commuted it to life without parole along with the sentences of everyone else on Illinois death row. The lawyer and novelist Scott Turow, who served on Ryan's capital punishment commission, used Brisbon as his hardest example when explaining why he had come to oppose the death penalty anyway.
Brisbon was born in Chicago on January 12, 1956, a date the defense stipulated at his 1982 sentencing hearing. He was the third of 13 children, Time magazine reported in 1983. His father was a member of the Nation of Islam, and at both of his death penalty hearings the defense presented evidence about how that upbringing shaped him. At the first, in 1982, the jury heard that his father taught him that white people were "the devil" and never disciplined him for misbehavior, believing his son could do no wrong. At the second, in 1986, his sister Ethel Grisby and a childhood friend testified about his schooling in the Nation of Islam, including the lesson that the white man was the devil, and about his close ties to his family.
Brisbon gave Time his own version. He said he had been raised by a strict father to be a racist and to dislike white people, and that as he grew up he decided "I didn't like nobody." The phrase became the magazine's headline.
The court records say little about his life between childhood and 1973. Affidavits filed in his later post-conviction case describe him as a husband, a brother and a father; his former wife, his siblings and his son all gave statements on his behalf. His mother, brother and former wife also described head injuries and headaches, though no medical records were produced to support them.
By the time of his 1982 sentencing, the State could show a long criminal record. According to the Illinois Supreme Court's 1985 summary, Brisbon had been convicted of a rape, of armed robbery on two other occasions and of aggravated battery, as well as of the two I-57 murders. The opinion does not give dates for those convictions. The surviving victim of the rape has not been publicly named, and is not named here.
The State also put before the sentencing jury two shootings for which he was never tried. A man named Perry Green had been shot in the face with a shotgun. Before he died he named a former employee and her boyfriend, whom he identified as Brisbon, and the woman later told police that Brisbon had said he did the shooting. Brisbon turned himself in and was charged, but at the probable cause hearing the two eyewitnesses and the woman refused to testify, and the charge was dismissed. The opinion also refers to a complaint over the shotgun killing of a storekeeper who, on his deathbed, said Brisbon had shot him; that complaint too was dismissed for lack of probable cause. The opinion does not make clear whether these were two separate cases or the same one described twice. In law Brisbon was never convicted of either shooting.
On June 3, 1973, Brisbon, David Sanders, Stanley Charleston and Darrell Thompson drove from Chicago to Kankakee in Sanders's Subaru. According to the testimony summarized in the appellate opinions, they meant to get high and rob a pizza parlor. In Kankakee they picked up a shotgun from a resident. Police activity in the area put them off the robbery, and they cruised the streets looking for someone else to rob without success. Then they started back toward Chicago on Interstate 57.
On the way, Brisbon proposed a new plan. Sanders would ram another car from behind on the expressway, a maneuver the witnesses called "bumping." When the driver got out to look at the damage, Brisbon would step out with the shotgun and they would rob whoever they had stopped. The others agreed.
The first car they bumped belonged to a woman driving a black Chrysler, on the exit ramp at Manteno. Brisbon got out and pointed the shotgun at her, but she walked back to her car and drove away. According to the testimony at Sanders's trial, Sanders shouted at Brisbon for not shooting her. She survived and testified for the State.
About ten minutes farther north they bumped a green Chevrolet driven by Betty Lou Harmon. Brisbon, carrying the gun, moved her into the back seat of her own car, and Thompson drove it a short distance with the others following. When the cars stopped she tried to run, and Sanders caught her. She was taken into a cornfield beside the road, and a few minutes later the others heard a shot. Her husband and a friend searched for her for two days before they found her body in the field. Her husband later testified at Sanders's trial.
Brisbon was never charged with Betty Lou Harmon's death. Charleston and Thompson testified that Brisbon took her into the field and came back saying he had killed her. Brisbon, in one of his later statements to prosecutors, said it was Sanders who had harmed her. The Illinois appellate courts allowed evidence of her killing at both trials as part of the same plan, and the Illinois Supreme Court later described it as an I-57 murder that was never prosecuted but that Brisbon had reportedly admitted to others. It remains an uncharged killing, and nobody was ever convicted of it.
Dorothy Cerney and James Schmidt were traveling together in a red car that night. They were a couple, and Time reported that they were due to be married in six months. Little else about them appears in the court records. Dorothy's mother was close enough to the case to call the prosecutor during the 1977 trial, and one of the jurors first chosen turned out to live two doors from Dorothy and to have known her. The appellate opinion in Sanders's case spells her surname Cerny; the opinion in Brisbon's case spells it Cerney.
Between five and ten minutes after the Harmon killing, Sanders bumped their car. He chatted with the couple about the staged accident. Brisbon then led them to a grassy strip beside the highway. At his and Sanders's direction, Thompson took Schmidt's watch and wallet and Dorothy's purse. Brisbon told the couple to make this their last kiss and shot each of them in the back with the shotgun. Time put the night's total haul at 54 dollars, two watches, an engagement ring and a wedding band.
Fingerprints would later tie Thompson to the scene: his prints matched prints on documents found in Schmidt's car and on a cigarette package found near the bodies.
The four men split up for the drive home. Charleston drove Schmidt's car; Brisbon drove Betty Lou Harmon's Chevrolet. They had agreed to meet at the house of Brisbon's cousin on the West Side. At about 10:45 p.m. a Chicago police officer chased a green Chevrolet weaving along the Eisenhower Expressway. It crossed the lanes, went down the embankment at Homan Avenue and disappeared from view.
A man sitting on his porch on West Van Buren Street between about 10:30 and 11 p.m. saw a car stop and a man run into an alley. The car rolled into a parked car. Ten or fifteen minutes later the man came back, wrapped a shotgun in a jacket and asked the neighbor to keep it for him. The neighbor refused. He later identified the man as Brisbon.
At his cousin's house, according to the testimony, Brisbon told her to turn on the news because he had killed people on the highway. He gave Charleston 11 dollars and told him to get rid of Schmidt's car; Charleston wiped it down and left it between two factory buildings. Two of Brisbon's cousins and their sister later testified that he had described the killings to them.
By the autumn of 1975 Brisbon was an inmate at Stateville Penitentiary, near Joliet. The prison's law librarian was another inmate, Robert E. Lee Jr., who was serving 20 to 50 years for murder and whose job was to help prisoners with their post-conviction papers. In mid-October 1975 Brisbon asked Lee for legal help on an unrelated matter, and the two met for about two hours. Two or three days later Brisbon asked Lee why he was in prison. When Lee said he had never heard of the I-57 murders, Brisbon told him about them.
Lee passed what he had heard to a medical technician at the prison, who took it to the police. The Illinois Supreme Court later wrote that this admission led to Brisbon's indictment and conviction. When a newspaper later reported that a prison inmate had helped solve the case, Brisbon threatened Lee with violence if he found out Lee was the informant.
State police officers then questioned Brisbon. After he was read his rights and told they were investigating a highway homicide, he agreed to talk. According to the appellate court's account of the trial evidence, he said friends had called him to ask what to do with the robbery money, asked the officers what they could do for him, and then gave a detailed account of the night. Three days later, when investigators asked for something to back it up, such as the shotgun, he said a friend had it and that his mother would bring it. The gun was never recovered; the friend was said to have got rid of it. The next day, after his mother met the investigators and spoke with him, he named "Stanley," David Sanders and Darrell Thompson and picked out photographs of Sanders and Charleston.
In a statement to an assistant state's attorney he first said he had heard about the killings from friends, then admitted he had been there. He said he had only driven during the first attack and that Sanders had harmed the first woman. In a later interview with another prosecutor he said he had watched the shooting of the couple from a distance. Shown Charleston's confession, which named him as the gunman, he agreed it was accurate. "You got it all right there," he said, according to the appellate opinion.
Charleston and Thompson were arrested in 1976. Both gave statements and pleaded guilty to murder. In return for testifying, Charleston received an agreed sentence of 12 to 20 years and Thompson 20 to 40 years, along with assurances that they would not be held in the same prison as Sanders or Brisbon.
Brisbon was tried in the Circuit Court of Cook County in 1977. The prosecutor was Michael Ficaro. The timing mattered: Illinois's death penalty had been struck down in 1972 and was restored only in 1977, the year of the trial, so it could not apply to killings committed in June 1973.
Charleston and Thompson described the night for the jury. The neighbor from West Van Buren Street identified Brisbon as the man with the shotgun; he had picked Brisbon out of a lineup photograph after jury selection had begun, a point the defense later challenged. Robert Lee testified about the conversation in the law library. Brisbon's cousins and their sister testified about what he told them. Evidence of Betty Lou Harmon's killing was admitted as part of the same plan. The defense called no witnesses.
During the trial the prosecutor learned, through Dorothy Cerney's mother, that one of the sitting jurors lived two doors from Dorothy and had known her. Questioned by the judge, the juror said she had been afraid to raise it and had told no one, including the other jurors. The judge dismissed her and seated an alternate, but refused a defense request to question the remaining jurors, reasoning that doing so would only draw attention to the episode.
The jury convicted Brisbon of two counts of murder, two counts of armed robbery and conspiracy to commit armed robbery. He received four concurrent terms of 1,000 to 3,000 years for the murders and robberies, and 6 to 20 years for the conspiracy.
On September 26, 1980, the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, in an opinion by Justice Mejda, affirmed the murder and armed robbery convictions and vacated the conspiracy conviction, because Illinois law did not allow a defendant to be convicted of both a conspiracy and the crime that was its object. The court rejected every other claim. It found that the dismissed juror's connection to the victim gave no ground for a new trial, that Brisbon's admissions to Lee lay "entirely outside Lee's duties as law librarian," that the neighbor's identification was properly admitted, and that the evidence of the Harmon killing "could not have altered the jury's verdict." The verdict, it said, left no doubt of his guilt. Later Illinois courts cited the decision for the rule that accomplice testimony can support a conviction.
David Sanders was tried separately. He admitted being present but said Brisbon had forced him to take part at gunpoint; Charleston and Thompson testified that he had never been coerced. A jury convicted him of two murders and two armed robberies, and he was sentenced to 300 to 900 years on each murder count. The First District affirmed on February 13, 1980.
Less than a year after his I-57 sentence, Brisbon killed again. On October 19, 1978, he was held on level 8 of Stateville's B-East segregation unit. A guard, Nobie Mercer, was escorting a new prisoner along the gallery. Brisbon asked to be let out to use the washroom because his toilet was clogged. Mercer refused, but on his third pass he opened the cell. Brisbon seized him and held a homemade knife to him, made him release H.M. from a neighboring cell, and locked Mercer in that cell.
Brisbon and H.M. went up one level and then down to level 2, where they found Richard Morgan, an inmate known as "Hippie." Another prisoner, identified here as D.B., joined them. D.B. and H.M. held Richard Morgan while Brisbon stabbed him in the back. Morgan broke free, ran, was chased, reached a guard and collapsed. He died soon after he was taken to the prison hospital. As Brisbon left, he told an inmate witness, Josie Baynes, that he had tried to kill the man. He then let Mercer out, and Mercer locked Brisbon and H.M. back in their cells, completed a count and reported to the deputy warden.
The knife was six to seven inches long, with a cardboard handle taped to the blade. Bloodstains on it matched the victim's blood type, and two fingerprints under the handle matched Brisbon's. Its paper sheath came from a shoe catalog Brisbon had been seen with. An inmate testified that five days earlier he had seen D.B. take a spoon from a food cart and had later seen Brisbon sharpening a spoon. Time described the weapon as the sharpened handle of a soup ladle. The court records give no details of Richard Morgan's life beyond the fact that he was a Stateville prisoner; the outcomes of any cases against H.M. and D.B. were not found.
Brisbon was tried for Richard Morgan's murder in the Circuit Court of Will County. Before the trial a television newscast reported his I-57 convictions and sentence; the judge refused to sequester the jury but warned the jurors repeatedly to avoid news coverage, and all of them said they had seen nothing. The jury found him guilty. Edward Petka, the Will County state's attorney, called him "a very, very terrible human being, a walking testimonial for the death penalty," Time reported.
At the sentencing hearing the jury found him eligible for death on two statutory grounds: the victim was an inmate killed on prison grounds, and Brisbon had already been convicted of murdering two or more people. The State introduced his prior convictions, the uncharged shootings, his long disciplinary record and photographs of the I-57 victims. In mitigation the defense presented the evidence about his father's teaching; a Jesuit priest and ethics professor, James Bresnahan, who testified that he saw serious ethical problems with executing a man with Brisbon's background; and a criminal justice professor, John Flanagan, who testified that long-term prisoners tend to settle down over time but that understaffed, violent prisons made that hard. The jury found no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude a death sentence. Judgment was entered on February 24, 1982.
Time interviewed Brisbon in 1983 in the Menard Condemned Unit, the official name for Illinois's death row, where he had then spent eleven months. The magazine reported that during his Stateville years he had taken part in 15 attacks on inmates and guards, instigated at least one prison riot, wrecked a courtroom during a trial and hit a warden with a broom handle. On death row he spent 90 supervised minutes a day outside a cell 7 feet 7 inches by 5 feet 10 inches, and lifted weights. "I'm no bad dude," he told the magazine, describing himself as "just an antisocial individual." He complained that his cell was inhuman, said he did not expect to be executed, and said that if he had to die it would be of natural causes. Michael Ficaro, who had prosecuted the I-57 case, told Time that nobody he had heard of deserved the death penalty more, and that he planned to be there to see it carried out.
Brisbon's violence did not stop. UPI reported in 2003 that in a fight at Pontiac Correctional Center in the early 1980s he stabbed John Wayne Gacy, who was executed in 1994. At his second sentencing hearing a Menard guard, Edward Martin, testified that he saw Brisbon stab another inmate, William Jones; Jones himself testified that Brisbon had not stabbed him, and the jury was left to weigh the conflict. An assistant deputy warden, George Welbourne, testified about Brisbon's part in a 1979 prison takeover, but conceded that Brisbon had tried to stop the disorder and had never been convicted of anything arising from it. By 1995 the Illinois Supreme Court counted more than 200 prison disciplinary violations on his record.
On April 19, 1985, the Illinois Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Ward, affirmed the murder conviction but vacated the death sentence. It rejected his claim that prosecutors had used their challenges to exclude Black women from the jury, upheld the removal of jurors opposed to capital punishment, and found the warnings about the newscast adequate. It also held that his admissions to Robert Lee were not protected by any privilege: the right of prisoners to legal help with their cases did not shield unrelated confessions.
The sentence fell because of how the State had argued for death. In closing, the prosecutor told the jury that despite the 1,000 to 3,000 year sentence Brisbon would be eligible for parole after about eleven years, adding, "Eligible. Not saying he was going to get it." The court called that "a highly prejudicial overreaction" and held that the possibility of parole has no place in deciding between life and death. The prosecutor had also linked the end of executions to rising homicide numbers, remarks the court said could only arouse the jurors' fears and prejudices. The photographs of the I-57 victims, it held, were unnecessary to prove that he had two prior murder convictions and should not have been shown. Justice Simon concurred separately. The case went back to Will County for a new sentencing hearing.
A new jury heard the case in 1986. Assistant State's Attorney Burmila argued that Brisbon had already received every punishment short of death and had killed again, and asked, "What other punishment is there that we can give this man but the death penalty?" The defense built its case around prison conditions and the circumstances of the Stateville killing, calling inmates including William Jones, alongside the testimony of his sister and his childhood friend. The judge refused to let the jury hear a Stateville inmate, James Foster, who had been told by others that H.M., not Brisbon, was responsible for the stabbing; the judge found that account unreliable hearsay that did not fit the physical evidence. The jury again found no sufficient mitigating factors, and the court again imposed death.
On May 24, 1989, the Illinois Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Ryan, affirmed. It rejected a series of claims, among them double jeopardy, the exclusion of Foster's evidence, objections to the prosecutor's argument, and a challenge to the selection of the jury. It set Tuesday, November 21, 1989, as the date of execution by lethal injection. In 1990 the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his case.
Brisbon then filed a post-conviction petition in Will County. The State argued that it was one more attempt to delay an execution, noting that about 12 years had passed since the murder. The petition claimed that his trial lawyer had failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence: affidavits from his former wife, his siblings, his son and two members of the clergy, describing him as a good husband, brother and father; evidence of head injuries that a doctor who never examined him said could have caused brain damage; and that doctor's opinion that his childhood religious indoctrination was akin to child abuse.
The circuit court dismissed the petition without a hearing. On January 19, 1995, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed in an opinion by Chief Justice Bilandic. It held that the jury had already heard about his upbringing, that more family witnesses would have added nothing new, that a sentence would not be overturned on speculation about what a mental examination might have shown, and that given the I-57 murders and his prison record there was no reasonable probability of a different result. Justice Harrison dissented on procedural grounds, arguing that the summary dismissal had been void. The court set Wednesday, May 17, 1995, as the new execution date.
Neither execution date was carried out.
On January 11, 2003, Governor George Ryan announced that he was commuting the death sentences of everyone on Illinois death row. UPI put the number at 158; CNN reported that about 156 of 160 condemned inmates were covered, after four were pardoned the day before. The clemency was a blanket order, not a case-by-case review, and CNN reported that Ryan did not believe the condemned had been given a fair shake by the justice system.
Brisbon was among those whose sentences were commuted. UPI's story that day singled him out in its headline as the "I-57 killer." It reported that his sentence became life without parole, and that prison officials planned to keep an extra watch on him when he moved from death row into the general population.
Brisbon became the example both sides of the death penalty debate reached for. Scott Turow, the lawyer and novelist who served on Ryan's Commission on Capital Punishment, wrote in his 2003 book Ultimate Punishment that he wished the death penalty could be confined to cases like Gacy's, or could remove the small risk that a man like Brisbon would kill again; but that he would rather let both men live out their days in prison, infuriating as that was. Richard A. Devine, the Cook County state's attorney, answered Turow in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 2005. He reminded readers that Brisbon had told an engaged couple to kiss their last kiss before killing them and had gone on to kill while imprisoned for those crimes, and he listed Brisbon with Gacy and Timothy McVeigh as names that made him wonder how far society had really come.
As of January 2003, when his death sentence was commuted, Brisbon was serving life without parole in the Illinois prison system, UPI reported. His present location and status have not been publicly confirmed.
Proven by final convictions: the murders and armed robberies of Dorothy Cerney and James Schmidt (1977, affirmed 1980) and the murder of Richard Morgan (judgment 1982, conviction affirmed 1985).
Never charged: the killing of Betty Lou Harmon the same night. Two accomplices testified that Brisbon took her into the field and returned saying he had killed her; the Illinois Supreme Court described it as an unprosecuted murder he reportedly admitted to others; Brisbon told prosecutors that Sanders harmed her. No one was convicted of it.
Charged and dismissed: the shooting of Perry Green and a complaint over the killing of a storekeeper, both dropped for lack of probable cause after witnesses would not testify. These are not convictions.
Disputed within the Stateville case: at the 1986 hearing the defense offered hearsay evidence that H.M., not Brisbon, did the stabbing. The judge excluded it as unreliable and inconsistent with the physical evidence, including Brisbon's fingerprints on the knife.
Prison violence: Time's 1983 figure of 15 attacks and its statement that he instigated at least one riot come from the magazine's reporting; the 1989 opinion records that the State's witness on the 1979 takeover conceded Brisbon had tried to stop it and was never convicted over it. The William Jones stabbing rests on a guard's testimony that Jones himself contradicted.
Details that vary between sources: the spelling of Dorothy's surname (Cerney in Brisbon's appeal, Cerny in Sanders's); the weapon in the Stateville killing (a sharpened spoon in the court record, a sharpened soup ladle handle in Time); where Brisbon stabbed John Wayne Gacy (UPI in 2003 says Pontiac; Time placed Brisbon at Menard in early 1983) and when; the number of inmates covered by the 2003 commutation; and Devine's phrase that Brisbon "continued to kill" in prison, when he was convicted of one prison killing.
January 12, 1956: Henry Brisbon Jr. is born in Chicago, the third of 13 children.
1972: Illinois's death penalty is struck down.
June 3, 1973: Brisbon, David Sanders, Stanley Charleston and Darrell Thompson drive to Kankakee; on the way back along Interstate 57 a woman driver escapes, Betty Lou Harmon is killed in a cornfield, and Dorothy Cerney and James Schmidt are shot beside the highway.
October 1975: in Stateville, Brisbon describes the I-57 killings to inmate law librarian Robert E. Lee Jr., who passes the information to police through a medical technician.
After October 1975: Brisbon gives statements to state police and prosecutors.
1976: Charleston and Thompson are arrested; both plead guilty and agree to testify.
1977: Illinois restores the death penalty. A Cook County jury convicts Brisbon of the murders and armed robberies of Cerney and Schmidt; he is sentenced to 1,000 to 3,000 years.
October 19, 1978: in Stateville's B-East segregation unit, Brisbon takes guard Nobie Mercer hostage and fatally stabs inmate Richard "Hippie" Morgan.
1979: prison takeover at Stateville, in which Brisbon is later described as taking part.
February 13, 1980: David Sanders's convictions and 300 to 900 year sentences are affirmed.
September 26, 1980: Brisbon's I-57 murder and robbery convictions are affirmed; the conspiracy conviction is vacated.
February 24, 1982: judgment and death sentence entered in Will County for the Morgan murder.
Early 1980s: Brisbon stabs John Wayne Gacy in a prison fight, according to UPI.
January 24, 1983: Time publishes "I Didn't Like Nobody," an interview from the Menard Condemned Unit.
April 19, 1985: Illinois Supreme Court affirms the conviction, vacates the death sentence and orders a new sentencing hearing.
1986: a second Will County jury returns a death sentence.
May 24, 1989: Illinois Supreme Court affirms; execution set for November 21, 1989.
1990: United States Supreme Court denies review; post-conviction petition filed.
January 19, 1995: Illinois Supreme Court affirms dismissal of the petition; execution set for May 17, 1995.
January 11, 2003: Governor George Ryan announces the commutation of all Illinois death sentences; Brisbon's becomes life without parole.
2003: Scott Turow's Ultimate Punishment discusses the case.
2005: Richard A. Devine's reply in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.