The part of this case that is still being fought is not whether Ralph Harris shot people. It is whether the confessions the state used to convict him were beaten out of him at Area 2 of the Chicago Police Department.
David Ford was killed in 1992 in an attempted armed robbery. So was William Patterson, in an attempted robbery in which James Patterson was also shot and survived. Those are the two murders for which Harris stands convicted. The third case against him concerned a woman identified in the court record only as R.T., who was sexually assaulted and robbed in 1995.
Police and published accounts put far more to his name. They describe around twenty-six people attacked in Chatham and Avalon Park, adjoining neighborhoods on the south side, between 1992 and 1995, a number of them surviving gunshot wounds, and they name four more men who died: Thomas Hodges, Jimmie Bramlett, Eric Watkins and James Williamson. Those four deaths, from 1995, form no part of the three prosecutions the courts have reviewed.
He was arrested on August 29, 1995 at a garden apartment on West 79th Street. Several officers went in with guns drawn, and Detective John Hamilton tackled him to the floor. He was taken to Area 2 for questioning, and he confessed.
Before trial he moved to suppress the confessions. He said that Detectives Michael McDermott and James Boylan had punched him in the stomach, neck and head, put a gun to his head and in his mouth, and hit him with a phonebook, and that Detective John Yucaitis had told him his girlfriend, who was at the station, would be arrested and charged and her children handed to the Department of Children and Family Services.
The state called McDermott, Boylan, Yucaitis and Hamilton. Harris did not testify. He called his girlfriend at the time, Angela Clark, and Patrick Blunt, who had stood in a lineup with him. The circuit court denied the motion, finding the statements freely and voluntarily made.
He was convicted in all three cases and sentenced to death twice, on March 26 and October 24, 1999. On January 10, 2003 Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence in Illinois, and both of his became life imprisonment without parole. The Ford and Patterson convictions were affirmed on direct appeal in 2005; the R.T. conviction, which came later, was affirmed in 2010.
Then the ground shifted. By the time Harris filed for post-conviction relief, the torture run out of Area 2 by Commander Jon Burge and the detectives under him had been documented at length. Harris argued that this new evidence corroborated what he had said in the 1990s, and that his trial lawyers had been ineffective for failing to look into McDermott's history.
At the evidentiary hearing that followed, Harris chose to present no live testimony, relying on his own earlier testimony from the Patterson trial and on documents about Area 2. The state produced photographs taken of him after his arrest and the evidence of a medical technician who had examined him. There was testimony about an abrasion on the left side of his face; the court thought it could have happened when he was tackled.
The judge found that the new material established a pattern and practice of physical abuse at Area 2, that McDermott had been complicit in abuse carried out by Burge on a suspect, had taken part himself in at least one other instance, and had invoked the Fifth Amendment about his conduct in another case. He denied relief anyway. Harris, he found, had confessed to the sexual assault to Hamilton, who had no such history, before he ever met McDermott, and McDermott's account of the other confessions was corroborated by the timeline and by witnesses the court believed.
The appellate court reversed in 2021 and sent the case back for a new suppression hearing before a different judge. The original judge had presided over the suppression hearing, the trials and the post-conviction hearing, and the appellate court found he had shown a tendency to credit the officers while giving little weight to Harris's new evidence. It held that the new evidence was strong enough that the original hearing would likely have come out differently had McDermott been open to impeachment on it.
What happened on remand was unusual. The new judge found that Harris had a history of inconsistent statements about the abuse and that witnesses, medical evaluations, videos and photographs showing him relaxed and uninjured disproved it. He was not, the judge ruled, physically, psychologically or mentally coerced. Then the judge vacated all three convictions and ordered new trials anyway, reasoning that a jury told of the detectives' conduct in other cases might weigh the confessions differently.
The state appealed. In November 2023 a divided appellate panel dismissed the appeal, holding that the 2021 decision had already implicitly vacated the convictions and that the new-trial order was not one the state could challenge. On April 24, 2025 the Supreme Court of Illinois disagreed. In an opinion by Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis, it held that the 2021 decision had not vacated anything, that the proceedings on remand were a continuation of the post-conviction case, and that the state was entitled to appeal. It sent the appeal back to the appellate court to be decided on its merits and expressly made no judgment on whether the new trials were properly ordered. Justice Mary K. O'Brien dissented, arguing that the state had given up its chance to contest the 2021 ruling. Justice P. Scott Neville took no part.
So the question of what was done to Ralph Harris in a police station in 1995 has now been before the courts for three decades, and the order granting him new trials is still waiting on a ruling about whether it can stand.
One further thing does not reconcile. A reference work describing the series says he attacked twenty-six women and raped and killed six of them. The six people named as having died are all men, and the only sexual assault in the court record is the 1995 attack on R.T. Both descriptions cannot be right.