[Ppnews] Man who fought to expose torture in the Chicago Police Department has died

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/andrewwilson/

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Andrew Wilson


Andrew Wilson


A cop killer who fought to expose torture in the 
Chicago Police Department has died, but his 
testimony from beyond the grave could still help bring down its perpetrators.

By John Conroy

November 22, 2007

Andrew Wilson, the notorious killer of Chicago 
police officers William Fahey and Richard 
O’Brien, is dead. Wilson, who was serving a life 
sentence at Menard Correctional Center, died of 
natural causes November 19 in a hospital in 
Belleville, Illinois. He will long be remembered 
not only for his crime but for his pivotal role 
in what followed­the exposure of torture within 
the police department. And he may yet have a role 
to play from beyond the grave.

Wilson was interrogated, as were most other 
police suspects who alleged torture, back in the 
80s; he shot Fahey and O’Brien in 1982. The 
accused officers were protected from punishment, 
first by the willing blindness of state and 
federal prosecutors and then by the statute of 
limitations. In September, however, U.S. attorney 
Patrick Fitzgerald indicated that he might still 
prosecute the perpetrators­not for the torture 
but for denying it under oath in civil suits 
filed more recently by five alleged victims. In 
order to mount such a prosecution, Fitzgerald 
would have to prove that torture took place, and 
no case offers better medical evidence than 
Andrew Wilson’s. He was tortured without finesse. 
Marks were left all over his body.

The Federal Rules of Evidence prohibit the use of 
testimony from someone who cannot be 
cross-examined by a lawyer representing the 
accused, but there’s an exception. According to 
rule 804(b)(1), testimony given at another 
proceeding at which the accused had a similar 
opportunity and motive to question the witness is 
admissible if the witness is “unavailable by death.”

Wilson was the third of nine children born to 
Robert and Margie Wilson, who’d migrated to 
Chicago from the south. According to a 1988 
presentencing report by social worker Jill 
Miller, Robert was a machine operator at a soap 
factory, a job he held for 40 years, and Margie 
worked as a waitress. In 1963, when Wilson was 
11, the family moved from an apartment into a 
split-level three-bedroom home in Morgan Park 
that Miller described as “neat, clean, and nicely 
furnished,” with a small library and an electric 
organ that all the children could play by ear. 
Miller reported that the family regularly 
attended church and that neither parent spared 
the rod, the father favoring an extension cord. 
Wilson described the “whuppings” as “standard,” not as abusive.

According to Miller, Wilson had trouble early on 
in school. In first grade he was bounced back to 
kindergarten after scoring 73 on a full-scale IQ 
test, and the following October he was placed in 
a program for the educable mentally handicapped. 
Four years later, Board of Education testing gave 
him an IQ of 78. In sixth grade, achievement 
tests showed him functioning at first- and 
second-grade levels, and he remained functionally 
illiterate all his life. Chances are he was more 
intelligent than his scores indicated. Joseph 
Prendergast, a remedial reading teacher with 
decades of experience, tutored Wilson for a time 
in prison and concluded that he had a learning 
disability that had never been diagnosed.

Miller portrayed Wilson as frustrated and 
embarrassed in school. She wrote that he became a 
truant who hung out with what his parents 
considered “the wrong crowd,” stayed out late, 
ran away, and no longer responded to his parents’ 
beatings. Yet Miller also cited sources who said 
he was polite to neighbors and liked by the elderly.

At 14 Wilson got a job washing dishes in the 
restaurant where his mother worked, but he was 
soon referred to juvenile court for truancy and 
committed to the Chicago Parental School, a 
residential Board of Education program. He ran 
away after six weeks. In 1967 he was sent to the 
Joliet Youth Facility for burglarizing a 
neighbor’s home. While in custody he underwent 
neurological testing, was diagnosed as having 
seizure disorders, and was prescribed 
anticonvulsive medication. He was also given 
tranquilizers for emotional disturbance and 
hyperactivity. Two years later a Department of 
Corrections doctor noted how well he’d adjusted 
and took him off the drugs. According to Miller, 
Wilson was never again given a neurological exam or assessed for medications.

He was 16 when he was released in 1969, and 
although he got jobs as a busboy and on a 
construction crew, he was arrested that November 
for burglary. Miller reported that Wilson’s 
mother left the family some months later, 
reportedly with another man, and that Wilson’s 
father raised the children alone after that. The 
youngest were four-year-old twins.

In the early 1970s Andrew fathered two daughters 
with a woman he didn’t marry. In 1975 he 
committed armed robbery­his targets a suburban 
policeman and a Sambo’s restaurant­for which he 
was sentenced to 8 to 16 years. He was paroled on 
October 23, 1981, and quickly returned to crime, 
assisted by his younger brother Jackie, who was 
21. They robbed a clothing store in November, a 
camera store in December. In February Andrew 
dressed as a postal carrier and they robbed a middle-aged woman in her home.

Five days later Andrew and Jackie entered a house 
and came out with clothing, a TV, a fifth of 
whiskey, some bullets, and a jar of pennies. They 
were driving south on Morgan in their brown Chevy 
Impala when gang crimes officers Fahey, 34, and 
O’Brien, 33, pulled them over. Both brothers had 
outstanding warrants for bail violations.

Andrew stripped Fahey of his gun, shot him in the 
head, and then shot O’Brien five times. The 
brothers sped off. O’Brien was dead on arrival at 
Little Company of Mary Hospital. Fahey died the next day.

The investigation was led by Lieutenant Jon 
Burge, commander of the Area Two violent crimes 
unit. He didn’t have much to go on, beyond a 
description of the perpetrators and their car, 
which had a damaged front grille. A now retired 
Area Two detective who took part in the dragnet 
told the Reader years later, “There were a 
million volunteers. . . . Normally you’d have 15 
to 20 violent crimes guys on duty. Now you’ve got 
not only them, you’ve got the property crimes 
guys, the gang crimes guys. Detectives from Area 
One were there. The brass was there because it 
was such a heater case. . . . My partner and I 
worked 36 hours straight. Burge had to send 
someone to his house to get clean socks and a shirt. He didn’t go home.”

Jesse Jackson compared the effort to a “military 
occupation.” The detective remembered, “It was a 
reign of terror. I don’t know what Kristallnacht 
was like, but this was probably close.” He blamed 
much of the abuse on the gang crimes unit: “Their 
idea is you go out and pick up 2,000 pounds of 
nigger and eventually you’ll get the right one.”
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Ultimately it was citizen cooperation that broke 
the case. One tip came from a body-and-fender man 
named Solomon Morgan. Jackie Wilson called Morgan 
and asked him to paint his car and repair the 
grille. Morgan realized the Impala matched the 
description of the killers’ car and called the police.

Burge and his detectives closed in on the 
brothers, who were moving separately from 
apartment to apartment on the south and west 
sides. At 5:15 AM on Sunday, February 14, five 
days after Fahey and O’Brien were gunned down, 
Burge and his men surrounded a building at 5301 
W. Jackson. Burge, the first man through the door 
of the garden apartment where Andrew was hiding, 
arrested him without firing a shot. Second 
District police arrested Jackie about three hours 
later, thanks to a south-side minister who passed 
on a tip from someone in his congregation.

What occurred over the next 15 hours haunts the 
city to this day. After confessing, Andrew 
emerged from Area Two in such bad shape that a 
lockup keeper insisted he be given medical 
treatment. He was taken to Mercy Hospital, where 
a doctor documented 15 separate injuries before 
one of the patrol wagon officers pulled his gun 
and refused to put it away. The doctor refused to 
continue, leaving the prisoner and the officer 
alone in the examining room. When the doctor 
returned, Wilson declined further treatment.

The next day he told public defender Dale 
Coventry that he’d been shocked, burned by a 
radiator, suffocated with a plastic bag, and 
kicked in the eye and beaten. Coventry had photos 
of a huge burn on his client’s thigh, parallel 
burns on his chest, and strange U-shaped puncture 
marks on his nose and ears. Wilson said the marks 
came from alligator clips attached to wires 
leading to a hand-cranked electrical device. He 
said Burge shocked him on his genitals and his 
back with a second device that resembled a curling iron.

Another prisoner in Wilson’s position might not 
have raised his voice. He was a cop killer­most 
people wouldn’t believe he’d been tortured, and 
many who did wouldn’t care. But Wilson testified 
under oath six times about what had happened to him.

He identified Burge and detective John Yucaitis 
(who has since died) as the primary perpetrators 
but said as many as 10 or 11 officers had been 
involved in beating and kicking him, and that a 
female detective took part in the handcuffing 
that preceded his electrical torture. Wilson 
claimed that he told assistant state’s attorney 
Larry Hyman, chief of the felony review section, 
that he’d just been tortured; later in the day, 
when he took Wilson’s confession with a court 
reporter present, Hyman failed to ask a 
prescribed question about whether the statement 
was being given voluntarily. That extraordinary 
omission might have aroused the curiosity of 
state’s attorney Richard Daley and his first 
assistant, Dick Devine, but apparently it didn’t. 
And there was no indication that they cared to 
get to the bottom of Wilson’s treatment when the 
Illinois Supreme Court threw out his conviction 
(and death sentence) in 1987. At his second trial 
Wilson was convicted without the confession, and 
the jury sentenced him to natural life.

Aside from the Illinois Supreme Court, no one 
paid much attention to Wilson’s torture claims, 
but he kept making them. In 1986, without a 
lawyer, he filed a civil suit in federal court. 
Several lawyers assigned by the court to work on 
the case found reasons not to, and finally Wilson 
contacted the People’s Law Office. Flint Taylor 
recalls fielding the phone call, hearing Wilson 
out, and then discussing the case with the other 
lawyers in the firm. “We didn’t think we’d ever 
make any money on the case,” Taylor says, “but it 
seemed like such an important issue. You shouldn’t be able to torture a guy.”

The civil trial in federal court began in 
February 1989. Wilson was represented by Taylor, 
John Stainthorp, and Jeffrey Haas. It seemed a 
doomed effort from day one­Wilson, a cop killer, 
armed robber, and home invader, facing off 
against Burge, who’d been decorated for valor in 
Vietnam, and three other officers, all accustomed 
to the witness stand. Wilson cowered, looking 
like he expected to be hit at any moment. But 
there was a certain credibility in his telling of 
the story, in his attempt not to cry in front of 
the jury, and in the medical evidence. Despite a 
brutal cross-examination by William Kunkle, 
representing the officers, Wilson scored points 
with at least some of the jurors. They couldn’t 
reach a verdict on the primary charges, and judge 
Brian Duff declared a mistrial.

The defense offered by the officers in the second 
trial contradicted aspects of their defense in 
the first. An interrogation room radiator that 
was broken in the first trial worked in the 
second, and the expert who testified that Wilson 
hadn’t been burned was jettisoned in favor of a 
jailhouse informant, a British con man who’d 
served time in seven countries and who testified 
that Wilson had confided in him that he’d burned 
himself. The jury came back with a confused 
verdict. It decided that Wilson’s constitutional 
rights had been violated and that the city had a 
de facto policy of allowing police officers to 
abuse people suspected of shooting policemen, but 
also that Wilson hadn’t been subjected to 
excessive force as a result of this policy.

Wilson appealed, won a third civil trial, and 
finally prevailed in 1996. He’d persisted in his 
suit even after it became clear he’d never see a 
penny in damages. Fahey’s widow and two children 
had filed a wrongful death suit against him, and 
in the end the city was ordered to pay $100,000 
to the Faheys and another $900,000 in fees to Wilson’s attorneys.

Wilson’s case was pivotal, not simply because he 
won it in the end but because of what it led 
to­the exposure of a torture ring. In February 
1989, during the first civil trial, one of 
Burge’s colleagues began sending anonymous 
letters to the People’s Law Office in police 
department envelopes. He or she listed the names 
of “Burge’s Asskickers” at Area Two and said 
Wilson wasn’t the only torture victim. One letter 
advised the attorneys to contact a Melvin Jones, an inmate at Cook County Jail.

The tip led to Burge’s eventual undoing. Jones 
also said he’d been given electric shock­as it 
turned out, nine days before Wilson’s arrest. 
Even better, Jones had described the experience 
in a court hearing seven years earlier. According 
to the transcript of that hearing, Jones said 
Burge had asked him if he knew two men with the street names Satan and Cochise.

A: I told him I have heard of them. I didn’t know them personally.

Q: What if anything did he say to you at that time?
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A: He said, they both had the same treatment, you 
know. He was telling me what kind of guys they 
was as far as supposed to be being, you know, 
kind of tough or something, you know. They crawled all over the floor.

The lawyers located Satan and Cochise, then 
serving long terms in prison, and they named 
other victims. The list has since grown to 107 names.

Judge Duff wouldn’t allow Jones’s story into 
evidence, so it had no immediate effect on 
Wilson’s civil trial. Yet without Wilson’s suit, 
it’s possible the Burge torture gang never would 
have been uncovered. Flint Taylor points out that 
even though PLO attorneys had already represented 
Phillip Adkins, one of the victims on the list, 
they’d had no reason to link the two cases 
because there were no abusing officers in common. 
Not until the Melvin Jones tip and the list of 
“Burge’s Asskickers” arrived, Taylor says, did 
anyone begin cross-referencing abuse cases at Area Two.

As a result of the Wilson revelations, some made 
public for the first time in the Reader (“House 
of Screams,” January 26, 1990), the Office of 
Professional Standards reopened its investigation 
of his treatment in police custody. The two 
reports that resulted were groundbreaking. 
Michael Goldston, asked to examine abuse 
complaints in general at Area Two, concluded that 
abuse was systematic, included “planned torture,” 
and was sanctioned by command level officers. 
Francine Sanders, assigned to examine the Wilson 
case in particular, concluded that, yes, the 
killer had been tortured using electric shock.

Sanders’s report provided the foundation for 1992 
Police Board hearings that resulted in Burge 
being fired. Testimony at those hearings provided 
the basis for the city’s acknowledgment in 1994 
that torture had occurred at Area Two. If it 
weren’t for Wilson’s suit, it’s possible that in 
2003 Governor Ryan wouldn’t have pardoned four 
Area Two victims who’d been sentenced to death.

And Burge, who’s 59, might still be on the force 
today if it weren’t for Wilson. The commander and 
other detectives who tortured prisoners appear to 
have deployed three electrical devices: a cattle 
prod, a device resembling the army field phone 
that some members of Burge’s military police unit 
used to torture suspects in Vietnam (“Tools of 
Torture,” February 4, 2005), and the instrument 
that Wilson said resembled a curling iron­a 
device identified by the Reader as a violet ray 
machine, also known as a shock wand (“The 
Mysterious Third Device,” February 4, 2005). The 
wand and cattle prod typically leave no marks. 
The field phone can also be hard to detect, but 
in Wilson’s case the alligator clips were 
attached to soft tissue, and to keep him in place 
while the shock was administered, detectives held 
him against a hot radiator. The telltale marks killed Burge’s career.

Since losing his job, Burge has been living in 
Florida, where he continues to collect his police 
pension. Attempts to reach him through his 
attorney, James Sotos, were unsuccessful. William 
Kunkle, who successfully prosecuted Wilson for 
the murders of Fahey and O’Brien and who later 
defended Burge in Wilson’s civil suit and before 
the Police Board, is now a Cook County felony 
court judge. He declined to comment on Wilson’s death.

A lawyer who spent more than 20 years as a 
federal prosecutor says he believes Wilson’s past 
testimony would be admissible if the U.S. 
attorney succeeds in bringing anyone to trial. 
“If the issues are pretty much the same­‘Did I 
torture him? Did I violate his rights? Did I 
commit a crime in doing that?’­And I said, ‘No, I 
didn’t,’ and I was crossing him and saying, 
‘Andrew, you’re a liar, you’re a cheat, you’re a 
thief, you’re a murderer,’ and my lawyer and I 
had the same opportunity to develop my cross as I 
would in this upcoming trial, if the government 
ever gets there, then the testimony could come in 
under that hearsay exception because Wilson is 
dead and unavailable to testify.”

Attorneys for Burge vigorously questioned Wilson 
in a deposition, at both civil trials, and at the 
Police Board hearings. Asked how he’d fight to 
keep that testimony from being admitted, the 
former prosecutor said he’d argue that “I didn’t 
have the same or similar motive to fully develop 
that examination, that lines of cross-examination 
that I would have engaged in were precluded by 
the trial judge, that I had a constitutional 
right to confront the witnesses against me, and 
this is a violation of the confrontation clause.

Jon Burge at a 1992 rally for his supporters

Jon Burge at a 1992 rally for his supporters


“And I would probably lose all those rulings.”

John Stainthorp, one of the lawyers who 
represented Wilson in his civil proceedings, says 
his client never showed any remorse for shooting 
the two officers. Life in prison has a certain 
order to it, and Stainthorp thinks Wilson was 
almost comfortable in such a restricted 
environment. “He was a small guy, but he never 
had a problem. . . . I think people knew that to 
some extent Andrew definitely had psychopathic 
tendencies and he didn’t give a shit. And if 
someone went after him, he wouldn’t care in some 
ways what happened to him. He wasn’t someone who 
attacked people or anything like that. People would just leave him alone.”

Stainthorp says Wilson periodically took classes 
in reading and writing but remained illiterate to 
the end. “So when talking about his torture, I 
was always amazed that every time he told it he 
would have the details absolutely correct,” 
Stainthorp says. “And sometimes I would get 
something a little wrong and he would correct me, 
and this is without reading anything. I mean he 
had no way of refreshing his recollection. And he 
would have all the details correct and it would always be the same account.

“The other thing about Andrew­whenever he talked 
about being tortured it would really upset him 
and it would make him cry,” Stainthorp says. “He 
would be absolutely furious with himself that it 
affected him that way. He would hate it, hate it, hate it.”

Asked if there is a single image of Wilson that 
stands out, Stainthorp recalls a visit about a 
year ago, almost a quarter century after Wilson 
was tortured. “He still cried when he talked 
about it,” Stainthorp says, “and it still made 
him furious that he cried. Obviously for Andrew 
it was important to be strong. One thing about 
torture is that it makes you weak and it makes you know that you are weak.”

John Conroy’s stories on the Chicago police 
torture scandal are archived at 
<http://www.chicagoreader.com/policetorture>chicagoreader.com/policetorture. 
Conroy can be reached at jconroy at chicagoreader.com.




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