As I have said previously I do not want to be involved in this affair. That is why I asked for the reassurance that these letters would be kept private. I do not wish to be shunned like Officer Laverty has been….Almost all of the detectives and police officers involved know the Wilson’s did the murders but they do not approve of the beatings and torture….I advise you to immediately interview a Melvin Jones who is in the Cook County Jail on a murder charge….When you speak with him…you will see why it is important. –anonymous letter to People’s Law Office attorney Flint Taylor, March 1989
Laverty paid for speaking up, but he also inspired at least one other person to do the same. The letter quoted above, one of a series mailed to the People’s Law Office in police department envelopes by a still-unidentified person, broke open the Jon Burge scandal. It led Flint Taylor and his colleagues to one victim who led them to others, until finally the highest levels of city and state government admitted that for nearly two decades police had used torture to extract confessions.
After five years as a patrolman he went to Area One homicide, commanded by lieutenant Walter Bosco. Shortly after he got there a brutality complaint was filed against him, the result of an incident from his days as a patrolman. Although the Office of Professional Standards dismissed it as unfounded, its mere existence bothered Bosco, who called Laverty into his office. “He said, ‘Detectives don’t get brutality complaints, I don’t tolerate it, so straighten out your act.’”
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“There is a certain amount of brutality that just goes with the territory. I mean, you have to keep control of the interrogation room. You are dealing with all hardened criminals usually. They gotta understand that you’re in charge of the interrogation room. If that involves smacking them in the head sometimes, then it does.”
One summer morning in 1978 Laverty was ordered to notify the family of Hamp Burks, a janitor, that Burks had committed suicide the night before in a tavern on 103rd Street. The paperwork, written by an Area Two detective, said Burks had grabbed the gun of Chicago police sergeant Henry Cooper, who was also in the bar, and shot himself in the head. “I don’t know why the midnight crew can’t make their own damn notifications,” Laverty told me, “but I went over to make the notifications by myself.”
Jones was arrested at Fenger. The following day he was presented at the hospital to Purvy, who according to the detectives’ report initially said no, but then, when the overhead lights were turned on and Jones removed his glasses, said, “That’s him.” Others present heard other things. Purvy’s Jones’s attorney, Peter Schmiedel, heard “yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.” A nurse heard “no,” and later “yes, yes, yes.” Another nurse, who later testified that Purvy “appeared not to know what was going on,” heard “yes, yes, no, no.” A prosecutor heard an unambiguous identification of the suspect. A federal appeals court would later conclude that whatever was said had been uttered in suggestive circumstances by a child afflicted with a head injury and was “worthless.”
Laverty was on the stand that afternoon. With the jury absent, he testified that he’d gotten involved in the case five days after Jones’s arrest, when the dead girl’s mother called Area Two and asked to have a detective sent to the hospital to talk to Purvy. Because detectives Houtsma and Tosello weren’t available, Laverty and another detective went. Purvy told them two men in stocking masks carried out the attacks, one of them armed with a gun, the other a man named George who took his mask off. Purvy referred to this man as George Anderson, described his cap, and said he was the leader of a gang that hung around the local public school. An aunt kept correcting Purvy, telling him he meant George Jones, and Purvy would change his story to suit his aunt, then go back to calling the man Anderson. Purvy’s mom arrived and said she’d found two pairs of panty hose in Sheila’s bedroom.
