Two bodies lay bloody and inert in their home at the edge of the world. Two people, husband and wife, brutally slain, thirty deep stab wounds between them. They found her in the dining room, white dressing gown punctuated with dark maroon slashes, arms lacerated in self-defense. He was curled up in the bathroom, a pair of pants covering his face like a shroud. This was the macabre end to the lives of Vincent and Rafaela Sanchez, a quiet, elderly Hispanic couple living deep in South Side Chicago. But in the austere landscape of the South Side, at the teetering edge of the city, nothing is as it seems.

Justice had to be served for such a heinous crime; someone had to be punished. But the clues just weren’t adding up. There was no indication of forced entry into the house, and no substantial physical evidence. Going off the sketchy and contradictory statement made by an 8-year-old neighbor, Area Two police began rounding up practically every black male in the neighborhood between the ages of 17 and 25 for questioning. At one point in the investigation, the list of suspects was well over 25 and comprised entirely of black males.

--

They slipped the plastic typewriter cover over his head and held it….held it…Boom, hit him in the stomach. He lay on the floor of the interrogation room struggling for breath, clutching his gut. Just a scared, scrawny kid…and an up-and-comer in the South Chicago gang known as the Apache Rangers. On the streets he was the Lone Ranger; in the clutches of the notorious Area Two police he was Aaron Patterson, a 22-year-old hoodlum and prodigal son of one of the highest ranking black officers on the Chicago police force.

As the interrogation continued, it went something like this:

We know you fucking did it, Patterson. We know you fucking killed them. And you know how? Huh? ‘Cuz all your boys are turning on you. Eric Caine told us and so did Stinky Bass. Now, you can make it easy and sign this confession or you can get intimate with this typewriter cover again, said John Burge, commander of Area Two.

I’m not signing shit! I didn’t do it…I don’t even fucking know who you’re talking about. And I’m not saying shit more till I call my dad and get lawyer.

So you got a big mouth like your father, huh? Plastic cover in hand, advancing. That’s not gonna help you now…

--

It’s night when he regains consciousness back in the holding cell. He sits up and eases the paperclip out of his pocket with fettered hands. You might imagine a wild Houdini-like escape, but his next move would prove much more effective than a futile break for freedom. He carefully straightens it out, drops to his knees in front of the wooden bench, and begins…to carve:

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)

--

It’s strange at times how your life unfolds. One minute you’re adrift, chilling, no real direction, and the next ... a certainty reveals itself and something just seems to click. That’s how I got involved in David Protess’ investigative journalism class and consequently, with Aaron Patterson’s struggle for freedom.

When the eight of us showed up for the first day of class, Protess gave us two enormous crates of photocopies containing everything from police reports to interview and trial transcripts. He told us that we had the choice between two cases, but that he wanted the class evenly divided into two groups of four. I started poring over the material that night and decided that I was interested in both cases and would choose a case based on balancing the two groups. Not to be fatalistic, but this method brought me one step closer to my life intertwining with Aaron’s.

--

At the beginning, Protess repeated again and again that the investigation started with the paper trail and would lead to the people trail. Prior to our investigation, four other classes had been building the case for Aaron’s innocence. I have to admit to feeling more than a little overwhelmed when I saw the enormous filing cabinet stuffed full of crime scene reports, trial transcripts, interview synopses, contacts, etc. However, once I immersed myself in the material, I became almost obsessively engaged with the case. I couldn’t restrain myself from diving into the heap of papers late at night, looking for incongruities…looking for the truth to just jump off the page and slap me in the face. The documents were riddled with pulp-fiction detective novel names like Stinky Bass and Mack Ray and Chester Williams and Robocop. Every single one of them had a different perspective and a different story to tell. The Aaron Patterson story, the meta-narrative from which all these other soliloquies emerged, was sucking me in.

--

Things became a little more tangible once we started following the people trail. I’m not at liberty to discuss all the details of the case, however, I can say that Protess re-selected this case after a new affidavit emerged over the summer, which incriminated two suspects in the case, one of whom was the aforementioned 8-year-old boy. It became our mission to corroborate the startling information that emerged in the affidavit.

This proved more difficult than I could have possibly imagined, but the obstacles taught me many things. First of all, our group, which consisted of me and three girls: Kate Crepel, Liz Olsson and Erin Chan, didn’t exactly blend in in the South Side. Kate and I are white, Erin is Asian, and Liz is black, raised by white parents. Taking a trip to the South Side makes you realize the staggering extent of segregation in Chicago, but trying to pull off an investigation made me realize that white skin in that hood is a harbinger of trouble. White people in the South Side are either cops or caseworkers, so it was pretty hard to explain that you’re just a college student and not to worry.

In the beginning, I actually felt guilty that I was going into these poverty-stricken neighborhoods and dredging up a painful memory that most people had put behind them. These people are just trying to survive day-to-day and here I was, a college student cruising in from the rich-ass white suburbs with the luxury of time and energy to stir up shit about something that happened 16 years ago. Who cared?

Another obstacle was that most of the people we were trying to find who could substantiate the affidavit didn’t exactly hold jobs or have permanent residences. There are many ways to find people, but most of the methods are based on tracing bills or payments, and many of the people we needed to find didn’t have any of the above. After 16 years, they had moved all over the Midwest and South and sadly, many of them were in prison.

We spent most of our time on wild goose chases all over the South Side. Knocking on doors in the projects, chasing down crack-heads and building trust with our confidantes in the neighborhood. Ultimately, we ended up corroborating a good deal of the new affidavit, but it never seemed like enough to us. Area Two police had beaten and strangled Aaron; important fingerprints had been submitted to the forensics lab and then conveniently misplaced; the police had intimidated witnesses to testify against him; the D.A. had offered Eric Caine a deal if he would testify against Aaron, as well as two highly substantiated alternate perpetrators.

Despite all this, the “truth” was always just on the periphery of our vision and as out of reach as our own shadows. To know for a fact that an innocent man, two innocent men, were deprived their freedom for a crime they didn’t commit was like torture. My nights were saturated with Kafkaesque dreams of despair and claustrophobia.

I left the quarter feeling drained and disappointed. There were so many other people we needed to talk to and so many angles we had left unexplored. It would never be enough until they were free. Over the course of the quarter, I had developed a chronic muscle spasm in my side, right below the rib cage, so I spent winter break drinking and nursing my rattled nerves back to some semblance of health.

--

It was around 11 a.m. and I was still rolling around in bed when my roommate Joe started yelling to get my ass into the living room. I bolted out of bed just in time to hear Gov. Ryan pardon Aaron Patterson and three other death row inmates as well as grant clemency to over 160 other prisoners. The news surged through me in a mix of chills and tears and laughter. It had actually happened. Aaron’s pardon was one of the most reaffirming things in my life.

I’d become so disillusioned that I thought our investigation had been completely futile, that the bureaucracy of the justice system was impregnable even to the truth. The pardon made me realize that, as cliché as it sounds, people can make a positive change in their environment. I mean, this shit seriously changed the direction of my life. What I came to realize is that people have passively come to rely on the government or other institutions to take care of everything.

Until I became involved in this case, I assumed that if there were a death row case with a good deal of doubt still surrounding it, someone would be assigned to investigate it (there was a private investigator assigned to Aaron’s case, but he didn’t know shit). Wrong. The justice system is looking for convictions, for someone to punish and make an example of, not necessarily to find the truth. To them, a closed case is a closed case, period. In Aaron’s case, it took a handful of bumbling college students to save him from the electric chair. What change will you make?

Don’t let him fool you—Stookey has graduated college and is most likely looking in the fridge for a beer. Help him find one: j-stookey@northwestern.edu.