advertisement

House of Screams, From the Chicago Reader of January 26, 1990 --continued

And so the police began to concentrate their efforts on finding the Wilson brothers, who were separately moving from apartment to apartment on the south and west sides. Pursuing various leads, Lieutenant Burge and his men surrounded a building at 5301 W. Jackson at about 5:15 AM on Sunday, February 14. Burge was the first man through the door, and he arrested Andrew Wilson without firing a shot. Not long thereafter, Chester Batey, a policeman with the Eighth District tactical unit, received a call from his father, a minister, who said that a member of his congregation knew where Jackie was hiding. Batey flagged down a passing police car, and at 8:05 that Sunday morning, he and assisting policemen from the Second District broke into the third-floor apartment at 5157 S. Prairie. The man inside denied he was the subject of the manhunt, but at the police station he admitted he was indeed Jackie Wilson.

Both Andrew and Jackie gave inculpatory statements at Area Two. They were tried together and convicted. Both convictions were reversed on appeal. The two brothers were then tried separately and both were convicted again. Today, more than seven years after the murders of Fahey and O'Brien , the Wilson brothers should be little more than tragic footnotes in Chicago's history, of consequence mainly to the children left without a father, the wife left without a husband, the mothers and fathers left without sons, and the policemen left without comrades. Instead, Andrew Wilson comes back to haunt the city, telling a bizarre tale fit for some third world dictatorship. In a civil suit against the city of Chicago, the police department, and various detectives from Area Two, Andrew Wilson says he was tortured.

You might be tempted, as many have been, to dismiss Wilson's claim as a con's tale, but the judges of the Illinois Supreme Court didn't. In granting Wilson a second criminal trial, they wrote, "The evidence here shows clearly that when the defendant was arrested at 5:15 am on February 14, he may have received a cut above his right eye but that he had no other injuries; it is equally clear that when the defendant was taken by police officers to Mercy Hospital sometime after 10 o'clock that night he had about 15 separate injuries on his head, chest, and leg. The inescapable conclusion is that the defendant suffered his injuries while in police custody that day . . ."

You might be tempted then to excuse the police, assuming that in their outrage over the death of a comrade they lost control and beat Wilson up. But Wilson was not complaining of a beating. He was complaining of burns and electric shock, the shock delivered by two different devices to his genitals, his ears, his nose, and his fingers. After examining the physical evidence, the deputy chief medical examiner of Cook County, initially a skeptic, became a believer. Perhaps you are still unmoved, believing that excruciating pain is fit punishment for a man who killed two cops. But what if it turned out that it was not merely Andrew Wilson who was tortured by electroshock? What if a parade of men arrested by detectives at Area Two over the course of a decade also claimed that they had been interrogated by electrical means, or had plastic bags put over their heads, or had their fingers put in bolt cutters, or were threatened with being thrown off a roof? What if there was no connection at all between the alleged victims, no evidence of any collusion among them, and yet they kept pointing to the same police station and the same group of officers?

We expect charges of corruption to surface periodically on any big-city police force, but normally we can take comfort, at least, in the way the charges come to our attention—an honest cop wears a wire; a federal agency does its job; a brave state's attorney decides he can't look the other way; or a newspaper commits great resources to an investigation. But the charges of torture at Area Two did not get a proper hearing until a convicted cop killer filed a civil lawsuit.

Andrew Wilson's suit came to trial last February 13 in the courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Brian Barnett Duff. It charged that various policemen beat Wilson after his arrest and arrival at Area Two; that they put a plastic bag over his head so he could not breathe; that they burned him, first with a cigarette and later on a radiator; that Detective John Yucaitis began the electric shock and Lieutenant Jon Burge carried it to great lengths; that detectives Patrick O'Hara and William McKenna participated in the conspiracy by making no mention of the torture in their reports on the case; and that it was a de facto policy or custom of the city of Chicago and the police department to mistreat persons suspected of killing police officers—in other words, that the ill-treatment was widespread and well-known, even at the highest levels of the department, and nobody did anything about it. Wilson was asking for $10 million in damages. The outcome would have no effect on his criminal conviction.

Although Wilson was suing six defendants (the four detectives, former Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek, and the city), it soon became apparent to everyone in the courtroom that the real showdown was between Andrew Wilson and Jon Burge, as Burge was the commander of the unit and allegedly the perpetrator-in-chief. On the surface, the battle seemed to be a mismatch of tremendous proportions. Jon Burge was born a few days before Christmas 1947, the second son of Floyd and Ethel Burge. Floyd, of Norwegian descent, worked for the phone company in a blue-collar job, and Ethel, who was of German, English, and Irish descent, went to work when her son Jon was about ten years old. She wrote a fashion column for the Chicago Daily News, did some modeling, organized fashion shows, and once wrote a book in the "dress for success" vein.

Jon Burge was a good student at Bowen High School and went off to the University of Missouri with great expectations. He managed to flunk out, however, not long after his arrival. In an interview last September he told me that he was enjoying himself too much to study, and so was asked to leave. After returning to Chicago he worked as a stock clerk in a supermarket for eight months and then joined the army, where he eventually attained the rank of staff sergeant. Along the way he served time as a drill instructor and attended Military Police school, where he received some training in interrogation (among many other things). He volunteered twice to go to Vietnam. The first time he was sent to Korea. The second time he got what he asked for.

In Vietnam Burge was twice awarded the army commendation for valor, both times for leaving a bunker to drag wounded men back to safety amid incoming fire. He also was given the Bronze Star for meritorious service, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and a Purple Heart (which he says was given to him for a shrapnel wound that laid him up for "about 15 minutes"). He took an honorable discharge in August 1969, went to work in a gas station, and applied to join the police. In March 1970, at the age of 22, he was officially accepted.

On January 26, 1972, Patrolman Burge, age 24, responded to a call of "woman with a gun" at a drugstore at 65th and Woodlawn. When he arrived he saw Erma Moody, 22, talking on the telephone and pointing a .22 caliber derringer at her own throat. She told Burge not to come any closer. She said she wanted to go home to check on her baby, and Burge and another officer escorted her there. Once in her home, Mrs. Moody, still holding the gun to her throat, said she would like to see a member of the clergy. Burge made the call, and he and the three priests who responded did their best to soothe the distraught woman. After about an hour and a half, Burge began to feel that Mrs. Moody was likely to pull the trigger, so he signaled to the other officer that he was going to make a move for the gun. Burge pounced. Erma Moody pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, as Burge had managed to jam his thumb into the firing mechanism. In recognition of that effort, the police department gave Burge his first department commendation.

Burge was commended again in 1980 for an incident that occurred while he was off duty. He was in the vicinity of 111th and Western when he spotted a car containing three men and felt that, as Officer Fahey might have said, the car was dirty. He stopped and waited. One of the men got out and walked into a nearby Fotomat. A few minutes later, the man left the store in a hurry and jumped into the car. Burge ran into the Fotomat, learned it had been robbed, and followed the fugitives in his own car. When they stopped at a red light, Burge pulled his gun, snuck up behind them on foot, ordered the trio out of the car, and placed them all under arrest.