Life Remembered: Former detective was beloved character
CHAMPAIGN – Brilliant, dedicated, entertaining and eccentric: Friends say Gary Wright, regarded as one of the Champaign Police Department's most talented detectives, was all those and more.
Gary Wright of Champaign died early Friday at Provena Covenant Medical Center in Urbana, after a struggle of several months with pancreatic cancer. He was 63.
A graduate of Champaign High School, Wright was hired at the police department in July 1967 and retired in January 1996. Almost all of his career was spent in the investigations division, where he solved numerous serious felonies.
"He was probably our best fingerprint person. They sent him to some special school. I don't remember for how long but when he came back, he really got into it," said colleague Mike Parker, whose police career overlapped with Wright's in investigations for more than 25 years. "I just liked him. He had a weird personality. It was one that everybody worked with and loved."
Fourth District Appellate Court Justice Robert Steigmann said that as a Champaign County prosecutor in the mid-70s, he was able to get Wright qualified to testify as an expert in fingerprint analysis.
"Gary was a wonderful guy and a really dedicated police officer who understood that 'cleared by arrest' meant nothing – that what a good police officer had to do was work closely with prosecutors to make sure the case was 'cleared by conviction.' In that regard he was a delight to work with when I was a prosecutor," Steigmann said.
Veteran News-Gazette reporter Jim Dey said he's going to miss his long-time, fun-loving friend and news source, whom he first met around 1977 when Dey began covering the city of Champaign.
"Gary Wright was one of the most interesting, intelligent and entertaining people I've ever known.
"When I had spare time, I would sit at his desk and just listen to him talk. ... The 'Choker' case was the highlight of his career," Dey recalled.
Dey was referring to Dallas Richmond, convicted in 1982 of the rape of three women and sentenced to 120 years in prison. Richmond was considered a suspect in 13 cases between June 1981 and March 1982 in Champaign and Urbana where elderly women were attacked in their homes, choked to unconsciousness, then raped.
Comparing finger and palm prints taken from crime scenes to inked standards with a mere magnifying lens and his eye, Wright made the identifications that led to Richmond's convictions.
"He examined thousands of fingerprints. He would start his day out that way and he'd end it that way and this was long before computers," said Judge Tom Difanis, who was the state's attorney when Richmond was prosecuted.
Wright was also a fixture at the Esquire Lounge, a popular downtown Champaign bar, where he had many friends among the regulars.
"Gary always had an opinion about everything. There were very few things he didn't have a comment about," said Traci Taylor, a bartender there for 26 years. "I can't tell you how many times if someone's child was in trouble or had an issue involving the police, he would always try to help that individual. He had a heart as big as Champaign-Urbana."
Taylor said she and Wright were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, he a fan of conservative Rush Limbuagh; she, not so much.
"When Carol Moseley-Braun was running for Senate, he and I made a bet. If Carol won, he had to go to the Bombay Bicycle Club and sing the Helen Reddy song, 'I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar.' I can't remember my end. It doesn't matter because (Moseley-Braun) won. At karaoke night he stood up in front of a crowded bar and sang it," she said.
Mike Cook, a retired Champaign police officer who worked in investigations with Wright about 20 years, said it was tough to pick just one Wright story to highlight. When pressed, he said his favorite involved an off-duty incident when Wright had consumed too many beers.
"He raised homing pigeons for a little while. He would cull his pigeons so that he would have the best of the breed. When he would cull them, he would clean them and have them for dinner," Cook said.
"In one of his after-work conditions he accidentally culled and ate the champion, prize-winning homing pigeon and did not realize it till the next morning," said Cook, laughing at the almost 30-year-old memory.
Among the News-Gazette newsroom favorites was Wright's retelling of seeing a woman, presumed dead from a combination of drugs and alcohol, move on the table in the morgue minutes before her autopsy was to begin.
It turned out she was suffering from an exceptionally rare case of "profound hypothermia." Her body temperature was reported to be 80 degrees.
Wright's comments the day after the April 1983 incident catapulted the story into the national tabloids.
"I'm telling you, I've seen dead people a hundred times in my life. And she was dead. You can believe me or not believe me. I saw a resurrection," Wright said.
Taylor said Wright's friends at the Esquire have already been talking about what name to put on a brass plaque that will commemorate his bar stool.
The names "Leonard the egg man" and "Master of the night stick" are under consideration, she said, both in reference to oft-retold hilarious Wright police experiences for which he took his share of ribbing.
"Leonard the egg man" was the name Wright gave when a suspect in an undercover drug investigation wanted to know who was knocking at his door.
The night stick moniker came from a younger officer who had been bitten by a pit bull on a domestic call that happened in 1995, less than a year before Wright's retirement. After numerous unsuccessful attempts by several officers to subdue the attacking dog, Wright used his police baton to get the job done.
"He's a master of the night stick. He got that dog off me," Chris Wagner said of Wright.
After his retirement from the police department, Wright worked for several years at Rogards Office Products making deliveries.
"He was good at it just like he was as a policeman," said his friend and former Rogards co-worker Tim Foutch of St. Joseph. "I thought he was a great guy. He had some great stories."
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