October 26, 2020 • 30 mins
In Chicago, old habits die hard.
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin bring us inside one of the worst police abuse scandals in U.S. history. For decades on the southside of Chicago, a group of white cops turned the interrogation room into a torture chamber for Black men. Those cops called themselves the Midnight Crew.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Dressing. Today we're going to tell
you about one of the worst police abuse scandals in
US history. For decades, on the South side of Chicago,
a group of white cops turned the interrogation room into
a torture chamber for black men. Those cops called themselves
(00:22):
the Midnight Crew. We'll start by introducing you to one
innocent man who encountered the Midnight Crew and ended up
confessing to murder. Eventually, it became all too clear that
what happened to him had happened to hundreds of others too.
Let's talk about how the Midnight Crew got exposed to
daylight and what's being done to make sure this kind
of police torture doesn't ever happen again. You know, we've
(00:56):
talked a lot during our podcast about psychological interrogation techniques.
This is a really different case. This is physical torture.
It's the kind of thing most people think doesn't happen
in the United States, but it did, and it did
in my lifetime in Chicago. This was real. I said,
how can this be going on? You know, at the
(01:17):
end of the twentieth century. I mean, this is medieval,
This is the stuff of the Spanish Inquisition, because by
and large, by the nineteen fifties, these kinds of third
degree tactics were no longer part of law enforcement. You know, Steve,
I never knew what the term third degree meant before
(01:38):
I went to law school. So for our audience, it
means physical abuse during interrogations, right. You know, Chicago's history
with police interrogations is a fascinating one. The third degree
thrived in Chicago in the thirties, forties and fifties. Then
a group of police reformers brought in psychological and terry
(02:00):
Asian techniques that they believed would be less likely to
lead to false confessions. But in Chicago, old habits die hard.
It's easy for anyone to understand why someone would falsely
confess if they're being physically abused or tortured. That's no
way to get the truth, let alone justice. Today's story
(02:25):
starts on July. It's summer in Chicago, one of the
hottest on record, with temperatures topping a hundred degrees on
the city is predominantly black South Side. A lot of
homes are older run down, don't have air conditioning. Economic
opportunities are thin, and people sweat just to pay the bills.
So when the temperature climbs, tempers run high to That's
(02:48):
true for the residents and for the police. On July,
things get way too hot in a south Side neighborhood
called Gauge Park. In the middle of the night, a
brick bungalow goes up in flames. After firefighters bring the
blaze under control, police go inside. They find five bodies,
two women who had worked as teacher's aids at a
(03:09):
local school, and three young children. All of the kids
had been smothered with pillows. One of the women had
been beaten and strangled. The other woman had been smothered too.
She was the daughter of a Chicago cop. It's a
horrible crime, and the case quickly becomes high profile. What
Chicago police call a heater. But there's no eyewitnesses, no
(03:30):
forensic evidence, no nothing. So police offer a two thousand
dollar reward for information. Sure enough, just a few days later,
a prison inmate calls police and claims that his friend,
Ronald Kitchen, confessed to him over the phone. Now prison
phone calls are recorded and monitored, A quick chuck of
the inmates phone recordings reveals he was lying. No one
(03:52):
he spoke with had ever confessed to anything, but with
no other leads, the police decide to go after Ronald
Kitchen and go after him hard. Ronald was twenty two
years old, and, as he admits today, he was no angel.
Back then, with one young child and a second on
the way, he made a living by selling cocaine, but
(04:12):
he was no killer and never had been. On the
evening of August, Ronald leaves his house and heads for
the corner store down the block. He's out to buy
a gallon of milk and some cookie dough for his
two year old son. Before he knows it, Ronald surrounded
by police cars. One of the officers says something about
a stolen vehicle. Another cop points a gun at him.
(04:34):
Ronald knows he had nothing to do with any car theft,
so he figures he'll be able to clear up the
situation without much difficulty. As the police put Ronald in handcuffs,
he hollers to his family down the block, I'll be
back in forty five minutes. Police bring Ronald to a
south Side station called Area three. They throw him into
an interrogation room and cuff his hands to an iron
(04:55):
ring in the wall, and the account Ronald gives of
the next sixteen hour is harrowing. According to Ronald, an
officer comes in and asks who have you been talking to?
When Ronald doesn't know how to answer, the officer starts
punching him in the chest and kicking his stomach. Over
the next several hours, that officer would leave, then come
back again over and over to ask the same question,
(05:19):
who have you been talking to? And to continue the beatings.
Sometimes he'd be joined by a second officer. When that
officer entered the room, he would remove his nametag before
joining the assaults. After hours of beatings, a third officer
came into the room alone. He asked if Ronald was
okay and if he wanted anything to eat. When Ronald
(05:40):
asked to call a lawyer, he says, the officer smiled,
picked up the handset from a nearby phone, and smashed
it into Ronald's skull. Do you hear ringing? Now? Said
the officer. On his way out, he turned off the lights,
leaving Ronald in the dark for hours. The beatings continued,
with Ronald waiting in agony for the next round to start,
(06:03):
the officers focused on areas of his body where damage
wouldn't be visible. At one point, officers cuffed both his
hands behind his back and used their nightsticks to beat
his genitals. But their desire to cover their tracks didn't
stop the police from targeting Ronald's head too. They just
used a phone book to cushion the blows and avoid
leaving a mark. This torture session was clearly premeditated, mapped
(06:26):
out in advance. The whole time. They were also calling
Ronald racial slurs. The N word just rolled off their tongues.
The goal here was total humiliation, physical and mental. Hours
of torture went by until Ronald finally broke. He signed
a false confession dictated by the police, admitting to the
(06:49):
Gauge Park killings. Based on that confession, Ronald Kitchen was
charged with capital murder, meaning that he was facing the
death penalty. At his first court appearance, Ronald told the
judge that he had been tortured. A few days later,
Ronald was transferred to a hospital for treatment. At the hospital,
his urine ran red with blood. Despite all of this,
(07:11):
Ronald's false confession was allowed into evidence. Against him at trial,
along with the testimony of that prison snitch who still
claimed that Ronald had admitted the killings. On September, Ronald
Kitchen was convicted of five counts of murder and sent
to death Row. There, he'd soon discover he wasn't alone.
(07:32):
At least nine other residents of Illinois Death Row had
been tortured into confessing too. There was something much bigger
going on. This episode is sponsored by a i G,
a leading global insurance company, and Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Morton
(07:54):
and Garrison, a leading international law firm. The A i
G Pro Bono Program provides free legal service, says, and
other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals most in need,
and recently they announced that working to reform the criminal
justice system will become a key pillar of the program's mission.
Paul Weiss has long had an unwavering commitment to providing
(08:15):
impactful pro bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members
of our society and in support of the public interest,
including extensive work in the criminal justice area. What Ronald
endured at Area three was no isolated incident. Ronald Kitchen
had encountered a group of white cops who called themselves
(08:39):
the Midnight Crew. The Midnight Crew closed cases by torturing
black men until they confessed, and they operated under the
authority of a Chicago police detective named John Burge. To
understand what happened to Ronald, you have to start asking
some tough questions. What kind of police officer would do
(09:00):
this to another human being? What kind of person would
knowingly break the laws of common decency, the laws of
humanity just to get a confession. When it comes to
John Burge, the answer is complex. Here's our friend John Conroy,
the journalist who was investigative reporting exposed the Midnight Crew.
(09:22):
John Burge was a very driven police officer. Initially he
was a patrol officer, and then he was mooted to detective,
and then he made sergeant, and then he made lieutenant.
He seemed to me like somebody who would show up
at my family's picnic and if my elderly aunt had
a problem starting her car on the way home, he
(09:44):
would have been the first one out there trying to
get it working. That just seemed to me to be
the kind of guy he was. On the other hand,
he brutally tortured people. John Burge was a Chicago Southsider
born who grew up in a white on if called
South Deering. He grew up in a working class, white
(10:04):
neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that during the
late nineteen sixties went from white to black over the
course of about four years, and his family was among
the last to move out. He then went off to college,
flunked out after about a semester, went home and enlisted
(10:27):
in the military. Bird served as a military police officer
in South Korea and Vietnam. For his service, he earned
the Bronze Star, Metal and Purple Heart. After he returned
to Chicago, Bird joined the police force and racked up
more than a dozen commendations. Everyone wants torturers to be
Hannibal elector or somebody like that out of signs of
(10:51):
the Lamps. Everyone wants torturers to be monsters, and they're
basically normal people like you and me. Burns, for instance,
once saved the woman, an African American woman, from committing suicide.
She had a gun to her throat. She pulled the
trigger and he got his thumb in the firing mechanism
and it didn't go off, but his apparent heroism wasn't
(11:14):
the full story, because John Burge and his underlings ended
up being accused of extracting confessions for more than two
hundred black men between using torture. You know, in Chicago,
the cops were under tremendous pressure because we had an
astronomical homicide People talk about homicides in Chicago now, they
(11:38):
were eight higher in the early nineties, and so, you know,
they hand solve crimes. They were getting information. That's another
reason why people do it. They actually might think that
they're helping out the good people of the community by
torturing the bad ones. You do get information when you
(12:01):
torture people, you just don't get accurate information. People will
say anything to stop the torture. Accusations against the Midnight
Crew started emerging. Just a few months before Ronald Kitchen
was convicted. In January, John Conroy published an investigative report
in The Chicago Reader entitled House of Screams. The birds
story came to me because I was writing a book
(12:22):
on torture but not torturers and countries that people normally
suspected of torture, torture and democracies. And then a friend
of mine called me and said, there's this guy named
Andrew Wilson. He claimed he was given electric shock by
the Chicago police and his testimony was just so compelling
the police could not explain away his injuries. Andrew Wilson
(12:46):
was a suspect in the murder of two Chicago cops,
and House of Screams told the story of what happened
to him in police custody. The rumor was that during
Wilson's interrogation, Burge and his men used techniques that Bird
learned as a military Harry police officer back in Vietnam.
Andrew Wilson emerged from the police station with these very
peculiar marks on his ears and his nose in the
(13:08):
shape of alligator clips. They were scabs, and he had
parallel burns on his chest and a big burn on
his thigh. He said he'd been held against a hot
radiator while electric shock was administered by a hand cranked
device not dio, similar from a field telephone used in Vietnam.
And because he'd shot the two cops, nobody wanted to
(13:30):
believe him. Nobody's going to have any sympathy for cop killers,
and Burge and his Midnight crew knew that they would
be more likely to get away with torturing a cop
killer than anybody else. You know, Frankly, when we get
in an uproar about torture, it's over the torture of
(13:54):
people we like, somebody like say Nelson Madela, and we
are outraged. But if you torture somebody whom we don't like, oh,
that's no problem at all. So, you know, I think
the true test of the society is can you stand
up and defend the rights of people whom you abhor.
(14:18):
During Andrew Wilson's trial, his attorneys started receiving letters in
Chicago police envelopes from an inside whistleblower. The department's torture problem,
it seemed, went much further than Andrew Wilson. The letters
provided a roadmap for anybody who wanted to investigate, because
they listed the people who went along with the torture,
(14:40):
and then it listed also the weak links, people who
didn't like Birch. They wouldn't be asked to participate in
the torture, but they would have been around the police station,
would have known about. After Conroy's story about Andrew Wilson
ran an avalanche of other allegation came forward. There were
(15:01):
men who had plastic bags put over their heads, men
who were waterboarded with seven up, men who had their
testicles stood on during interrogation. All black men tortured by
all white cops. Of course, I think race was a
factor in all of this. A lot of the abuse
that was inflicted was not just physical, but it was verbal,
(15:24):
and it was regular use of the N word. The
stories were horribly similar, and the evidence was there from
the beginning. One torture victim, Aaron Patterson, managed to leave
a visible cry for help in the interrogation room. And
just picture this. This guy is being tortured and he's
scratching this message in a metal bench with a paper clip,
(15:45):
and the message couldn't be clearer. Please threaten me with violence,
slapped and suffocated me with plastic No lawyer or dad
signed false statement to murder. Why did he do this?
He did it because he was afraid he wouldn't survive
the torture, and that even if he did survive, he
(16:06):
was afraid that no one would believe him. Aaron did survive,
and one of the other survivors was Ronald Kitchen. Ronald
later realized that the second officer who participated in his interrogation,
the one who took off his name tag before beating him. Well,
that was no ordinary member of the Midnight Crew. That
was John Burge himself. By the time John Conroy published
(16:32):
House of Screams, John Burge and the Midnight Cruise torture
campaign had been going on for nearly twenty years. Meanwhile,
Burge had been promoted to commander, out ranking of the
other officers on the Chicago Police Force. So my article
came out in January. As we were approaching press time,
(16:53):
I was really uneasy. I thought, Oh Jesus, you know
we're gonna go with a story that says that the
Chicago police engaged in torture. Nobody had said anything of
the kind before. I thought there would be a furor
and we might get sued, even though we had done
every legal check that could be done. Burge was a
(17:15):
powerful man, but the allegations against him were too numerous
and too similar to ignore. John Burge was suspended from
the Chicago Police Force. The local police union rushed to
Burge's defense, throwing him a fundraiser at a union hall.
I was there. It was packed with more than a
thousand people, probably most of them cops, but I'm sure
(17:39):
some of them were States attorneys, because I know that
it was advertised in the States Attorney's office. Meanwhile, more
and more allegations of police torture were coming forward, beatings,
cattle prods, Russian roulette. The Chicago Police Board held a
hearing in into burgess alleged misconduct. Basically, it was an
employment fitness here. It was not a criminal case, and
(18:03):
the city had attorneys present the case against Birch and
they did a pretty done good job. I thought they
actually sold the Police board on the idea that something
had indeed happened here. During the hearing, an internal police
report came to light. It suggested that police supervisors had
known about the midnight cruise systemic brutality for years. The
(18:29):
Police board found that John Birge had participated in physical
abuse and fired him from the Chicago Police. Now. The
Police Board's decision was remarkable in that it never used
the word torture. It said, John Birge did chick and
or punch and or denied medical attention to and or
and or and or you couldn't tell, Oh, well, what
(18:51):
exactly do you think happened. So as a result of
that decision, Birds got fired, but he was allowed to
retire with his pension. Another agency, the Office of Professional Standards,
began investigating too, and it released a report that went
a step further. The investigation found that Chicago police had
taken part in a systematic, planned torture campaign that command
(19:14):
officers knew about. Meanwhile, Ronald Kitchen, one of the victims
of that torture, was still on death row for a
crime he didn't commit. And remember, he was there along
with other men who had been tortured just like him
by John Burge and the Midnight Crew. For years, Ronald's
appeals failed and the system turned a blind eye to
the unthinkable abuse he suffered. But Ronald and the others
(19:36):
on death row didn't stay silent. The group began finding
their voices, speaking out about the fact that the Midnight
Crew had tortured innocent people into falsely confessing. What's amazing
to me is how these men found their voice. They
did so by re enacting each other's trials. You have
(19:57):
to remember that when people are in prison, every instinct
tells you not to talk to other inmates about your case.
But these men they acted out their case. They played
the role of prosecutor of defense, attorney of police witness,
and in some cases they convicted one another. That process
(20:20):
gave them agency, and at the end of the day,
all of these men became great storytellers. They could not
only tell the story of what happened to each of them,
but they could tell the stories of each other. As
the Midnight Crew torture scandal blew up, Ronald's personal fight
(20:40):
for justice became un ignorable. In two thousand one, Ronald
got a new team of post conviction lawyers. They discovered
previously undisclosed evidence about that prison snitch who claimed Ronald
had confessed. Turns out the snitch had received money and
early release from prison in exchange for his false testimony.
That evidence, plus the discovery of the Midnight Crew torture scandal,
(21:03):
led prosecutors to agree that Ronald's conviction should be thrown out.
On July seven, two thousand nine, Ronald Kitchen became a free,
exonerated man. Six weeks later, he was awarded a certificate
of innocence. Those forty five minutes that Ronald had expected
(21:28):
to be gone they turned into twenty one years behind bars.
The Gauge Park killings have never been solved. As for
the other men on death row with Ronald, over the years,
several of them walked free to those who remained in
prison had their sentences commuted to life, and they're continuing
to fight their cases. And what about John Burge. Well,
(21:50):
as we told you, he got kicked off the Chicago
Police Force. But neither John Burge nor any member of
the Midnight Crew was ever charged with or convicted of
any of torture because the statute of limitations had passed
by the time the truth came to light. Maybe we
can find some small measure of justice though, in the
fact that John Birge did go to prison for lying
(22:12):
about torture. In two thousand ten, Burge was sued by
someone he tortured. During the lawsuit, Burge gave a sworn
statement denying that any abuse had occurred on his watch.
That falsehood was enough to convict Birge of perjury. John
Birge served from two thousand eleven to two thousand fourteen
in federal prison, a much shorter length of time than
(22:34):
many of his victims spent behind bars. After he left prison,
Burge gave an interview, calling the torture victims human vermin.
He took up residence in Florida, still collecting his police
pension four thousand dollars a month. He even drove a
boat called Vigilante. Well, no justice was not served in
this case. I mean he was sentenced to four years
(22:55):
in prison. He didn't serve that. Burge was convicted thirty
seven years after the first time. We know that he
used electric shock. You know, at the end of the day,
John Burge was released after only serving a few years
in prison, while Ronald and the other men on death
Row spent decades in some of the harshest prisons in
(23:18):
Illinois system. That's not justice. In two thousand and eighteen,
John Burge died at his home in Florida. After his death,
the police union posted a statement on Facebook saying that
the Fraternal Order of Police does not believe the full
story about the Birge case has ever been told. They're
probably right. Decades after Burge's reign of terror, allegations of
(23:41):
torture by the Midnight Crew are still coming to light.
In two thousand nine, the state of Illinois formed a
Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to review and respond to
these allegations. Meanwhile, lawsuits upon lawsuits have been filed and
are still being filed. So far, the Midnight Crew has
cost the City of Chicago one lion dollars in brutality settlements,
(24:02):
defense costs, and reparations. A Reparation's ordinance passed by the
City Council created a fund so that many of these
torture survivors, those with credible claims of torture, could be
compensated for what happened to them. It was a recognition
and ownership of this problem by the City of Chicago,
(24:25):
and it's never happened before in the United States. One
lawsuit filed on behalf of fifty torture victims settled under
the condition that the story of John Burge and systemic
Chicago police misconduct be included in the Chicago Public Schools
high school curriculum so that everyone remembers. We can never
(24:46):
forget the Chicago torture scandal, because if you don't remember,
then history can repeat itself. We have to learn the
lessons of history, and the best way to do it
is to teach young minds about it. And that's where
you'll find Ronald Kitchen. Today, he and other survivors of
the Midnight Crew visit classrooms across Chicago, where they talk
(25:09):
to teenagers about what they endured and what they hope
can be learned from their ordeals. And if you pay
attention to the way Chicago's kids react to these stories,
you'll have hope for the future. They listen, They stay
to hear the end of the story, even after the
bell rings. What do you think about all the recent
social media videos of police brutality? Students ask how can
(25:31):
we as young people make a change. For his part,
Ronald Kitchen has no quick answers, but he does have
a quick sense of justice. As he told students at
one Chicago high school, there's no gray area in torture.
You need to see it for what it really is.
It's black and it's white. Hello, hey, Ronald, how are
(25:57):
you doing? It's Laura and Steve. How are you doing.
I'm good, I'm good. When you visit those schools, what
do you hope the kids learned from hearing you to speak? Well?
I think the meaning of going to the schools this
let him knows that this could happen to anybody. It's
mind bothering because the boogey Man not just touched me,
(26:17):
stop me, kick me, punched me, slap me. The boogey
Man did all this to me, and then your job
became to fight the Boogeyman. It wasn't just one bad guy.
You were fighting a whole system that let these guys
do what they did. For so long we was fighting
good laugh. We didn't have a rock. We had a
consul paper, and that punslum paper came out to be
(26:39):
stronger than that rock could ever do. It's hard for
people to understand how you could get the space or
the time on death row to re enact these trials.
We had a couple of good captains back there. They
let us have law classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I
thank them for helping us with the process of gaining
(26:59):
out freedom. You and the other guys, they're organized, work
together and made a big, big change even though you
were locked up. You know, do you talk to kids
in schools about how they should come together and work
to make change in the same way find their own voices. Yeah,
that's the whole point of having them. Finding course is
(27:19):
your best weapon. If we found out voices and a
depth for hell no force to be heard. No matter
what you we what are you enjoying in life these days? Ronald?
My family, I think that's the best. And a dope
from me with my little family. Did I hear you
say you were on your way to get a pony? Yeah?
The day is my daughter's birthday. She turned in nine
(27:42):
and the theme is cowboy. So yeah, I'm gonna get
the pony. Now. That's so nice. I'm trying to get
this she bug it right now. I will. When you
think of this scandal, you have to think about not
only Burge in his Midnight crew. You have to think
(28:04):
about the armies of people who knew about it and
kept quiet every time somebody was tortured. There were police
officers in that station who heard the screens, and then
there were states attorneys who came in and had to
write out the confessions. There were lawyers who heard these
stories from their clients, and judges who heard these stories
(28:28):
in court. A lot of folks had to know about
what was going on for so many years. This was
a case of systemic racism, not just of a few
bad apples. It was an open secret and not so
secret open secret, and you know, think about what that
(28:48):
does to these communities. The court system may have turned
a blind eye to these defendant stories, but they must
have told their family members and their friends and their
neighbors what happened to them. And this repeated story of
abuse must have leaked out and saturated the South Side,
an open wound that for years was not addressed injustices
(29:12):
like the Chicago police torture scandal are at the root
of what our countries experiencing right now, a national reckoning
with race and the criminal justice system. These stories need
to be told so that we can collectively acknowledge the
wrongs and start having a real discussion about what's right.
(29:37):
And that's the story of the Midnight Crew. Next week
we'll take you to the United Kingdom to tell you
about the Birmingham Six. Two pubs were bombed in one
of the biggest mass murders in British history, and six
Irish men found themselves in the wrong place at the
worst time. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of
(29:58):
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flam and
Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by senior producer
and Pope, along with producers Josh Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by j Ralph.
(30:21):
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
and II Writer, and you can follow me on Twitter
at s driven. For more information on the show, visit
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show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful
Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Dressing. Today we're going to tell
you about one of the worst police abuse scandals in
US history. For decades, on the South side of Chicago,
a group of white cops turned the interrogation room into
a torture chamber for black men. Those cops called themselves
(00:22):
the Midnight Crew. We'll start by introducing you to one
innocent man who encountered the Midnight Crew and ended up
confessing to murder. Eventually, it became all too clear that
what happened to him had happened to hundreds of others too.
Let's talk about how the Midnight Crew got exposed to
daylight and what's being done to make sure this kind
of police torture doesn't ever happen again. You know, we've
(00:56):
talked a lot during our podcast about psychological interrogation techniques.
This is a really different case. This is physical torture.
It's the kind of thing most people think doesn't happen
in the United States, but it did, and it did
in my lifetime in Chicago. This was real. I said,
how can this be going on? You know, at the
(01:17):
end of the twentieth century. I mean, this is medieval,
This is the stuff of the Spanish Inquisition, because by
and large, by the nineteen fifties, these kinds of third
degree tactics were no longer part of law enforcement. You know, Steve,
I never knew what the term third degree meant before
(01:38):
I went to law school. So for our audience, it
means physical abuse during interrogations, right. You know, Chicago's history
with police interrogations is a fascinating one. The third degree
thrived in Chicago in the thirties, forties and fifties. Then
a group of police reformers brought in psychological and terry
(02:00):
Asian techniques that they believed would be less likely to
lead to false confessions. But in Chicago, old habits die hard.
It's easy for anyone to understand why someone would falsely
confess if they're being physically abused or tortured. That's no
way to get the truth, let alone justice. Today's story
(02:25):
starts on July. It's summer in Chicago, one of the
hottest on record, with temperatures topping a hundred degrees on
the city is predominantly black South Side. A lot of
homes are older run down, don't have air conditioning. Economic
opportunities are thin, and people sweat just to pay the bills.
So when the temperature climbs, tempers run high to That's
(02:48):
true for the residents and for the police. On July,
things get way too hot in a south Side neighborhood
called Gauge Park. In the middle of the night, a
brick bungalow goes up in flames. After firefighters bring the
blaze under control, police go inside. They find five bodies,
two women who had worked as teacher's aids at a
(03:09):
local school, and three young children. All of the kids
had been smothered with pillows. One of the women had
been beaten and strangled. The other woman had been smothered too.
She was the daughter of a Chicago cop. It's a
horrible crime, and the case quickly becomes high profile. What
Chicago police call a heater. But there's no eyewitnesses, no
(03:30):
forensic evidence, no nothing. So police offer a two thousand
dollar reward for information. Sure enough, just a few days later,
a prison inmate calls police and claims that his friend,
Ronald Kitchen, confessed to him over the phone. Now prison
phone calls are recorded and monitored, A quick chuck of
the inmates phone recordings reveals he was lying. No one
(03:52):
he spoke with had ever confessed to anything, but with
no other leads, the police decide to go after Ronald
Kitchen and go after him hard. Ronald was twenty two
years old, and, as he admits today, he was no angel.
Back then, with one young child and a second on
the way, he made a living by selling cocaine, but
(04:12):
he was no killer and never had been. On the
evening of August, Ronald leaves his house and heads for
the corner store down the block. He's out to buy
a gallon of milk and some cookie dough for his
two year old son. Before he knows it, Ronald surrounded
by police cars. One of the officers says something about
a stolen vehicle. Another cop points a gun at him.
(04:34):
Ronald knows he had nothing to do with any car theft,
so he figures he'll be able to clear up the
situation without much difficulty. As the police put Ronald in handcuffs,
he hollers to his family down the block, I'll be
back in forty five minutes. Police bring Ronald to a
south Side station called Area three. They throw him into
an interrogation room and cuff his hands to an iron
(04:55):
ring in the wall, and the account Ronald gives of
the next sixteen hour is harrowing. According to Ronald, an
officer comes in and asks who have you been talking to?
When Ronald doesn't know how to answer, the officer starts
punching him in the chest and kicking his stomach. Over
the next several hours, that officer would leave, then come
back again over and over to ask the same question,
(05:19):
who have you been talking to? And to continue the beatings.
Sometimes he'd be joined by a second officer. When that
officer entered the room, he would remove his nametag before
joining the assaults. After hours of beatings, a third officer
came into the room alone. He asked if Ronald was
okay and if he wanted anything to eat. When Ronald
(05:40):
asked to call a lawyer, he says, the officer smiled,
picked up the handset from a nearby phone, and smashed
it into Ronald's skull. Do you hear ringing? Now? Said
the officer. On his way out, he turned off the lights,
leaving Ronald in the dark for hours. The beatings continued,
with Ronald waiting in agony for the next round to start,
(06:03):
the officers focused on areas of his body where damage
wouldn't be visible. At one point, officers cuffed both his
hands behind his back and used their nightsticks to beat
his genitals. But their desire to cover their tracks didn't
stop the police from targeting Ronald's head too. They just
used a phone book to cushion the blows and avoid
leaving a mark. This torture session was clearly premeditated, mapped
(06:26):
out in advance. The whole time. They were also calling
Ronald racial slurs. The N word just rolled off their tongues.
The goal here was total humiliation, physical and mental. Hours
of torture went by until Ronald finally broke. He signed
a false confession dictated by the police, admitting to the
(06:49):
Gauge Park killings. Based on that confession, Ronald Kitchen was
charged with capital murder, meaning that he was facing the
death penalty. At his first court appearance, Ronald told the
judge that he had been tortured. A few days later,
Ronald was transferred to a hospital for treatment. At the hospital,
his urine ran red with blood. Despite all of this,
(07:11):
Ronald's false confession was allowed into evidence. Against him at trial,
along with the testimony of that prison snitch who still
claimed that Ronald had admitted the killings. On September, Ronald
Kitchen was convicted of five counts of murder and sent
to death Row. There, he'd soon discover he wasn't alone.
(07:32):
At least nine other residents of Illinois Death Row had
been tortured into confessing too. There was something much bigger
going on. This episode is sponsored by a i G,
a leading global insurance company, and Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Morton
(07:54):
and Garrison, a leading international law firm. The A i
G Pro Bono Program provides free legal service, says, and
other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals most in need,
and recently they announced that working to reform the criminal
justice system will become a key pillar of the program's mission.
Paul Weiss has long had an unwavering commitment to providing
(08:15):
impactful pro bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members
of our society and in support of the public interest,
including extensive work in the criminal justice area. What Ronald
endured at Area three was no isolated incident. Ronald Kitchen
had encountered a group of white cops who called themselves
(08:39):
the Midnight Crew. The Midnight Crew closed cases by torturing
black men until they confessed, and they operated under the
authority of a Chicago police detective named John Burge. To
understand what happened to Ronald, you have to start asking
some tough questions. What kind of police officer would do
(09:00):
this to another human being? What kind of person would
knowingly break the laws of common decency, the laws of
humanity just to get a confession. When it comes to
John Burge, the answer is complex. Here's our friend John Conroy,
the journalist who was investigative reporting exposed the Midnight Crew.
(09:22):
John Burge was a very driven police officer. Initially he
was a patrol officer, and then he was mooted to detective,
and then he made sergeant, and then he made lieutenant.
He seemed to me like somebody who would show up
at my family's picnic and if my elderly aunt had
a problem starting her car on the way home, he
(09:44):
would have been the first one out there trying to
get it working. That just seemed to me to be
the kind of guy he was. On the other hand,
he brutally tortured people. John Burge was a Chicago Southsider
born who grew up in a white on if called
South Deering. He grew up in a working class, white
(10:04):
neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that during the
late nineteen sixties went from white to black over the
course of about four years, and his family was among
the last to move out. He then went off to college,
flunked out after about a semester, went home and enlisted
(10:27):
in the military. Bird served as a military police officer
in South Korea and Vietnam. For his service, he earned
the Bronze Star, Metal and Purple Heart. After he returned
to Chicago, Bird joined the police force and racked up
more than a dozen commendations. Everyone wants torturers to be
Hannibal elector or somebody like that out of signs of
(10:51):
the Lamps. Everyone wants torturers to be monsters, and they're
basically normal people like you and me. Burns, for instance,
once saved the woman, an African American woman, from committing suicide.
She had a gun to her throat. She pulled the
trigger and he got his thumb in the firing mechanism
and it didn't go off, but his apparent heroism wasn't
(11:14):
the full story, because John Burge and his underlings ended
up being accused of extracting confessions for more than two
hundred black men between using torture. You know, in Chicago,
the cops were under tremendous pressure because we had an
astronomical homicide People talk about homicides in Chicago now, they
(11:38):
were eight higher in the early nineties, and so, you know,
they hand solve crimes. They were getting information. That's another
reason why people do it. They actually might think that
they're helping out the good people of the community by
torturing the bad ones. You do get information when you
(12:01):
torture people, you just don't get accurate information. People will
say anything to stop the torture. Accusations against the Midnight
Crew started emerging. Just a few months before Ronald Kitchen
was convicted. In January, John Conroy published an investigative report
in The Chicago Reader entitled House of Screams. The birds
story came to me because I was writing a book
(12:22):
on torture but not torturers and countries that people normally
suspected of torture, torture and democracies. And then a friend
of mine called me and said, there's this guy named
Andrew Wilson. He claimed he was given electric shock by
the Chicago police and his testimony was just so compelling
the police could not explain away his injuries. Andrew Wilson
(12:46):
was a suspect in the murder of two Chicago cops,
and House of Screams told the story of what happened
to him in police custody. The rumor was that during
Wilson's interrogation, Burge and his men used techniques that Bird
learned as a military Harry police officer back in Vietnam.
Andrew Wilson emerged from the police station with these very
peculiar marks on his ears and his nose in the
(13:08):
shape of alligator clips. They were scabs, and he had
parallel burns on his chest and a big burn on
his thigh. He said he'd been held against a hot
radiator while electric shock was administered by a hand cranked
device not dio, similar from a field telephone used in Vietnam.
And because he'd shot the two cops, nobody wanted to
(13:30):
believe him. Nobody's going to have any sympathy for cop killers,
and Burge and his Midnight crew knew that they would
be more likely to get away with torturing a cop
killer than anybody else. You know, Frankly, when we get
in an uproar about torture, it's over the torture of
(13:54):
people we like, somebody like say Nelson Madela, and we
are outraged. But if you torture somebody whom we don't like, oh,
that's no problem at all. So, you know, I think
the true test of the society is can you stand
up and defend the rights of people whom you abhor.
(14:18):
During Andrew Wilson's trial, his attorneys started receiving letters in
Chicago police envelopes from an inside whistleblower. The department's torture problem,
it seemed, went much further than Andrew Wilson. The letters
provided a roadmap for anybody who wanted to investigate, because
they listed the people who went along with the torture,
(14:40):
and then it listed also the weak links, people who
didn't like Birch. They wouldn't be asked to participate in
the torture, but they would have been around the police station,
would have known about. After Conroy's story about Andrew Wilson
ran an avalanche of other allegation came forward. There were
(15:01):
men who had plastic bags put over their heads, men
who were waterboarded with seven up, men who had their
testicles stood on during interrogation. All black men tortured by
all white cops. Of course, I think race was a
factor in all of this. A lot of the abuse
that was inflicted was not just physical, but it was verbal,
(15:24):
and it was regular use of the N word. The
stories were horribly similar, and the evidence was there from
the beginning. One torture victim, Aaron Patterson, managed to leave
a visible cry for help in the interrogation room. And
just picture this. This guy is being tortured and he's
scratching this message in a metal bench with a paper clip,
(15:45):
and the message couldn't be clearer. Please threaten me with violence,
slapped and suffocated me with plastic No lawyer or dad
signed false statement to murder. Why did he do this?
He did it because he was afraid he wouldn't survive
the torture, and that even if he did survive, he
(16:06):
was afraid that no one would believe him. Aaron did survive,
and one of the other survivors was Ronald Kitchen. Ronald
later realized that the second officer who participated in his interrogation,
the one who took off his name tag before beating him. Well,
that was no ordinary member of the Midnight Crew. That
was John Burge himself. By the time John Conroy published
(16:32):
House of Screams, John Burge and the Midnight Cruise torture
campaign had been going on for nearly twenty years. Meanwhile,
Burge had been promoted to commander, out ranking of the
other officers on the Chicago Police Force. So my article
came out in January. As we were approaching press time,
(16:53):
I was really uneasy. I thought, Oh Jesus, you know
we're gonna go with a story that says that the
Chicago police engaged in torture. Nobody had said anything of
the kind before. I thought there would be a furor
and we might get sued, even though we had done
every legal check that could be done. Burge was a
(17:15):
powerful man, but the allegations against him were too numerous
and too similar to ignore. John Burge was suspended from
the Chicago Police Force. The local police union rushed to
Burge's defense, throwing him a fundraiser at a union hall.
I was there. It was packed with more than a
thousand people, probably most of them cops, but I'm sure
(17:39):
some of them were States attorneys, because I know that
it was advertised in the States Attorney's office. Meanwhile, more
and more allegations of police torture were coming forward, beatings,
cattle prods, Russian roulette. The Chicago Police Board held a
hearing in into burgess alleged misconduct. Basically, it was an
employment fitness here. It was not a criminal case, and
(18:03):
the city had attorneys present the case against Birch and
they did a pretty done good job. I thought they
actually sold the Police board on the idea that something
had indeed happened here. During the hearing, an internal police
report came to light. It suggested that police supervisors had
known about the midnight cruise systemic brutality for years. The
(18:29):
Police board found that John Birge had participated in physical
abuse and fired him from the Chicago Police. Now. The
Police Board's decision was remarkable in that it never used
the word torture. It said, John Birge did chick and
or punch and or denied medical attention to and or
and or and or you couldn't tell, Oh, well, what
(18:51):
exactly do you think happened. So as a result of
that decision, Birds got fired, but he was allowed to
retire with his pension. Another agency, the Office of Professional Standards,
began investigating too, and it released a report that went
a step further. The investigation found that Chicago police had
taken part in a systematic, planned torture campaign that command
(19:14):
officers knew about. Meanwhile, Ronald Kitchen, one of the victims
of that torture, was still on death row for a
crime he didn't commit. And remember, he was there along
with other men who had been tortured just like him
by John Burge and the Midnight Crew. For years, Ronald's
appeals failed and the system turned a blind eye to
the unthinkable abuse he suffered. But Ronald and the others
(19:36):
on death row didn't stay silent. The group began finding
their voices, speaking out about the fact that the Midnight
Crew had tortured innocent people into falsely confessing. What's amazing
to me is how these men found their voice. They
did so by re enacting each other's trials. You have
(19:57):
to remember that when people are in prison, every instinct
tells you not to talk to other inmates about your case.
But these men they acted out their case. They played
the role of prosecutor of defense, attorney of police witness,
and in some cases they convicted one another. That process
(20:20):
gave them agency, and at the end of the day,
all of these men became great storytellers. They could not
only tell the story of what happened to each of them,
but they could tell the stories of each other. As
the Midnight Crew torture scandal blew up, Ronald's personal fight
(20:40):
for justice became un ignorable. In two thousand one, Ronald
got a new team of post conviction lawyers. They discovered
previously undisclosed evidence about that prison snitch who claimed Ronald
had confessed. Turns out the snitch had received money and
early release from prison in exchange for his false testimony.
That evidence, plus the discovery of the Midnight Crew torture scandal,
(21:03):
led prosecutors to agree that Ronald's conviction should be thrown out.
On July seven, two thousand nine, Ronald Kitchen became a free,
exonerated man. Six weeks later, he was awarded a certificate
of innocence. Those forty five minutes that Ronald had expected
(21:28):
to be gone they turned into twenty one years behind bars.
The Gauge Park killings have never been solved. As for
the other men on death row with Ronald, over the years,
several of them walked free to those who remained in
prison had their sentences commuted to life, and they're continuing
to fight their cases. And what about John Burge. Well,
(21:50):
as we told you, he got kicked off the Chicago
Police Force. But neither John Burge nor any member of
the Midnight Crew was ever charged with or convicted of
any of torture because the statute of limitations had passed
by the time the truth came to light. Maybe we
can find some small measure of justice though, in the
fact that John Birge did go to prison for lying
(22:12):
about torture. In two thousand ten, Burge was sued by
someone he tortured. During the lawsuit, Burge gave a sworn
statement denying that any abuse had occurred on his watch.
That falsehood was enough to convict Birge of perjury. John
Birge served from two thousand eleven to two thousand fourteen
in federal prison, a much shorter length of time than
(22:34):
many of his victims spent behind bars. After he left prison,
Burge gave an interview, calling the torture victims human vermin.
He took up residence in Florida, still collecting his police
pension four thousand dollars a month. He even drove a
boat called Vigilante. Well, no justice was not served in
this case. I mean he was sentenced to four years
(22:55):
in prison. He didn't serve that. Burge was convicted thirty
seven years after the first time. We know that he
used electric shock. You know, at the end of the day,
John Burge was released after only serving a few years
in prison, while Ronald and the other men on death
Row spent decades in some of the harshest prisons in
(23:18):
Illinois system. That's not justice. In two thousand and eighteen,
John Burge died at his home in Florida. After his death,
the police union posted a statement on Facebook saying that
the Fraternal Order of Police does not believe the full
story about the Birge case has ever been told. They're
probably right. Decades after Burge's reign of terror, allegations of
(23:41):
torture by the Midnight Crew are still coming to light.
In two thousand nine, the state of Illinois formed a
Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to review and respond to
these allegations. Meanwhile, lawsuits upon lawsuits have been filed and
are still being filed. So far, the Midnight Crew has
cost the City of Chicago one lion dollars in brutality settlements,
(24:02):
defense costs, and reparations. A Reparation's ordinance passed by the
City Council created a fund so that many of these
torture survivors, those with credible claims of torture, could be
compensated for what happened to them. It was a recognition
and ownership of this problem by the City of Chicago,
(24:25):
and it's never happened before in the United States. One
lawsuit filed on behalf of fifty torture victims settled under
the condition that the story of John Burge and systemic
Chicago police misconduct be included in the Chicago Public Schools
high school curriculum so that everyone remembers. We can never
(24:46):
forget the Chicago torture scandal, because if you don't remember,
then history can repeat itself. We have to learn the
lessons of history, and the best way to do it
is to teach young minds about it. And that's where
you'll find Ronald Kitchen. Today, he and other survivors of
the Midnight Crew visit classrooms across Chicago, where they talk
(25:09):
to teenagers about what they endured and what they hope
can be learned from their ordeals. And if you pay
attention to the way Chicago's kids react to these stories,
you'll have hope for the future. They listen, They stay
to hear the end of the story, even after the
bell rings. What do you think about all the recent
social media videos of police brutality? Students ask how can
(25:31):
we as young people make a change. For his part,
Ronald Kitchen has no quick answers, but he does have
a quick sense of justice. As he told students at
one Chicago high school, there's no gray area in torture.
You need to see it for what it really is.
It's black and it's white. Hello, hey, Ronald, how are
(25:57):
you doing? It's Laura and Steve. How are you doing.
I'm good, I'm good. When you visit those schools, what
do you hope the kids learned from hearing you to speak? Well?
I think the meaning of going to the schools this
let him knows that this could happen to anybody. It's
mind bothering because the boogey Man not just touched me,
(26:17):
stop me, kick me, punched me, slap me. The boogey
Man did all this to me, and then your job
became to fight the Boogeyman. It wasn't just one bad guy.
You were fighting a whole system that let these guys
do what they did. For so long we was fighting
good laugh. We didn't have a rock. We had a
consul paper, and that punslum paper came out to be
(26:39):
stronger than that rock could ever do. It's hard for
people to understand how you could get the space or
the time on death row to re enact these trials.
We had a couple of good captains back there. They
let us have law classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I
thank them for helping us with the process of gaining
(26:59):
out freedom. You and the other guys, they're organized, work
together and made a big, big change even though you
were locked up. You know, do you talk to kids
in schools about how they should come together and work
to make change in the same way find their own voices. Yeah,
that's the whole point of having them. Finding course is
(27:19):
your best weapon. If we found out voices and a
depth for hell no force to be heard. No matter
what you we what are you enjoying in life these days? Ronald?
My family, I think that's the best. And a dope
from me with my little family. Did I hear you
say you were on your way to get a pony? Yeah?
The day is my daughter's birthday. She turned in nine
(27:42):
and the theme is cowboy. So yeah, I'm gonna get
the pony. Now. That's so nice. I'm trying to get
this she bug it right now. I will. When you
think of this scandal, you have to think about not
only Burge in his Midnight crew. You have to think
(28:04):
about the armies of people who knew about it and
kept quiet every time somebody was tortured. There were police
officers in that station who heard the screens, and then
there were states attorneys who came in and had to
write out the confessions. There were lawyers who heard these
stories from their clients, and judges who heard these stories
(28:28):
in court. A lot of folks had to know about
what was going on for so many years. This was
a case of systemic racism, not just of a few
bad apples. It was an open secret and not so
secret open secret, and you know, think about what that
(28:48):
does to these communities. The court system may have turned
a blind eye to these defendant stories, but they must
have told their family members and their friends and their
neighbors what happened to them. And this repeated story of
abuse must have leaked out and saturated the South Side,
an open wound that for years was not addressed injustices
(29:12):
like the Chicago police torture scandal are at the root
of what our countries experiencing right now, a national reckoning
with race and the criminal justice system. These stories need
to be told so that we can collectively acknowledge the
wrongs and start having a real discussion about what's right.
(29:37):
And that's the story of the Midnight Crew. Next week
we'll take you to the United Kingdom to tell you
about the Birmingham Six. Two pubs were bombed in one
of the biggest mass murders in British history, and six
Irish men found themselves in the wrong place at the
worst time. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of
(29:58):
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flam and
Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by senior producer
and Pope, along with producers Josh Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by j Ralph.
(30:21):
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
and II Writer, and you can follow me on Twitter
at s driven. For more information on the show, visit
Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com. Be sure to follow the
show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful
Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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