This is Chicago, okay?
Ex-cop's sister accuses Burge
Former police official bragged about torturing suspects, lawyers told
By Steve Mills
Tribune staff reporter
April 1, 2004
Former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and a former homicide detective bragged about beating and other forms of torture they allegedly used against murder suspects at a South Side police station, the detective's sister has told lawyers for a former Death Row inmate.
"They began to boast about power and what really happens in a police station," Ellen Pryweller, sister of former Detective Robert Dwyer, said in a sworn videotaped statement given to attorneys representing Madison Hobley.
"When they get them in a police station, they give them hell," she added. "...They beat the [expletive] out of them. They throw them against walls. They burn them against radiators. They smother them. They poke them with objects. They did something to one guy's testicles."
Pryweller, whose videotaped statement was given to the Tribune by Hobley's lawyers, said she was present in 1987 while her brother and Burge talked about the alleged torture, with her brother saying, "I can make anybody confess to anything."
Hobley was sentenced to death for setting a January 1987 fire in a South Side apartment building that killed seven people, including his wife and infant son. He was pardoned in January 2003 and has sued the Police Department, Burge, Dwyer and other detectives, saying he was tortured into making a false confession.
