State’s attorney candidate prosecuted boy whose murder conviction was overturned because police coerced confession

Two short years after joining the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, Eileen O’Neill was lead prosecutor in the 1993 murder case of Anna Gilvis, an 83-year-old woman found dead and beaten inside her Chicago Lawn home, her hands tied and throat slashed.

The crime was heinous. But just as shocking was that the defendant was an 11-year-old boy, referred to in court documents only as “A.M.” because he was a juvenile. O’Neill helped secure A.M.’s conviction, which was later thrown out by a federal judge who said his confession to police was coerced.

O’Neill — now Eileen O’Neill Burke — is one of two Democrats running in the March 19 primary to replace Kim Foxx as Cook County state’s attorney. O’Neill Burke’s record as a prosecutor, criminal defense attorney and judge has come under increased scrutiny as she campaigns as a candidate who, while keeping some of Foxx’s reforms, would bring a more “balanced” approach to county prosecutions. Her opponent, Clayton Harris III, is backed by some of Foxx’s allies, including Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.

O’Neill Burke defended her actions in her first detailed comments about her involvement in the case since it was first reported on by WBEZ. She said no court, state or federal, has faulted how the state’s attorney’s office handled the prosecution.

“As a prosecutor, you are responsible for presenting the best case possible based upon the law and evidence provided by police in order to seek justice,” O’Neill Burke said in a written statement, adding A.M.’s confession at the time was “compelling evidence.”

“And that was the case presented to the State’s Attorney’s Office for prosecution thirty years ago,” she continued. “No case is iron-clad. As a prosecutor, you are responsible for presenting the facts at hand before the court or a jury, and seeking justice on behalf of the victim.”

Before his juvenile prosecution, A.M. hadn’t had a criminal record and was described by family members as warm and outgoing. Despite his juvenile case being overturned, records show his life was thrown into turmoil afterward. One of his attorneys said he was robbed of a childhood. As an adult, he was arrested multiple times — largely on drug and theft charges — and was murdered at age 35. The Tribune is only identifying A.M. by his initials because of the juvenile nature of the charges.

O’Neill Burke’s answers about her role in the Gilvis case come as Foxx’s office has said it has moved to vacate more than 250 convictions, many involving police or prosecutorial misconduct, following years of problematic cases that have caused some criminal justice reformers to refer to Chicago as the nation’s wrongful conviction capital.

The effort has not been without flaws. Foxx has been criticized for being too lenient on defendants and Foxx had to recently replace the head of her office’s Conviction Review Unit after that attorney was accused of prosecutorial misconduct herself.

A.M.’s case was also prosecuted 30 years ago, at a time when Black juveniles were being named as suspects in several high-profile, violent crimes that helped spark a national push lead by police and prosecutors to crack down on so-called “superpredators,” a phenomenon that has since been largely debunked.

The week before A.M. was charged, another 11-year-old, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, was found dead under a South Side viaduct after the boy was suspected of shooting a gun at rival gang members and accidentally killing a 14-year-old girl. Two other boys in Sandifer’s gang, aged 14 and 16, were charged with murdering Sandifer because gang members were worried Sandifer would talk to police.

Gilvis’ murder went unsolved for nearly a year. Court documents show A.M., who lived with his family in an apartment next door, spoke to police the day Gilvis’ body was found on Oct. 5, 1993. He told them that the evening before he saw a Black male enter Gilvis’ backyard and saw Gilvis later that night. Detectives spoke to other adult suspects but returned to speak with A.M. several months later, in September of 1994, after he had moved away.

A.M. changed his story from the year before, court records show, at first claiming he overheard a neighbor talking to two other adults about how Gilvis had money and later saying he saw them jump the fence and enter Gilvis’ house. That neighbor was arrested and interrogated but denied any involvement. When Chicago police Detective James Cassidy confronted A.M. about the neighbor’s denials, A.M. changed his story again, this time saying he followed the neighbor into Gilvis’ house and witnessed him beating her with a baseball bat and stabbing her with a knife.

Cassidy said he pushed back multiple times, telling A.M. he did not believe him, according to court records. A.M. changed his story again, claiming he was a lookout for the neighbor.

After hours of questioning over two days at Area 1 police headquarters, detectives said A.M. confessed to killing Gilvis because she had directed racial slurs toward him. Cassidy later said A.M. burst out crying, shaking, chest heaving, and said, “I hated her and I killed her; she called me a n----- almost every day.”

During the two-day trial, the courtroom was “rendered silent” as O’Neill questioned A.M., the Tribune reported at the time.

“She fell down?” O’Neill asked.

“Yes,” A.M. said.

“You told Detective Cassidy she dragged herself into the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“You followed her there?”

“Yes.”

“You told Detective Cassidy you pushed the door open?”

“Yes.”

“You stabbed her in the throat?” O’Neill asked.

“Yes.”

“You took (your) bloody clothes and you put them in a dumpster?”

“Yes.”

A.M.’s head “barely rose above the witness box as he testified,” the Sun-Times reported. But the Marquette Park Lithuanian Homeowners Association, of which Gilvis was a member, said the boy, who was 10 at the time of the murder, had acted “like a monster.”

Cassidy and his attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Racial hostilities and violence were a fact of life in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood from the mid- to late 20th century. Gage Park High School regularly saw brawls among students after it was integrated in 1965. The next year, Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked during a housing rights march through Marquette Park. The American Nazi Party opened an office on West 71st Street in 1970, and the Ku Klux Klan rallied in Marquette Park in the 1980s.

During questioning at trial, A.M. said he admitted to the murder under duress and because Cassidy assured him that, if he told the truth, he could go home for his little brother’s birthday party. Years later, in testimony before a federal judge, A.M. said he responded “yes” to O’Neill Burke’s questions at trial because the facts were the ones he repeated to Cassidy, not that he had actually committed those acts.

A.M.’s mother testified that when she arrived at the police station after her son was questioned by Cassidy, she found her son crying and he told her, “I felt threatened and scared … They were hollering at me.”

Without the boy’s confession, the case likely would have remained unsolved. There were no other witnesses and no fingerprints found at the scene besides Gilvis’.

What’s more, physical evidence did not match parts of A.M.’s confession, according to court records and news reports.

A.M. told police he sneaked into Gilvis’ home through an unlocked back door but evidence showed it was pried open. He said he used rope from a hanging planter to tie Gilvis up, but she was actually tied by the hands, arms and neck with a telephone cord and her ankles were tied with a cloth ribbon. A.M. never mentioned stealing anything but Gilvis’ room was ransacked and a diamond ring and gold watch were never recovered.

Other evidence was exculpatory, including an adult-sized bloody palm print near the bathroom and shoe print on the back porch, and a blood trail that suggested Gilvis was dragged to the bathroom where she died. A.M. weighed 88 pounds at the time, while Gilvis weighed 173, making it unlikely he was strong enough to drag her. He at one point told police she “ran” to the bathroom but Gilvis used a cane.

A.M. did not fit the typical bill for a violent offender, either. He had no previous criminal record or psychological disorders, no history of violence or rage, school trouble or gang ties, his attorney said. He sang in the choir at the Hyde Park Seventh Day Adventist Church.

“You have to believe that a 10-year-old could break into somebody’s house, beat them with a cane, cut their throat, tie them up, ransack their room, then change their bloody clothes and throw them away, and not leave a single piece of evidence,” A.M.’s attorney, Stephen Broussard, told the judge, according to the Sun-Times. “Not a stick of evidence that says, ‘I did this crime.’ It should be our experience that children don’t act that way.”

O’Neill Burke countered: “The only person who has a motive to lie to police to try to throw them off is the person who murdered Anna Gilvis.”

“I would never prosecute any case if I doubted the evidence or there were ‘red flags,’” O’Neill Burke said in her statement Thursday. “That was true then, and it is true now.”

“The trial court judge was presented with all of the evidence of A.M.’s multiple statements and weighed that evidence before making his decision,” she said.

A.M. was found delinquent in a juvenile petition charging him with first-degree murder and placed in the custody of the state’s Department of Child and Family Services for five years, a sentence O’Neill Burke and Cassidy said was not harsh enough. News reports indicate he was released to family members.

“Our juvenile criminal act was written at a time when kids were knocking over outhouses, not killing people,” O’Neill Burke said at the time. “We’re looking at a whole new breed here.”

“The longer I sit here as a Juvenile Court judge, the more I realize I just can’t make any generalizations about what young people will do,” Judge Stuart Lubin said at the time. “The most damaging testimony in this case came from the minor’s own mouth. He knows too much.”

Asked whether she regretted describing A.M. as a “new breed” of criminal or whether it contributed to the subsequent superpredator narrative, O’Neill Burke did not directly answer in her statement.

“These types of senseless violent crimes scar entire communities. The escalation in violent crime that we have seen among all categories of offenders, including juveniles, should give us all pause,” she said.

An appeal to state courts affirmed A.M.’s conviction, and the Illinois Supreme Court denied review of that decision.

By 1998, though, Lubin and many others had changed their tune after another high-profile case involving Cassidy and juvenile suspects disintegrated.

That case involved the rape and murder of 11-year-old Ryan Harris in Englewood in which two boys, ages 7 and 8, were first arrested after questioning from Cassidy.

The Ryan Harris case drew national attention because police accused the young boys of the horrific crime before forensic tests found semen on Harris’ clothes, causing charges against the pre-adolescent suspects to be dropped. DNA evidence later led police to Floyd Durr, who was eventually convicted in the case.

Attorneys in A.M.’s case filed suit in September 1998 challenging A.M.’s conviction, alleging Cassidy had obtained false confessions that mirrored the Ryan Harris case.

“I always think about all my cases and whether I’ve made the right decision,” Lubin told the Tribune then. “I just don’t know.”

Lubin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A.M.’s challenge was not heard until January 2000, by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer.

Attorneys argued that in both the Harris and Gilvis cases, the accused boys were not read their Miranda rights before their alleged admissions. The Tribune reported other similarities, including that the “alleged confessions were retracted once parents were allowed to see their children; no physical evidence tied the boys to the crimes; the boys’ physical stature raised questions about whether they could have committed the crime; none of the boys had any prior contact with police; and experts could find no mental disorder in any of the boys that would account for homicidal violence.”

A.M.’s admission was not videotaped, which is now legally required. The only accounts of his confession were from notes taken by Cassidy and by an assistant state’s attorney.

A.M., then 16, said Cassidy asked a series of leading questions with details of the murder.

“I was under so much pressure, I didn’t know what to do,” A.M. said, according to the court transcript.

Jenner & Block attorney Thomas O’Neill, who is not related to O’Neill Burke, represented A.M. in the case pro bono alongside Steven Drizin, a Northwestern University law professor. While his memory of the case was hazy, O’Neill recalled recently that A.M. was “very shy … very quiet” and “bright” but “lacking confidence to the extreme. Getting him to open up about anything, he was just afraid.”

Pallmeyer ruled in June 2002 that the boy’s arrest was illegal and his confession should have been thrown out because it was coerced. The boy was never free to leave the station where he was being questioned and authorities should have questioned him in front of his parents or a police youth officer. Part of her ruling also pointed out A.M.’s trial attorney was ineffective. That attorney has since passed away.

O’Neill Burke said in her statement she respected “the opinion of the court and appreciate the fresh perspective federal judicial review brings to a case — especially after police misconduct comes to light, as is what happened here.”

“I remember it being a big legal win. Whether it was enough in time for (A.M.) is another question,” his attorney Thomas O’Neill said.

A.M. “had spent time in the juvenile justice system,” because of the Gilvis case, O’Neill said. When proceedings with Pallmeyer started, he was staying at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles for a parole violation and aggravated battery that occurred while he was in Maryville Academy, according to court transcripts. O’Neill said A.M. was “sort of lost in the system.”

His first adult arrest was on a disorderly conduct charge in March 2000, less than two months after he turned 18. His second arrest, for the same charge, came six months later. Both cases were dropped, court records show.

Court records show A.M. was arrested more than two dozen times between 2000 and 2018, with the charges ranging from narcotics possession and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon to petty theft and selling loose cigarettes. He was sent to prison at least four times and ordered to undergo substance abuse counseling.

Out of prison in 2018, A.M. was living in an apartment near West 81st Street and South Racine Avenue in Auburn Gresham, court records show. Banned from a nearby Dollar General store after previous theft attempts, A.M. was arrested on June 20, 2018, after trying to steal shampoo, deodorant and laundry detergent, police records show.

Three days after missing a court date, A.M. was fatally shot just outside his home. Witnesses told responding officers a man got out of a car and fired three to five rounds at A.M. as he stood outside. Chicago Fire Department paramedics found A.M. lying facedown with a single gunshot wound to the chest. He died less than an hour later at Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

A toxicology screening revealed traces of cocaine and fentanyl in A.M.’s blood. His murder remains unsolved, as does Gilvis’.

O’Neill Burke said she witnessed as a judge and defense attorney how the justice system can improve, and said there’s an obligation “to make resources available to safeguard the rights of the accused and to maximize the opportunity for rehabilitation of young offenders.”

She said, if elected, she would prioritize clear communication between prosecutors and the police “so that officers understand the law and prosecutors know when — and when not to — charge someone and take them to trial based on how the police handled the case.”

In a lawsuit brought by the People’s Law Office against the Chicago Police Department in 2003, attorneys said CPD’s lack of public exoneration exacerbated A.M.’s “ongoing pain, suffering, and injury,” including “severe anxiety and trauma, social isolation, depression, suicidal ideation, anger, irritability, inattentiveness, self-hatred, exacerbation of pre-existing conditions and loss of freedom.”

He was “robbed of his childhood, as well as his ability to grow up in his own home with his mother and brothers. He experienced, and continues to experience, psychological and behavioral problems, as he was and is stigmatized as a child capable of horrendous murder,” the suit said.

O’Neill said he lost touch with A.M.’s family in the years after the Pallmeyer hearing and was unaware he was murdered.

“There’s a lot of tragedy here, human tragedy,” he said.

aquig@chicagotribune.com

scharles@chicagotribune.com