The father. The street tough. The ladies’ man. The supervisor in a white-collar and tie.
Tyrone Watson was all of them; yet, he was none of them, friends say.
But hunched over on his knees in the Lake County Courthouse early Sunday, sobbing as he told authorities he was the man police were seeking in “the Zion murders,” Watson finally confronted the climax of years of pretending.
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As police continue to build their case against Watson, charged in the murderous weekend spree that claimed the life of his daughter and injured five other relatives, the people who knew him have been left to wonder if they knew the man at all.
Taken together, however, the varied and disparate descriptions offered by friends, neighbors and family members are the profile of a man living in several, conflicting worlds.
But as those worlds crumbled during the last several months, Watson, 32, entered a downward spiral that police say ended violently and brought him to his knees on the courthouse floor-shoeless, in a T-shirt and worn sweat pants, crying like a child with his head in his hands.
To those who knew him longest, Watson was the cocky “Ron Ski,” a nickname earned as a high schooler hanging out in North Chicago and later emblazoned on the vanity plates of his custom Chevy Blazer.
It was a moniker given to him by fellow members of the PMC Club, an ad hoc group of area teens dedicated to “women, money and cars.”
“He was the type who would talk a lot of stuff, but he would never do anything,” said Walter Barnett, a onetime PMC member who grew up with Watson.
Watson’s “Ron Ski” persona was a street tough, one who would later portray himself to neighbors as a pseudo-gangster, a man with a grim attitude seemingly taken from the movies.
“He liked to play macho and always was acting like he was in a gang,” said John Sorg, a neighbor of Watson.
Relatives said Watson also saw himself as a ladies’ man-much to the consternation of Stacey Nabors, the longtime girlfriend who would become his wife, mother of his children and one of his alleged shooting victims.
During his 15-year relationship with Nabors, Watson fathered three children with three other women, according to records filed in Lake County court. Each would later file paternity suits against him and when he failed to make child support payments, have his wages garnisheed.
Watson married Stacey Nabors in 1986. They had three children and it was out of their family that another of Watson’s characters emerged-that of a father who struggled to separate himself from “Ron Ski” and build a home for his children.
He supported his family as a supervisor at Abbott Labs, training workers on the production line how to operate equipment. Stacey also worked at Abbott and together they purchased their three-bedroom home at the corner of Carmel Boulevard and Eshcol Avenue in Zion.
Teachers at Elmwood Elementary School this week recalled how Tyrone Watson would show up for parent-teacher conferences concerned about his children’s progress, and how he proudly used an entire roll of film to record his daughter in a social studies Quiz Bowl competition.
Watson agreed to help coach a park district softball team on which his daughters played.
“He loved his kids,” said Harold Cochran, 70, who lived next door to Watson as he grew up and kept in contact with him through the years. “His kids were his life.”
But there was a dark side, Cochran said, like the time Watson showed him a 9 mm. automatic pistol he had purchased for protection. At the same time, family members said Watson’s continued relationships with other women were the source of constant battles with his wife. Court records show a pattern of abuse and beatings in the home, some of which ended in battery charges against both Watson and his wife that were later dropped.
“He had a temper, you know,” said Priscilla Sanders, Watson’s sister-in-law. “He had an evil streak in him.”
Five times Watson was arrested for beating his wife. Five times she refused to press the charges in court. The couple filed twice for divorce in 1989 and 1991, but reconciled.
But last year, Stacey Watson had had enough and pursued a divorce, which was granted on the grounds of “extreme and repeated mental cruelty” in November, according to court records.
“He loved his children and was a very dedicated family man,” said Greta Lovelace, a lifelong family friend. “He was dedicated to his job and liked what he was doing.
“But a lot of things had gone on in his life that he didn’t like and didn’t know how to handle.”
After the divorce, Watson persisted in his attempts to repair the marriage, friends said. Stacey occasionally relented, ignoring the court orders she had sought to keep him away and allowing him to bunk on the couch.
He was absent from work more and more, said a co-worker at Abbott who requested anonymity. And when he was there, he confided to some that he was depressed at the prospect of his failed marriage and crippling child support payments.
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He resigned from Abbott on March 1, though the circumstances that brought his departure are unclear. He told friends and neighbors he had been forced out because of sexual harassment allegations. Abbott officials said he left of his own accord.
Without a job and increasingly bitter and restless, Watson turned to friends for advice.
`He would talk about the problems he was having with Stacey and how he had lost his job. He had recently starting drinking also. I think he was just getting kind of depressed,” Barnett, the childhood friend, said of a conversation with Watson two weeks ago.
Tyrone Watson’s worlds apparently collapsed on him during the early morning hours on Sunday, when police say he walked into a bedroom where a 10-year-old girl lay sleeping, carried her to the basement and put a gun in her mouth. “I’ll kill you and everyone else in the house if you don’t do this,” authorities said he told her before raping her repeatedly and then turning the gun on his sleeping family.
“I’ll put my hand on a stack of Bibles, that wasn’t the Tyrone I knew; he was a good man,” said Turner Lovelace, whom Watson had considered a surrogate father. “He sure had me fooled, because I never thought he would do anything like that to his own children.”