So, first, the facts: Chicago. Summer 1986. School’s out, you’re begging your mom to let you see Top Gun ‘cause it’s PG-13, and you spend your pocket changevon a pack of candy cigarettes to give your teachers a heart attack at recess (remember when they were banned from Northwest entirely back in 84? Boy, was I mad. Rolling little bits of chewing gum into cylinders just wasn’t the same.)

 

A teenager from Missoula named Henry Bicknell moves into town right at the end of his junior year. He went for the track team (apparently he could run a 4.5 minute mile. Not bad!), started an amateur radio club with his favorite math teacher, but by all accounts wasn’t a really social kid. What he got up to all day was anyone’s guess-nno siblings, dad selling cars in South Bend, and his mom a nurse by day and a waitress by night just to make ends meet. His teachers remember him as worryingly quiet, not really talking to anyone. His report card from the only semester he spent at Lake View High is dismal- Cs, Ds, and an A in shop.

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Of course, after his death a little more of his life came out, as is often the cases with lonely boys. Isn’t that kind of sad?3I mean, just to think of all the 17 year old boys wandering around right now who nobody’d notice unless they went and disappeared. Give one a hug for Henry, huh?

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Anyway. Turns out Henry Bicknell was into some weird shit. His room was chock full of beat-up old appliances from the heap behind the Home & Video (some of ‘em stolen, I’m sure). He got fined for trying to build a transmitting CB radio tower in his backyard without a permit, which I believe is why he started that radio club (it makes sense, right? Get a school to sign off on whatever you want to do but aren’t allowed to? Kids have been doing it for ages.)3There were synthesizers, Walkmans, transcoders, MIDIs, theremins, microphones, and transmitters wedged into that little bedroom. Like a rat’s nest made of wire.

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And, like a rat, the boy liked to get into places. Abandoned places. They found a list of coordinates under his desk- abandoned copper mills, asylums, hospitals, factories. Rivals this website, to be honest! Always leaving behind a little symbol of his initials, HB (of course, now you’ll see them in all abandoned places around here from teenage jokesters of the era, but the police file has some genuine photos of them that I believe are real.) I know it’s crazy, but I think he and I would have been friends. Maybe if he had a friend with him that night it wouldn’t have turned out like it did..

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The first the greater Chicago area heard about Henry Bicknell was in these wanted posters that went up all around near the Fourth of July. It might be hard to believe nowadays, but back then kids going missing in Chicago was kind of a big deal, and he stuck around in my brain for a while - I think he just had this sad look to him in all the photos on the posters, like he really wanted you to find him. People kind of assumed he ran off -- he’s 17, he had a car -- so nobody really started searching until the first week of August. Guess his dad got back from South Bend and got all out of shape about it, decided to post the biggest reward I had ever seen – almost ten thousand dollars, his savings for the new house. If it wasn’t for him, probably Henry would have been just another teenage runaway story that passed in and out of the papers and got forgotten about.3

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Of course, me and my friends tried to “find” him, dreaming of all the NES games we could get for that amount of money. But more by looking really closely at the guys at the corner store than combing the outskirts of Busse Woods with bloodhounds. None of us really thought he could be dead.

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On August 18th, there was a major breakthrough: they found his car. 1976 Buick Electra, the kind of big, shiny, chromo box that you could get used but not too used in those days. Navy blue, Wisconsin plates. It was parked on Lamon Avenue, right next to this depressing little park- not even a name back then, just Park No. 552 (boy, I bet some of you recognized that one! One of the few municipal parks in Chicago that got repeated over and over on the news.) One street lamp and a little concrete sidewalk around it, more of a postage stamp than a park- no trees, even, just enough grass for the dogs to shit on.

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His car was covered in dust and those plastic clamshell cassette tape covers. Apparently the kid had rigged his own sound system in there, and was given to recording his own mixtapes off those pirate alt stations that showed up from the valley every once in a while. If the police weren’t already looking for him, maybe all that stolen music would’ve gotten them to start! But here’s the thing -- each and every case, labeled as carefully as it was, was empty. Not a single tape in all 400 tape cases. His key was still in the ignition. Why drive ten minutes to the outskirts of Chicago, get out of his car, and then leave it there? And where the hell were those tapes?

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A friend of mine was riding by on his bicycle while the police went sniffing around the park, and said he saw them pulling miles and miles of cassette tape out of the ground, big heaping piles bigger than any car. But I think he was just making it up. Still, that gives you some sense of what it was like being a kid in this time- he captured our imaginations, and heading back to school it was all anyone wanted to talk about. We all got little yellow slips from the school saying they had someone to talk to us if we needed it. I think they thought he killed himself and didn’t want an epidemic on their hands.

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The way they found out what happened to him was absolutely classic: another teenage fuck-up was down on the same block ‘cause he’d heard from his older brother’s cousin’s stepdad that there was a cool abandoned radio station down there. I won’t tell you exactly where, since I don’t want any kids headed down there themselves, but there was a certain Chicago rock station that stopped broadcasting there in 1981, moved their transmitter up to the Hancock (you know, that black slab of a monstrosity downtown. Yep, your angsty tunes come right from the top of it! If that isn’t modern art, I don’t know what is.) But, of course, the tower was still there, boarded up and all. They hadn’t gotten the chance to take it down.

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And that night, when little Johnny Doe was coming to hang out there and smoke a couple joints, the light on top of it was on.

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He broke in through the plywood over the back window - not being too careful, I'm sure - and his boots settled onto a floor that rustled. He cast his flashlight down and saw trails of cassette tapes, a river of those shiny little ribbons, leading deeper into the abandoned radio station. Being a stupid teenager, he probably thought something like: Cool! And then he realized he didn’t even need his flashlight. There was a booth with the “On Air” sign over it glowing red- red enough to light up the hallway. He headed down to the window of the booth and saw it had been covered from the inside with black paper.

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Now, you don’t get to be an urban explorer for long before you run into some guy who’s down on his luck and sleeping in a place most people wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. You recognize pretty fast when the “abandoned” place isn’t abandoned any longer, and if you’re smart you turn around and pretend you never saw anything and close the door on your way out. But our Johnny Doe wasn’t very smart- lucky for us. When he opened the door, he found it unlocked (this is always the weirdest detail in the police reports to me. Why not lock the door?) 

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It's hard to tell, twenty years later, exactly what he saw. In the police interview, he says the room is "alive" - I think he's thinking of all those cassette tape ribbons on the walls moving in the wind from the door - and "shrinking" (maybe he'd already had a couple of joints.) From the crime scene photos we know there was a tape deck, a microphone, the ripped-out wires of everything else in that room-- and an outline on the floor in roughly the shape of a person. Chip bags and soda cans all over the floor. JD thought one of his friends must have been "fucking with" him, so he hit play on the tape deck.

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And, according to legend anyway, that's the exact moment stations all over the city broadcast this recording in the middle of their regularly scheduled programming:

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