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<img src="http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/andrewwilson/wilson.jpg" width=300 height=297 alt="Andrew Wilson">
<br><br>
Andrew Wilson<br><br>
</font><h4><b>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.</b></h4><font size=3>By John
Conroy<br><br>
November 22, 2007<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br>
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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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
A: I told him I have heard of them. I didn’t know them
personally.<br><br>
Q: What if anything did he say to you at that time?<br>
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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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<img src="http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/andrewwilson/burge.jpg" width=300 height=203 alt="Jon Burge at a 1992 rally for his supporters">
<br>
Jon Burge at a 1992 rally for his supporters<br><br>
<br>
“And I would probably lose all those rulings.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
<i>John Conroy’s stories on the Chicago police torture scandal are
archived at
<a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/policetorture">
chicagoreader.com/policetorture</a>. Conroy can be reached at
jconroy@chicagoreader.com.<br><br>
<br><br>
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