CHICAGO _ A man with a long prison stint in his background for attempted murder fatally shot a Cook County judge and wounded his girlfriend outside the judge's residence earlier this month, Chicago police said Thursday in announcing the first-degree murder charges.
At a news conference Thursday evening at police headquarters, Cmdr. Rodney Blisset, who heads the Area South detective bureau, released few details of the investigation but said detectives reviewed videos and compiled a timeline of events, leading to the arrest of Earl Wilson, 45.
Videos obtained by the Chicago Tribune did not show the actual shooting but provided glimpses of the gunman arriving on the scene in a red Pontiac Sunfire and fleeing on foot in an alley behind Associate Judge Raymond Myles' Far South Side home.
Wilson, who was arrested without incident at 5:08 p.m. Tuesday coming out of his Englewood neighborhood residence, has a criminal record dating to the early 1990s, Cook County court records show. He was sentenced in 1992 to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted murder and home invasion for stabbing a former girlfriend two years earlier, according to the records. He was released from prison in 2004.
The brazen attack on Myles, believed to be the first fatal shooting of a Chicago-area judge in more than three decades, touched off a massive, round-the-clock investigation by numerous detectives and their supervisors. The judge had worked for many years at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, the county's main criminal courthouse, winning respect as hardworking and friendly.
Wilson's arrest comes two weeks after authorities charged Joshua T. Smith, 37, as the alleged getaway driver in the attack on Myles and his girlfriend shortly before dawn April 10.
Smith's videotaped statements to police after his arrest assisted police in targeting Wilson as the suspected shooter, law enforcement sources told the Tribune.
Police also are investigating the possible involvement of a third person in the plot, the sources have said.
At the news conference, a reporter asked if police had additional suspects in the shooting.
"There's more work to be done," replied Blisset, declining to be more specific.
Blisset could not say how Wilson and Smith knew each other.
The Tribune has reported that police are looking into whether the judge's girlfriend was targeted in the attack for personal reasons. Smith is related to a former husband of the judge's girlfriend. She ended that marriage two years ago after discovering he might be a bigamist, and he later secured an emergency order of protection against her after alleging she had threatened to shoot him, court records show.
Police have said that shell casings found outside Myles' home matched ballistics evidence from an attempted armed robbery in the early morning hours three months earlier in Englewood. The Tribune has learned that attempted holdup _ in which the victim was shot and wounded _ took place on the same block where Wilson lives.
"It underscores the real problem of illegal guns that also are used over and over to cause havoc in some of our communities by individuals who also commit these crimes multiple times over," Blisset said.
Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson told reporters that Wilson "is no stranger to the criminal justice system," noting he served 12 years of the 18-year prison sentence for the 1992 attempted murder conviction. Since his release from prison in 2004, he's been arrested for vehicle theft, domestic battery and a weapons violation, Johnson said.
Wilson was convicted of possession of a stolen motor vehicle in 2009 and sentenced to three years in prison, according to court records.
During Smith's April 13 bond hearing, prosecutors disclosed that the killing of Myles, 66, a judge since 1999, had been hatched weeks earlier as a plot to rob his girlfriend, not to target the judge.
Prosecutors said the gunman had been tracking the movements of Myles' girlfriend for two to three weeks to learn her schedule. In a video statement to detectives, Smith said his partner lay in wait for the girlfriend before 5 a.m. April 10 after observing she regularly left the judge's home in the West Chesterfield neighborhood to work out early in the morning, according to prosecutors.
The gunman surprised the woman by the back garage of the two-story brick residence, shooting her in the left thigh, prosecutors said.
Apparently hearing the gunfire, Myles emerged onto the rear porch and confronted the gunman. He was shot five times and killed. The girlfriend, 52, survived.
Smith, who said he stayed in the getaway car in the alley behind the judge's house, told detectives he heard gunshots, then picked up the gunman and drove off. The gunman fled with only the woman's gym bag but tossed it away in anger when he discovered it contained no money, prosecutors said.
The gunman had been led to believe the judge's girlfriend might be carrying as much as $3,000, according to the sources.
The woman's purse was left behind at the crime scene with a gun inside it, according to law enforcement sources.
Smith was ordered held without bond on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated battery as well as a misdemeanor count of obstruction of a peace officer for allegedly instructing his ex-girlfriend and her daughter to lie to police for him. Police have said the ex-girlfriend owned the getaway car but did not know about the robbery plot.
Court records show that the judge's girlfriend had her marriage declared invalid in February 2015 after receiving information leading her to believe her husband, then 72, had been married to another woman when the two wed in Markham nearly 11 years earlier.
According to a transcript of court proceedings in February 2015, the judge's girlfriend testified she had only recently learned of her husband's alleged bigamous relationship when the other woman died.
Later, in August 2015, as part of the divorce case, the ex-husband obtained an emergency order of protection after alleging in court that his former wife had cursed at him and threatened to shoot him.
