Harold Hill Versus Burge Protegees at Area Three

By Kari Lydersen
Infoshop News
January 6, 2008

(Photos: by Robert Thornton)

When teenage Harold Hill was arrested for armed robbery in 1992, he figured he might as well come clean. He told Chicago police officers everything they wanted to know, reasoning he had committed a crime and would have to pay for it.

Now Hill, 34, figures it was his cooperativeness and lack of guile which led a “group of notorious Chicago Police Detectives,” in the words of a lawsuit he has since filed, to allegedly frame him for a 1990 murder and rape.

According to the testimony of Hill and his lawyer and legal documents, Area 3 Chicago detectives used physical and mental coercion to get Hill and two other men, one mentally disabled and one who was actually in jail at the time of the murder, to confess to raping and murdering Kathy Morgan in a south side building that was then set on fire.

As Hill tells it, during their interrogation about the robbery charge the detectives asked him if he knew anything about other recent crimes in his neighborhood. He mentioned the murder, which was common knowledge on the street.

“I should have shut up and gotten a lawyer, but I was only 18,” he said. “Once you start talking, they think they can put more on you. People know I’m like a gentle giant, I wouldn’t do anything like that murder.”

“They had a case to close, and they knew no one would pop up as an eyewitness to say Harold Hill didn’t do it,” said Russell Ainsworth, an attorney with the firm Loevy & Loevy who has filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Chicago and various officers on Hill’s behalf. “They know he’s a vulnerable individual, cooperative, facing serious felony charges he has confessed to. They interrogated him all night without sleep.”

Two days later officers arrested Dan Young Jr., who was illiterate and had an IQ of 56, which is considered severely mentally retarded. Hill’s lawsuit states that Young also couldn’t count backwards, didn’t know how to tell time and didn’t know what a ship was.

The officers allegedly beat, kicked and threatened Hill and Young and fed them details of how they supposedly raped and killed Morgan.

“They were hollering, slapping my face, saying we know you did it,” Hill said. “(Detective Ken) Boudreau would come in and hit me, then Boudreau would ask questions like what color were the victim’s clothes, and (assistant state’s attorney Mike) Rogers would coach me, mouthing the answers.”

Based on their interrogation, they then arrested 19-year-old Peter Williams. He was allegedly handcuffed to a radiator for hours without access to a bathroom, beaten with a blackjack and subjected to a mock execution where an officer put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The three eventually signed nearly identical confessions describing how they had all raped and murdered Morgan.

The group of officers which interrogated them has direct links to former commander Jon Burge, who was fired after an internal investigation in 1991 found him responsible for the torture of 60 or more African American men at Area 2. Burge had been transferred to Area 3 in 1988, overseeing and training the detectives who allegedly tortured Hill, Young, Williams and others. “I call them Burge 2.0,” said Ainsworth. “At Area 3 and Area 1, there was a pattern of the same things. Framing, using physical and mental coercion. The number of victims who have come forward is pretty horrific.”

Once it was determined Williams was in fact in jail on a narcotics charge at the time of the murder, charges against him were dropped. But Young and Hill were tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Hill said his public defender was incompetent. They were convicted based largely on their confessions and the bite mark testimony of forensic dentist John Kenney. Kenney’s testimony was later discredited since the victim’s skin was badly burned, and Kenney said he had been “pushed” by prosecutors to testify.

Ainsworth notes that the fact Williams was falsely arrested should have made it obvious that Hill and Young’s confessions had also been fabricated, since the details in all three confessions were nearly identical, including specific details allegedly supplied by the detectives that actually didn’t match the crime scene reports.

“[The confessions] said they took off her gray pants on the side of the building; gray pants were found, but the body was found in blue pants,” said Ainsworth. “If you look at all three confessions it’s quite easy to see they’re fabricated. They were all fed these details.”

The gray pants found at the scene were men’s pants; Ainsworth said the detectives took pains to make sure Hill identified the pants as men’s.

“Why a murderer would notice that the pants were men’s pants is odd,” he said.

For years Hill proclaimed his innocence and tried to get people to listen to his story. After writing many letters to lawyers and representing himself in filing appeals, he finally attracted the attention of attorney Katherine Zellner, who represented him pro bono.

“When I heard about what Burge had been doing, I knew I had gone through the same thing,” Hill said. “I knew I needed a mouthpiece.”

DNA from hair and material under the victim’s fingernails was finally tested, not matching Hill or Young. They were exonerated in January 2005. Young was released and filed a lawsuit against the city and county, but he was killed in a hit and run a year later.

Hill served another year of his sentence for the robbery charge, a sentence he and Ainsworth think was surprisingly long.

“I didn’t shoot anybody, I was just like, ‘Give me the money,’” he said. “I should have been able to plea bargain for a six year sentence.”

Ainsworth thinks the robbery conviction was rushed through to facilitate trying Hill for the murder.

“Doing prison time as a rapist/murderer is a much different story than doing time as an armed robber,” he said. “You’re in maximum instead of medium security, and other inmates target rapists. Plus all this time he knows his family is wondering if he really could be a rapist and murderer.”

In prison, Hill said he was put in protective custody because he refused gang members’ demands to join them and to attack a guard as an initiation.

“I contemplated suicide,” he said. “I was discouraged. But I tried to stay optimistic.”

Now that he is free, Hill wants the police who he alleges physically and mentally abused him and wrongfully pinned a heinous crime on him to be brought to justice. His lawsuit, filed in December 2006, charges the group of officers led by Ken Boudreau and John Halloran “engaged in a disturbing succession of similar abuses over a period of years, frequently preying on the young and mentally-challenged in order to close unsolved cases via abusive methods of interrogation.”

Twenty-six other cases of abuse at Area 3 are cited in Hill’s lawsuit, and Ainsworth said more than 60 others exist. The Chicago Tribune reported Boudreau was involved in at least a dozen cases where charges were later dropped or defendants were acquitted. Burge, Boudreau, Halloran, the city of Chicago and numerous other officers are named as defendants in Hill’s suit. Most of the officers are still on the force, and in many cases have received promotions and commendations.

“The city’s refusal to investigate these allegations just lets the bad seeds believe they can violate people’s rights with impunity,” Ainsworth said.

Hill’s allegations are just one of countless charges of police misconduct and brutality wracking the department in the past few years. Mayor Daley recently appointed new police superintendent J.P. Weis, an FBI agent, to deal with mounting scandals and citizens’ distrust of the police.

Along with highly publicized bar beatings by off-duty officers and several recent killings of civilians by police, the city has been involved in a legal tug of war with a University of Chicago lawyer and independent journalist over whether police personnel records showing tactical officers with high numbers of abuse complaints can be made public.

The records, obtained during discovery in a civil rights lawsuit filed by former public housing resident Diane Bond, show a relatively small number of officers have logged a large number of complaints, with little or no action taken by the department.

Though Hill has been exonerated, he still needs a pardon from the governor to clear his record. With the murder and rape charge still on his record and a decade and a half in prison behind him, he has had trouble finding work and readjusting to life.

“I missed all of my 20s,” he said, including seeing his daughter, now 18, and son, now 15, grow up. “When you go to prison the world forgets about you.”