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Who killed Tim McNamee? Question gripped Fox Valley 30 years ago

Second of two parts.

It had to be another of lawyer Tim McNamee's pranks, a secretary thought as she arrived before 6:30 a.m. on June 9, 1987, to find her boss lying next to his Porsche 944 in the parking lot of the McNamee & Mahoney law firm in Carpentersville.

When McNamee, one leg bent with his knee in the air, didn't jump up, she saw the pool of blood.

The early-morning discovery of one of the best-known, best-looking, hardest-working and hardest-living people in the Fox Valley lying dead ignited a contentious criminal investigation and fueled tales that echo 30 years later.

Still wearing his softball jersey from the night before, McNamee, 34, co-owner of the popular Bandito Barney's Beach Club and Bordello in East Dundee, had been murdered by a single shot from a World War I-era Remington .30-06 rifle. His identical twin, Thom, an international model who was dating Elle Macpherson, orchestrated a macabre Irish wake that included taking his brother's corpse out for a night on the town before a massive funeral with Tim's body displayed on a 1959 Corvette convertible.

This wasn't a domestic situation or barroom fight where people know who did it and police wrap up the case before the funeral.

“The saying is, 'If you don't have a good lead in 48 hours, you're not going to solve it.' and I heard a lot of that,” remembers then-Carpentersville Police Chief Leon Kutzke. For the next 18 months, investigators had no one in custody, no motive and mounting pressure in a town where folks knew each other and everybody had a theory about who might have wanted McNamee dead.

Thought to be the intended victim in a 1987 shooting that killed his law partner Tim McNamee, attorney Tim Mahoney of Carpentersville had a tense 18 months until felon William Nally of Elgin was convicted of the murder. Daily Herald File Photo

In the center of it all was Tim Mahoney, McNamee's partner in law and in ownership of the bar.

“We're lifelong friends but I don't get to experience the loss,” Mahoney recounts. Now 66, he still runs the McNamee & Mahoney law firm out of the same modified brick home where McNamee was gunned down.

Mahoney, at the time representing a father in a vengeful divorce and child-custody case, immediately suspected he had been the intended target. Mahoney says others, including Thom McNamee at one point, entertained rumors that Mahoney was a suspect, that a police officer orchestrated the killing, or that it had something to do with romance or drugs.

Blessed with good looks and a confident, some would say cocky, manner in the courtroom, Tim McNamee had represented police officers in employment matters, embarrassed police officers in criminal cases (addressing one on the witness stand as “fatso”) and defended accused drug dealers. Kutzke says there never was evidence to suggest Mahoney or McNamee were involved with drugs.

As for that divorce case, 26-year-old mom Nadine Walter and boyfriend William Nally, a 44-year-old Elgin tough guy whose three prison stints included one for beating a man who lost sight in one eye, testified before a grand jury that they were out of town when McNamee was shot and had nothing to do with it.

“If Nadine is telling Nally who to shoot, it's me,” says Mahoney, who wore a bulletproof vest for most of the next year and was home the night someone shot out his bedroom windows. “She hated me.”

Investigators, including two Carpentersville detectives, four Illinois State Police detectives and occasional help from the FBI and the Illinois attorney general's office, considered hundreds of leads about who killed McNamee, Kutzke says.

Growing up in a modest house in Carpentersville with their mom, the 11 children in the McNamee family has been coping with tragedies since David died at the dinner table at 9 years old after suffering a brain aneurysm. Tim was murdered at age 34, Thom died at 56 of a brain tumor, and Dennis died last month at age 62. Courtesy of Eileen McNamee

Tim and Thom were two of 11 McNamee children who grew up in a three-bedroom home in Carpentersville with their mom, Joanne, a schoolteacher who was divorced from their father, Richard. In 1966, one of the seven brothers, David, collapsed during dinner in their home at age 9 and died of a brain aneurysm. At the time of Tim's murder, Jake, 22, was undergoing rehabilitation from a near-fatal motorcycle accident.

Both Eagle Scouts who were driven to succeed, Tim and Thom graduated from Western Illinois University in Macomb and worked for an Elgin roofing company to pay their way through John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Tim became a high-profile attorney in Carpentersville; Thom became an international model and built a small-business empire by buying bars and other properties in East Dundee and beyond.

They changed the name of their bar from Wall Street to Bandito Barney's Beach Club and Bordello, added a beer garden and drew professional athletes and Thom's model and acting friends from around the globe. They built a log cabin home along Route 31 in Carpentersville with an eight-person hot tub and a house rule that no bathing suits were allowed. A fundraiser in Chicago that featured models, actresses, Super Bowl quarterback Jim McMahon and other members of the Chicago Bears raised $150,000 for a reward and sparked more tips, which led to problems for investigators.

“There were so many leaks,” recalls Kutzke, who has a master's degree in public administration and was the first “outside” chief hired in Carpentersville. He eventually moved notes and evidence out of the police department and kept his own paperwork, which grew to be more than 3 feet tall, in a locked closet. Thom McNamee, who hired a private investigator and was critical of the police, became obsessed with avenging his brother's murder, friends remember.

“He lost his soul with the loss of his brother,” Mahoney says. “He could never come to grips with that.”

As neighbors growing up in Carpentersville, Mahoney and the McNamee twins were a year apart at St. Edward High in Elgin, where Mahoney was a football star and Tim and Thom were the team managers who wore thick glasses. They rekindled their friendship during law school. Mahoney and Tim McNamee worked for another lawyer in town before launching their own firm, where McNamee earned the right to have his name listed first after, Mahoney says, “I let him win” a game of one-on-one basketball. Mahoney is forever tied to the McNamees.

In addition to keeping McNamee in the firm's name, Mahoney and his wife, Jackie, named their daughter, Katie, 19, after an employee who was dating Thom when she was killed in a car crash. They also have a 22-year-old son. “His name is Tim, and he's not named after me,” Mahoney says.

An arrest came in November 1988. Nadine Walter, being questioned in a $32,000 credit card scam, cut a deal to testify against Nally. She and Nally had talked about killing Mahoney as a way to scare her ex-husband into giving back her son, Walter testified. Nally, after shooting McNamee, told her, “One down, one to go,” she added. She drove the getaway car, and later wore a wire to record Nally admitting, “Honey, we're killers.”

  Sporting a scar on his right cheek from a car crash, William Nally of Elgin had a long criminal history before he was convicted of murdering Carpentersville attorney Tim McNamee. Nally, shown here in Pontiac Correctional Center, died in prison in 2007. Gilbert Boucher II/gboucher@dailyherald.com

Nally, a Grim Reaper tattoo on his left arm and the image of a python wrapped around a dagger on his right, was convicted of murder on March 31, 1989, and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2007. In exchange for her cooperation, Walter faced no charges, changed her name, graduated from Florida A&M law school in 2005 and was working for a county prosecutor when Thom McNamee successfully fought her attempt to be admitted to the Florida bar. She did not respond to repeated attempts to reach her for this story.

“It always feels good, but this one in particular because it had taken so long,” says Kutzke, who also was police chief in Lombard and now uses the McNamee case in a criminal justice class he teaches as director of the Administration of Justice Studies at Chandler-Gilbert Community College in Arizona.

The McNamee legacy reaches beyond murder, models, hot tubs and wakes.

  This riverfront park named for murdered attorney Tim "Mackers" McNamee includes a canoe launch and was donated by his identical twin brother, Thom "Mac" McNamee, who died of brain cancer in 2009. The pair loved nature and wildlife. Burt Constable/bconstable@dailyherald.com

East Dundee renamed part of River Street to Thom McNamee Way. The annual Thom McNamee Memorial St. Patrick's Day Parade is the second-biggest in the state behind Chicago's. The McNamee family also orchestrates a huge fireworks show around that Irish holiday. So dedicated to wildlife that he once drove around with, and fed, a family of mice he found living in the back seat of his old Camaro, Thom, nicknamed “Mac,” donated a riverfront park and canoe launch dedicated to Timothy “Mackers” McNamee.

“They liked to champion for the little guy,” says brother Phil McNamee, 58, who lives in Marengo and just retired from teaching at Huntley High School. He was contented working as a roofer when his big brothers filled out the paperwork and drove him to the admissions office at Western Illinois University, where Phil became known as “Little Mackers.”

“What made them so popular wherever they went was just their personalities,” says Gary Mueller, a close friend of the family and owner of one of the McNamees' old bars, Rosie O'Hare's Public House, in East Dundee. He calls Tim and Thom the “twin towers” of 9/11 because Tim was found dead on the 9th and Thom died of a brain tumor on the 11th of June in 2009.

“They lived life so hard, going 20 hours a day. They were good, genuine guys,” Mueller says.

“They both lived life to the fullest,” Phil McNamee says. “They were a lot of fun to be around.”

Carpentersville riverfront undergoing makeover this summer

How Thom McNamee celebrated twin Tim — after his 1987 death — in the fast lane

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