They ruled that the deaths of Hampton and Clark were justifiable homicide by the police. In January 1970, a coroner's jury held an inquest.
Witnesses said that they heard two bangs, presumably the close-range shots to the back of Hampton's head that killed him. The police cleared out the people from the rest of the apartment, wounding several others, and went to Hampton's bedroom. They first shot and killed Mark Clark, sitting in the front room of the apartment with a shotgun in his lap on security duty. Īt 4:00 a.m., a 14-man armed Chicago police team arrived at the apartment, and at 4:45 a.m. Hampton fell asleep while talking to his mother on the telephone. O'Neal slipped secobarbitol into Hampton's drink so he would not wake up during the police raid. Afterward, he and several Panthers went to his apartment, and around midnight they ate a dinner prepared by O'Neal. On the evening of December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education class at a local church, attended by most Panther members. The FBI required O'Neal to give them a drawing to show the layout of Hampton's apartment on Monroe Street in the West Side, where the Panthers often gathered, so they could prepare a raid. That summer, the police raided Panther offices, arrested several members, and burned the building down. In 1969 Hampton was working on the Rainbow Coalition, an alliance among gangs and minority groups in Chicago, and the FBI and police became increasingly concerned about his activities and growing political power. O'Neal was assigned as one of the heads for the Black Panther leader's security, and had keys to several Panther headquarters and safe houses.
O'Neal soon established himself with Fred Hampton, who was 20 years old at the time. By 1966 they were attempting to infiltrate and undermine black nationalist movements such the Black Panthers and discredit black civil rights leaders. The FBI had been conducting their illegal COINTELPRO operation since the mid-1950s, expanding their efforts against communists to include black civil rights activists. In 1968 the FBI offered him a deal: in exchange for having his felony charges dropped and receiving a monthly stipend, O'Neal agreed to infiltrate the Panthers as a counterintelligence operative, or informant. In 1967, when he was about 18 years old, he was caught by FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell, who had tracked O'Neal down for stealing a car and driving it across state lines to Michigan. William O'Neal was born and grew up in Chicago, and had gotten into trouble with the law as a teenager.
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