Former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and a former homicide detective bragged about beating and other forms of torture they allegedly used against murder suspects at a South Side police station, the detective's sister has told lawyers for a former Death Row inmate.

"They began to boast about power and what really happens in a police station," Ellen Pryweller, sister of former Detective Robert Dwyer, said in a sworn videotaped statement given to attorneys representing Madison Hobley.

"When they get them in a police station, they give them hell," she added. "...They beat the [expletive] out of them. They throw them against walls. They burn them against radiators. They smother them. They poke them with objects. They did something to one guy's testicles."

Pryweller, whose videotaped statement was given to the Tribune by Hobley's lawyers, said she was present in 1987 while her brother and Burge talked about the alleged torture, with her brother saying, "I can make anybody confess to anything."

Hobley was sentenced to death for setting a January 1987 fire in a South Side apartment building that killed seven people, including his wife and infant son. He was pardoned in January 2003 and has sued the Police Department, Burge, Dwyer and other detectives, saying he was tortured into making a false confession.

Dwyer could not be reached, and Burge declined to comment. But James Sotos, one of the attorneys for Burge, Dwyer and the other police officers named in the lawsuit, said Pryweller's account was untrue.

"It never happened," Sotos said Wednesday. "Dwyer never said those things to her."

Moreover, Sotos said, Pryweller gave the statement in a friendly environment--to lawyers for Hobley--and without any cross-examination to test her account and probe for possible inconsistencies.

Pryweller is scheduled to answer Sotos' questions in a sworn deposition as part of the lawsuit on Monday, according to the attorneys.

Pryweller's statement appears to be the first from someone close to the officers at the center of long-standing allegations of torture.

The allegations resulted in Burge's firing in 1993 by the Chicago Police Board, which concluded he tortured Andrew Wilson while Wilson was being questioned in the murders of two police officers. Wilson was convicted of those murders and is serving a life sentence.

The allegations prompted the April 2002 appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate more than five dozen torture allegations and to determine if criminal charges against any of the officers are warranted. That investigation is continuing.

Finally, the allegations led former Gov. George Ryan to grant pardons based on innocence to Hobley and three other condemned inmates.

Jon Loevy, one of Hobley's lawyers, called Pryweller's charges "blockbuster," saying that with the videotape, "you have someone's sister saying [the detectives] admitted a pattern of torture and laughing about it."

Attorney Andrea Lyon, who represented Hobley during appeals and is working on the lawsuit, said Pryweller's account is important because it shows torture was "talked about, planned and even discussed." It also supports what so far has been a largely circumstantial allegation.

Dwyer was one of the detectives at the center of the Hobley case. He contended he had notes of a disputed confession by Hobley, but he said at trial that he could not produce them because they had gotten wet and torn.

Pryweller is Dwyer's older sister, and their relationship was contentious at times.

At the time Pryweller said the conversation occurred, she was in the middle of a contentious custody dispute after a divorce, and she said her brother and others in her family often criticized her.

Two years later, in 1989, a Cook County judge jailed Pryweller for contempt because she failed to produce her children for counseling and for visitation with their father.

Court records show that Pryweller got counseling as well.

Pryweller did not report the conversation immediately, Lyon said, because a friend told her there was nothing she could do and no one would believe her.

But at a family gathering after a sister died in 2002, Dwyer approached her to talk privately, Pryweller said. He said the controversy over alleged torture had been growing and he was the target of lawsuits, she said.

"He said, `Do you remember Jon Burge?'" Pryweller said in the video. "I looked at him, `How could I ever forget?'" Dwyer told her he was innocent and a victim, Pryweller said. "I said, `Bobby, you're no choirboy. Don't ever try to go there with me.'"

After that conversation, according to Lyon, Pryweller grew more curious, and she found newspaper articles about the torture allegations.

Lyon said Pryweller then learned that Ryan was going to speak at Northwestern University in November 2002 and attended the speech. It was there, Lyon said, that Pryweller began to better understand the seriousness of the allegations.

Pryweller went into a restroom at the university crying and was spotted by a law student, Ashley Baynham, who encouraged her to talk to one of her professors, Thomas Geraghty. Geraghty, in turn, suggested that Pryweller talk to the special prosecutors. Baynham and Geraghty on Wednesday confirmed their conversations with Pryweller.

Hobley's attorneys learned about Pryweller last year after she attended the speech at DePaul University law school where Ryan announced the four Death Row pardons, Lyon said.

Special Prosecutor Robert Boyle said that his office had spoken with Pryweller four times, though never under oath, and that investigators were "painstakingly going through this with her" as they tried to research her account.

"Once we became aware of her," Boyle said, "we've spent some significant time on this issue, and we're not finished. We're attempting to corroborate certain things."