Before presiding over his courtroom at the Leighton Criminal Court Building each morning, Cook County Judge Raymond Myles was known to often rise early and go to the gym.
But unbeknownst to him, prosecutors said, someone was watching him, studying his movements over the course of several days as he and his girlfriend left to work out in the morning before work.
Then, on April 10, 2017, the longtime jurist was shot and killed in an act of violence that stunned his colleagues at the county’s main Southwest Side courthouse where he for years had presided over cases — many involving acts of violence similar to his own slaying.
Myles, 66, was the first Chicago-area judge to be shot and killed in more than three decades in a case that generated national news and a massive police investigation. In 1983, a former Chicago police officer shot and killed Judge Henry A. Gentile, 63, and attorney James Piszczor, 34, in Gentile’s Daley Center courtroom in downtown Chicago.
During a trial that opened Tuesday morning at a branch courthouse in south suburban Bridgeview, Cook County prosecutors alleged that Earl Wilson, 54, and another man killed Myles and injured his girlfriend, in an attempted robbery, believing that the girlfriend had money in her gym bag. Wilson’s co-defendant, Joshua Smith, pleaded guilty in 2023 to armed robbery and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
The trial is overseen by DuPage County Judge Jeffrey McKay to avoid the perception of bias by Myles’ fellow Cook County judges. It began before a full courtroom of family members and supporters, and is expected to last around two weeks.
Wilson is charged with murder, armed robbery and other felonies.
“He was watching them and he was waiting and he was seeing what time they came and went,” Assistant State’s Attorney Jennifer Keating said during her opening statement.
During the course of the trial, the attorneys are precluded from mentioning that Myles was a judge.
Wilson’s public defenders, though, argued to the jury that Wilson’s involvement is a lie concocted by Smith to minimize his own role in the slaying.
“Nothing about this case is what it seems,” said Assistant Public Defender Takenya Nixon.
In fact, she said, the slaying is not a clear-cut robbery case. Smith’s father was previously married to Myles’ girlfriend, and was not happy about the divorce or her new boyfriend, Nixon said.
After his killing, court employees remembered Myles as a hard-working and friendly judge. He was a Cubs fan and wore a team jacket to work during the team’s 2016 World Series run.
“Everyone here is devastated,” then-presiding judge of the Criminal Division LeRoy K. Martin Jr. said at the time. “People know when a judge is fair.”
Myles earned his law degree from the University of Illinois and worked as a prosecutor and a private-practice defense attorney before taking the bench in 1999.
For years, Myles presided over what was then known as bond court, the notoriously chaotic place for first appearances for new arrestees.
Among high profile cases he oversaw in that role, Myles ordered William Balfour to be held without bail in the 2008 killings of three relatives of singer Jennifer Hudson and refused to grant a controversial gag order in the infamous murder of seven people at a Brown’s Chicken in Palatine.
In a twist of fate, Myles was the victim in another act of violence a couple of years before his death, when he was beaten in a road rage incident after a minor traffic collision in 2015.
On the morning of his death, he woke up around 4 a.m. at his home in the 9400 block of South Forest Avenue on the city’s Far South Side.
But as his girlfriend left the residence, she was confronted by a gunman who took her gym bag and shot her in the leg in an apparent robbery attempt, according to prosecutors.
Myles rushed outside and exchanged words with the attacker before he was shot and killed.
“You don’t have to do this,” Myles begged to Wilson, Keating alleged. “What did the defendant do in response to Raymond’s pleadings? He shot him.”
His girlfriend survived, but required a blood transfusion.
Using surveillance video, detectives tracked a distinctive bright orange car to a relative of Smith’s, who was later arrested, prosecutors said.
Wilson’s attorneys, though, said detectives showed the girlfriend a photograph of Wilson, and she did not identify him as her shooter.
“There have been lies told over and over and over about what happened on April 10, 2017,” Nixon said.
