Jacquelyn Greco found guilty of husband's 1979 murder
It took more than 30 years for police to charge Jacquelyn Greco with the murder of her husband in their Inverness home. It took a jury about two hours to convict her.
Jurors found the 69-year-old grandmother guilty Monday afternoon of the 1979 murder of Carl Gaimari.
“We're overwhelmed. We never thought this day would come,” said Michael Gaimari, whose family — including his 99-year-old mother Helen — always believed Greco had something to do with Carl's death.
Gaimari and his brother John were headed to Helen Gaimari's nursing home to deliver the news.
“All we wanted was justice for Carl, for his children and for our family,” said John Gaimari.
Prosecutors said greed motivated Greco and her lover, who they say arranged a home invasion and robbery on April 30, 1979. It began when two masked gunman entered the Turkey Trail Lane home, tied Greco up, and locked her and three of her children in a master bedroom closet. It ended when Gaimari, 34, returned home from work at the Chicago Board of Trade and was shot six times in the chest with his own gun.
Greco's lover, former Chicago police officer Sam Greco — whom she married less than four months after the murder and divorced some years later — has never been charged. The gunmen were never identified. Prosecutors said the investigation remains open. As for Greco, she faces between 20 and 40 years in prison when she is sentenced Dec. 19.
Defense attorneys acknowledged the marriage between Greco, also known as Jackie, and Carl Gaimari was troubled. Both were having affairs but were reconciling at the time of Carl's death. The stay-at-home mom had a commodities broker husband, four children, a nice home in Inverness and a lover on the side, said her attorneys. Why would she upend that by murdering the breadwinner?
“It doesn't make sense,” said Cook County assistant public defender Caroline Glennon during closing arguments Monday. “She's spending Carl's money and she's sleeping with Sam.”
“He's worth more to her alive,” said Glennon, echoing a statement Greco made.
Glennon also mentioned a recorded phone conversation Greco had with her sister, Elsie Fry, on Feb. 14, 2013, during which Greco spoke of a plan to kill Gaimari: “It's what I wanted to happen but I didn't want it to happen. I would never take my children's father away.”
Planning a murder is different from committing one, Glennon said.
“It may make you a terrible human being but it doesn't make you guilty of murder,” she said.
The law says it does, said prosecutors, who pointed to those same statements as evidence of Greco's guilt.
Fry testified that two months before the murder, Greco told her, “we found out a way to kill Carl.” Fry, 86, kept silent until 1981, when she told her daughter. Inverness police got a break in the case in 2013 when Fry agreed to let them record her conversations with Greco, which were played in court.
During the tearful exchange, a distraught Greco insists she's innocent, threatens to kill herself and begs Fry to tell authorities she was mistaken. Fry insists she will not lie for Greco.
“Everything you need to convict (Greco) of murder you heard in those two conversations,” said Cook County assistant state's attorney Ethan Holland of the recording he called “a glimpse into the extremely guilty mind of Jacquelyn Greco.”
For 34 years, Greco “walked the streets a free woman,” said Cook County assistant state's attorney Maria McCarthy. Now she must answer for her crime.
Proof, said McCarthy, that “no matter how much time passes, justice will be done.”