Retired Navy diver drowns. Police are suspicious.

On the morning of March 25, 1976, an employee of the Chicago Sun-Times, which was then located on North Wabash Avenue just east of Marina City, spotted a body in the Chicago River. Firefighters arrived by boat and pulled the body from the river. It was a man in his mid-fifties, stocky, with gray hair, dressed only in his underwear. There were no obvious signs of violence, so it was believed he drowned accidentally.

(Right) Video frame from CBS news story showing the area where the body was found, east of the State Street Bridge.

For two days, no one knew who the man was. He was just “Unknown Case 303” at the Cook County Morgue. The story took a strange turn when William Hamilton of Jackson, Michigan, showed up at the morgue and said the body was that of his 32-year-old brother-in-law, Estel Millard Blevins, a wealthy Florida stockbroker who had been missing for three days.

Blevins was described as more of a slender man, with blond hair. He was an account executive with the company that is now known as Merrill Lynch, and he lived in an exclusive area of Clearwater Beach. He told his office he needed some time off. He had told his wife, Mary, he was going to Chicago.

“Hamilton” had first come to the funeral home on March 27, 1976, saying he wanted to bury his brother-in-law who had drowned in the river. When the funeral director called the morgue to see if the body was ready to be picked up, he was told the body had not yet been identified. He then told the man claiming to be Hamilton that he would have to first go to the morgue and identify the body.

With that job done, the man paid the funeral home $985 in cash (equal to $5,559 in 2024) and changed his order to a cremation. However, before the body was cremated, the funeral home took fingerprints and on April 6, 1976, it was learned the deceased was not Estel Blevins but Joseph R. Tallarico, a 53-year-old, retired Navy scuba diver who had lived with his sister, Joy, at Marina City.

By April 12, the Cook County Coroner was suspecting that Tallarico might have been murdered. “He must have been doped up and tossed in the river,” said Andrew Toman. “He died of a combination of alcohol and morphine. There was no water in his lungs. Therefore, he was dead before he ever hit that river.”

“My brother didn’t drown,” Joy Tallarico told the Chicago Tribune. “He was a professional diver. He had a drinking problem. But if he got drunk and fell in the river, why would all his clothes be off? And what about the morphine? He never took any kind of stuff like that.”

(Left) Joy Tallarico, the victim’s sister, is interviewed at her Marina City apartment by a young Bill Kurtis. Introduced by Walter Cronkite, it was the last story on CBS Evening News for April 13, 1976.

Joy, who had last seen her brother walking south on State Street after dinner the night before, speculated the body was being used as a patsy, so that someone could disappear.

“Someone’s pulling your leg.”

Merrill Lynch was looking for Blevins but only because his wife had been injured in an automobile accident on March 23, 1976. After hearing of the drowning, a representative of the company called the funeral home and asked for a description of the body. The representative chuckled upon hearing the description, telling the funeral director, “Someone’s pulling your leg.”

Soon, police learned Blevins was $250,000 in debt – an amount equal to $1.4 million in 2024 – and his creditors were mobsters. The police now believed that the mysterious man who had identified the body was, in fact, Blevins. He had come to Chicago, they believed, to falsely identify a body in the county morgue and collect on a $300,000 insurance policy – claiming to be his brother-in-law, William Hamilton.

Blevins had a history of insurance fraud and a history of disappearing. He had gone AWOL from the U.S. Army 14 years earlier. When he was found, he was driving a car that had been reported stolen.

When the funeral director was shown a photograph of Blevins, he said it was the same man who had come to the funeral home, posing as Hamilton. A police handwriting expert determined that Blevins had written Hamilton’s name on morgue records.

(Left to right) Joseph Tallarico, Walter Cronkite, and Estel Millard Blevins.

And then there was the letter Blevins wrote to police and the Chicago Tribune that led the authorities to suspect that Blevins was still alive. In the letter, Blevins said he had come to Chicago with $50,000 to buy $350,000 in stolen securities. He said two men took him to a suburban apartment, took his money, but would not hand over the securities.

With no money and no securities, Blevins said he was afraid an accomplice who had put up the money would not believe him and would have him killed. That’s when he came up with the idea to identify a body at the morgue as his own and drop out of sight.

By April 13, Hamilton – the real William Hamilton, an unemployed motorcycle mechanic – told Chicago police that Blevins had told him he was using his name, and that he’d cut Hamilton in on the money if he went along with it.

As if the case could possibly get any stranger, on September 16, 1976, Blevins was finally arrested – for allegedly stealing construction equipment in Georgia. He had returned to Florida, but the crime of body theft was only a misdemeanor, so Florida officials refused to extradite him to Illinois.

Meanwhile, Joy Tallarico filed a $3 million lawsuit against the coroner’s office and the funeral director.

• Watch the CBS Evening News story

Written by Steven Dahlman
Presented for nonprofit educational purposes

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