The front page of the Daily Herald from Aug. 8, 1972, shares news of the murders three days earlier of Paul and Marion Corbett, Marion’s sister Dorothy Derry and Marion’s daughter Barbara Boand.
Fritz Gohl remembers growing up in Barrington Hills during the 1950s and 1960s when nobody locked their doors. That changed on Aug. 5, 1972, after residents of the affluent Northwest suburb awoke to the news that four of their neighbors had been murdered in their home in what appeared to be a robbery gone wrong.
The tragedy, which unfolded 50 years ago Thursday, claimed the lives of 67-year-old Paul Corbett, a retired insurance executive; his 58-year-old wife, Marion, a pianist and composer; her daughter Barbara Boand, 22; and Marion’s sister Dorothy Derry, 60.
One police officer described the killings as “wholesale slaughter.”
Coming 10 years before the Tylenol murders based in the suburbs and more than two decades before the Brown’s Chicken massacre in Palatine — seven were killed in each of those cases — the shooting deaths of four people inside a Barrington Hills estate dispelled the notion that the suburbs were somehow immune to the staggering violence that affects other communities.
In the aftermath, families bought guns and guard dogs, said Gohl, a Barrington Township trustee who previously served 16 years as a Barrington Hills village trustee.
“People were quite concerned,” Gohl said. “Was this random, or was something else involved?”
Random evil
In a 1972 report, Time magazine compared the slayings to the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Manson Family and quoted then-Cook County Sheriff Richard Elrod positing that racial hatred “could have been one of the primary motives” for the murders. While the victims were chosen at random, published reports focused on the fact that the victims were white and the assailants were Black.
It all began when four strangers showed up at the Corbett house on Aug. 4, 1972, asking for directions.
Donald Taylor, his brother Reuben Taylor, Michael Clark and Nathaniel Burse were 20-something Vietnam War veterans identified as members of De Mau Mau, a loosely organized militant group whose members were implicated in slayings in Highland Park, Monee and southern Illinois. Authorities said the crimes were racially motivated.
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