Alan Wyman was a handyman with an apparent knack for getting to know men who lived conventional lives and women who didn’t. He lived in an apartment building in the 4300 block of North Western, and achieved sudden notoriety in October 2006, when a story about what went on there splashed across an inside page of the Chicago Sun-Times. The writer, Stefano Esposito, began on a breathless note: “The middle-aged woman is blindfolded and handcuffed. Her kidnapper has already raped her, choked her and threatened to kill her if she struggles. Then Alan Donald Wyman removes the steel cables he’s used to pin her to his bed. He leads the woman, who still cannot see, along a narrow hallway to a wooden trap door at the base of a specially built closet, Cook County prosecutors say. . . . He opens the trap door and forces the woman to crawl into a tiny, soundless black chamber. The woman loses all sense of time. And then the 53-year-old Wyman rapes her again, prosecutors say. Wyman’s occasional acts of mercy: spoonfuls of brown sugar and glasses of water.”
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At the time, the paper’s editor, Michael Cooke, explained the story to me as a “somewhat successful” attempt by a writer with a “wonderful style” to convey the “absolute horror of what allegedly had taken place.” But a lot of readers considered the story a disaster. Some read it as an invitation to lynch Wyman at sundown, but one group, led by Julie Peterson, who runs a community Web site in the Lincoln Square area, had a different reaction. “Many people felt the Sun-Times was giving him some kind of mystique, as some dark James Bond,” Peterson told me when I wrote about it back then. “He was a sick, sick person who kidnapped and tortured a person. It’s so important not to give him this Silence of the Lambs treatment as if he was some kind of intellectual. Let’s focus on the crime. I can’t imagine him being more thrilled with the article the way it was written.”
This May, Wyman finally went on trial, facing his accuser from Esposito’s story. His defense was that she’d consented to whatever happened between them. By now Sweeney had changed jobs, and when the woman testified on May 16 she covered it for the Tribune. The woman held a “steady, even gaze” as she identified Wyman in court, Sweeney wrote, and “through tears, swatted back repeated questions from Wyman’s attorney, who asked whether the sex during the attack was consensual and whether she’d agreed to be paid to engage in ‘bondage’ with Wyman.”
Peterson went on, “Michelle is a mother and was a wife for 23 years. She’s told me about how she and her husband loved each other very much and tried to reconcile before and even after the attack but after the attack she couldn’t be close to him because of the trauma of the assaults.
Schmookler, in Germany on business, talked with me briefly by phone and then sent a lengthy e-mail. “In reading the latest stories about the trial,” he wrote, “all I see is that it comes down to her word against his, and she has everything to gain . . . and nothing to lose by fingering him. . . . At the same time I know only what I was told by Alan and some friends and neighbors of his whom I met, what I know from my business and personal dealings with Alan, and what I saw when I was in his apartment shortly after his arrest. I saw no such padded room/closet large enough for a person (all that crap in the Sun-Times story some years back, which I just re-read—sounds like a huge concoction of crap an inventive reporter might come up with from a few sound bites).”
“That’s when his story started falling apart,” says the friend.
