On January 15, 1990, Martin Luther King Day, around 2 AM, William O’Neal walked out of his uncle Ben Heard’s apartment in Maywood, Illinois. He ran onto Interstate 290, the Eisenhower Expressway, and stepped in front of a moving car. He was 40.

The Cook County Medical Examiner ruled it a suicide. His wife said it was an accident.

21 years earlier, O’Neal had infiltrated the Black Panther Party for the FBI. He had drawn a floor plan of an apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street in Chicago. He had marked the location of every door, every window, and the bed where Fred Hampton slept. He had handed that floor plan to his handler, FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell.

14 days later, Hampton was dead.

The Deal

William O’Neal was born April 9, 1949 and grew up on the west side of Chicago. By 17, he had been involved in car theft, home invasion, kidnapping. In 1966, he stole a car and drove it across state lines into Michigan. Federal offense. It should have sent him to prison.

It sent him to FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell. Mitchell offered a deal. The car theft charge disappears. O’Neal gets a monthly stipend. In exchange, he infiltrates the Illinois Black Panther Party and reports back to the bureau. O’Neal was 17 or 18. He took the deal.

By 1968, O’Neal had made himself indispensable. He was running security. Fred Hampton, 20 years old, trusted him enough to make him head of security for the Illinois chapter. O’Neal had keys to Panther headquarters and safe houses across Chicago. He sat in on leadership meetings. He knew where Hampton slept, who visited, what weapons were where, when the chapter was most vulnerable. Every detail went to Mitchell. Weekly reports, floor plans, schedules.

Indoctrination

What O’Neal reported was not criminal activity. It was a 20-year-old feeding children. Every morning at 6 AM, Hampton ran political education classes, breaking down Marx and Mao into language high school dropouts could understand. After class, the Panthers served free breakfast. Eggs, toast, juice. O’Neal watched kids line up before school every day. He reported it to Mitchell. The FBI categorized the breakfast program as indoctrination.

Then Hampton started building something no one had seen before. He connected with the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican organization led by Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, a street gang turned political movement fighting gentrification and police brutality in Lincoln Park. Hampton brought them in. Then the 20-year-old did the thing that broke everyone’s brain.

Hampton reached out to the Young Patriots, a group of poor white Appalachians in uptown Chicago. They wore Confederate flag patches on their jackets. Their members had migrated from Kentucky and Tennessee looking for factory work and found the same poverty, the same brutal cops, the same slum landlords. A Panther named Bob Lee, a field marshal in the Illinois chapter, heard them at a meeting and told Hampton they were fighting the same enemy. Hampton saw it immediately. Not a race war. A class war.

Spring 1969, they made it official. The Rainbow Coalition. Black Panthers, Young Lords, Young Patriots. Everyone wore the same button striped with black, red, brown, and white. Fred Hampton in a black beret walking arm in arm with William Preacher Fesperman of the Young Patriots, who still had a Confederate flag on his jacket.

O’Neal watched all of it from the inside. Years later, he said Hampton was genuinely a good guy. No corruption, no violence, nothing the FBI could actually use. So they stopped trying to arrest him.

December 3, 1969

Hampton taught a political education class at a local church that evening. Afterward, he and several Panthers went back to the apartment. O’Neal had prepared dinner. According to FBI reinvestigations, O’Neal slipped secobarbital into Hampton’s drink. Cook County chemist Eleanor Berman later ran two tests on Hampton’s blood. Both showed barbiturates. Hampton was not known to take drugs.

Around 1:30 AM on December 4, Hampton fell asleep mid-sentence while talking to his mother on the phone. His fiancee Deborah Johnson, nine months pregnant, was lying next to him. O’Neal left the apartment before the raid. The floor plan had already gone to the FBI, which passed it to Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan’s office. Hanrahan organized a 14-man team from his special prosecutions unit. They had a search warrant for illegal weapons. They arrived at 4 AM.

12 seconds. The team entered through the front and rear simultaneously. They fired between 82 and 99 rounds into the apartment. The Panthers fired one. It came from Mark Clark’s shotgun as he fell after being fatally hit. It discharged reflexively.

Fred Hampton was shot twice in the head while unconscious in his bed. Deborah Johnson was dragged from the room. She later said Hampton raised his head slowly, eyes open, then laid it back down. That was the only movement he made. Mark Clark was dead. Four other Panthers were wounded. The seven survivors were indicted on attempted murder charges. Every charge was dropped.

The police called it a shootout. The ballistics called it an execution.

Eyes on the Prize

O’Neal’s role stayed hidden for three years. On February 3, 1973, the Chicago Tribune published a front-page story identifying him as an FBI informant. Attorney Jeffrey Haas, who had known O’Neal through Panther defense work, read it and could not believe it. O’Neal was placed in the federal witness protection program under the name William Hart and relocated to California. His marriage collapsed. He reportedly returned to Chicago in 1984, living quietly and working for a downtown attorney.

In 1984, O’Neal gave a rare interview to the Chicago Tribune. He said he had no remorse. He said if he had not met Mitchell, he would probably be in jail or dead. Then he said: If you ask me if I’m a happy man, I’m not happy. No, I’m not even content.

On April 13, 1989, O’Neal sat for an interview with the PBS series Eyes on the Prize II. Five months after that interview, in September 1989, O’Neal ran into traffic for the first time. He survived with injuries. Nobody connected it to the interview. Not yet.

On camera, O’Neal denied drugging Hampton. The forensic evidence disagreed. Then he talked about going back to the apartment after the raid. His voice dropped. I just began to realize that the information that I had supplied leading up to that moment had facilitated that raid. I knew that indirectly I had contributed and I felt it and I felt bad about it and then I got mad and then I had to conceal those feelings which made it worse. I could not say anything. I just had to continue to play the role.

The first episode of Eyes on the Prize II aired on January 15, 1990. Martin Luther King Day. That night, O’Neal ran into traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway. He died before his own episode was broadcast. The documentary aired his interview on February 19, 1990. America watched a dead man describe the guilt that killed him.

The Check

The civil lawsuit filed by Hampton’s family took 13 years. In 1982, a federal jury found that the FBI, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, and the Chicago Police Department had conspired to violate the civil rights of Hampton and the other Panthers. The FBI, Cook County, and the city of Chicago settled for $1.85 million. Nobody went to prison.

Records indicate O’Neal was paid roughly $300 a month. For drawing the floor plan. For drugging the drink. For delivering the chairman.

The Rainbow Coalition collapsed after Hampton’s death. The Illinois Panthers never recovered. Six years later, the federal government launched the national school breakfast program. The same free breakfast the FBI called indoctrination when Hampton served it became official policy once they had killed the man who built it. In 1984, Jesse Jackson named his presidential campaign the Rainbow Coalition. He never credited Fred Hampton.

The FBI used the same playbook in Los Angeles that kept Geronimo Pratt imprisoned for 27 years. Julius Butler was an informant inside the Southern California Panthers. His testimony convicted Pratt of a murder the FBI’s own wiretaps proved he did not commit. Same mechanism, same result, different coast.

The floor plan O’Neal drew is in the public record. It still has markings showing where Hampton’s bed was. Hampton was shot twice in the head while lying in it, unconscious from the barbiturate O’Neal put in his drink. O’Neal was 40 when he died. Hampton was 21. The floor plan outlived them both.

Sources: Chicago Tribune investigation (February 3, 1973); Chicago Tribune interview with William O’Neal (1984); PBS Eyes on the Prize II (aired February 19, 1990); Cook County chemist Eleanor Berman toxicology reports; federal civil jury verdict and $1.85 million settlement (1982); Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) dramatization.