Thomas Yancey has never been charged with a sex crime, but last spring, a few months after being released from prison, he had to go to police headquarters on South Michigan to register as a sex offender. Yancey, who’s 52, insists he doesn’t belong on a list of sex offenders, though he’d understand if someone wanted him on a list of child murderers. In 1974, when he was 21, he and a 15-year-old accomplice killed a teenage acquaintance during a botched robbery.
He and 15-year-old Nathaniel Brown Jr. decided to burglarize the apartment of a man who lived in Yancey’s building, David Wilkerson. “Me and [Wilkerson] used to stick up together,” he says. “But [Brown] wanted to rob him, and I said OK.”
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While Yancey and Brown were trying to decide what to do with the body, two acquaintances walked into the room. Yancey says they joined the discussion about what to do with the body, and all four of them dropped Wilkerson’s body down an elevator shaft. “The reason we put him there was we wanted somebody to find him,” he says, adding that they considered dumping him in the subbasement of a nearby skating rink. “The others wanted to put him down there, but I didn’t. I knew his father and mother–I knew him. Something just told me not to put him there, because nobody would find him. It’s a bad feeling after that, after murder. I didn’t want them not to find him.” He says the elevator in the building broke down every day, so he knew someone would come to fix it and find the body, which is what happened.
Yancey started to feel that he was finally doing things right, but he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to do them outside of prison. He’d been given a sentence with a range of years to be served and time off for good behavior. The law changed in 1978, and the amount of time people already in prison had to serve was then determined by the Prisoner Review Board, commonly referred to as the parole board.
He was headed for his sister’s. “I hadn’t seen her in maybe three or four years–she has lupus,” he says. “I hadn’t been home since 1975. I had a Stevie Wonder song in my mind–it’s called ‘Living Just Enough for the City.’ I’m looking up inside the train station, and I see people–I see my people, people I know, like my nephew, my niece, my sister, and another niece. But I mixed up some of their names.”
