GRUESOME CRIME IS LATEST BLOW TO PROUD COMMUNITY
By Doug Moore

St. Louis Post-Dispatch,MO
Sept 27 2006

East St. Louis

Miles Davis grew up here.

This is where Tina Turner cut her teeth and met her then-husband,
Ike.

Katherine Dunham adopted this town as her own. Advertisement

The city’s pride and joy is Jackie Joyner-Kersee, billed as the
world’s greatest female athlete.

For all the big names that come with this small town, it’s the day-in
and day-out perception that East St. Louis is best known for: You
don’t want to be here after dark unless you’re looking for trouble.

But it’s also a town of fiercely proud people who say they love East
St. Louis, even when standing among a row of boarded-up houses and
weed-choked lots. They’re residents, usually the older set, who
remember when the town was a hub of activity. Jobs were plentiful.

Lawns were manicured. The National Municipal League in partnership
with Look magazine hailed East St. Louis as an All-America city 45
years ago.

Now, it’s a city that doesn’t make headlines unless the news is bad.

And usually it’s about murder and vote fraud.

The most recent headlines are almost too gruesome to believe. A woman
allegedly cut a fetus out of her good friend and left the friend,
Jimella Tunstall, to bleed to death. Then, police say, the suspect,
Tiffany Hall, led them to the bodies of her friend’s three children,
found stuffed in a washer and dryer. Police say they had been
drowned.

Unfortunately for a town that has hope for a turnaround, it’s far
from the first time the national spotlight has shined to reveal its
dark side.

Race riots in 1917 have left deep pocks in the city’s landscape and
given residents a wary eye on outsiders.

It was the same year that the violent death of a young boy jarred the
community and the country.

An Armenian baker complained to police that a house of prostitution
was being run next door. Soon after, his 3-year-old son, Alphonso
Magarian, went missing. Nine days later, the boy’s headless body was
found 100 yards away in a dump heap, according to "Race Riot at East
St. Louis," a book by historian Elliott Rudwick.

"Who could do such a thing?" was the outcry from the community then –
and now.

Police are not discussing a motive. Hall has been charged with
Tunstall’s murder and the death of the unborn child, but not the
three children. Other sensational crimes have bolstered the
perception that East St. Louis is a dangerous place. During the
course of several months in 2001, police found the bodies of eight
women who had been dumped there. Serial killer Maury Travis, of
Ferguson, was linked to at least three of them.

A decade earlier, a serial killer targeting children terrified the
city. Parents were afraid to let their children walk to school or
play in the yard. Lorenzo Fayne was convicted of killing six children
in and around East St. Louis from 1989 to 1993.

Eleven children died in a house fire in 1981 while their mother was
out gambling.

Heinous crimes are not the only blemishes that have put East St.

Louis on the national map. Buster Wortman, who died in 1968, ran the
Metro East operations for Chicago-based Al Capone. In the 1980s, with
the city in financial straits, trash collection was stopped. For
seven years, trash piles grew on vacant lots. Abandoned houses became
makeshift landfills. And in 1990, a judge gave City Hall to a man who
had been severely beaten in the city’s jail as a way to help satisfy
a $3.4 million judgment. Two years later, however, an appeals court
gave City Hall back to East St. Louis. A vote fraud case took down
two prominent politicos last year.

The town’s rise as a political powerhouse peaked in the 1950s, when
the population was more than 82,000. Today, countywide elections can
still be decided by East St. Louis voters, but the city’s steep
decline in population has lessened its influence. In 2000, the
population was 31,542, according to the U.S. census. Today, the
number is thought to be well below that.

Railroad jobs gave way to the construction of interstates, which were
built through the city and took down large chunks of neighborhoods.

Factories closed and moved elsewhere, and those who had the means to
move – mainly white families – moved with the jobs. It left a broken
city that has not yet been able to put itself together again.

"The headlines we see today are not all that different than they were
in the paper 50, 75 or 100 years ago," said Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville political science professor Andrew Theising,
who has written extensively on the city. "East St. Louis is exactly
what it was designed to be – a city that was designed to facilitate
profit, both legal and illegal."

He notes that the national award given to the city in 1960 was for
its turnaround of corruption, not for its model as an ideal place to
live.

"Even though some people have very pleasant memories that sound like
bedroom suburb memories, East St. Louis was never designed to deliver
that," Theising said.

Still, says Mayor Carl E. Officer, the brutal deaths of three
children and an expectant mother cannot be discounted as simply more
violence in this impoverished town.

"You don’t ever get used to it," said Officer, who also runs a
funeral home. "We really have to reflect on our faith. I don’t know
of anything else you can draw upon."