- Aaaaah, Prison Life -
- Paperboy2000 -
Thursday, July 30, 1998
APC News Service
Bragging to an undercover FBI agent that he was a mob hit man
did not do much for Ronald Tellez' law enforcement career.
Tellez still wears a blue uniform, but has traded his Blue Island
police star number 150 for prisoner number N-98894.
It's been a decade since Tellez was charged by his own police
department for being a contract killer.
Those involved in the case have scattered, changed names and
jobs, but they generally agree the Tellez story was something
normally seen on the big screen, not played out in Blue Island.
"There was a certain element of Hollywoodness to his case,"
remembers Andrea Lyon, an attorney who defended Tellez on one
of the murder charges.
Tellez, 42, is now living at the Pontiac Correctional Center in a
room where he can stretch his arms and touch the walls.
He is serving a life sentence for the 1986 murder of Blue Island
businessman George Mueller.
He was also convicted for the 1984 murder of South Bend, Ind.,
businessman Harold Rowley, and has been investigated for the
disappearance of Rowley's stepson, Gary Kessen, who hasn't been
seen since 1985.
Despite the murder convictions, Tellez maintains that he was
framed and contacts newspapers to proclaim his innocence.
His appeals to date have been denied, but he still tries to tell his
story — one that many, including a jury, have had trouble believing.
Murderers often return to the scene of the crime, said former Blue
Island Police Chief Paul Dennis Greves.
But rarely are they wearing a police uniform when they do.
When the call came in on March 29, 1986, that George Mueller,
58, had been found shot three times, Tellez was among the first
officers to report to Mueller's vending machine business on
Western Avenue.
Initially, Mueller's children believed their father was killed in a
robbery attempt. The family business had been a crime target
before, said son Randy Mueller.
But the robbery theory was dropped once it was discovered that
George Mueller had secretly married Constantina Branco, a
woman nearly 30 years his junior, who stood to gain financially
from his death.
She became a suspect, especially when police discovered she went
on a cruise after the murder, Greves said.
Several months later, a state police detective visited Greves to tell
him they had information that an officer, someone named "Tayez,"
was the shooter. Tellez pronounces his name "Tell-ez."
"Looking back, I don't believe I felt then that it was possible,"
Greves said.
To keep an eye on him, Greves reassigned Tellez, whom he
remembers as an intelligent man and a good officer, but a bit of a
"hot dog."
While Greves was not entirely convinced Tellez was the shooter, he
nonetheless could not help but react differently to him.
Meanwhile, Connie Branco Mueller had grown scared.
She visited her mob-connected father, who was serving time in a
California federal prison for counterfeiting.
Connie's father, John Branco, contacted the FBI.
"I was worried about this screwball cop killing my daughter and her
children," Branco testified during the trial.
Connie later would plead guilty to paying Tellez less than $1,000 to
kill Mueller for the insurance money.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and paroled in 1992.
Tellez knew from Connie that Branco had mob ties, so he agreed
to meet Branco at a tavern, where an undercover FBI agent taped
Tellez talking about the murders.
"I need no reasons. I don't get personal. I don't get involved. I just
do the operation accordingly," Tellez tells Branco on the tapes.
He brags of leading covert operations into South America and
about being the second officer on the scene of Mueller's murder.
With the tapes, the state's attorney's office moved in on Tellez. On
July 15, 1987, Greves arrested him.
What troubles Greves about the case is the time his department
spent investigating before Tellez was named a suspect.
In daily meetings, investigators would list their thoughts about the
case on a chalkboard. All the officers could see that chalkboard in
the police station.
"One day, Ron Tellez walked in, and there were our thoughts on
the board," Greves recalls.
"He probably walked out laughing."
But to hear Tellez tell the story, he was actually undercover trying
to crack the case when he made the incriminating statements on the
tapes.
"I did not kill Mueller. I got nothing to do with this guy in Indiana. I
never met him," Tellez said during a recent interview in prison.
"I lied. I actually lied in the tapes," he said, digging through his
stack
of legal papers to point out discrepancies in what he said on the
tapes and what actually happened.
And he contends he was set up to take the blame from the real
killer.
But why say that he killed someone if he didn't?
"I was trying to obtain evidence from them so I can run to the feds
and say I got this guy," he said.
The details he provided about the Mueller murder were
well-known facts that any officer would know about a murder in his
town, Tellez said.
He points out parts of the tape transcripts that he said don't match
up, like testimony Connie gave that Tellez had a black Corvette
when they planned the murder.
Tellez brings out papers showing he did not purchase the black
Corvette until three months after Mueller's murder.
He claims that he suspected Connie was involved in Mueller's
death from the beginning and that he was trying to get close to her
father to gain her trust.
With her father's trust, Tellez hoped he could find out what they
knew, solve the case and finally be promoted to detective.
Tellez said he didn't tell anyone in the department about his
undercover work because he didn't trust them.
The other officers didn't trust Tellez because of his "showboat"
attitude, Greves said.
Tellez said he spent the night before the murder on the set of "Light
of Day," a movie starring Michael J. Fox that was filmed in Blue
Island in the spring of 1986.
"If I was going to plan to kill Mr. Mueller, why would I be up there
with the guys from 'Light of Day' with Michael J. Fox and his
double?" he asks, his eyes large from behind his glasses.
Tellez said he worked a day shift the day of Mueller's murder, went
home, slept, showered, then reported to work again at 10:30 p.m.
When the call came in, Tellez says he was handling a disturbance at
7-11.
He reported to the murder scene and escorted Mueller's brother
away from the building.
Tellez claims he hadn't heard from Connie in months when Mueller
was murdered.
"I'm not an assassin. To prove my innocence is hard enough, but if I
was the kind of guy they thought I was, no way. I would have had
(expletive) scope weapons, things that ..." he said, flinging his arms
to show them empty.
The case of a police officer turned hit man was not one you forget,
said Illinois Appellate Court Judge Patrick Quinn, who was one of
the prosecutors on the Mueller case.
"It would seem bizarre and farfetched if it weren't true," he said.
Tellez's defense attorney, Andrea Lyon, agreed that it seemed an
unlikely story.
She recalls the jury's reaction.
"They were laughing out loud at him, and not because it was
amusing," she said.
"The stuff he was saying sounded so preposterous to them."
But no one else could put forth that testimony, she said.
Tellez escaped the death penalty after jurors deadlocked at his
sentencing hearing.
Now, several years later, Lyon remembers Tellez as someone who
read too many Robert Ludlum books, popular spy novels in which
everyone is pretending to be someone else.
"I was an administrator in the army, a very good one," Tellez says,
pulling out a blue file folder filled with certificates, awards and
evaluations.
He was stationed at Fort Ord, Calif. ,from 1975 to 1978.
After his discharge, Tellez returned to Blue Island, where he had
been raised with his older brother and sister.
In an equally bizarre story, his brother was arrested by undercover
FBI agents in 1986 for taking part in a plot to overthrow the
government of the small South American country of Surinam.
Tellez says he doesn't keep in touch much with his brother, or the
daughter and son he had during a six-year marriage.
His son is now in prison on charges of attempted murder. In 1992,
at the age of 18, Justin Tellez pleaded guilty to charges that he
stabbed his girlfriend 21 times after an argument.
Tellez's mother and sister visit sometimes. "I can't tell you how
hurtful it is to have them sit across from you here," he said,
gesturing out the window to the barbed-wire-encased prison yard.
"I knew so many people in Blue Island. If you were in my squad
car and we drove down Western Avenue, all you'd do is this, 'Hi,
how you doing?'" he says, waving his hands.
Randy Mueller remembers Tellez driving around in his squad car.
"As far as I remember, he seemed to be pretty normal," said
Mueller, now 34.
He was surprised to hear that after all this time, Tellez was still
proclaiming his innocence.
Since the murder, Mueller has tried to put the tragedy behind him
through heart-to-heart talks with friends and family.
But their father's absence was especially noticed at a July 4th family
reunion this year, said Rick Mueller, Randy's older brother.
"I wish my dad was there," he said.
Behind the prison walls, Tellez is known as "Rocco," a name he
picked up while boxing at Illinois' Menard Correctional Center.
"Prison is a bad place. Everybody knew I was a cop. They tried to
kill me in the shower one time," he said.
"After that, I ran to my cell, not panicked. I left my door open as a
sign that I would stand up."
He is in protective custody at Pontiac. Because of the training
Tellez had as a police officer, prison officials say he is labeled a
high escape risk, a designation of which he seems proud.
His days now are filled with his 90 minutes of daily "yard," lifting
weights, playing handball, watching TV, listening to the radio and
reading his law books.
He works in the prison law library during his allotted time, building
his case through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Despite his life sentence, prisoner # N-98894 still entertains ideas
of regaining his badge.
"If you're a cop and you make a felony arrest, you can't sleep for a
couple days because that's a high like you would not believe. It's
better than sex," he said, his voice growing louder.
"You're involved in a shooting, it's better than sex. You can't sleep
for two or three days."
"The badge, it's you," he said.
Some question what that badge really meant to Tellez in light of his
murder conviction.
It was the movie "Serpico" with Al Pacino as an officer fighting
police corruption that first inspired Tellez to become a cop.
Patrolling the streets of Blue Island for nine years, he aspired to
become a detective, just as New York City cop Frank Serpico did
in the 1973 movie.
Tellez likens himself to Pacino's Serpico, an honest cop following
the rules.
Others say he has trouble distinguishing fact from fiction and that he
is more like the cops in the movie who abused the public's trust.
Whoever he saw himself as, the person now left in his place is
"Rocco."
"In here, I'm nice," Tellez says, referring to the meeting room
situated away from the rest of the prison. "Out there, I'm Rocco."
"Maybe deep in here I'm still a police officer," he said, motioning to
his chest. "I'm a hard-core convict now."
Tom Alciere
as evidence in court? If I claim that it was I, not Oswald, that killed
Kennedy, and I'm not under oath, there's no law against that.
Only if the statements reveal knowledge that only the killer COULD know,
should they be evidence.
Tom
--
Bill Lindemann
Good question. And the article, as posted, gives little information about the
evidence used to convict the cop. But think about it. It's hard enough to get
a cop's boss to have him arrested. Harder still to get the DA to prosecute
him, a judge not to favor the cop's defense, and a jury to convict. Juries
don't
often spend a lot of time laughing at testimony, either. And from the judge's
comments afterwards to the reporter, *he* believes the cop is guilty, too
So yes, you could claim you killed Kennedy. Hell, you could claim you helped
build the OK City bomb, a case that has a much higher hot-button appeal
right now. But even if you were an ex-con the DA would have to have *some*
evidence to bring to court in addition to your hearsay confession.
Believe me, the cop is guilty.
-Bill