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From the Chicago Reader of January 26, 1990 House of Screams Torture by electroshock: Could it happen in a Chicago police station? Did it happen at Area Two? By John Conroy In Chicago police documents, February 9, 1982, is recalled as cold and overcast. At about two o'clock that afternoon, Gang Crimes officers William Fahey, 34, and Richard O'Brien, 33, were in uniform, cruising south on Morgan, when they zeroed in on a brown, two-door Chevrolet Impala. Why they stopped the car is unclear. Officer Fahey's widow recalls that her husband had a sixth sense for spotting cars in which the police might have an interest; even when he was off duty, he had the habit of pointing to vehicles and saying, "That car is dirty." On that cold day in February, he may have had a feeling that the '78 Impala was dirty. He would have been right. The occupants of the car, the brothers Andrew and Jackie Wilson, had committed a burglary less than an hour before. The take had not been spectacular: some clothes, a television, a fifth of whiskey, some bullets, and a jar of pennies. Jackie, 21, also known as Robert and Bubbles, was driving; he was wanted for parole violation. Andrew, 29, also known as Joseph, Tony, and Gino, had a chrome-plated .38 under his hat on the front seat; he was wanted on two warrants, one for parole violation, the other for bond forfeiture in an armed-robbery case. The tales told by witnesses and participants diverge at this point, but it seems likely that Jackie saw the lights flashing atop the police car and pulled the Impala to the curb at 8108 S. Morgan. Officer O'Brien left the driver's seat of the police car and approached the Impala. Jackie got out of the car, and O'Brien allegedly joked about seeing one of the men throw a beer bottle out the window. He asked Jackie for his license, and when Jackie said he didn't have it, O'Brien frisked him and then decided to check out the car. At about that point Andrew Wilson got out of the passenger seat, and in the next 30 seconds a tragic sequence was played out: Officer Fahey, having come to the passenger side of the Impala, picked up Andrew's jacket from the front seat. He may have found the bullets from the burglary in a pocket. While he was holding the jacket, Andrew moved in behind him and stripped him of his gun. The two men began to struggle for the weapon and slipped in the snow. Andrew Wilson pulled the trigger, perhaps accidentally, perhaps not, and a bullet went through the head of William Fahey. Meanwhile, on the driver's side, Officer O'Brien had leaned into the Impala and found Andrew's .38 on the front seat. Hearing a shot, he backed out of the car, pointed his weapon at Jackie Wilson, and yelled, "Freeze." Jackie froze. O'Brien, probably unable to see his partner, took a step toward the rear of the car. Andrew Wilson shot him once in the chest with Fahey's gun. Andrew then yelled at his brother, telling him to disarm O'Brien. Jackie yelled back that the cop was still moving. The older Wilson climbed onto the back of the Chevy, pumped four more bullets into O'Brien, slid off the car, and picked up O'Brien's gun. The brothers got back into the Impala and sped off, leaving the two policemen bleeding in the snow. As the Wilson brothers pulled away, a man named Andre Coulter was driving north on Morgan with his friends Dwayne Hardin and Louis Booker as passengers. At the scene of the shooting Coulter pulled to the curb and the three men warily crossed the street. Coulter put his jacket under O'Brien's head and Hardin picked up the radio in the police car and informed the dispatcher that two police officers were down and bleeding. Almost simultaneously, two residents of the 8100 block of Morgan were reporting the same news over the phone. In no time the scene was crawling with cops. O'Brien and Fahey were loaded into a paddy wagon and driven at high speed to Little Company of Mary Hospital. O'Brien was dead on arrival. Fahey died 20 hours later. The police began to track the killers with fragments of information. Andre Coulter said the getaway car was a late-model Impala and he thought he remembered that the front grillwork might have been damaged. An electrician who had been doing a job in the neighborhood reported that the car was a brown two-door. Other witnesses described the fugitives as blacks in their 20s, and Tyrone Sims, who had witnessed the shooting from his front window, helped put together a police sketch. A bulletin went out for a 1977-80 Chevrolet Impala, bronze, rust, or burnt orange in color, a two-door model with "possible damage to front grill on driver's side." Lieutenant Jon Burge, commanding officer of Area Two Violent Crimes, was off duty when the incident occurred. He was at a car wash at 87th and Langley when a detective came running through looking for the suspect vehicle. The detective told Burge of the shootings, and almost simultaneously Burge's beeper went off. He sped to his office to take charge of the investigation. He would not return home for five days. At that time Area Two, which sprawls over some 60 square miles of the south side, was headquartered in a brick building at the corner of 91st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. The cops who called it home were having a tense winter. At times it seemed almost reasonable to believe that someone had declared open season on policemen. Five law-enforcement officers had been shot in the area, four of them fatally, within little more than a month. (The victims, aside from Fahey and O'Brien, were two deputy sheriffs, shot during an armed robbery at a McDonald's, and James Doyle, a rookie cop, who was shot dead on a CTA bus while arresting a robbery suspect named Edgar Hope.) As a result, feelings were high when the police set out to find the killers of Fahey and O'Brien. A grid search was set up to find the Impala, and a house-by-house canvass began in the area of the shooting. Enthusiasm brought excess. Policemen began kicking down doors. Patricia and Alvin Smith claimed that plainclothesmen pointed guns at the head of their 12-year-old daughter. Adolph Thornton reported that a policeman had shot Chuck, Thornton's two-year-old German shepherd. William Phillips, 32, a Chicago fireman, complained that he had been arrested for standing on a street corner, that one of his teeth was knocked out in the process, and that he was later charged with disorderly conduct. The Reverend Willie Barrow of Operation PUSH said that in the neighborhood of the shooting, every young black male in sight was being stopped and questioned, and the Defender quoted a woman who said she'd sent her son away because "the police were crazy, picking up kids who clearly did not match the description of the two men who were wanted." Renault Robinson, director of the Afro-American Police League, called the dragnet "sloppy police work, a matter of racism." He compared the police action to that of a southern sheriff leading a posse that turned into a lynch mob. Jesse Jackson announced that the black community was living under martial law, in "a war zone . . . under economic, political, and military occupation," that the police department was holding "the entire black community hostage for the crimes of two." Ironically, it was pure luck and citizen cooperation, not the dragnet or the police enthusiasm, that broke the case. Tyrone Sims, the man who had witnessed the shooting from his front window, was shown a large batch of mug shots and tentatively identified Donald White, also known as Kojak, as the shooter. Kojak, it turned out, had nothing to do with the murders, but by the strangest of coincidences he knew who the murderers were. He lived next door to the house that the Wilsons had broken into on February 9, and according to police reports, the loot from the burglary had been divided at his house. Kojak explained that Andrew Wilson was plotting the jailbreak of Edgar Hope, the man who had shot the rookie cop on the CTA bus on February 5; Wilson needed guns for the jailbreak, Kojak said, and the burglary had been carried out with that in mind; the burglars had found bullets, but no weapons. A body-and-fender man named Solomon Morgan, who had known the Wilsons for ten years, also fingered the two brothers. After the shooting, Jackie Wilson had called Morgan and asked him to paint the Impala and repair the car's grillwork. Morgan, realizing that the description of the killers' car matched the vehicle he was supposed to paint and repair, called the police.