It happened fast. Police officer Robert Perkins had stopped a man at the corner of 61st and Wabash. It was 10:30 in the morning on March 7, 1992. Perkins suspected him of burglary.
As the intersection filled with squad cars, Eldridge Smith, a fellow Third District officer, moved close to his downed friend and spoke into his ear. An ambulance arrived and the paramedics went to work.
Ramona Perkins, a student at Lindblom High School, lived with her father in Prairie Shores, and they were extraordinarily close. She’d been out shopping. She came home to find the answering machine pulsing with messages. By the time her mother arrived the girl was inconsolable. “You can’t understand,” Ramona said through her tears. “Your daddy is alive. Mine is dead.”
Soon Wallace Davis arrived. Stanley took him into the bathroom and repeated the confession. “Oh, Stan, you must have been out of your mind,” said Wallace. “Turn yourself in, man, turn yourself in.” When Stanley Davis called and told his mother, Dorothy Collins, Darring knew for sure the story was true. “Bring me my son,” Dorothy Collins told him.
Wallace Senior worked for a while as a presser at a cleaners, a job arranged by his mother, Hattie Davis, the family matriarch. Hattie was one of the first female black supervisors at the main post office and is still remembered there. Known for her proper manners and expensive clothes, Hattie set high standards for her female staff. “She expected a certain standard of dress, or you didn’t work,” says Rosetta Johnson, now the post office’s personnel manager. “She used to get on my case about my miniskirts. I remember one day borrowing a long smock that fell below my knees just so that Miss Davis wouldn’t say anything to me.”
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“We were mischievous, just like other kids that age,” says Richard Thomas, now a janitor with the CTA. “We used to cut school and steal stuff. We hung out and had fun–life wasn’t serious then.” Another Valley Boy, Glover Jones, now a landscaping contractor, describes Bob as intensely loyal. “He picked his friends carefully, but if you were one of them you knew it.” For a time the two of them worked at a shoeshine parlor at 35th and Wallace. One day Jones told Perkins he was planning to take his girlfriend to the Riverview amusement park but was short of money. Perkins “gave me $12, which was a lot at the time,” Jones recalls, “and he never asked for the money back.”
