Perry Cobb and Darby Tillis were arrested in Chicago in 1977. They were charged with the armed robbery and murder of Melvin Kanter and Charles Guccion at a North Side hot-dog stand. Cobb and Tillis would be tried a total of five times, more than any other persons in U.S. judicial history, and would serve nine years in prison, four of those on Death Row. In their fifth trial in 1987 both men would be exonerated and released. Earlier this winter we got a chance to hear from Perry Cobb and offer some of his thoughts and memories to you. He begins on the day of the arrest.
Things were going well. I was a professional entertainer in Chicago and my contract was up with the Creations, formerly known as the Debtones. I had been working with Minnie Ripperton, Sydney Barns, and Lou Barns, along with a fabulous drummer, Fufu. Dorothy Layne, with the Rolls Royce, was also connected with us. I had just completed a book of songs, the arrangements were there—everything. All that was left was recording them.
I remember what I was doing the day I was arrested. I was waiting for Minnie Rippington and Camilla Lang to pick me up at the hotel where I was staying. They were visiting from California, and we were going to drive to the West Coast together. I like scenery and the outdoors, so I was looking forward to this.
On that particular day, I was taking a bath when there was a knock on the door. I answered as loud as I could but they didn’t seem to hear me. They knock again, so I put on my terry-cloth towel and go for the door. The next thing I know, men are rushing in with guns like I’ve never seen in my life. As a child, I had always been a fan of Westerns; I liked Westerns and action movies. I didn’t particularly care for love or comedy or scenes of that nature. Well, these men had more weapons drawn than I had ever seen.
I dove on the bed trying to get away from them, and the next thing I know, I have guns not just around my head but up against my head. I was ordered to get up off the bed, then snatched up and pushed out into the hall. They ripped my towel off so I was standing there totally naked. One of the men had his weapon at the base of my skull. I heard him click the hammer back—a very frightening sound. He was saying, “You did it, you n———-.”
“Did what? What did I do?” No one would answer. They just told me to be quiet, not to make any noise.
So I started making as much noise as I could to bring attention to what was happening. Doors opened and neighbors began to come into the hall. I asked them to please follow these men who said they were policemen. There were no uniforms; these were all guys in plainclothes. I wanted to be followed. They said they were taking me to the police station, but they wouldn’t tell me why. They just kept saying that I did it. It was awful.
This policeman with the gun at the back of my head pulled it down and holstered it. They brought me some pants—they didn’t allow me to put on any underwear. Then they pulled a shirt out, and when I put it on, they put on the handcuffs. I had some money on the lamp table along with a watch and a ring. The watch had been sold to me by Jim Smith, who later turned out to be one of the state’s witnesses against me. At the time I didn’t know anything about that, other than the fact that I’d bought a watch from him.
At the police station they interrogated me but wouldn’t tell me what I was being locked up for. They had typed up some papers that they wanted me to sign. The papers stated that I had seen three guys going into this certain restaurant late at night and I could identify these men. They offered me money to do this. I wouldn’t because I hadn’t seen anyone. And I didn’t hang out on the streets; I was not a drinker or a drugger.
I had a lot of fun going to dances and parties when I was a kid. But since my livelihood was entertainment, I had no reason to want to pursue that life other than the fact that I was working. Not that I am a goody-two-shoes. I was involved with different discrepancies as a child growing up; I made mistakes. But I was not the person to go around robbing and killing people.
At the police station there was this man in the next room calling out, “Fifi! Fifi!” A few people called me that so I answered, “Who is that?” He answered, “This is Frenchie.” I knew a man by the name of Frenchie who was a good artist. He said, “They got us locked up for the same thing.”
I thought, “How does he know why I’m here? I don’t know why I’m here myself.” Frenchie told me we were locked up for supposedly having robbed and killed two people in this restaurant on the North Side. I told him that they had offered me money to sign papers saying I had seen three other guys go in there and come out. He said, “They didn’t offer me any money.” Then they separated us.
The interrogators tried to break me down. They told me that Frenchie said he had seen me do it. Next they came back with, “This watch we found in your room belonged to one of the victims. Where did you get it?” I didn’t believe them so I wouldn’t tell them anything. They left me handcuffed to the radiators and the handcuffs got extremely hot.
Later, I told my attorney where I got that watch and why I wouldn’t tell the police. I couldn’t trust them the way they had treated me.
Cook County
Finally they took us over to Cook County Jail. I believe that it was a day or two later that this fellow named Darby showed up. He told me, “I got the same case as you got.” Somehow, they had hooked me up with these two people, Darby Tillis and Earl Grant [Frenchie]. We weren’t friends. We weren’t associates. We had nothing in common except that we were human beings. Darby is a black man and I am a black man. Earl Grant is a white man. Not that the color made a difference, but the fact of the matter is that we were almost strangers. I had not seen either of them more than a couple of times in my life.
Things were tense between us three in County. No one of us knew if the other two were guilty and going to turn state’s evidence. They wound up offering us all money at different times to testify that the other two were involved. None of us would do it. The thing that probably saved us was that we all had similar morals and principles and none of us would agree to turn on the others.
Eventually they severed us from Earl Grant, the white boy, and the state made it a black-on-white crime with Darby Tillis and me as the robbers.
Through out the five trials the state’s case against Cobb and Tillis stood on three points: 1) A watch originally belonging to one of the victims was found in Cobb’s possession: Perry Cobb states he bought this watch from the boyfriend of the state’s witness, Jane Doe; 2) The testimony of Doe, who under a grant of immunity testified that she had been the driver for Cobb and Tillis; 3) The evolving testimony of a single eyewitness, Arthur Sheilds, “who testified at the first trial that he ‘didn’t see the faces too well—not well enough to walk up and say, “He’s the man.” At the second trial, the eyewitness was more confident, testifying, “They look like them.” Finally, at the third trial, the eyewitness testified, “I know these are the faces I saw.” ‘ “
The First Trial
They took us over to Thirteenth and Michigan for the first trial. The state’s star witness was Jane Doe. Her story was that we had ridden around with her for hours in her car, then she had dropped us off to rob these two gentlemen. She testified that we said there would be a lot of money there. Supposedly she had met us through her boyfriend, Jim Smith. This was the same guy who sold me the watch that linked me to the murders. I only knew him by JS. He was supposed to have introduced Darby Tillis and me. Doe said she took us to the place to rob it, and she waited while we supposedly robbed these two older men and killed them. She said we forced her into it: that I pulled her hair and called her names and threatened her with guns and all this crazy stuff.
Her story didn’t make sense. She meets these two strangers and she rides them around in her automobile for two and three hours while they’re planning to murder someone and rob them. They then leave her to go and commit a crime, and she’s stays there and waits while they do it, then lets these murdering strangers back in the car. Who would do that? But this is what she said.
The state brought in its other witness, Arthur Sheilds. He testified that we were the ones he had seen. But on cross-examination he stated that he had never said that we were the men, but that we looked like the men. That first trial turned out to be a hung jury: eleven to one, eleven in favor of conviction. The one holdout was a black man from Mississippi.
The Second Trial
While we were waiting for the second trial, they brought Earl Grant in. He had bruises and cuts. When we talked to him, he told us they had worked him over trying to get him to say Darby and I did this thing. They wanted him to testify against us. He wouldn’t do it so they brought him over and threw him back in with us. They told him he was going be executed right along with us. He still refused to cooperate with them, period.
The second trial was again held at Thirteenth and Michigan. When the trial started, there in the spectators’ section sat the black juror from our first trial, and he had his family with him. The state’s attorney looked around and saw him and stopped the trial. They dismissed the jury, had them go into another room. Then they brought this man up and asked him why was he in the courtroom. He told them that he had been a juror on the first trial and that he’d become interested in the case. He wanted his family to witness this because he’d never seen anything like it in his life. They accused this man of trying to communicate with the new jury and forced him to leave.
In this trial, Arthur Sheilds testified for the state that at there was a great difference in height in the two men he had seen. One man was approximately 6 feet 11 inches and the other guy was about 5 feet 8 inches or 5 feet 9 inches. The taller man had a full beard. I had been picked out as the taller man. At this time I didn’t have much facial hair; I couldn’t grow a beard like that. I just had a little mustache and goatee.
Addressing the 6 feet 11 inch, 5 feet 8 inch descriptions, which meant over a foot difference in the heights of the killers, our attorney had us take off our shoes and stand. There was maybe an inch and a half difference between Darby Tillis’s height and mine. They had grabbed two men that were relatively the same height and neither of us was close to 6 feet 11 inches.
During this whole nightmare, Darby and I were suspicious of each other. I was not certain whether he had done it or not, but I knew for a fact that it wasn’t me. And I could understand how he was unsure of me because I was known to fight in jail and such. But when we stood there with this man saying 6 feet 11 inches and 5 feet 9 inches, and here we were both about the same height, he looked at me and we knew they were lying about both of us.
Next the fingerprint evidence came out: fingerprints that they got off the cash register, and someplace in the wall where money had been hidden, and on the counter. The fingerprints did not match either of us. No match on the prints and the height difference didn’t fit, but the prosecutors still went on. It didn’t matter to them. They had a black-on-white crime and they were stuck on doing it to Darby Tillis and me. So we had another hung jury.
What did they do? They kept going. They transferred our case to Twenty-sixth and California to Judge Joe Maloney. At the third trial all evidence from the first two trials and all testimonies were given via transcripts to Judge Maloney, so he was quite familiar with the case. He had to have seen that there were a lot of inconsistencies in the first two trials.
On that third trial there was an all-white jury. They faced two black men charged with robbing and killing two old white gentlemen. A lot of the public had no sympathy for two black men charged with things of this nature. Now, I can understand that. I don’t care what color you are, if evidence has shown that you did something of that nature, that cruel, to anyone, I don’t care if you are green, white, yellow, or the last colored person in the world—if you did something like that you should pay for it. But I knew that Darby and I were innocent.
The Third Trial
It turns out that Sheilds, the eyewitness, who in the earlier trials said we might be the men in the earlier trials, had been looking through extra thick bifocals from one store window into another store window. Now imagine the problem: it’s dark outside, and the person has bifocals on and is looking from one window into another window forty-five feet away. I’m a dark complexioned man and so is Darby Tillis; how could this person accurately distinguish who those men were? Yet, in this trial he changed his testimony. He stated that he had never said we looked like the men, but rather that he knew we were the men. They brought back the transcripts of the first two trials in which he testified that there was a large height difference in the two men. He changed his mind on that also. This witness, had at one time, said in court that all blacks looked alike to him, and then had tried to take those words back. The court allowed these things to happen. They ignored the fingerprints; the lack of fingerprints didn’t matter anymore. They bought this man’s new certainty and Doe’s story about driving us to the place. They found us guilty and sentenced us to death.
So in ’79, after three trials, they took us to Statesville, to Death Row. We went through some really rough stuff there, especially those of us on Death Row that were doing law work, helping other prisoners with their cases. Things like finding ground-up glass in our food.
Soon after that, the whole Statesville Death Row was transferred to Menard. The guys that worked there on Death Row called us mummies. They didn’t call us by the number or the name; they just called us mummies. Like “that mummy is in cell 8,” or “the mummies in cell 5 and cell 4 have been communicating.” This is how they referred to us. We were no longer human beings. I didn’t like it, period. I had a name. I let them know that none of their rules and regulations applied to me because these rules were for a person who was guilty and I had committed no crime.
They thought I was crazy because I would not comply. And I held to that all the time I was locked up. They decided I just didn’t have any sense. But it wasn’t that. It was the fact that I was there for something I didn’t do, and I was not going to comply because I didn’t belong there.
At Menard there were problems. There was an inquiry where they found one of the guards was hooked up with the Klansmen. Another guard was suspended for providing white boys with knives because they were going to have some kind of black-and-white war. These are factual things that are on record. What I didn’t understand is why they would allow such men to work Death Row.
In working on our appeal we needed certain law books. These books were the lifeline to our appeals. So we filed a petition to get a librarian who would distribute the books without favoritism. We had to have that stuff to educate ourselves, to fight to show our innocence That’s the type of person I am today. I don’t have any problem asking questions. I feel good when I’m learning. I haven’t met any man or woman that knows everything. If all the men and women on earth put what they knew together they still could not make one grain of sand or one blade of grass.
Four years on Death Row: Statesville, Menard, and finally Pontiac. Just before being transferred to Pontiac I had a dream. God was involved in it, a dream that our innocence would come out. We had filed our appeal on that third trial. You see, our lawyers had a witness that had been a friend of Doe and Smith. This witness was prepared to testify that we hadn’t been involved but that Doe, her boyfriend Jim Smith, and a tall black man had. Judge Maloney refused to allow this testimony. Our lawyers read this into the record at that third trial. We based our appeal on this testimony. We still had no idea whether we had won our appeal or not. So many men made their appeals and got rejected. We won that appeal. They overturned the conviction and sent us back to County.
Sometime after this, Thomas J. Maloney was “convicted of taking bribes in criminal cases. At his trial, witnesses testified that he was tough on defendants who had not bribed him in order to divert suspicion that he was taking bribes in other cases.”
No human being in America is supposed to be tried more than once for the same offense. The catch is this: if there is a mistrial then that rule doesn’t apply. We had two mistrials, which allowed them to try us three times and come up with the conviction. After the conviction there is an appeal. We won the appeal. This enabled them to try us again. There are no words to paint this type of mess. I think it would take the devil and his tribe to come up with the words for expressing this.
They tried us for the fourth time and the jury came back six to six. Mistrial. Here we go again.
The Fifth Trial
In the fifth trial a prosecuting attorney from Will County came forward. The man’s name was Falconer. It seems that as a young law student he had worked with Jane Doe and did babysitting for her children. Remember she was the state’s star witness. Back then she had confessed to Falconer that her boyfriend and another person had committed a crime; they had robbed and killed these people. She said her boyfriend was the one that did the shooting. She also told him that they had two black men locked up for it, and she laughed.
At the time Falconer didn’t believe her. But he came across an article about our overturned trial in one of his lawyer journals. He saw Doe’s name and remembered her story. He then called the lawyers that were representing Darby and me. I was real leery about him. I thought this was another treacherous trick. It took a while to convince me to allow this man to testify. Our lawyers sent a third-party lawyer, some investigators, and a clergyman to witness Falconer’s testimony. They had it on tape, and I listened to it over and over before I said yes. I had never heard of a state’s attorney coming forward to testify for a defendant. But he did come forth and he did testify.
If Falconer hadn’t seen that article, who knows? Unless God had another plan. But he did see it. They also convinced me to take a bench trial [a trial before a judge rather than a jury] because each time we had a jury we had a mistrial. It was twelve minds or one. The judge is just one man making this decision and he’s a white man and we’re black and they are accusing us of killing white people. I finally said whatever is going to be is going to be. I was born and I have to die just like everyone. We went with the judge. Jim Smith came up and testified for the first time; Jane Doe was nowhere in sight. They found out that the state’s attorney paid her into the thousands of dollars for her testimony. They had bought her new clothes and relocated her because she said that she was in fear of her life. But we’re the ones that were falsely accused and locked up.
I can’t really express the pain—but I know it destroyed my family. My children grew up without a father. Some terrible things happened to my youngest twin daughter. I can’t really express the pain—my youngest twin daughter was eleven years and eight days old was a guy twenty-six years of age raped her for five hours. Tore her up. Another one of my kids got shot. And I was locked up, unable to do anything. Things have happened that I won’t get over the rest of my life. Worst of all is that my children and I don’t really know each other; we just know each other. I can’t look at a child of mine and sense there is something wrong . . . and that’s a bad thing.
Anyway, the testimony of Will County state’s attorney Falconer and the fact that it wasn’t our fingerprints along with height difference was in our favor. Arthur Sheilds, the witness who had changed his testimony so often, had died. The state had found Jim Smith and cleaned him up. He came to testify for the first time. I think the judge frightened him when he said the state’s witnesses knew more about the crime than the investigators had found out. I didn’t know anything, Darby Tillis didn’t know anything, and Earl Grant didn’t know anything, but Smith and Doe did. Then our lawyer asked the judge why they didn’t take Jim Smith’s fingerprints. The state’s attorneys got him out of there real fast.
So, that is the case. The judge found us innocent—not guilty! And all that time we’d been locked up. Nine years in prison, four on Death Row. All that we’d gone through. Darby Tillis’s daughter was also raped and shot. It’s a lot. A whole lot. And the stigma is still ours. We are earmarked for the rest of our lives. I don’t care what they say about them taking it off the record. They can’t take it out of the paper. They can’t take it out of people’s minds. It was all on TV, in newspapers, magazines. We can’t remove lies that were put in print and photographs. You can’t do that. You can’t take it out of people’s hearts.
My youngest daughter carried around my photograph, a couple albums, three or four records, and a half-written letter to show that her daddy was an entertainer, a singer. Not a murderer. But parents would not allow their children to play with mine because of what they had read. I think it had a lot to do with my grandfather’s heart attack, and my grandmother . . . I never saw my grandparents ever again. I had four of them left. I came back and had none.
My baby sister died two weeks after I got home. I never had a chance to see her, except in the casket. Then my daddy died and then my mother. It’s still hard on me. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. Not one day. That’s about it. As far as feelings, I can’t describe my feelings to you, and I wouldn’t dare tell you that I’m not bitter, because bitter can’t express it. I’ll tell you this much: there’s no amount of money they could give me for what they’ve done to me and my family. And to this day they haven’t given me one dime.
I try and get along the best I can. I look at people and I don’t hate them because of the color of their skin. I don’t hate anymore. I hated so bad when I was on Death Row it almost killed me. I know I had knots in my stomach as big as golf balls from the hatred. And I was told that if I didn’t get rid of that it was going to kill me. God helped me to get rid of the hate, but it took a long time. Not a day goes past that I don’t have some feeling, some memory about things that happened to me and my family during that time.

First published in Cornerstone (ISSN 0275-2743), Vol. 30, Issue 121 (2001), pg. 10.
© 2001 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.
Electronic version may contain minor changes and corrections from printed version.