Making a Monster: A Simon City Royals Murder Saga

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He’d later say that Larry Toifel was the one who confirmed to him that TJ did it.

The pregnant lady, Tina Elder, picked TJ out of a lineup as looking like the shooter.

Larry Toifel also admitted that it was his buddy and fellow Simon City Royal TJ all along.

The motive soon surfaced.

Earlier in the day, Eric Morrow had asked TJ to stop throwing gang signs at kids in a passing bus, and TJ had threatened him and called him a bad word.

Unable to let a threat go idle, TJ had confronted Eric that very evening, pressed him up against the wall of the HoneyBaked Ham business, and shot him.

Eric stumbled a short distance to Tina Elder’s mother, Sandra, who was like a stepmother to him, gasped, “Ma, I’ve been shot.

” Then, he died.

That night, at around 4:00 am, TJ was fast asleep in his grandmother’s home when a police task force came pounding at the door.

They woke up his family and handcuffed the preteen after giving him some time to throw on a Duke jacket he always wore.

Still groggy at the police station, TJ was forced to stand with five other similar-looking kids known to police as shills who took turns wearing the jacket so witnesses could ID the shooter in a double-blind lineup.

Again, TJ was picked out.

He told police he was doing homework and playing Nintendo the night of the murder.

Police were not concerned.

Bugaki had solved the case within 48 hours, and days later his lucky streak seemed to get even better.

The second suspect was hand-delivered to them by the boy’s own father, Ezekiel Romo, who told police that his son, Victor, had confessed to being there, but wanted to clear his name.

The story Victor provided placed himself squarely there as the second boy who had shoved Eric but had not pulled the trigger.

There was just one problem.

Victor insisted the shooter was not some guy named T.

J.

but a fellow named Juan Carlos Torres, a member of a wannabe gang called the Triangles.

Juan Carlos was also 13, also known to carry a gun.

But that’s where the similarities between him and T.

J.

ended.

Juan Carlos had seen Eric Morua attempted to collect a $40 debt for his sister’s boyfriend, Leo Robles, who was also affiliated with the Triangles.

During the course of that, Juan Carlos had shot Eric and Victor freaked out and ran away.

Through it all, he insisted he didn’t even know anyone named Thaddeus Jimenez.

All of this set the stage for an unusual trial.

Larry Teufel, Tina, and Sandra Elder, and Philip Torres for the prosecution.

And the self-admitted involved party, Victor Romo, testifying for the defense.

Then, there was the Duke jacket.

Witnesses agreed on that detail, and T.

J.

not only owned one, he’d later been identified in it.

But prosecutors had just one more ace up their sleeve, which served to offer a glimpse into the mind of Thaddeus Jimenez.

It was a small stack of letters written to T.

J.

‘s 12-year-old girlfriend, Liz, after his arrest on murder charges.

And they were not your typical love letters.

Quote, “I’m going to tell him to stop Larry from going to court in any way, even if he has to kill him.

” T.

J.

wrote, referring to a fellow Simon City Royal.

“It won’t mean anything to me, and it only takes the pull of a trigger.

” And later, “The Royals are supposed to be looking for him.

It looks like I’ll have to kill him myself since the Royals won’t.

He’s lucky he’s living now, but I told my cousin not to kill him because he’s my problem.

As soon as I I out, Danny’s [ __ ] ass will be going to Larry’s wake.

You know the rule.

If you shoot, you shoot to kill, but watch for mice or you will pay the price.

But don’t worry, I won’t get caught.

The letters also painted a picture of a kid adapting to prison life.

Quote, “In here I get treated like a king.

I get anything I want, even weed.

All you need is money, and in here I have a lot of it.

In a way, it’s going to be hard leaving all of that behind.

But then again, I’ll be very happy to leave this shithole.

” The Royals were founded in Chicago near Simon’s Park in the early 1950s.

Originally a greaser gang, the Royals evolved in unpredictable directions over the years.

First when they became part of the Folk Nation under Larry Hoover, then when they took off south of the Mason-Dixon line and became something like a peckerwood gang in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other places.

By the ’60s, they were known as a home invasion crew, heavily involved in Chicago turf wars with other gangs like the Latin Kings or Gaylords.

Their symbols have been the colors royal blue and light blue, a top hat with shotguns or swords, a bunny head with a bent left ear, a cross, and the Folk Nation patch, among other things.

Male members are sometimes referred to as knights or the title sir followed by the person’s name or moniker.

And female members are known as royal ladies.

Leaders are sometimes called crown princes who keep, quote, “made men” as a leadership committee.

To this day, sometimes Royals members wear leather vests.

They’re considered a Caucasian gang, but it’s obviously not anywhere near as strictly racial as many other white gangs typically are.

And the multi-generational element adds an interesting layer to their culture.

Search around on Facebook and you’re likely to find groups of old-timers nostalgically talking about their days as young Simon City Royals.

As if they’re discussing being on a high school football team.

It’s an odd phenomenon, especially in a modern context, where the gang is still routinely accused of murder and various forms of mayhem.

By the 1990s, there were more than 500 documented members of the Royals in the city of Chicago alone.

There was also something called the Pee Wee Royals, a name designated for kids as young as 10 who wanted to be full-fledged Simon City Royals, but needed to either age or prove their worth.

We can never be sure if it was this gang evidence, Larry’s testimony, Thaddeus’s haunting letters, or just a combination of everything.

But by the trial’s end, the jury had found him guilty.

On the day of his sentencing, a judge handed down a prison term of 50 years.

TJ rose to his feet, raised his fists, and dove at the prosecutors, and was intercepted by court bailiffs before he could take a swing at them.

That same year, TJ’s mom, Victoria, told the Chicago Tribune she wanted to grab a gun and shoot Simon City Royals for corrupting her innocent son.

By age 17, Thaddeus was moved to adult prison with no end in sight for decades.

But what almost no one knew, especially not the jurors that convicted TJ, was that there was a confession tape out there.

And it had been provided to police by Ezekiel Romo, the father of TJ’s co-defendant, Victor.

But the voice on the tape was not TJ’s or Victor’s.

It was Juan Carlos Torres, the boy who Victor had told police was the real killer.

The boy who jurors had implicitly cleared by convicting TJ.

This confession tape had been provided to police who didn’t even bother to listen to it.

But they had given it to prosecutors.

A judge had then ruled it inadmissible, but had it been allowed, it likely would have given a whole new meaning to the note found inside Eric Morse’s pocket about a $40 debt to some guy named Leo.

TJ didn’t do his time quietly.

He spent it doing two things.

Getting in trouble with prison guards, including write-ups for violence and gang activity, and writing to any legal representation he could dream up, from the ACLU to the Innocence Project.

He would sit and wait for every mail call for some glimmer of hope.

Then, finally, something came.

The state appeals court was overturning his conviction.

Not because of tainted testimony or the confession tape, but because the jury hadn’t been properly vetted about the amount of gang evidence they were going to hear.

Thaddeus was brought back to Cook County Court, and the same witnesses testified in almost exactly the same way.

The only thing that was different was the sentence.

Thaddeus got 45 years this time instead of 50, but with the caveat that he would only do half his time.

That places release date somewhere in his mid to late 30s.

Judge Richard Divine had some parting advice for him.

You might skip that Royals gang signs, all that BS, and try changing your lifestyle once you’re away.

So, when you get out, you can at least give your mother some years of pleasure when she sees you as a free person.

So, TJ returned to prison, where everything basically stayed the same for the next 10 years.

Then, something incredible happened.

A small group of academic lawyers and investigators, called the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions, agreed to take on TJ’s case.

One of their first orders of business was to track down Larry Toefel to see if he stood by his testimony from 1994 and 1997.

Finding Toefel was easy.

All investigators had to do was to get in a car and drive to the mental ward where he had spent the last 5 years since being diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I just want to fix this thing.

It’s been way overdue.

You know, I just want the right guy to get caught who really did this.

He now said T.

J.

was innocent.

Larry claimed he’d been trying to tell the cops who the real killer was this whole time.

He had told them it was Juan Carlos Torres, a boy who’d confronted Eric Moro about a debt, pressed him against a wall, and shot him while screaming triangles.

The story lined up shockingly well with what Victor Romo said.

Larry said he had only changed his story because the cops had sat him down for hours and screamed at him about being a liar and needing to tell the truth.

Deprived of sleep, confused, and struggling with mental exhaustion, he’d told them it was T.

J.

The other witnesses were re-interviewed, and when investigators got around to Tina, they were in for another surprise.

She mentioned that Detective Jerome Bogucky had shown her a picture of Thaddeus Jimenez right before she ID’d him in a supposedly unbiased lineup.

That alone was a significant deviation from police practices, where eyewitnesses are supposed to be given as little direction towards a particular person as possible for obvious reasons.

With these new developments, T.

J.

‘s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss.

Was this remarkable turnaround a big deal? Not to Judge Stanley Sachs, who denied the petition with these words: frivolous and without merit.

Another year, another loss for T.

J.

With nowhere else to run, his lawyers petitioned the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to reinvestigate.

It was a long shot, but it worked.

The CCSAO began to take a fresh look at the Eric Moro murder.

>> >> And what they found began to turn heads.

It wasn’t just the issue of tainted witnesses.

It was about that secretly recorded confession tape.

In the tape, a boy’s voice takes responsibility for killing Morrow, but blamed Morrow for quote punching me in the nose.

Then it added, they pinned the blame on the other gang boy.

Torres had allegedly confronted Morrow about a debt to his sister’s boyfriend, Leo Robles.

Had anyone bothered to interview Leo Robles? Well, in 2008, investigators did.

Hey Leo, do you remember anything about a murder from 1993? Sure, he replied, then admitted to tossing the murder weapon the Chicago River from the Belmont Avenue Bridge, and recounted how a Triangles member named Luis had given him the gun.

Luis said he got the gun from Juan, who had used it to shoot Eric Morrow.

>> >> So, investigators showed up at Juan Carlos Torres’ home.

He denied knowing Victor or Ezekiel, a verifiable lie.

Then said he wanted to talk to a lawyer before listening to his alleged confession tape.

Instead, he quit his job, pulled his kids from school, abandoned his family home, and fled the state.

On May 1st, 2009, the State’s Attorney formally dropped the charges against T.

J.

, freeing him from prison and handing him a certificate of innocence.

Then they went and found Juan Carlos Torres in Indiana and charged him with murder.

It was a stunning development that posed a significant question.

If T.

J.

was really innocent, how had all these witnesses and the police gotten it so wrong? Well, T.

J.

wanted to find out the answer, too, and he did it in the form of a civil lawsuit against Jerome Bogacki and the Chicago Police Department.

Bogacki was not about to admit that he framed a man.

Like T.

J.

had done in 1994, he took his case to trial.

In front of a civil jury in 2012, T.

J.

‘s lawyers argued basically the opposite, painting Jerome Bogacki as a ruthless detective who realized he’d screwed up when Ezekiel Romo came forward and suppressed evidence so people wouldn’t start to ask how he’d gotten four witnesses to accuse an innocent boy of murder.

The supposed Duke jacket was really a Georgetown jacket, they said.

Evidence that changed to fit TJ’s wardrobe.

As for TJ, he’d lost most of his life to a lie.

Adding, “Prison is designed for monsters and children aren’t monsters.

But the system, because of all that violence and sexual abuse, unfortunately, it breeds monsters.

And TJ had to make his way in there.

” Bagacki’s lawyer even took a page out of Joe Pesci’s handbook at the trial.

Quote, “Everything he just said was baloney.

The state’s attorney got duped and Jerry Bagacki is paying for it.

” How did this argument land? Well, the jury awarded TJ $25 million paid for by the city of Chicago.

TJ’s lawyer, Jon Loevy, told Bagacki that he was prepared to seek even more damages for TJ out of Bagacki’s pocket unless Bagacki apologized.

“Do you acknowledge, sir, that by your actions you violated Mr.

Jimenez’s rights?” Loevy asked.

“Yes,” Bagacki said.

Then he told Jimenez, “I’m sorry if you have been wronged.

” Three years earlier, Thaddeus Jimenez was a prison inmate with a murder conviction who’d spent most of his formative years and all of his adulthood locked up.

Now he was one of the richest men in Chicago who said he was moving into the future with ambitions and optimism.

He assured the courts and the public he had left his gang ties firmly in the past.

And why not? In the nearly 20 years since he’d been arrested, the Simon City Royals had faded into oblivion in Chicago.

While ironically gaining footholds in the South.

In Mississippi, they were challenging the Aryan Brotherhood for control of the state’s lucrative meth markets and prison dominance.

In September 2025, members of the gang there suspected a woman named Tina Broaddus was cooperating with law enforcement.

They got her to a house on O’Neal Road in Gulfport, where a member named Joshua Peterman lived.

Then beat and strangled her over the course of several hours.

Her body was stuffed into a drum and burned.

But ironically, almost every participant except Peterman ended up cooperating against him.

Some admitting they were high on meth they got from Peterman at the relevant time.

Peterman served as his own lawyer, giving fiery closing arguments, but eventually receiving a life without parole sentence.

The following year, Simon City Royals started their own nonprofit in Mississippi called 13 Dr.eams Incorporated, which prosecutors contend was just a money laundering scheme.

Later that year, a Simon City Royals leader named Alan Posey allegedly lifted the gang’s {quote} no snitching rule in the hopes that someone would tell the cops who murdered an elite Royal member named Matthew Spooner, so that Posey could direct someone to kill Spooner’s killer once he got to prison.

The ruse apparently worked.

The suspected killer, Brad Fitch, was indicted and brought to Hancock County Jail, where Posey, Jeremy Holcomb, and Justin Shaw stabbed him repeatedly with shanks made by and for the gang.

These two murders and other crimes, including extortion of a subordinate Royals mother, prison drug smuggling, attempted killings of a rival Insane Royal Knights, aka Nines, as well as the creation of a tech team to commit wire fraud for the Royals, were all a part of a 2022 RICO prosecution that sent 37 suspected Royals, including Posey, Holcomb, and Shaw to federal prison.

Back in Chicago, the Royals had been cast aside by the thousands of other gangs that formed over the years.

But Thaddeus wasn’t satisfied with this.

And he envisioned something else.

A blue wave crashing down on the city thanks to him and his new-found riches.

All of that leads to the events of August 27th, 2015.

Thaddeus and his friend Jose Roman got into TJ’s black Mercedes convertible carrying two guns and a Gucci bag full of bullets.

They joked around and flashed their guns on camera.

What you is? Huh? You ain’t [ __ ] All right.

This world [ __ ] homie.

Then they pulled up to a man who greeted them.

What’s up, folks? It was a standard greeting for people in the Folk Nation, like Gangster Disciples or Simon City Royals.

The man’s name was Earl Castile, someone who had rebuffed TJ’s attempts to recruit him into the Royals.

TJ was not amused.

Why don’t I blast you right now? Blast me, [ __ ] Why don’t I blast your goofy ass? You talking to my brother, man.

I ain’t got nothing against you, man.

Why would you shoot? Shut up, [ __ ] TJ shot him once in each shin.

The police had already been called.

They tracked down the Mercedes and chased it till it crashed.

Police caught up and took him in.

Earlier, back in 2012, the same day he became a millionaire, he had been caught with a gun and begged a judge, {quote} “I had no idea how the world this worked.

Have mercy on me.

Give me one more chance.

” This day was the end result.

When TJ came back to court on federal and state charges, prosecutors and his lawyer revealed what had happened to that $25 million.

First, he gave half to his lawyers.

The other half was spent on fancy cars, posting bail for his gang friends, like a $100,000 bond for a Royal who’d shot and paralyzed a rival, a 2011 Range Rover for Jose Roman, and a Porsche Panamera for Royal Luis Candelaria, who ended up in prison on gang charges.

And now, he was broke, having gone through $12.

5 million in 3 years.

When Earl Castille sued TJ for shooting him, he told the courts he had nothing.

A judge ordered him to pay $6 million anyway.

One of the most tragic parts of all was a letter seized by police and published in court, which told the reader to quote, “Not show anyone.

” The letter chides those who are disloyal to TJ or to quote, “Fake Royals” who stand in the way of the gang’s inevitable takeover.

“This is where I was created.

This is my home, my house, my world.

No matter where they put me, any jail, any prison, I will always be at home.

” The Blue Wave TJ advocated for had been coming to fruition.

In January 2015, a suspected Royal was found in the possession of a gun used to shoot a Four Corner Hustlers member.

Royal love Four Corner Hustler killer.

Versace Lenny Batman It’s my neighborhood now.

His excuse? “I’m a Royal.

I got to protect myself.

” In April 2015, a group of Royals robbed the Ben Salem Food Market in Chicago and threatened to shoot the owner.

All told, nearly a dozen Royals were charged with firearm offenses that year, including Thaddeus.

By the case’s end, a judge sentenced TJ to 110 months in federal prison, and he was given 12 years in the state.

He appears to be out now.

The final chapter of his story is still unwritten and therefore still with the potential for yet another remarkable turnaround.

He does have an active bench warrant in federal court, but details behind that have been kept under seal since it was issued in November 2025.

But what about Juan Carlos Torres, the supposed real killer? In 2010, a judge found him not guilty of Eric Moreau’s murder, calling Larry Toyfel an unreliable witness and casting doubt on the confession tape, which apparently starts with somebody whispering that they’re recording now a short time before the confession starts.

So, who won here? Not Bagacki, whose reputation is badly damaged by negative media coverage.

Not Juan Carlos, who spent 2 years in jail.

Not Eric Moreau’s family, who witnessed both suspected killers get off.

And certainly not Thaddeus, who lit lost most of his life and all of his money.

But perhaps the moral of the story is something Thaddeus himself touched on in his childhood writings.

In that spirit, we’ll leave you with the following excerpts from a poem he wrote back in juvenile hall when the Eric Moreau case was fresh in his mind.

We decided to go to the park across from the mall to talk to a big bull and play a little ball.

My homies Larry and Eric decided to stay.

About half an hour later, I was on my way.

Late at night and I fell asleep, tired as hell.

I’m finally on my feet.

1 hour later, I was woke by a bang.

My door opened and I almost swung.

A cop reached over and grabbed my shoes.

The other grabbed my jacket and said I lose.

Chilling in the station, watching a lyric.

The show cut off and showed my homie Eric.

They said he died with a bullet to the chest.

The doctor said he tried my best.

I said to myself, is that why I’m here? I said, no, it can’t be.

I wasn’t even there.

A cop came in and said he was Sergeant Kurder.

Asked me if I knew I was in here for murder.

Now I’m in here doing the time.

They should know by now I didn’t do the crime.

This wouldn’t have had to ever happen if I didn’t join the gang.

So take my advice and do the right thing.