Carlo Barlassina, 43, male, Italian-born, was a Barnabite priest who served as head preacher at the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine in the Niagara Falls area of New York. In late June 1971 he was on the road for church work, traveling toward San Diego for an assignment connected to the Our Lady of the Rosary Church, and he broke the long trip with an overnight stop in Chicago.
On June 29, 1971, that stop ended in violence inside a Chicago hotel room.
Investigators determined he had been strangled, and the killing carried the blunt signature of a robbery: cash and property were taken, including several checks and about $1,000, leaving behind a quiet, baffling scene where a clergyman on a routine journey had been reduced to a nameless victim in a city far from his parish life.
For a time, the case sat in that uneasy space where motive feels obvious—greed—but the person behind it is a shadow. The break came only after another violent episode drew attention to a drifter named Bruce Alan Davis. In February 1972, Davis was arrested in Washington, D.C., after the killing of a local businessman, James Earl Hammer; he was ultimately convicted there of involuntary manslaughter and imprisoned. While he was serving that sentence, Chicago authorities linked him to the strangulation of Barlassina, turning the priest’s unsolved death into a case with a specific name attached to it.
The legal steps followed in late 1972. Davis was extradited to Illinois on November 28 and charged in the Chicago case; within weeks he pleaded guilty, and on December 17 he was convicted and sentenced to 25 to 45 years in prison—reported as being added to, and in some accounts running consecutive with, the time he already owed in the District of Columbia. With that plea, the investigation effectively narrowed to a single suspect and resolution: Davis was the arrested and convicted killer tied to Barlassina’s death.
Years later, Davis’s name resurfaced repeatedly in headlines for reasons that cast a grim backlight on the priest’s murder. After serving time in federal custody and later at Menard Correctional Center in Illinois, Davis escaped in 1982 and killed a correctional officer during the breakout. Captured soon after, he began claiming responsibility for a far larger body count across multiple states—confessions that were widely reported but largely unconfirmed, and he was not ultimately charged for additional killings beyond those already on the books. He later died by suicide in custody, leaving Barlassina’s case as one of the murders that did reach a courtroom ending, even as the broader story around the man who admitted to it unraveled into a trail of allegations and unanswered questions.
