Who Killed the Candy Lady?: Unwrapping the Unsolved Murder of Helen Brach

By James Ylisela

A deep dive that “has brought together all the evidence” in the fascinating cold case of a millionaire widow, the Chicago horse mafia, and murder (Daily Mail).
 
Thirty-five years ago, Helen Brach walked out of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and vanished without a trace. By all accounts, the sixty-five-year-old heiress to the E.J. Brach & Sons candy fortune was in good health. But shortly after her leaving the clinic the details of Helen Brach’s life—and presumed death—moved from fact to speculation, and they have been shrouded in mystery ever since.
 
Who Killed the Candy Lady?: Unwrapping the Unsolved Murder of Helen Brach is the true and complete story of Helen Vorhees Brach’s mysterious disappearance and unsolved murder, as told by veteran Chicago journalist Jim Ylisela. This book will reveal the sordid facts behind the case and the seedy underbelly of Chicago’s notorious crime world. Drawing from never-seen documents, interviews, and insiders’ perspectives of prosecutors, horse thieves, and candy heiresses alike, Who Killed the Candy Lady? is a true-to-life whodunnit.
 
This is a fascinating and entertaining tale, and after finishing it readers will be unable to stop themselves from jumping to their own conclusions. Written with the straightforward precision and sly wit of a longtime Chicago writer immersed in the case’s details, Who Killed the Candy Lady? is the ultimate guide to this unsolved murder mystery.
 
“It only took me a day to read this book because I could not put it down . . . A fantastic writer and great storyteller.” —Nerd Problems

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781572844742

Book preview

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Copyright © 2014 by James Ylisela

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

Who Killed the Candy Lady?: Unwrapping the Unsolved Murder of Helen Brach

by James Ylisela

First ebook edition, August 2014

ISBN-13: 978-1-57284-474-2

ISBN-10: 1-57284-474-4

Published by Agate Digital, an imprint of Agate Publishing.

For Nora and James

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters

Foreword

Chapter 1: The Horse That Entered the Witness Protection Program

Chapter 2: The Candy Lady Vanishes

Chapter 3: Two Prime Suspects

Chapter 4: Chicago’s Horse Mafia

Chapter 5: The Con Man Gets Conned

Chapter 6: The Feds Come Knocking

Chapter 7: The Best Live Theatre in Chicago

Chapter 8: The Vet to the Defense

Chapter 9: Richard Bailey Talks…and Talks

Chapter 10: Joe Plemmons Grows a Conscience

Chapter 11: Bailey Passes a Test

Chapter 12: The Houseman’s Shady Stories

Epilogue: So Who Did It?

Acknowledgments

Cast of Characters

The Main Players

Helen Brach. Wealthy heiress to the E.J. Brach & Sons candy fortune. Disappeared without a trace in February 1977.

Richard Bailey. Con man, gigolo and Helen Brach’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance. Serving 30 years in federal prison for fraud and conspiracy to commit murder.

Ross Hugi. Horse doctor for the rich and famous—and the infamous. The veterinarian who put the only horse in history into the federal witness protection program.

Jack Matlick. Helen Brach’s houseman and perhaps the last person to see her alive. A prime suspect in her disappearance, but never charged. Died in 2011.

Joe Plemmons. Horseman, con man extraordinaire and the only person to actually confess to Helen Brach’s murder, though he was never charged. Prosecutors have yet to take any action on his 2004 account of Brach’s demise.

The Horse Mafia

Silas Jayne. Patriarch of the family that dominated the Chicago horse business. Accused by Plemmons to have ordered Brach’s murder from prison in 1977. Died in 1987.

Frank Jayne Jr. Silas’ nephew, an unnamed co-schemer in the case against Richard Bailey and named by Joe Plemmons as an accomplice in Brach’s murder. He has consistently denied any involvement. Served prison time for arson and cocaine. Still runs Jaynesway Farms in Bartlett.

Ken Hansen. Longtime horse trainer and mentor of Joe Plemmons. Convicted in 2002 of the 1955 rape and murder of three boys. Died in prison in 2007.

The Actual Mafia

Victor Spilotro. Named by Joe Plemmons as an accomplice in Helen Brach’s murder. Plemmons also implicated Victor’s brothers, Anthony and Michael Spilotro, who were killed themselves, presumably by their mob bosses, and buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.

The Investigators

John Rotunno. Special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Turned Joe Plemmons into a confidential informant and believes he corroborated the horseman’s detailed account of Brach’s murder. Retired December 2012.

John O’Connell. Former officer of the Glenview Police Department. Investigator, Cook County State’s Attorney. Longest tenure working the Brach case. Teamed with Rotunno to interrogate Bailey, Matlick and Plemmons. Retired in 2013.

James Delorto. Special agent with the ATF, investigating arson. Still believes the badly decomposed body he exhumed in 1990 is Helen Brach. Retired in 1994, now a private investigator.

The Prosecutors

Steven Miller. Assistant U.S. Attorney, led the case against Richard Bailey. Now a partner in the Chicago office of Reed Smith.

Ron Safer. Assistant U.S. Attorney, prosecutor in the Bailey case. Now managing partner in the Chicago office of Schiff Hardin.

Tom Biesty. Assistant Cook County state’s attorney, supervisor of the cold case unit.

The Defenders

Patrick Tuite. Richard Bailey’s attorney in the federal conspiracy case. Now retired.

Kathleen Zellner. Bailey’s attorney in his 2005 effort to win a new trial.

Foreword

One Mystery, Two Theories

Richard Bailey is nearing his third decade in a federal penitentiary, still waiting for good news that may never come. Now in his eighties, Bailey represents the federal government’s best argument that one of Chicago’s greatest murder mysteries—the disappearance and presumed death of candy heiress Helen Vorhees Brach—has been solved.

But in truth, Bailey sits in prison having never been convicted of Brach’s murder. No judge or jury has found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, federal prosecutors convinced a judge they had just enough evidence—a preponderance, in legal parlance—to show that Bailey may have conspired to kill the candy heiress. It was that preponderance of evidence, shaky as it was, that sent Bailey to prison for the rest of his days, or if he lives, until his early 90s.

Bailey was dating Helen Brach when she disappeared and may, in fact, have killed her or conspired with others who ultimately carried out the deed. But he may also be innocent, at least of that crime, and that’s the problem: No one, not even the feds, can say for sure, and there is an uncomfortable amount of evidence that suggests someone else may have murdered the heiress and disposed of her body.

Helen Brach disappeared in February 1977, and I came into this story about two decades later. In the years since, I’ve pored over court documents and police and FBI files, and I’ve interviewed dozens of people with ties to this story. I haven’t solved the mystery, but I’ve combed over the record closely enough to build two plausible scenarios to explain Brach’s disappearance and presumed murder. One scenario is elaborate, a bit messy, and implicates many people, including Richard Bailey (though not in Brach’s actual murder). The other is clean and simple, and focuses on Brach’s longtime houseman, Jack Matlick. Both explanations have strong evidence behind them.

As it turned out, I had two guides in my investigation, and each tilted in opposite directions to explain Brach’s demise. The first was Ross Hugi, a veterinarian who tended the horses of the rich and famous in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, where Helen Brach once lived. When I met Hugi in 1996, he had recently been released from federal prison, having served six months for his role in a fraudulent horse sale cooked up by Richard Bailey. That transaction jump-started the federal investigation into Brach’s disappearance and led to Bailey’s 1995 imprisonment.

Hugi is convinced the government has failed to solve the Brach mystery. The federal prosecutors didn’t have a body, a murder weapon, any witnesses to a homicide or any other forensic evidence. But they had a powerful Justice Department weapon—federal racketeering and conspiracy laws—and used it to connect Hugi and Bailey’s 1989 horse deal to Bailey’s questionable sale of three horses to Helen Brach in the mid-seventies. Helen Brach’s discovery that Bailey and others were cheating her, federal prosecutors insisted, led Bailey in 1977 to conspire with the local horse mafia (not Hugi) to arrange Brach’s murder before she exposed their criminal activities.

Hugi didn’t buy it. He thought Bailey was the wrong guy, that no one in the horse business could keep that kind of secret and that the authorities, from local police to the feds, let the likeliest killer—Brach houseman Jack Matlick—slip away. Matlick had behaved suspiciously after Brach’s disappearance and lied repeatedly to investigators looking into the case. Yet he was never charged and died in 2011.

My other guide was John Rotunno, a determined—and now retired—agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Rotunno entered the Brach case after solving an even older mystery, the 1955 rape and murder of three young boys by horseman Ken Hansen. Rotunno’s confidential informant in that case—Joe Plemmons—would later provide a detailed account of Brach’s disappearance—and his own involvement in her murder.

I’ve tried to tell this story the way it unfolded after the feds got involved, and you’ll see how the two scenarios play out, and even cross paths, as the years tick by. By the end, you may reach your own conclusion about what really happened, and I offer my best conjecture.

It has been an adventure. With Hugi, I’ve chased after Brach’s houseman in western Pennsylvania and tramped through a swamp in central Indiana looking for Brach’s body. I’ve visited Richard Bailey in prison and observed Bailey taking a polygraph exam I helped to arrange. With Rotunno, I’ve studied every aspect of Plemmons’ grisly account of Brach’s demise and the agent’s prodigious efforts to corroborate his story.

There are many colorful characters in this long, meandering case, and most of them don’t come out looking particularly good. One of the few who did, as it turns out, is a horse.

—James Ylisela Jr.

Chicago, Illinois

April 2014

Chapter 1

The Horse That Entered the Witness Protection Program

On a mild spring afternoon in 1991, Illinois veterinarian Ross Hugi stood alone in his barn, contemplating a handsome bay horse with a white splotch on its forehead—a horse Hugi had just been paid to kill.

Instant Little Man was a racehorse, or was supposed to be, but the gelding hadn’t earned his keep at the track, and the smart money said he never would. His wealthy owner, Chicago apparel wholesaler Phillip Sudakoff—Mr. Suds to those who knew him—figured Instant Little Man would fetch a far heftier purse as a death claim on an insurance form. People in the horse business did that sort of thing, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, when horse killing for profit was