Hazel Loretta Paquin Tanis was a 56-year-old white woman in Paterson, New Jersey when, in the early hours of June 17, 1966, she stepped into the Lafayette Bar and Grill at the corner of East 18th and Lafayette Streets, a small neighborhood place where she was known by name. She had spent the evening on her feet working as a waitress at the Westmount Country Club during a graduation banquet and stopped at the Lafayette near closing time, intending to see friends, hand over a deposit for an
upcoming union trip to Atlantic City, and then go home to the family who knew her as a mother and grandmother. Inside the bar, only a few people lingered: bartender James “Jim” Oliver behind the counter, patrons Fred “Bob” Nauyoks and William Marins at the bar, and Hazel sitting a little apart near the end of the counter as the night wound down.
Just before 2:30 a.m., the quiet room shattered. Two men pushed through the front door of the Lafayette carrying a shotgun and a handgun and, without warning, opened fire. The shotgun blast tore into Oliver's back as he turned toward the cash register, killing him almost instantly; the pistol rounds slammed into Nauyoks's head and he collapsed on his barstool. Marins was struck in the head, the bullet passing near his eye and dropping him to the floor, where he pretended to be dead. Hazel, realizing the horror unfolding, left her stool and tried to get away from the bar, crouching near the front of the room. One of the intruders swung the shotgun toward her and fired, devastating her upper arm and shoulder and throwing her to the floor. As she lay there, grievously wounded, the man with the pistol stepped closer and fired again and again, bullets ripping into her chest and lower body. The air filled with smoke, splintered glass, and the metallic smell of blood as the attackers turned and ran.
Upstairs, waitress Patricia Graham Valentine was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire and a woman's scream. Looking out her second-floor window above the bar, she saw two men running to a late-model white car with distinctive butterfly-shaped taillights and out-of-state plates before it sped off into the darkness. When she rushed down to the street and into the Lafayette, she found a scene that would haunt her: Oliver crumpled behind the bar, Nauyoks slumped forward with a cigarette still burning between his fingers, Marins staggering and bleeding from the face, and Hazel on the floor, terribly wounded. Another man, small-time criminal Alfred “Al” Bello, was near the cash register, grabbing money before he fled, claiming he was looking for change to call the police. Valentine made the actual call, and within minutes patrol cars and an ambulance converged on the bar, officers picking their way through shattered glass and spilled liquor to reach the wounded.
Detective Jim Lawless was the first officer inside. He recognized the regulars on the floor and behind the bar, but there was little he could do except direct the ambulance crew toward the living. Hazel was lying amid broken glass and scattered money, her abdomen torn open, blood pooling around her. The ambulance attendants, hardly more than teenagers, wrapped and lifted her as best they could and rushed her to the hospital along with Marins, who had somehow remained conscious despite his head wound. Doctors worked frantically to repair the damage to Hazel's chest and abdomen, operating on her shattered arm, damaged spleen, intestine, and lung. She survived the night and the days that followed, but only in a precarious balance between surgery, shock, and infection.
Even in that fragile state, Hazel became part of the investigation. From her hospital bed, she struggled to give police a description of at least one of the men who had stood over her with a pistol. A sketch artist worked from her words as she shifted between saying one attacker was tall and the other short, then that both were tall, one light-skinned, one darker. Those inconsistencies, understandable in light of her trauma and pain, later led a court to exclude her statements from trial, but at the time detectives clung to every fragment of detail she could manage. She remained in the hospital for nearly four weeks, enduring repeated procedures and fighting complications. On July 14, 1966, she succumbed to her injuries and related medical complications, described in some accounts as resulting from an embolism following her many operations. With her death, what had begun as a double killing became a triple homicide that gripped Paterson and, eventually, the world beyond it.
In the minutes after the shooting, police fanned out through the streets of Paterson, armed with the hurried descriptions from Valentine and Bello: two well-dressed men, one with a shotgun, one with a handgun, leaving in a white car with out-of-state plates. Within roughly ten minutes of the gunfire, Sergeant Theodore Capter stopped a white Dodge Polara driven by 19-year-old John Artis, with local middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter lying in the back seat and a third man, John “Bucks” Royster, in the front passenger seat. The officers questioned them briefly, then let them go. When Capter and his partner later heard the fuller description of the getaway car's plates and taillights, which closely matched Carter's car, they searched again and soon found the Dodge, this time with only Carter and Artis inside. Police escorted them back to the Lafayette so that Valentine and Bello could look at the car, and both witnesses said it resembled the vehicle they had seen leaving the scene. Carter and Artis were then taken to headquarters, where a search of the trunk produced a single. 32-caliber cartridge and a 12-gauge shotgun shell that investigators treated as possible evidence, although later ballistics testing would show that neither matched the ammunition used in the bar.
That same morning, police brought Carter and Artis to the hospital for a bedside identification. Marins, partially blinded and in shock, did not identify either man as a shooter. The descriptions of the attackers' build, facial hair, and clothing gathered from both Marins and Hazel did not clearly match Carter or Artis. Both men agreed to take polygraph examinations in a nearby city, and the examiner later reported that they appeared truthful when they denied involvement in the Lafayette killings, although the test suggested Carter might know who was responsible. The investigation nonetheless turned in circles. Another figure, Eddie Rawls, the stepson of a Black bar owner shot dead earlier that same night at a different Paterson tavern, briefly emerged as a focus of suspicion when a polygraph suggested he either committed the Lafayette shooting or knew who had. He refused a second test and later told prosecutors he would invoke his right against self-incrimination if called to testify, but he was never charged. The grand jury that met in the weeks after the crime did not indict anyone, and the case seemed to be stalling even as Hazel lay gravely ill.
Around Paterson, people whispered about motives. Only hours before the Lafayette attack, a white man named Frank Conforti had walked into the Waltz Inn, confronted its new Black owner, Leroy Holloway, over money, and then shot him dead with a shotgun. The killing inflamed racial tensions in a city that had already experienced riots two summers earlier. When Oliver and his patrons at the Lafayette were gunned down later that night, many residents and police linked the events in their minds, imagining the barroom murders as an act of bloody retaliation. Prosecutors would eventually anchor their case on that theory, portraying the Lafayette shooting as deliberate vengeance tied to the earlier killing at the Waltz Inn.
Four months after the night Hazel was shot, the stalled investigation lurched forward. Facing other criminal charges and lured by reward money, Bello and his burglary partner, Arthur Dexter Bradley, approached police with new statements. They now claimed that the men they had seen near the Lafayette with guns in hand were Carter and Artis. On October 15, 1966, officers arrested the two men for the triple murder, and a grand jury indicted them in November on three counts of first-degree murder. Their joint trial opened in April 1967 in Passaic County, with the state seeking the death penalty. There was no physical evidence tying them to the bar: no gun was ever found, the ammunition in Carter's trunk did not match the crime-scene shells, and neither their clothing nor their car showed any trace of blood. Marins took the stand and, again, did not identify either defendant as a shooter. Hazel's earlier hospital statements, disjointed and contradictory, were not presented to the jury. The prosecution's case rested heavily on Bello and Bradley, both of whom had lengthy criminal records and admitted they had been near the bar that night because they were committing a burglary.
Despite the gaps and contradictions, the jury convicted Carter and Artis on May 26, 1967. Carter received a sentence of 30 years to life, and Artis 15 years to life, punishments that effectively named them as Hazel's killers in the eyes of the law. They appealed, but the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 1969. In prison, Carter transformed himself into a symbol of resistance, writing his autobiography and attracting a network of supporters that included investigators, activists, and ultimately celebrities and musicians. Through their efforts, new cracks appeared in the case. In 1974, both Bello and Bradley signed sworn recantations, saying they had lied at trial under pressure from police and prosecutors and in hopes of leniency and reward money. On that basis, Carter and Artis sought a new trial, but the same trial judge rejected the recantations as unbelievable. The New Jersey Supreme Court later found that key evidence about deals a
