A 68-year-old man who fled the country after being questioned in a 2004 Gold Coast homicide has been charged with first-degree murder following his extradition from Peru, officials said during a detention hearing on Saturday.
David Barklow is accused of fatally shooting 40-year-old Kent Projansky inside Projansky’s 30th-floor apartment in the 1100 block of North Dearborn Street on December 18, 2004. He was brought back to Chicago last week after years of international efforts to locate Barklow, according to Assistant State’s Attorney Katie Siefert.
She said Projansky’s body was found lying on his back in the entry hall, partially clothed, with five gunshot wounds, including a contact shot to his lower lip and a bullet to the back of the head.
A friend found Projansky’s body days later, after Projansky stopped answering calls. Officers discovered two spent .32-caliber shell casings in the apartment and a third in the bedroom, as well as blood on nearby stairwell railings.
Prosecutors said friends and family told investigators that Projansky sold cannabis from his apartment and often kept large sums of cash inside. One acquaintance said Projansky could have as much as $20,000 in the unit and typically carried about $3,000 on his person.
According to Siefert’s detention filing, neighbors reported hearing gunshots and whispering from the victim’s apartment around 11 a.m. on the day of the murder. One neighbor later told police she saw a tall White man with medium-length gray hair wearing a tan jacket walking away from the victim’s unit shortly after the noises were heard.
Three days later, a construction worker found a green duffel bag behind a bank in the 8500 block of West Higgins Avenue, roughly 14 miles from the crime scene and about two miles from Barklow’s mother’s home in Park Ridge, said Siefert. Inside the bag were a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with a defaced serial number, ammunition, blood-stained clothing, and gloves. Forensic testing later linked bullets and shell casings from the apartment and inside the bag to the same weapon, prosecutors said.
Also in the duffel bag was a Galerie Lafayette shopping bag containing a trench coat stained with the victim’s blood, Siefert said. Galerie Lafayette is a European luxury department store chain with only two known operating locations at the time of the murder: one in Paris and the other in Berlin. Homeland Security records showed Barklow had traveled from New York City to Paris in November 2003, roughly a year before the killing, Siefert alleged, suggesting he could have obtained the bag there.
In 2017, the case was reopened under a statewide cold-case project. The Illinois State Police lab allegedly found seven latent fingerprints on the items inside the duffel bag, including on an ammunition box, that matched Barklow. DNA testing on the clothing and gloves tied both Barklow and the victim to the items, Siefert said.
Latent prints are the invisible impressions left behind when a person’s fingers touch a surface, transferring sweat, oils, or other residues that can be revealed and analyzed through forensic processing. Those prints were collected in 2008, but initially produced no matches. When the case was reexamined in 2017 using updated fingerprint identification technology under the statewide initiative, analysts concluded that the prints belonged to Barklow.
Siefert said Barklow lived across the street from Projansky at the time of the killing. After he was questioned in 2019, he fled the United States, first crossing into Canada and then flying to Sweden. Authorities said he was later found living in Ecuador before being detained in April at the Lima, Peru, airport on an Interpol Red Notice.
While awaiting extradition in Peru, Barklow allegedly contacted a U.S. State Department official and claimed he had been cleared by Chicago police in 2019 and was in Germany when Projansky was killed. Homeland Security records did not show any travel to Germany during that time, prosecutors said.
Barklow, who has a 1995 federal conviction for bank fraud, has been detained pending trial.
“My office will never stop working to seek justice for victims and their families, no matter how much time has passed,” Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said in a statement. “I am grateful to the Chicago Police Department for its thorough investigation of this case, and for crucial support from the DOJ, the FBI, and Peruvian authorities who helped ensure that the defendant would face these charges in Cook County.”
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