Judas and the Black Messiah centers on Bill O’Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated the Black Panther Party, becoming the head of security. His intel was behind the Chicago police’s raid and assassination of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. The film’s credit sequence offers brief snippets into his life in the aftermath of Hampton’s death. But, because the film is singularly devoted to the events of O’Neal’s work with the FBI and the Black Panthers, Judas and the Black Messiah doesn’t spend a lot of time exploring what eventually became of O’Neal.
The film ends not long after Hampton is killed. After O’Neal successfully drugs the chairman, he leaves shortly after, presumably going back to his apartment so that he won’t be caught in the middle of the deadly raid. Judas and the Black Messiah helpfully reveals that O’Neal continued in his role with the Black Panther Party and as an informant with the FBI until 1973, four years after Hampton’s death in 1969. For his years of work, O’Neal received more than $200,000 and a bonus from J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who was involved with the conspiracy to kill Hampton and subsequently cover it up.
In 1972, O’Neal served as a key witness in the case against Sergeant Stanley Robinson. O’Neal’s testimony — which states that he saw the sergeant kill two men — helped to convict Robinson, who had been accused of murdering drug dealers. However, O’Neal’s time with the Panthers and the FBI came to an end in 1973, when his role in the raid and Hampton’s murder was discovered. O’Neal was placed in the federal witness protection program thereafter.
With his name changed to William Hart, O’Neal moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he lived until secretly returning to the area circa 1984. By then, O’Neal had already left his first wife, their marriage allegedly strained by the fact that he was in the witness protection program. O’Neal remarried before moving back to Chicago, bringing along his second wife. According to his friends at the time, O’Neal spent the rest of his days working for a local attorney and became a father shortly before his death in 1990. In 1989, the former informant gave an on-camera interview with the public TV series Eyes on the Prize, recounting how he became involved with the FBI and his role within the Black Panther Party ahead of Hampton’s death.
In 1990, O’Neal, according to his uncle Ben Heard, tried to jump out of the second-story living room window. However, Heard says he stopped him, though he wasn’t able to hold him for long before O’Neal broke free and left his uncle’s home. He then ran across the lanes of Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway where he was hit by a car and killed. O’Neal’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide, with Heard revealing that he believed his nephew felt remorse for his involvement in Hampton’s assassination. Judas and the Black Messiah glosses over a few key details regarding O’Neal’s life in the aftermath, though it does provide a bit of the archival footage from his Eyes on the Prize interview to wrap up his story.