On Aug. 9, 1998, as Chicago police detectives were questioning two young boys in the Ryan Harris murder investigation, a top police official telephoned the home of Terry Hillard, the former chief of detectives who six months earlier had been appointed superintendent.
Faced with one of the most sensitive cases to confront the Chicago Police Department–the arrests of 7- and 8-year-old boys for the slaying of the 11-year-old girl–Hillard now says he did not pose a single question.
Testifying under oath in a deposition last month, Hillard for the first time described his role in the Ryan Harris investigation, saying he chose not to get involved in any aspect of the case–except to get enough information to answer reporters’ questions.
Questioned by lawyer Flint Taylor, who represents one of the boys in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the city, Hillard said that he did not ask how the two boys came to be suspects or the conditions under which they were interrogated. Nor did he ask what evidence his detectives had to link the boys to the girl’s slaying.
In more than 200 pages of sworn testimony, Hillard described himself as a hands-off administrator who leaves the day-to-day operation of the department to his chief deputies. He said he is loath to dictate to those deputies for fear that he will “micromanage” them.
Hillard, a 33-year police veteran who served two years as chief of detectives, said he does not question or challenge decisions of his detectives, because he trusts them and he has no expertise in questioning suspects or witnesses.
“I was chief of detectives, but that don’t mean that I was qualified to go out and investigate, you know, homicides and rapes, because I had never been a detective,” said Hillard, according to the court-reported transcript of the deposition.
After prosecutors dropped charges against the boys–when DNA tests showed the presence of semen, which ultimately led to the indictment of Floyd Durr for Harris’ murder–Hillard said he did not ask how detectives had conducted their investigation and did not request an internal investigation. Had there been a problem, he said in the deposition, someone would have told him.
Yet at a news conference after the charges were dropped, Hillard declared that the detectives had committed no misconduct. Asked by Taylor to explain how he could clear his officers without doing any investigation, Hillard said that he merely read a press release prepared by his media affairs unit.
“They write it, and I read it,” he said.
It was only after the charges were dropped that he got a complete “rundown” on the case, he said.
Touted by Mayor Richard M. Daley as a veteran who knew the department “from top to bottom” when he was named superintendent in February 1998, Hillard said he is generally reluctant to make suggestions about investigations or get “off into specifics.”
“I’ve learned over these last–since I was chief of detectives,” Hillard said, “that when people of the stature of the superintendent speak, people want to take it as gospel…. I don’t have to tell my folks what to correct. They are coming to me and telling me how they corrected it, and they are a lot more proactive than I am, you know.”
As the lawsuit has moved toward trial, and Taylor and other lawyers have taken depositions of Hillard and other top command officers involved in the case, a more complete picture of how the Ryan Harris investigation unfolded has begun to emerge.
Ultimately, if the case goes to trial, a jury likely will be asked to determine whether Hillard’s description of his actions are accurate or are an attempt to downplay his involvement to avoid liability.
`Closely monitored’ probe
In a statement issued Friday, Hillard contended that he “closely monitored” the investigation.
“The Chicago Police Department’s Detective Division and Youth Division are two of the most highly respected law-enforcement units in the nation,” Hillard said in the statement.
“As Chicago police superintendent,” Hillard said, “I conducted myself as any top police executive in the country would have acted.”
He added that he relied “with confidence” upon the officers from those “two elite police units … to provide the highest-caliber investigation.”
The lawsuit filed by Taylor on behalf of the younger boy, who now is 10, names the City of Chicago and about a dozen police officials and others who worked on the Ryan Harris investigation. A similar lawsuit filed by R. Eugene Pincham on behalf of the older boy, now 11, is pending in Cook County Circuit Court.
The girl disappeared July 27, 1998, and was found dead in a weed-choked lot the next day. She had been sexually assaulted and died of a blow to the head. Less than two weeks later, detectives brought in the two boys for questioning, viewing them initially as witnesses. Detectives claimed the boys confessed, and both were charged on Aug 9.
In his deposition, Hillard said he learned of the questioning in a telephone call from Deputy Supt. Michael Malone. But Hillard said hedid not question whether detectives had determined if the boys were old enough to understand Miranda warnings or form the intent necessary to be charged with murder–issues that later were critical because of the boys’ ages.
Hillard explained: “I don’t talk over the telephones, you know. I don’t go into details over the telephone.”
Asked by Taylor to elaborate, Hillard responded: “I don’t trust telephones.”
Department priority
From the start, solving Harris’ slaying was a department priority. The victim was a child, and her death occurred in the Englewood neighborhood, where the serial slayings of prostitutes and other women in previous years had generated fear in the community and accusations that police had failed to investigate them aggressively.
Indeed, Hillard said he and the Police Department were “getting beat up” in the media and the community.
“[E]very time that I watched TV it was something negative about Terry Hillard and the Chicago Police Department,” he testified. “And being a new superintendent at that time, you know, it wore on me for a while.”
At a staff meeting in police headquarters the morning after the boys were arrested, Hillard recalled that he again asked no questions about the case. He said in the deposition that the notion of whether the boys understood their Miranda warnings “didn’t register.”
The arrests of the two boys were announced that same morning at a press conference held by top officers from the Wentworth Area violent crimes unit.
But, Hillard said, it was not until the following day that he asked for an explanation of why the boys had been charged. He was at a community policing conference at a downtown hotel.
With the eyes of the world focused on what were described as among the youngest children ever charged with murder, Hillard said that he anticipated that reporters would ask him about the arrests. He wanted to know enough about the murder to answer some of their questions.
After summoning two officers to a suite in the hotel, Hillard recalled that he had only one question for the officers in what turned out to be a 10-minute meeting.
“The one thing that I asked is how do we know that these young kids are involved,” Hillard said he asked.
Sgt. Stanley Zaborac, who oversaw the investigation of Harris’ slaying, told Hillard what police and prosecutors often say when asked about a crime: that the two boys knew things about the crime only the killers would know.
Zaborac, in his deposition, recalled the meeting differently.
“The superintendent, to my knowledge, didn’t ask a single question, other than, `How are you?'” Zaborac testified. “The superintendent said nothing.”
Instead, John Townsend, the first deputy superintendent, who has since retired, posed most of the questions, Zaborac recalled in his deposition.
Hillard also said he did not brief Daley about the Ryan Harris case.
“There are certain things that the mayor needs to know and certain things that the mayor need not know, especially coming from the superintendent,” said Hillard. “If he wants to know about it, all he has to do is to pick up the Tribune and the Sun-Times.”
Although Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine publicly apologized–as did Daley–and said that the boys should never have been charged, Hillard said in the deposition he still believes the charges were appropriate.
“I feel that the Chicago Police Department and detectives acted properly,” he said. “They went with the facts they had.”
