Months after Chicago firefighters discovered a North Lawndale man dismembered inside his burning home, authorities have charged the man’s live-in caretaker with shooting the man to death, trying to cut his body into pieces and burning the home that they shared to conceal his killing.
In the days following Michael Lipford’s March 7 death, prosecutors alleged that the caretaker, DeParris Slaughter, searched the internet querying, among other things, whether death is painful and what the best knife was to cut through a human arm.
Slaughter, 32, appeared before a judge at the Leighton Criminal Court Building Monday morning. He sat back in his chair at the defense table and listened with no apparent reaction as Judge Susana Ortiz read through the charges against him: one count of first-degree murder, one count of concealment of a homicidal death, once count of dismembering a human body and one count of residential arson.
Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Mike Pekara said surveillance camera footage, cellphone data and transaction records show that Slaughter had spent the early days of March buying a used Pontiac, a dolly from a nearby Menards, and taking Lipford to a March 5 doctor’s appointment. Lipford made that appointment, Pekara said, and his last phone call took place later that afternoon.
On the evening of March 7, Chicago firefighters were called to the house where Lipford and Slaughter both lived in the 2300 block of South Kirkland Avenue. There, they found Lipford’s partially dismembered body, with some limbs in green plastic wrap and placed inside a trash bag. Police found two reciprocating saws in the home and later determined that the fire had begun in three separate locations. One of those locations, Pekara said, was Lipford’s body.
Pekara said that the Cook County medical examiner’s office ruled that Lipford — who’d previously landed in the Tribune’s pages after a warrantless raid on his apartment led to a federal civil rights lawsuit — had died as a result of a gunshot wound to his neck, while his body had been taken apart and burned after he was killed.
Police records obtained in a freedom of information act request show officers first arrested Slaughter two days after the alleged murder and arson, with a can of gasoline on the floor of the Pontiac he’d allegedly bought in the days before the killing. Police questioned him and let him go before arresting him again Saturday, in a south suburban parking lot.
A Cook County public defender argued that Slaughter had not evaded police over the course of the investigation and would return to Chicago, where his two children live, voluntarily if released on bail. Ortiz ordered Slaughter held, saying his alleged actions showed more concern for consequences he might face than the violence inflicted on Lipford.
“He stood in a caretaking position to (Lipford),” Ortiz said. “This appears to have been contemplated and planned.”
Prosecutors did not offer a possible motive for the alleged murder. When Lipford’s family first got word of his killing in the spring, they were stunned that someone would be violent toward him.
One of Lipford’s 10 siblings, Evelyn Moss, said she had never met Slaughter, but knew of him. After Lipford’s mobility worsened following hip and knee surgeries, Moss said Slaughter had been the one “to get him where he needed to go.”
Occasionally she’d overhear an argument between the two men or he’d show up in a picture her brother sent her, she said. It had occurred to her that he could be behind the killing, but she’d had her doubts that she’d ever get closer to a firm answer.
“I’d been praying for this for a long time,” she said. “I thought it was going to be a cold case.”
Moss has not been looking forward to the holiday season, which for her typically involves “a big old family gathering with all the nieces and nephews” and a lot of food.
“We’d cook and talk about how God has blessed this family,” she said. “This Christmas is going to be different. When that happened, it just tore apart my whole world.”
She said the news of an arrest for the killing would make the first holiday without her brother a little easier. Slaughter is next set to appear in court Dec. 24.
