Some people wait nearly their whole lives to find work they truly love. So it was with Lyndell Zinsmeister.
A few minutes later Robert Hudson and Carl McFadden walked in, and a third man, Harold Riggins, appeared in the doorway brandishing a shotgun. Hudson pulled a .38 revolver off his hip and announced, “This is a stickup.”
In 1967 prison sentences in Illinois were “indeterminate.” Even inmates like Hudson were entitled to parole and they usually received it. But in 1978 the sentencing system changed. The state shifted to determinate–or flat-time–sentences, and the possibility of parole vanished for everyone except already-sentenced prisoners like Robert Hudson. Inmates in Hudson’s position, called “C-numbers” for the letter that was the usual prefix to their prison ID numbers, remain eligible for parole. But the get-tough atmosphere has penetrated the state Prisoner Review Board, and they rarely get it.
As Hudson was shooting Lyndell Zinsmeister, a young man named Robert Neldon, his girlfriend, and a friend were eating lunch in their car, which was parked at a hamburger drive-in across the street. They watched Hudson and McFadden climb into the car Riggins was driving, then chased the car north into Chicago. Someone in Riggins’s vehicle busted out a back window and started shooting, hitting the radiator of Neldon’s 1960 Plymouth. Neldon kept on coming and pulled alongside the getaway car. When Hudson leveled a shotgun at him, “I drew back,” Neldon recalls, but he forced the stickup men into a dead-end alley in Morgan Park. They abandoned their car and raced away on foot. A police officer collared Hudson as he walked among schoolchildren near 115th and Laflin, and soon the other men were in custody as well.
Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, Hudson grew up in downstate Cairo in a family of nine children. His mother died when he was a young boy, and his father, a press foreman at a cooking-oil plant, dominated the household. “My dad was from the old school,” recalls Hudson. “He was a damn good father in many ways–he provided for us, and we never missed a meal. But he believed in strict everything. He used to beat me so bad I had welts on my body as big as a finger.” Robert also felt that his stepmother was uncaring. “I wanted to get away,” says Hudson, and he wasted not a second in doing so. At the age of 13, educated only to fifth grade, he took off for Toledo, passed himself off as 16, and got a job in a foundry. Soon he was laying track for the Santa Fe.
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His long waltz with crime and punishment began at age 14, when he was sent away for burglarizing a service station in Michigan. He did time first in a reformatory and then in the state prison at Jackson, which he describes as “a gladiator school really, where you had to prove how tough you were.” Released at 21, he returned to Cairo and married a teenage girl he met at a country store. Bertha and Robert Hudson migrated to Chicago and moved in with his older sister Lorraine in Woodlawn. The couple would have two sons, Robert Jr. and Milton, but they didn’t have much of a relationship. “He always stayed off to himself,” says Bertha, now a nurse’s assistant in Los Angeles. “He and I lived in the same house, but he’d only say a few words to me.”
Hudson went on trial that September in the courtroom of circuit court judge James Mejda. He was the only defendant; Riggins would be tried separately. Carl McFadden described the robbery attempt. Lou Debus told how he’d begged Hudson to spare Zinsmeister’s life. Hudson didn’t take the stand, and Lizak limited his defense to hints that the evidence left room for reasonable doubt.
