The Fence - Dick Lehr [86]
But Walker’s comment was a tease. His memory turned all fuzzy after that. He said he could not recall if the officer was in uniform or dressed in plainclothes, whether the officer was white or black. “I couldn’t say,” he said. “All I know is I saw figures going forward.” Most frustrating, he denied seeing Daley, Williams, or Burgio at all.
Investigators at one point were hoping gang unit partners Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan might be able to build on these leads. After all, the pair said their car was the fourth one in. Hussey and others interviewed them three times—more than any other officers—but they got little back. Hussey said flat-out at one point he thought they knew more. But the two gang unit cops were dug in: They saw nothing. By their account, they arrived after the beating and in time to find Mike on the ground. It didn’t matter that on key points they contradicted each other—or others contradicted them.
The sessions proved a disappointment to Hussey, featuring the same monotonous drumbeat of “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t recall.” After the stack of skeletal reports and a bunch of know-nothing taped interviews, Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan came across as breaths of fresh air. The Form 26 report Kenny prepared was a detailed, typewritten account of the night that at 520 words stood out as an opus—up to ten times longer than most of the reports turned in by nearly sixty police officers. In his, Kenny wrote he thought they were the third police car at the dead end, while Bobby said they were the fourth or fifth. Both were mistaken; they were farther back than that, more likely in the seventh or eighth position. But that missed the point. The point was their openness about placing themselves in the thick of it.
When asked by the investigators to identify other officers they’d seen, Kenny and Bobby did so—naming names or describing physically those whose names they didn’t know. When asked by investigators to scan through a book of officers’ faces, they did so—pointing out the officers they hadn’t known by name. In his interview, Bobby described seeing a “commotion” down to the right along the fence when he first jumped out of the cruiser and ran to the left, after an officer running in that direction. When asked about the officers down by the fence, Bobby said in that split second he hadn’t recognized them. But he did have this detail: Two were in uniform—a black cop and a white cop.
In his interview, meanwhile, Kenny was similarly forthcoming. While most officers seemed to take great pains to place themselves as far away as possible from the fence, Kenny talked in the only manner he knew—straightforward. He gave a point-by-point account of his role in the car chase and described in detail how he bolted from the cruiser, scaled the fence, and eventually captured Robert “Smut” Brown.
But for all their cooperation, the problem was Kenny and Bobby didn’t have any evidence to break the case. Bobby certainly had a tidbit about seeing two uniformed cops in the commotion, but Kenny didn’t even see a commotion. He told Hussey he was coming to a stop when down the hill he first spotted the four suspects jumping from the Lexus. “My eyes were just trained on a kid coming out of the passenger side, a black kid with a brown leather jacket.” he said during his first interview. Kenny ran after Smut Brown. “I didn’t see anything or hear anything,” he said. “I was trained on him.” Hussey asked him if he’d seen anyone else chasing the suspect, and Kenny said no.
“There could have been,” he said, “but I just kept my eyes aimed on him.”
When the sixty-five-minute interview ended, Hussey thanked Kenny for his effort to recall the night’s events. “I appreciate your candor,” he said to Kenny.
Given that, Kenny was surprised when he was called back for a second interview several weeks later. He showed up at headquarters on April 25 at the end of an overnight shift. The interview began at 6:50 A.M.