On the afternoon of August 13, 1973, Judith Elaine Ott, twenty-eight, visiting Chicago from Seattle with her husband and their child, went into a public washroom in Grant Park. Her husband, David, waiting nearby, heard her screaming and got to the door in time to see a man coming out with a knife in his hand. He chased him down and, with a couple of park employees, held him until the police came. Judith Ott had been stabbed to death inside. The man was Lester Harrison, fifty-one, who had been arrested at least ten times before, had killed a man in prison twenty-two years earlier, and had been set free by every system that had held him.
Harrison was born in Mississippi on June 7, 1922, into a family with several brothers and sisters. Little else is known about his early life beyond the fact that he began to show signs of mental illness in the late 1930s, around the time he began committing small crimes. Other published accounts give his birth year as 1933, but his wartime draft record and the ages given in the 1970s and 1980s all fit 1922. In 1945 he was convicted of robbery in Illinois and sentenced to five to ten years, which he served at the Southern Illinois Penitentiary at Menard, near Chester.
On August 10, 1951, a fellow prisoner, Norman E. Kimme, was found in the engine room of one of the prison buildings, his head beaten in with an iron rod. Kimme was twenty-eight, a Navy veteran serving fourteen years for killing his girlfriend. Harrison admitted the killing and was charged with murder. The Randolph County State's Attorney, John Heuer, argued that he had been sane when he killed and when he confessed, but in January 1952 Judge Quentin Spivey found him insane and sent him to the security hospital at Menard instead of to trial. Some later accounts describe this as an acquittal by reason of insanity; the contemporary report is of a finding that he was insane, with no trial held.
The hospital eventually pronounced him cured and released him, its staff satisfied that he was no longer a danger. What followed was a run of eight more arrests between the late 1950s and early 1971: theft, attempted armed robbery, unlawful possession of a weapon, assault, public indecency. Four ended in short prison terms and two in fines. Twice more he was found unfit for trial and sent to psychiatric wards. He lived on disability checks, drank heavily, collected pornographic photographs and films, and spent much of his free time in Grant Park looking for women.
In early 1971, arrested for theft under the name Sylvester B. Hudson, he was examined again. The psychiatrist, Dr. Edward J. Kelleher, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia but found him fit to stand trial, and he was convicted and sentenced to a year and eighteen months, then released in the courtroom on time already served in the Cook County Jail. He also used the name James Bonde. A Chicago Tribune investigation after his arrest in 1973 laid out how many times the courts and hospitals had had him and let him go.
The first of the Grant Park killings was blamed on someone else. On the evening of July 19, 1970, Agnes Lehmann, forty-six, a homeless woman from the skid row district, was found raped and beaten to death in the park. The same night Wilbur McDonald, thirty-one, a factory worker with no criminal record, was found unconscious elsewhere in the park with a fractured skull and most of his teeth knocked out, and said he had been beaten and robbed as he crossed the grounds. His shoes were found a few feet from Lehmann's body. On circumstantial evidence he was convicted of her murder and sentenced to 150 years.
Judith Betteley, twenty-four, an architect from Stoke-on-Trent in England who was visiting Chicago, was found raped and beaten to death in the park on September 5, 1972, over the Labor Day weekend, near the bandshell. Some accounts spell her name Bettelley. On September 28, three weeks later, Harrison was arrested for hitting a woman named Cozetta Gladys with a concrete brick on a Chicago street, and was released on $5,000 bond despite his record. Irene Koutros was raped and stabbed to death in the park's underground garage in July 1973, and on August 3 Lee Alexis Wilson, twenty-four, an art student from California at the Art Institute of Chicago, was killed and mutilated. A piece of flesh had been cut from one victim and taken away. Ten days after Wilson's death, drunk, and straight from a pornographic film, Harrison walked into the park and attacked Judith Ott.
At the police station he began to talk. He confessed to killing Ott, Lehmann, Betteley and Wilson, and gave details that only the investigators then knew. He said he had taken the missing flesh home and eaten it. In his apartment detectives found the women's belongings and body hair sealed in envelopes with newspaper clippings about the killings. Police also tried to connect him to the deaths of Irene Koutros and of Elizabeth Dawson; he denied any part in either. Both women had lived next door to him. Accounts disagree on when they died: one puts both deaths in August 1972, another places Koutros's in July 1973. Neither killing was ever charged to him. By the end of August 1973 he had been charged with four murders.
His confession to the Lehmann killing freed Wilbur McDonald. The Cook County State's Attorney agreed to his release, and he walked out on August 15, 1973, two days after Harrison's arrest. His conviction was treated as a miscarriage of justice, and Governor Dan Walker pardoned him and apologized to him formally. McDonald sued the state for five million dollars; the court awarded fifteen thousand, then the most Illinois law allowed for a wrongful imprisonment.
Harrison was never tried in the ordinary way. Psychologists who examined him after the confessions called him a schizophrenic lust murderer. He was found unfit for trial, and in 1978 was found not guilty by reason of insanity of one of the killings (some accounts say of all of them) and committed under the Sexually Dangerous Persons Act, a rarely used Illinois statute that held him until he could be shown to be no longer sexually dangerous. Prosecutors and the doctors assumed he would never be released.
In 1986 he nearly was. That January an old spinal injury left him almost completely paralyzed, and in May his assistant public defenders, Thomas Reynolds and W. Jameson Kunz, asked the Cook County Criminal Court to release him, arguing that a man of sixty-three who could not move was a danger to no one. They said the Illinois Department of Corrections supported the motion, since his medical care cost more than $184,000 a year. The hearing was set before Judge James M. Bailey. The State's Attorney's office answered with testimony that he still had movement in his hands and fingers, and hospital staff described his continuing sexual behavior toward nurses. The court ordered an independent neurological examination, and his sister and nephew wrote to the judge, without signing their names, asking that he be kept locked up.
In August 1986 the petition was withdrawn. Therapy had brought back enough movement for him to walk on crutches, which ended the argument that he was harmless, and he stayed confined in a psychiatric hospital. No reliable report of his later life or death has appeared since. Five killings rest on his own admissions, not one of them on a verdict, and the man first convicted of the Lehmann murder served three years for it.