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From the Chicago Reader of December 3, 1999
Pure Torture By John Conroy
| Police lieutenant Raymond Patterson couldn't believe his
son Aaron was a gangbanger. He was wrong. Then he didn't believe that police
officers had forced Aaron to confess to a double murder. He may have been wrong about that too. |
Lieutenant Raymond Patterson has a bank of war stories accumulated
during the 26 years he
spent on the Chicago police force, but the most tragic is almost
certainly the tale of the younger
of his two sons.
"As a kid, Aaron was the one that most mirrored myself," the retired
lieutenant said in an
interview with the Reader in 1996. "I was always an outdoors
person, I was really into sports
and things of that nature, and he expressed an interest in it. So
if I couldn't find somebody to go
play tennis with me, for example, he always wanted to go. He liked
to fish and things like that,
the outdoorsy-type things that a man likes to do with his sons. And
he was a good fisherman.
We would go fishing and nobody would catch fish but Aaron."
The bond between the two began to rupture after Aaron began high
school at De La Salle.
Although Aaron studied periodically, his interests were elsewhere,
and he began hanging out with
a crowd of young men from less ambitious families who attended less
distinguished schools.
"I remember getting calls from police saying Aaron was gangbanging
or Aaron was among
several people standing in front of a grocery store and the owner
asked them to move and he
was the only one that caused a problem. And to show you how I was,
I would not allow police
officers to bother him. I went so far as to tell them that they had
no reason to mess with my son.
I made one of them bring him home one night. 'You got my son? Well,
bring him home.' And
then when he brought him home, I jumped all over the officer verbally,
because I figured that
they were harassing my son for no reason. I mean after all, 'I am
a sergeant of police, why are
police officers out there messing with my son?'
"That is how blind I was. I was acting as a father. No officer
could convince me that Aaron was
doing any of the things that they say he did. Because whenever the
police had him I would
always ask, 'Did you do what they say you did?' He would say no.
That was good enough for
me."
According to Patterson, this denial lasted several years, and though
the relationship between
father and son became testy, with regular arguments over Aaron's
choice of friends, Ray
Patterson continued to believe that his son was no gangster.
Finally, sometime in the mid-1980s, Aaron's father received a call
from an officer whom he
knew fairly well. "He was working tactical unit at that time, and
he called me in the middle of the
night and asked, 'Did Aaron just run into the house?' I said, 'Yeah.'
Because about five minutes
before he called I heard Aaron run into the house and back into his
bedroom. And this officer
said, 'Raymond, I got to talk to you.' So I said, 'Come on over.'
"And he said, 'You know you been denying that Aaron is a gangbanger,
and we are probably
going to lose friendship over this, but I just got to tell you, not
only is he a gangbanger but he is
the leader. He has a street name of Ranger, and he is with the Black
P Stone Rangers'—or
whatever offshoot of that organization—'and he wears it.'
"When he said that a little light went on—'You're talking about
a tattoo.' You think you know
your kids, but how often do you really look at them? I mean up close.
I went back to his room
and told him, 'Take your shirt off.' Took his shirt off. Both sides,
emblazoned there on his upper
arms, 'Apache Rangers.' On one side it had his name, 'Ranger.'"
At that moment, Patterson said, he could have crawled into a hole
no bigger than a quarter. "I
felt like a fool. I felt low. I felt embarrassed. I just could not
reconcile myself with what I had just
discovered."
He would come to feel a whole lot worse. In the spring of 1986
Aaron was charged with three
attempted murders and a brutal double homicide in which an elderly
couple were stabbed 34
times. That October he was found guilty of one of the attempted murders
and six months later he
pled guilty to the other two. In 1989 Aaron was convicted of the
double murder and was
sentenced to death.
Aaron was not meek by any means—a psychologist hired by his lawyers
in 1987 to do a
forensic psychological assessment described him as arrogant—and after
his arrest for the double
homicide he made what seemed to be an audacious claim about his treatment
by detectives at
Area Two. He claimed to have been tortured—suffocated with a plastic
typewriter cover—until
he agreed to say whatever the detectives wanted him to say. Aaron
maintained that he had never
killed anybody, and since then he has argued that the real killer
has gone on to rob and stab and
maim.
The elder Patterson knew some of the officers involved—some he
knew personally, others he
knew by reputation—and he could not believe them capable of torturing
a policeman's son. He
walked away. If his son was on death row, perhaps he belonged there.
In 1996, ten years after Aaron's arrest, his father drove to Menard
Correctional Center to see
him. The lieutenant was by then an enlightened and sorrowful man.
He'd concluded that Aaron's
wild claims of suffocation were mere statements of fact. He'd concluded
that he had devoted his
working life to an organization that could torture his son and protect
the torturers. He'd
concluded that detectives framed the wrong man, and that the man
he believed to be the actual
killer had recently stabbed another woman 25 times. And he'd realized
that when his son's need
was greatest, he had abandoned him. Aaron had betrayed him, but he
had in turn betrayed
Aaron.
Raymond Patterson entered the Chicago Police Academy on March 17,
1969. Over the years
he served as a patrolman, as a member of a tactical unit, as a sergeant
and watch commander in
a south-side district. He proudly recalls that in the mid-1980s the
department selected him to
attend Northwestern University's prestigious Traffic Institute, an
executive training course for
police officers. Not long after attending the course, he achieved
the third-highest score on the
Chicago police lieutenants exam. He subsequently served in the inspection
and personnel
divisions and as a field lieutenant in districts Five and Six. He
retired in January 1996.
As he rose through the ranks, he and his wife Jo Ann came to live
a middle-class life in South
Shore. Jo Ann worked as a teacher in the Chicago public schools and
later became assistant
director of education at a private school. Their first son, Raymond
Jr., had been born in July
1963, and Aaron a year later. Raymond became an athlete who ranked
seventh in his graduating
class at De La Salle. He spurned Stanford and Princeton to attend
Washington University in
Saint Louis, and now holds a master's degree from the University
of Texas at Austin and a
well-paying corporate job in Indianapolis.
Aaron took a different path. In letters written from death row
he disputes his father's recollection
of the revelation that he was in a gang. Aaron recalls the phone
call from the tactical unit officer,
but he places it in 1982. He denies that he shed his shirt at his
father's command and thinks that
his parents knew he was involved with gangs much earlier than that.
In Aaron's view, the first
time his parents found out he was in a gang was in 1969. He was then
five years old and was
sent home from kindergarten for hanging out with older gang members
and cursing in the
schoolyard during recess. He believes that spot of trouble prompted
his parents to send him to a
Catholic grammar school. Aaron remembers settling down for a while
after that but says he got
involved again in gang activity in 1976, when he was 12. In the course
of the next few years,
Aaron recalls, when friends of his were arrested they would sometimes
ask for Officer
Patterson, hoping for a break. Those requests infuriated his father,
he says, and certainly should
have revealed to him that Aaron was a fellow traveler.
Aaron says there was no precise day when he suddenly decided to
be a gang member, that no
one in particular sold him on the idea, that it just came naturally
given that so many people he
knew, including uncles on his mother's side, had been or were members
of street gangs. His
brother seemed to have been inspired at De La Salle, but Aaron says
he found it boring. "I was
footloose and adventurous, I always wanted to live on the edge, push
the envelope. Street life
fascinated me." His choice of friends, he says, was determined in
part by his curfew. The "middle
class negro[es]"—his term—who attended De La Salle lived too far
away.
Aaron recalls that if he went to a party on the weekend, he had
to be home by the time the city's
curfew took effect, lest he incur his father's wrath, which he says
was considerable. He recalls
sneaking out of the house through the basement door after his parents
thought he had gone to
bed, a ploy that worked until he was 17 and had no curfew.
"All my guys were real rough looking," he wrote from prison. "And
I do mean rough and were
the best fighters I ever seen. When I first started running with
them I used to drift off like I was
[an] innocent bystander and take notes on how they got into confrontation
with bigger, older
rival gangs, outnumbered like five to one. And before I knew it,
I saw grown men running away,
getting flipped on their backs by 12/13/14/yrs old friends of mine.
It was like a gladiator or free
fall wrestling show. You had to see it to believe it."
The Apache Rangers operated mostly in the Bush, a neighborhood
that bordered the old U.S.
Steel plant on the southeast side, not far from the police department's
Fourth District
headquarters. The group seems to have been relatively insignificant,
a small band of adolescents
and teenagers. In those days, Patterson says, gangs on the southeast
side were not so quick to
resort to guns. He describes meeting the Apache Rangers' rivals in
the middle of the week for a
good fight and then meeting them again on Saturday to play football.
Elsewhere in the city,
Patterson says, gangs were doing a lot of shooting, and the fighting
his group specialized
in—"with fists/belts/bottles/sticks/ bats/garbage can tops/etc."—was
going out of style. A few
times, Patterson says, one of his comrades, a young man known as
Snag, "came very close to
getting us killed by journeying in areas where getting beaten up
wasn't an option. Those guys
wanted to gun us down."
Patterson says he became the gang's strategist, determining who
they would fight and how they
would make their approach. "We used to go to el stations and bus
stops after school looking for
rival gangs. At first they felt confident they could beat us since
it was only about seven of us. But
once the fight started they eventually ran or pulled a gun out and
started shooting at us. After a
few times if they saw us coming they would run or deny they were
in gangs."
"I enjoyed the camaraderie and trust we had to rely on each other
in a tight pinch . . . " Patterson
wrote. "My rules were simple. No fighting amongst each other. No
stealing from each other, no
rapes, or armed robberies of innocent persons. No fucking each other's
women. No younger
members under 16 could smoke cigarettes, sell drugs, skip school,
or use guns. If any older
members tried to influence or hit younger members they got punished.
. . . We felt honorable and
rebellious at the same time. . . . I was like the conscience of all
of them. They knew I was fair
and clean cut."
Patterson described himself as skinny, tall, and innocent in appearance
in those days, and he said
his "good boy image" protected him. Members of rival gangs might
immediately recognize
Patterson's friends as trouble, but the policeman's son looked different
and went to a different
school. "Even the police couldn't figure out who I was. I always
got away after fights or blended
in with the crowd watching. I'd put my school jacket on and act like
I didn't know anything.
"Detectives finally figured out I was the ringleader and that I
used to wait on the bus stop for
guys or go into school and tell them to cut class. One day I was
on the bus stop waiting for them
and detectives drove up on the sidewalk and pinned me to the wall
so I couldn't run. I tried to
play innocent, saying I was waiting on my girlfriend to get out of
class. They knew I was lying.
They told me, 'We been watching you for awhile. You are somebody!'
I denied all of that. They
put me in the car and took me to a rival gang's high school and made
me get out in front of all
those guys I'd beaten up before and was wanted by. The detective
car pulled off and there I was
standing there about to get beat down. But the rivals were so shocked
to see me dropped dead
into their laps I had just enough time to run like my pants were
on fire. Once I got the first step,
ain't no catching me! A whole group of them chased me to the viaduct
but stopped there since it
was my hood on the other side. While I'm running, I see the detective
car riding down the street
next to me, honking the horn and waving. It was funny to them and
confirmed that I was in a
gang!"
Lieutenant Patterson recalls that he threw Aaron out of the house
not long after discovering his
tattoos. The lieutenant has no precise memory of the timetable of
his confrontations with his son,
but he has a vivid memory of a day—perhaps a year later—when Aaron
paid a surprise call at
his office. "He just came in and said, 'Could I see you for a minute?'
I said, 'Yeah, come on in.'
He showed me a letter from the city that said that he had taken the
police test and he had scored
in the 97th percentile. And I never knew that he had even taken the
test. He is a very bright kid.
He just sort of misdirected it. He was doing it, basically I think,
to appease me. I doubt if he had
any real interest in the police department. I was often angry with
him because of his gangbanging
career and constantly getting him out of jail and stuff like that.
So I guess to appease me he went
down without my knowledge and took the police test, and I guess he
wanted to wait until he was
sure that the results were favorable. Then he came over to see me,
and he was proud.
"So I ran into my boss's office. Marty was the commander of my
district and I was his
community relations sergeant at that time. We were very, very close.
I said, 'Marty, Marty, look,
look, look at this. Read this.' Marty, with his long cigar, says,
'Well, I'll be damned. Maybe this
will be the exact thing that will turn him around. When he gets through
his drug test and all that
stuff, tell him come see me. I will see what I can do for him.'
"I have never expressed this to Aaron, but when he walked into
my office that day with that
letter, my chest must've reached out to there. But I would never
tell him that, you know. Because
to me the greatest honor that a son can bestow on his father is to
tell his dad that he wants to do
what he does. And my sons, neither of them had ever expressed a desire
to do what I did, and
then all of a sudden, without my knowledge, he made some attempt
to. That was mind-boggling.
That really elated me."
Aaron recalls taking the police exam and scoring well, but he has
no recollection of going to his
father's office to show him the results. Aaron thinks the results
were mailed to his parents' house
and he went over there to pick them up. What is certain is that in
April 1986, not long after the
exam results came in, some detectives knocked on the Pattersons'
door. "We just chitchatted for
about five minutes or so," the lieutenant recalls, "and what I thought
they were there for was to
do his background check. I don't know why I was so naive, but I knew
a background check
had to be done, because when I took the test even my mother in Virginia
was interviewed.
"After about five minutes they said they were looking for Aaron
in connection with a shooting of
some gangbanger in the gang opposite to his own."
Patterson was not a typical gangbanger. He graduated from De La
Salle and had plans for his
future. He enlisted in the National Guard, went through basic training,
and liked the military
enough to then enlist in the army. Ten months into his training,
he broke his ankle. He was given
a medical discharge and returned to Chicago, and though he fell in
with the old gang again, he
also began attending the University of Illinois. For a time he worked
at a McDonald's, and during
one Christmas season as a handler at the post office. He took up
residence with a girlfriend. He
says he found it hard to hold down a job, attend college, maintain
a relationship with his
girlfriend, and run the gang, so he dropped out of school.
During this period he also extended his rap sheet at a fairly rapid
rate, becoming a regular visitor
to the police department's Fourth District station in South Chicago.
From May 1983 through
April 1986 he was arrested seven times for battery, three times for
aggravated battery, twice for
attempted murder, twice for armed violence, and once each for damage
to property, aggravated
assault, criminal trespass, and possession of marijuana.
Most citizens would find that a shameful record, yet Patterson
contends that it shows some
honor. Every violent crime he was charged with, he says, was committed
in response to an
attack on himself, on his gang, or on the rules the Apache Rangers
were supposed to live by.
The people he shot and otherwise assaulted, he says, were gang members,
fellow combatants,
not innocent bystanders, not anyone he was trying to rob. He argues
that he was not a thief, and
his rap sheet shows nothing to contradict that claim; he incurred
no charges of burglary, armed
robbery, or home invasion. He contends that he committed no crimes
with knives, and it is true
that the assaults on his sheet up to his last arrest mention none.
Not being a thief is a small claim to virtue. Not being handy with
a knife seems beside the point if
guns are used instead. Both attributes, however, are crucial to Patterson's
argument that he does
not belong on death row.
The detectives from Area Two who called at Lieutenant Patterson's
home wanted to question his
son about more than the shooting of a rival gang member. They also
wanted to ask about the
murders of Vincente Sanchez, age 73, and his wife Rafaela, 62, whose
decomposing bodies
were found in their southeast-side home on April 19, 1986. Vincente
had been stabbed 25
times, Rafaela 9. The corpses were discovered after a boy named Wayne
Washington, who did
odd jobs for the couple, noticed that the back door was open and
told a neighbor to call the
police.
Vincente Sanchez, a retired steelworker, had been working as a fence.
The initial police report
described the residence as "filled with clothes, household items,
tools, suitcases, and such an
assortment of non valuable items to the extent that it [is] difficult
to maneuver through the rooms."
Four guns were found at the scene. Two were registered to Sanchez,
one was not registered to
anyone, and one was hot, having been stolen from a woman who lived
two blocks away. None
had been recently fired.
In the course of their investigation, detectives found word on
the street to be contradictory.
Some sources said Patterson and the Apache Rangers were responsible,
some pointed to a
member of another gang, and one man called Sweet Tooth told detectives
that he had heard that
the murders were done by Willie Washington, the brother of the boy
who had spotted the open
back door.
It happened that when Area Two detectives called on Lieutenant
Patterson he didn't know
where Aaron was. Aaron knew the police were looking for him on charges
unrelated to the
Sanchez murders and he was avoiding his usual haunts. A few weeks
before the Sanchez
murders, Patterson had shot a rival gang member in the chest. And
on April 18, the day before
the Sanchezes' bodies were found, Patterson and other Apache Rangers
had beaten one of their
comrades for stealing. The beating caused severe head and chest injuries.
On April 30, police acting on an anonymous tip found Aaron Patterson
hiding in the attic of a
building at 8456 S. Euclid. They brought him to an interview room
at Area Two, and detectives
from the violent crimes unit began their interrogation. They had
also arrested Eric Caine, a man
who was a member of a different gang—the Vice Lords.
The detectives' field investigation report says that both men failed
polygraph tests. It goes on to
offer the following scenario, allegedly compiled with the cooperation
of both of the accused:
Caine approached the Apache Rangers because he needed guns to protect
himself from the
Spanish Gangster Disciples, who had attacked his house and his girlfriend.
Patterson said he
could have a gun at half price if he went with them on "a mission."
The mission was the invasion
of the Sanchez home. Patterson allegedly told detectives that once
inside, he took matters into
his own hands because Caine proved an ineffective interrogator, unable
to get Vincente Sanchez
to say where his guns and drugs were.
This is a portion of Patterson's alleged statement: "We told the
guy we wanted his guns. I pointed
a gun at him. My gun didn't work but the chump didn't know it. Eric
had a knife. I got a knife
too, from the kitchen. The Mexican [Vincente Sanchez] was too slow
getting the good stuff, the
guns. I went off. I'm Ninja. He was scared. He backed away. I shanked
him. He tried to run.
I'm the last Apache so I got him. I stabbed him. I was a straight
up Ninja. His old lady was
screaming. She tried to run too. I had that chick swinging everywhere.
I shanked her. More than
once the bitch. When I go on a mission I get it done. That old chump
took too long to get it done
so I did him. Eric, that shrimp, he got scared. He tried to stop
me. He was so scared he ran out.
He took a red bag with a shotgun in it. We couldn't find the good
stuff. When I left I took the
knife with me. I tossed it on the tracks."
Fair enough, one might think. Patterson confessed, end of story,
book him. And yet Patterson
wasn't booked. According to police documents, assistant state's attorney
Kip Owen was
present for the interviews and heard the confession, yet he was not
willing to file charges. "At this
point in the investigation," the police field investigation report
reads, "ASA Owen deferred formal
charging pending a continuing investigation." According to the police
report, Area Two
detectives proceeded to search for the murder weapon along the IC
tracks, walking them from
87th street to 92nd to no avail. Then, without any more evidence
than they'd had when Owen
declined to file charges, Patterson was charged by assistant state's
attorney Peter Troy. Troy
wrote out a statement and asked the Apache Ranger to sign it. He
refused.
Evidence proved to be in short supply. No witnesses claimed they'd
seen Patterson come or go,
and there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. Fingerprints
found at the scene did
not match the Apache Ranger's. Bloody shoe prints also provided no
corroboration. No hair or
fiber samples put Patterson in the house, and none of his clothes
turned up with the blood of the
victims—and there must have been plenty of blood.
Lieutenant Patterson calls his son "a pioneer" in accusing Area
Two detectives of torture, and the
description is accurate. Aaron Patterson leveled his accusations
on May 2, 1986, at his very first
court appearance, three days after his arrest. While other men had
previously claimed to have
been tortured at Area Two, when Patterson told his story those claims
had no currency. No one
in any position of authority outside the police department (and,
one might suspect, the state's
attorney's office) knew that Patterson was just one of many African-Americans
who had made
the same claim against a small gang of south-side detectives and
their commander, Jon Burge.
Patterson's claim was entered into the court record three years
before attorneys from the
People's Law Office began to see a pattern and started compiling
a list that eventually included
more than 60 alleged victims; four years before the Reader
reported that Commander Burge had
been accused of electric shock as far back as 1973; four years before
Office of Professional
Standards investigator Michael Goldston wrote a report stating that
the abuse had been
systematic and included "planned torture"; five years before Amnesty
International called for an
inquiry; seven years before Jon Burge was dismissed by the Police
Board for the "physical
abuse" of cop killer Andrew Wilson; ten years before the city of
Chicago's own attorneys argued
in federal court that Burge engaged in the "savage torture" of Wilson
and a man named Melvin
Jones; and 13 years before the Area Two victims—11 of whom are awaiting
execution—pricked the conscience of the Tribune's editorial page,
which called for a judicial
inquiry for the first time on July 31, 1999. (The Sun-Times had expressed
its concern seven
months earlier.)
Patterson showed a certain self-confidence in that first court
appearance, a self-confidence that
many might label reckless. It was a bond hearing—a session in which
a judge is merely
supposed to set bail for the accused, not make any determination
of guilt or innocence. Patterson
appeared with no attorney, refusing the services of both the public
defender's office and the
lawyer representing codefendant Eric Caine, who did her best to protect
Patterson by warning
him to keep his mouth shut. Nonetheless Patterson persisted, trying
to interrupt the proceedings
and finally getting a nod from the judge that he could say something.
Without hesitation, he
claimed to have been suffocated with a plastic bag.
Two years later, on March 30, 1988, he told his story at some length
at a hearing on a motion to
suppress his confession. He described his arrest and interrogation
as an ordeal that lasted 25
hours. He claimed that upon his arrival at Area Two, he asked for
an attorney. None was
provided. He claimed that when his interrogators grew tired of his
unwillingness to confess to a
crime he had not committed, they cuffed his hands behind his back,
turned off the lights in the
interview room, covered his face with a gray typewriter cover so
that he could not breathe, and
began beating him about the chest. When the lights were turned back
on, the detectives were
sitting and standing about the room as they had been before, as if
nothing had happened.
Patterson says he again asked for an attorney, to no avail, and the
detectives said they would
repeat the treatment until he cooperated. When he continued in his
refusal, he says, the lights
went off and the typewriter cover again was placed over his face.
"I was trying to find an outlet
where I could breathe and they was saying, 'Well, hold his nose and
his mouth.' And they did
that for a minute or two. And they kept on saying, 'Answer me. Answer
me,' you know. And I
wouldn't say nothing. And then after a while they kept on doing it
and they was punching me and
stuff and I said, 'OK, anything you say.'" The lights then went back
on and the Apache Ranger
saw the detectives as they had been before.
At that point, faced with the prospect of going through the suffocation
and beating routine
repeatedly, Patterson says he stopped resisting. "So I more or like
just said, 'Whatever you say,'
you know. Everything they said I would like, 'OK, whatever you say.'
They was more or less
telling me what was supposed to have transpired at that house, you
know, what their theory was
about what happened."
Seemingly assured that their quarry was under their control, the
detectives removed his
handcuffs, Patterson says, and left him alone for about an hour while
they rounded up a state's
attorney. According to Patterson, assistant state's attorney Kip
Owen entered the room with a
plainclothes policeman whom Patterson later identified as Jon Burge.
Patterson says he asked to
speak to Owen alone, and after Burge left asked for an attorney and
declined to make a
statement. Owen allegedly walked out. Burge walked in, Patterson
says, sat down, took out his
gun, and put it on the table. Patterson claims that Burge said "you
are fucking up," that things
would get worse for him, that if he told of what he'd been through
it would be "your word against
our word. And who are they going to believe, you or us?" (In a recent
interview with the
Reader, Owen called this account "absolute nonsense. . . .
I don't know that I have ever met Jon
Burge, ever in my entire life.")
In Patterson's account, Burge left the room again and the Apache
Ranger found a paper clip on
the floor. He used it to scratch two messages into the bench and
one into the door frame
indicating that he had been tortured and prevented from calling for
help. Those messages were
later discovered intact by Isaac Carothers, an investigator with
the public defender's office and
now 29th Ward alderman. According to an affidavit filed by Carothers,
one etching read as
follows:
Aaron 4-30-86
I lied about murders
Police threatened me with
violence, slapped and
suffocated me with plastic
(no phone)
(no lawyer)
(no Dad)
The prosecution had one witness who linked Patterson to the crime,
Marva Hall, who was 16
when the Sanchezes' corpses were discovered. Testifying under oath
before the grand jury three
weeks after the murders, Hall identified Patterson as "Lone Ranger"
and said she had joined his
gang at 13 but was no longer a member. She said that on April 18,
1986, she had seen him in a
car and he had asked her if she knew anyone who wanted to buy a shotgun
and a chain saw.
Hall said Patterson claimed to have gotten them at the Sanchezes'
house, where he had stabbed
both husband and wife.
She also claimed the shotgun had a scope on it. This would be most
unusual. A shotgun is an
imprecise weapon meant to blast an area at relatively close range,
and a scope is a device
attached to rifles, occasionally to handguns, to aid shooters aiming
at distant targets. Putting a
scope on a shotgun is a little like wearing a baseball mitt to catch
a football. You can do it, but
nobody does.
One month later, on June 6, 1986, Hall recanted her grand jury
testimony. She told Investigator
Carothers that she had never heard Patterson admit to any murders
and that she had never told
the police that he had. Carothers wrote out an affidavit saying precisely
that and Hall signed it.
Three years later, at Patterson's trial, Hall recanted her recantation
and went back to her original
story. She claimed that she had given the signed statement to Carothers
because Patterson had
phoned her four times from jail and in each of those calls had threatened
to kill her if she came to
court. She admitted that she had never called the police about those
threats.
Patterson's attorney, public defender Brian Dosch, proposed to
Hall that the conversation with
Patterson had occurred a week before the murders, that the Apache
Ranger had been seeking a
buyer only for a saw, and that two men she knew had witnessed the
sales pitch. Dosch also
asked Hall if she was not driven by other motives in telling her
story to police. Hall's cousin had
been brought in for questioning about the murders, and Dosch raised
the possibility she had
attempted to clear him by offering Patterson to the police instead.
Dosch argued that Hall was
happy to see Patterson sacrificed, as he had beaten up her boyfriend
a week before the bodies
were found. The public defender put Carothers on the stand, and the
future alderman said Hall
told her she was afraid not of Patterson but of the police. Judge
John Morrissey, however,
ordered the comment stricken. Morrissey also refused to allow the
defense to establish that
Patterson could make only collect calls during the time that he was
allegedly threatening Hall.
Dosch did not contest Hall's description of a shotgun with a scope
on it, presenting no experts
who would have pointed out the absurdity of such an attachment. No
one seems to have noticed
at the time that Hall had also changed the location of the weapon.
She originally told Area Two
detectives that she saw it on the floor of the car. At trial, she
testified that it was in the trunk.
Dosch says he fully intended to put Patterson on the witness stand
to describe how he had been
tortured, even after Judge Morrissey ruled that he could be impeached
with his
attempted-murder convictions. Dosch changed his mind after police
officer James Jackson took
the stand and prosecutor Jack Hynes made an error that might have
been egregious. Officer
Jackson testified about reading Patterson his Miranda rights. The
last line of the Miranda litany
is, "Do you wish to answer questions at this time?" Hynes asked Jackson
what Patterson had
replied, and Jackson indicated that Patterson had not wished to answer
questions.
Dosch immediately asked for a mistrial. Morrissey called for a sidebar.
"Mr. Hynes, what are
you doing?" he said. "That's a comment on the defendant's postarrest
silence. My God." The
U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a defendant's silence cannot be
used against him or her, and
commenting on postarrest silence is therefore forbidden. However,
violations of the rule are
usually considered less serious if a defendant ultimately confesses
and if that confession
withstands challenges and is brought to the attention of the jury.
Morrissey declined to grant Dosch's motion for a mistrial, but
the public defender thought the
violation was significant enough that even if the jury voted to convict
Patterson, he could be
certain of a reversal on appeal and a second trial. Dosch then decided
not to put Patterson on
the stand, thereby keeping his felony record from the jury, but also
preventing the jurors from
hearing about the circumstances in which the unsigned confession
was generated.
The jury also heard nothing about the list of men who claimed to
have been tortured by
Commander Burge and his detectives. Dosch had access to the list,
which was being compiled
by the People's Law Office, and he has since shouldered blame for
not pursuing it and for not
making Burge a central figure in Patterson's case. But in fairness
to Dosch, it must be noted that
Burge was still three years away from being purged, and the leading
figure on the list of Burge's
victims was Andrew Wilson, who did not prevail in his civil suit
against Burge and the city until
nearly seven years after Patterson's trial ended. As the convicted
killer of two policemen, Wilson
would have won Patterson little sympathy had Morrissey allowed him
to testify, and the judge's
other rulings in the case suggest that evidence of torture would
have never been heard in that
particular courtroom.
For example, the judge refused to allow Dosch to introduce photos
of Patterson's
interrogation-room etchings. Morrissey called them "hearsay." Dosch
subpoenaed complaints
filed with the Office of Professional Standards that named detectives
who had arrested and
interrogated Patterson. Morrissey reviewed the documents in camera
and then refused to turn
them over, stating that he found them "irrelevant and immaterial."
Dosch proposed to question
Detective James Pienta, who had played a major role in Patterson's
case, about his role in the
Andrew Wilson case. Wilson, who was subjected to electric shock,
also claimed to have been
suffocated with a plastic bag. Morrissey declared that avenue off-limits
to Dosch.
In closing arguments, prosecutor Kenneth Zelazo leaned heavily
on the testimony of Marva Hall
and her performance on the witness stand. "Recall the tears of Marva
Hall," he said. "Those
were tears of honesty. Those were tears of fear. Those were tears
that tell you about the
defendant."
The jury deliberated for nine hours. They came back with a verdict
of guilty.
After delivery of the verdict, the trial entered its aggravation/mitigation
phase. Assistant state's
attorneys Zelazo and Hynes presented witnesses who they hoped would
make the jurors feel
that they had convicted a particularly evil man who deserved to be
put to death. Public
defenders Dosch and Janice McGaughey countered with witnesses they
hoped would make the
jurors reluctant to take Patterson's life.
Officer Charles Gomez, a member of the Fourth District tactical
unit, testified that at 11:30 PM
on April 18, 1986, he and his partner had seen three men carrying
a rug through an alley and that
the men had dropped the rug and started running when they saw Gomez's
car approach. The rug
was soaked with blood, and while throwing it into the trunk of the
police car, Gomez heard a
moan come from a nearby garage. He found a man there lying naked
in a pool of water, covered
with blood, his head split open. Gomez called paramedics and followed
a trail of blood back to
the Apache Rangers' headquarters, an apartment he could not enter
because there were several
hostile dogs in the yard.
The nearly dead man, Russell Warner, also took the stand. He testified
that on that evening, he
had been taken at gunpoint by an Apache Ranger to the gang's headquarters,
where he was
accused of having stolen a .22-caliber pistol from the gang. Warner
claimed that he told those
assembled that he had a gun like the one that was missing and "wasn't
going to fight over no
pistol," so he phoned a friend and asked him to bring the weapon
to Patterson. After the weapon
was turned over, Warner said, he was beaten, stripped naked, wrapped
in a rug, and disposed
of in the garage; he fell into a coma that lasted three days. "I
got a steel plate in my jaw, my nose
is broke, and then I got . . . a scar on my back and then the back
of my head." Patterson's
attorneys tried to get Warner to admit that he had been a member
of the Apache Rangers and
had taken the gun with the intention of selling it to buy cocaine.
Warner denied this, and even if
the jury doubted his denial there was no getting around the horror
of the Apache Rangers'
punishment. Aaron Patterson had pled guilty to attempted murder charges
in that case.
Police officer Fred Vlahovich took the stand and testified that
on April 6, 1985, he had pursued
Patterson down a gangway, that Patterson had fired at him, and that
the Apache Ranger later
pled guilty to the resulting charges. The judge in the case ordered
Patterson to turn over the
weapon, and Vlahovich reported that he had.
Area Two violent crimes detective Michael McDermott testified that
he had visited two Apache
Rangers in the hospital who allegedly had been assaulted by Patterson.
McDermott said
Patterson had punished Kirk Belt and Joseph Jackson for not carrying
out his orders. He said
Patterson had hit Belt on the head with a hammer and had shot Jackson
with a rifle. According
to the policeman, Patterson straddled Jackson and pointed a rifle
at his head. Jackson shouted
"No!" and put his hands in front of his face. A shot went through
both hands, broke Jackson's
jaw, and lodged near the back of his head. McDermott testified that
the doctor who treated
Jackson predicted that he would no longer be able to use his right
hand.
Henry Simmons, a Cook County state's attorney, testified that he
had prosecuted Patterson for
the shooting of Charles Lampkins, the trial taking place while the
Sanchez murder trial was
pending. Lampkins was a member of the Cobras street gang who had
survived after being
wounded in the chest. Simmons said Patterson had testified at his
trial that he and the Apache
Rangers fought only other gangs, that they would continue to do so,
and that Lampkins had been
shot in self-defense. Simmons said the judge had sentenced Patterson
to nine years for
attempted murder.
Corrections officers testified that while Patterson was awaiting
trial for the Sanchez murders, he
was involved in two violent incidents in Cook County Jail. In one,
the Apache Ranger had
stabbed another inmate, a man accused of killing the brother of El
Rukn leader Jeff Fort.
Patterson's attorneys suggested that the wounded man was the aggressor,
while guards
contended it was Patterson who owned the shank. In the other incident,
Patterson participated in
a riot that may have been sparked off when guards forcibly terminated
an inmate's phone call in
the day room. Patterson was alleged to have hit one guard with a
broom handle, causing a
laceration that required stitches, and to have broken the hand of
another guard by throwing a
chair at him.
After that litany of mayhem, the defense took over. Aaron's brother,
Raymond Jr., testified first.
He told the jury about his education, and said he was an account
executive for Pitney Bowes.
He went on to describe Aaron's childhood. Both boys had attended
Saint Bronislava's, a now
defunct Catholic grammar school; both had played Little League; both
had gone to day camp.
Aaron, he said, was a fine baseball player, a fast runner, a superior
roller skater, and an altar
boy.
"Aaron got along with all the neighbors particularly well," Raymond
said. "I know it's hard to
believe, but everybody liked Aaron quite a bit. . . . He was close
to a lot of people in the
neighborhood, not just the kids in the neighborhood but some of the
parents in the area too."
Aaron, he said, had been chosen by the next-door neighbors to be
godfather to both their
children.
Raymond went on to say that his parents had been strict, particularly
about the boys being home
by curfew. He described an evening when he and Aaron had run a few
miles to get home on
time because no bus appeared. Raymond said that when he and his brother
were in their last
years at De La Salle, Aaron started to bristle whenever rules were
invoked, both at school and
at home. "I kind of like would brush [it] aside, you know, as it's
a matter of time, you know. I
will be out, I will be grown, be able to do what I want to do. But
my brother . . . he objected
more than I did."
Asked why his life had turned out so different from Aaron's, Raymond
said it was because he
had been more passive in his last years in high school and because
he'd not been as socially
successful as Aaron. "I think Aaron was comfortable in the environment
he was in, more or less,
and he felt at home there," Raymond said. "I did not feel at home
in the neighborhood." When it
came time to choose a college, Raymond wanted to leave town. One
of the things he was most
afraid of, he said, was the pull of his surroundings in Chicago,
and he said he would be reluctant
to raise a family here. Had he stayed, he said, he would have been
hanging out with the same
people Aaron hung with.
Aaron's mother, Jo Ann Patterson, was the next witness in mitigation.
She had stayed at home to
raise the children while they attended Saint Bronislava's, and she'd
help support the small school
with bake sales, teas, and luncheons. In those years, the boys could
play outside only until the
streetlights came on. Their report cards were the basis for rewards
and punishment. Good
grades earned them money, but infractions like speaking out of turn
in class resulted in a period
of no television and home confinement. She recalled a report-card
day when Aaron did not
come home after school, staying away for four hours to avoid the
rebuke he knew was coming
for the check mark in the discipline column of his card.
Asked to recall Aaron's high school years, Mrs. Patterson recalled
that she and her husband had
often discussed what they could do to make their son's journey to
and from De La Salle less
dangerous. "Sometimes he would run into someone who was wanting to
chase him or he would
say they were shooting at him. And I just—we just didn't know what
to do. We'd say, 'Why
don't you go earlier or later, something like that?' But he never
did talk anymore. . . . We did not
know what to do at that point."
She recalled that "it was a no-no to hang in front of the house.
. . . If you had company, you did
not sit on the front porch. If you wanted to entertain, you come
in the living room and entertain
or go somewhere in the house and entertain." Aaron resented the rule,
his mother recalled, and if
his friends did come over, they would come inside for "about four
minutes, enough for Aaron to
get dressed and to go wherever else they had to go. I do not remember
anyone ever being there
to visit as a friend over a half hour."
As Aaron neared graduation from high school, his parents made plans
for him to attend college.
He had other ideas. One day he came home and said he had enlisted
in the National Guard.
Mrs. Patterson recalled being disappointed but coming to support
the plan because Aaron was
excited about it and because he said he would use whatever money
he saved to attend college
later. She testified that after Aaron's military career came to an
end, he returned home and took
up with his old pals, and his parents started to see him only at
6 PM, when they had dinner. She
recalled one holiday family gathering during this time. On such occasions
the boys were expected
to be around and help out, but Aaron disappeared and showed up when
everything was just
about over.
"And his dad asked him, 'What are you going to do with your life?'
And we both were—his dad
and I were both disappointed because we had not seen him all that
day. And I think that they
had some kind of heated discussion at that point, and that's when
Aaron just left the house and I
did not see him anymore for a long time."
Public defender McGaughey then had Mrs. Patterson identify photos—of
Aaron's first
communion, Aaron and Ray Jr. serving mass at Saint Bronislava's,
the family at the Wisconsin
Dells and Niagara Falls, Aaron with a Little League trophy, Aaron
at his senior prom.
McGaughey asked Mrs. Patterson if she had any explanation for why
Aaron had "difficulties
with the police in his later years."
"All I know is that everybody knew Aaron and that he was always
a protector," she said. "And I
would always tell him, 'Would you just mind your own business? You
have a lot to do for
yourself, don't worry about what somebody did to someone else. I
mean, they can take care of
themselves.' . . . And he always say, 'Well, that's the problem.
Nobody does anything around
here about what goes on.' And I say, 'Well, as long as it does not
affect you, why don't you just
leave it alone?' But . . . he just did not want to do that." Aaron
would accuse his mother of being
naive, of not knowing what was going on on the streets. She would
respond that she did not
want to know what was going on, that she had plenty of responsibilities
as it was.
Mrs. Patterson said Aaron would tell her nothing about his difficulties
until a situation had gotten
beyond the point where she could do anything about it. Then he would
explain himself, and the
story was always the same: Aaron was doing something to protect a
friend, or he had been
challenged "because he was supposed to be some kind of protector."
She concluded that
Aaron's lifestyle was hopeless. "If you stay on the street . . .
" she said, "the trouble just comes to
you." Thus, she said, it was natural for her son to be blamed for
the Sanchez murders. The police
knew Aaron, they needed a solution for the double homicide, and Aaron
could play the lead
role. "I could not believe it, when they told me that he was found
guilty, because I know he could
not have done this. I know it. He is not that kind of person. He
is a protector. He guards against
harm."
Aaron's father also testified in mitigation, and it must have seemed
remarkable to the jury to have
a lieutenant on the police force, the commanding officer of the employee
development section,
testifying on behalf of the chief Apache Ranger. In response to questions
from Brian Dosch,
Lieutenant Patterson sketched in his background. He had a BA in criminal
justice and history
from the University of Illinois, earned while serving as a patrolman.
He had a master's degree
from IIT in public administration with a concentration in labor relations,
also earned while on the
job. He was then midwest president of the American Criminal Justice
Association and a member
of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.
In response to questions from Dosch, the lieutenant described a
"normal parent-child
relationship" with Aaron, free of confrontation unless his son got
into trouble. When asked about
Aaron's friends, he was blunt. He didn't like them. He had objected
to Aaron's friends "on most
occasions." They did not "contribute to the betterment of society.
. . . They just didn't seem to be
doing anything." The public defender asked why Aaron had hung out
with them. "Well, Mr.
Dosch," the lieutenant said, "if I could really answer that question,
then I would know what to do
about it. But he never really gave me any reasonable reason why he
would hang with them."
The lieutenant recalled his discovery that his son was in a gang.
"Several police officers had
mentioned it to me prior to my actual finding out," he said. When
he spotted "the insignia"—the
lieutenant did not use the word "tattoo"—he and his son "had words.
. . . I let him know in no
uncertain words how I felt about it, and I reminded him at that time
that I had been denying to
my friends that he was a gang member because he was my son." Aaron
moved out not long
thereafter, and his father testified that he did not know where his
son was living after that. Every
time he ran across Aaron, he said, he would talk to him about the
futility of his lifestyle.
Dosch: Do you like your son?
Lieutenant Patterson: Did I like my—
Dosch: Do you like your son?
Patterson: Well I love him.
Dosch: I have nothing further.
Dosch and McGaughey presented some of the Pattersons' neighbors
who testified that Aaron
had helped the elderly in the neighborhood, doing odd jobs for them,
often without pay. A
Chicago policeman who had been friends with Aaron in grammar and
high school testified that
Patterson "was a nice guy to me and everybody that I know he came
into contact with.
Everybody liked him." A psychologist hired to write a forensic psychological
assessment testified
that Patterson had no arrest record as a juvenile, that he had graduated
in the top 35 percent of
his class at De La Salle, that he had been on the honor roll for
one year, and that he was in
training as a radar technician when he was discharged from military
service.
The effect of the aggravation testimony, however, proved impossible
to overcome. The jury
voted in favor of execution, and Aaron Patterson was sent to death
row.
In the ten years Patterson has spent waiting to be killed, the
prosecution's case has fallen apart.
Marva Hall, who recanted her grand jury testimony and then recanted
her recantation at trial, has
since recanted her trial testimony to several journalists and to
Patterson's attorneys. In an
affidavit signed on July 2, 1998, Hall said she had seen Patterson
with a shotgun, but that it had
been a few weeks before the Sanchez murders. She said she had been
intimidated into
implicating Patterson by police and prosecutors.
The only other evidence connecting Patterson to the crime is his
alleged confession, which was
written by a state's attorney and which he refused to sign. Patterson's
claim that the confession
came after he was suffocated now holds considerable credibility.
The city has admitted that
"savage torture" occurred at Area Two, and a federal court has agreed.
Also haunting the prosecution case is the criminal career of Willie
Washington, whose brother
Wayne was instrumental in the discovery of the bodies of Vincente
and Rafaela Sanchez. Recall
that Patterson had never before been charged with a home invasion,
had always used a gun in his
crimes, and had never been charged with a stabbing, much less one
carried out with such frenzy.
Willie Washington, who was briefly a suspect in the case, invaded
the home of Colleen Hamling
in Aurora on April 26, 1994. Hamling was stabbed nine times in the
neck, seven times in the
upper spine, eight times in the chest, and once on the hand. The
35-year-old Hamling struggled,
sustained numerous cuts on her arms, and then pretended to be dead.
She survived and
identified her attacker as Washington, who lived next door and had
previously asked her for
money. According to Aurora police documents, when Washington was
interviewed about the
crime he admitted that he smoked about $300 worth of crack a day.
He pled guilty to attacking
Hamling and to two other home invasions and is now serving a 50-year
sentence in the Menard
Correctional Center. He has denied killing Vincente and Rafaela Sanchez.
Despite the collapse of the evidence against him and the emergence
of a more likely suspect,
Patterson remains on death row. His case is now in the final stage
of appeal at the state level. In
the Illinois Supreme Court a few weeks ago, assistant state's attorney
Carol Gaines argued that
he deserved no evidentiary hearing, that execution should proceed
as scheduled. In oral
arguments on September 14, Gaines admitted that torture had occurred
at Area Two,
specifically in the case of Andrew Wilson, but said that there was
no connection between
Wilson's case and Aaron Patterson's. Wilson had emerged from police
custody with physical
injuries (the alligator clips used in the administration of electric
shock had left a pattern of
abrasions on Wilson's ears, there were burns on his thigh and chest,
and his head was cut open).
Patterson, Gaines argued, had no physical marks. It did not matter
to Gaines that torturers often
use methods that leave no marks; in her brief she and fellow prosecutor
Renee Goldfarb cited
eight Illinois Supreme Court decisions, six of them involving men
who alleged torture at Area
Two, in which the judges had held that physical injury was required
to prove police brutality had
taken place. Patterson's etchings also made no difference to Gaines
and Goldfarb; it was their
view that Patterson's claims of torture should not be believed because
he had not complained
about it to the state's attorney who took his alleged confession
or to the paramedic who
examined him when he arrived at Cook County Jail. Goldfarb and Gaines
also argued that
Marva Hall's newest recantation was irrelevant, as the time to raise
the issue of the prosecution's
use of perjured testimony was in an earlier appeal.
Patterson now awaits the court's ruling, which is expected in the
next few weeks. If the supreme
court decides that his case should not be reexamined, he will have
exhausted his avenues of
appeal on the state level. His attorneys will then ask the U.S. Supreme
Court to intervene. This is
a routine and required procedural step that defense attorneys recognize
as hopeless; the
likelihood of the Supreme Court agreeing to review such a case is
minuscule (in the court session
that ended in June, the justices were asked to review 8,083 cases;
they ruled on only 90). After
the U.S. Supreme Court files its expected rejection, Patterson will
have one more shot at
avoiding execution—a habeas corpus hearing in U.S. District Court.
A perusal of the newspaper archives since the end of the Patterson
trial might lead the
superstitious to conclude that a certain stain marked the lives of
some of its participants.
Prosecutor Kip Owen achieved some notoriety in 1998 when he charged
two boys, ages seven
and eight, with the murder of 11-year-old Ryan Harris. Owen and the
two other assistant state's
attorneys who worked on the case dropped the charges after receiving
a crime lab report that
semen had been found on the girl's clothes (the possibility of semen
being produced by a seven-
or eight-year-old is highly remote). DNA in the semen was later found
to match that of a man
charged with the rapes of three girls aged 10, 11, and 15.
Prosecutor Jack Hynes was recently named a circuit court judge,
only to have Tribune reporters
Ken Armstrong and Maurice Possley point out that as a state's attorney
he had had two cases
reversed because he had discriminated against members of minorities
during jury selection. The
Chicago Bar Association and the Cook County Bar Association have
since called for his
dismissal, and the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission
may investigate whether
Hynes lied on his application to become a judge by omitting mention
of having been rebuked by
a higher court.
Judge John Morrissey's hostility to evidence of police brutality
surfaced in other cases after
Patterson's, ultimately to the embarrassment of the judiciary. In
a front-page story last May 18,
Tribune reporters Armstrong and Steve Mills highlighted the judge's
behavior in People v.
Ronald Jones. Prosecutors had charged that Jones killed an alleged
prostitute after having sex
with her and refusing to pay, basing their theory on a statement
Jones purportedly gave to Area
One detectives, a statement Jones claimed was both false and beaten
out of him. In their article,
Mills and Armstrong presented Morrissey's repeated rejections of
defense attorneys' requests
for DNA testing. "What issue could possibly be resolved by DNA testing?
. . . Save arguments
like that for the press. They love it. I don't. . . . I think you
guys really believe Ronald Jones is
innocent despite the written confession. . . . I will tell you one
thing: I really draw that conclusion
after the last tome you sent me where you said that I was absolutely
wrong in denying DNA
testing. I kind of laughed at that, folks."
DNA tests, later allowed by the Illinois Supreme Court, showed
the semen belonged to
someone else. Jones was released from death row, and the state's
attorney's office dropped all
charges against him.
Morrissey is now presiding over People v. Darrell Cannon, another
Area Two torture case in
which he has made controversial rulings in favor of the police. (For
details see "Poison in the
System," which ran in the Reader, June 25, 1999.)
Patterson has shown a certain charisma while under this death sentence.
There are 11 men on
death row who have alleged that they were tortured at Area Two (they
are known collectively as
the Death Row 10, one member having arrived after the group was formed).
Of the lot,
Patterson has garnered the most support by far. He has an active
defense committee working for
him, and assorted luminaries—among them Bianca Jagger and former
judge and White House
counsel Abner Mikva—have signed a petition asking the Illinois Supreme
Court to spare his life.
He is the only Area Two victim with demonstrable support from any
local African-American
politicians: state representative Connie Howard has been active on
his behalf, and congressmen
Danny Davis, Bobby Rush, and Jesse Jackson Jr. have demonstrated
mild interest. Patterson
also has a Web page maintained by the Canadian Coalition Against
the Death Penalty, and there
are indications that the government of the Republic of Ireland may
write a letter on his behalf.
The show 60 Minutes II has scheduled a story about Patterson and
the Death Row 10 for
December 7, and Newsweek covered his case last May, focusing on the
efforts of Northwestern
University professor David Protess and his journalism students, who
have been investigating the
case for more than two years. In interviews, Patterson pleads not
just his case but that of the
other members of the Death Row 10 as well. He is convinced he will
be released, and talks of
saving some of his best material for the book and movie versions
of his travails.
Throughout all this, Jo Ann Patterson has been unflagging in her
determination to save her son's
life. Chris Bergin, a lawyer who works on the Aaron Patterson Defense
Committee, calls her the
group's "spiritual leader." A quiet, unassuming woman, she now finds
herself organizing and
addressing rallies, speaking at legislative hearings, and participating
in press conferences. In July
1998 she helped organize a bus trip to Pontiac. She and the committee
marked Aaron's 34th
birthday by demonstrating outside the prison gates, an event that
Aaron saw reported on the
local evening news. When the Illinois Supreme Court heard oral arguments
in Aaron's case last
September, his mother helped pack the courtroom, a room so rarely
filled that staffers can count
on one hand the number of times it has happened. She has also spoken
with Colleen Hamling,
the victim of Willie Washington's assault in Aurora, in an effort
to enlist her in the campaign to
save Aaron's life. A white woman stabbed by a black crack addict
speaks to a different
constituency than a black gang leader on death row with three attempted
murder convictions.
Jo Ann Patterson, however, has labored largely without the help
of her husband. The two
separated in 1990, after 28 years together. Lieutenant Patterson
believes the breakup was his
fault, that his ambition to get ahead on the job got in the way of
his family relationships. "I
overdid it," he said in an interview, "with the result that my family
fell apart. . . . I spent a lot of
time in trying to get myself promoted, and I wasn't the most faithful
husband."
In the wake of that breakup, which came six months after his son
was sentenced to death, the
lieutenant says he felt "split from the whole family. . . . I was
angry with the whole family, which is
kind of a juvenile way of looking at things as I sit here now. When
I reflect, I just felt alone, that
is all."
Having a son on death row, he said, seemed to have no effect on
his place on the police
department's totem pole, but over the years it became one of several
factors that diminished his
enthusiasm for the job. "I found myself sitting up in that office,
day after day, listening to other
people's problems, helping other police officers' sons and daughters
out of trouble, listening to
these goddamn alderman crying all the time and asking for favors,
and helping them out of
mischief. Then I come home to my own house and don't know what to
do about my own
goddamn problems," he said. "I think those types of things impacted
my career more than
anything the police department did to hold me back. I just wasn't
motivated to get promoted."
Years passed, and he had nothing to do with Aaron. "For a long
time I had felt betrayed by
Aaron," the lieutenant said, "because I have never taught Aaron to
be a gangbanger." For years
he wrestled with the question of whether Aaron had indeed murdered
the fence and his wife. "I
guess that is a bias I have against gangsterdom. I just couldn't
see any reason to believe him. It's
a terrible thing to say, I admit that, but my feelings had a lot
to do with whether or not I believed
him, and my belief or disbelief in him stemmed from when he lied
to me. I have never been able
to reconcile myself to that. And he had been lying to me for so long.
I guess that is the problem
with lying. I guess it comes back to haunt you sooner or later."
It was 1996 before the lieutenant came to believe that the police
had the wrong man, and at that
point he went to visit Aaron in Menard. In an interview with the
Reader a few months after that
visit, the policeman recalled, "He was pretty cold to me initially.
. . . ' Why do you let me stay in
here for ten years? I'm your son.' And I don't have to tell you any
more about that. That was
deep. That hurt." In a subsequent interview a few weeks ago, he suggested
the gap between
visits may have been only six years, though he admitted that his
memory was hazy. Aaron insists
that his father has visited him only twice in the last 13 years,
once in 1986 and once in 1996.
"I don't think he sees how I could believe that he did this," the
retired lieutenant told the Reader
in 1996. "He said, 'When I shot those people, I never denied it.'
And he didn't. He admitted
readily that he had shot these guys. And he was convicted and sentenced
for that and he has
done his time on it. But he was very upfront about that. But he is
steadfast in his innocence on
this. And the more I review some of the evidence that I was too proud
to even try to look at
heretofore, the more I am torn to believe him."
During the visit in 1996, Aaron described the roles that various
officers had played in his arrest
and interrogation. "This guy's name came up," the lieutenant recalled,
"and he was one of the
guys that supposedly had struck my son. And this guy [later] worked
for me as one of my
sergeants. He was an excellent employee. I mean excellent. He is
just superior in his job. He was
my desk sergeant and I depended on him a lot. Then when I went to
visit Aaron, Aaron calls his
name, I almost fell off the chair. Aaron said this guy actually hit
him, that he returned from
McDonald's with a bag of hamburgers or something and he struck Aaron.
But Aaron said that
he didn't have a lot to do with the case, it was just that Aaron
was raising so much hell in there
that he heard the commotion and went in and struck him with a hamburger—'Shut
up all that
noise.' And he called this guy's name and that really shocked me.
It really shocked me."
The retired lieutenant began thinking about the fine details of
the case. The murders were
supposed to have been the by-product of a joint venture between members
of the Vice Lords
and the Apache Rangers. "Is that what usually happens in real life?"
he asked. "Gangbangers
don't usually operate that way. They don't usually take on joint
ventures like that."
He also found it suspicious that evidence had disappeared. The
state's attorney's office cannot
locate the fingerprints lifted at the scene, the footprint left in
the congealed blood, or blood
samples taken by evidence technicians, all of which could prove useful
in identifying the killer.
"I have always felt that if you are going to charge a person with
a heinous type crime, you ought
to be pretty sure that this person did it, and the only way you can
do it is to cross your t's and
dot your i's. . . . The biggest injustice you can do is to let the
real killer get away." And that, he is
certain, is what happened. "I think Willie Washington killed these
people, and at the very least I
know Aaron didn't. And I will put anything on that. That is one thing
that gives me some
consolation now as I sit here while my son sits in prison. At least
now I know that he didn't do it.
This is almost as bad as the crime itself, for them to arrest the
wrong person when they had
every chance to get the right person, but they didn't use the initiative
that they should have used.
And nobody made 'em."
The lieutenant may have been convinced of his son's innocence,
but the two were not reconciled.
After retiring at age 58, Raymond Patterson seemed to have a lot
of time on his hands, but he
did not go back to the prison. He now has two other children with
another woman, from whom
he has since separated. He spends his time studying the Civil War
and visiting sites where great
battles were fought.
When People v. Patterson was argued before the supreme court in
September, the retired
lieutenant drove to Springfield and sat in on the session. Afterward,
he stood on the courthouse
steps, had his picture taken with his son's lawyers and Aaron's mother,
and politely answered
questions from the press.
No one had known that the lieutenant was coming. And suddenly,
with reporters,
photographers, and supporters still mingling about, no one seemed
to know that he had gone.
Ever the policeman, he would explain that he had departed quickly
because his parking meter
was running out of time.
"I am not out to do a thing on the death penalty in general," Raymond
Patterson said later. "I am
not anti-this or anti-that." He explained that he agreed with the
approach being taken by Aaron's
present attorneys, Flint Taylor and Tim Lohraff from the People's
Law Office. "I just wait and
hope any direct assistance that is necessary, I am there to do it."
"Keep in mind," he said, "that I had a son—at one time I thought
we were the perfect father and
son, during the period of his growing up and my chasing my career.
And then the relationship
changed and at the present time I just wish it were better. That
is how I'd like for you to see it.
We don't have the perfect relationship, but one time I like to think
it was pretty close to that."
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