Still Riding

Checking back in on Anthony Garrett, Richard Zuley, and the unfinished story from the Crying Wolf bonus episodes.

It has been about six months since we released the Crying Wolf bonus episodes on Anthony Garrett. When I initially decided to write those episodes, I thought of them as an extension of Lee Harris’s story; another window into the workings of the same former Chicago detective and Guantanamo interrogator, Richard Zuley. But as I started researching Anthony’s story quickly, it became its own thing, and, now, its own unfinished business.

Quick recap for those just coming to this: A seven-year-old boy, Dantrell Davis, was shot and killed while walking to school with his mother outside Cabrini-Green in 1992. The city needed someone to blame. Anthony Garrett, a Cabrini resident with a gang history, a long rap sheet, and a military record became that someone.

For more than thirty years, Anthony has insisted that he did not kill Dantrell Davis. He has also insisted, from the beginning, that his confession was coerced.

When we left Anthony’s story in December, his long-awaited hearing had begun, but the central figure in so much of the story — Zuley — had not yet testified. It was not even clear whether he would.

Now he has.

Zuley testified in February. Then, in April, a separate Zuley-linked coerced confession case surfaced publicly through a proposed city settlement. And this past Monday, closing arguments took place in Anthony Garrett’s case.

Zuley spent more than three hours on the stand in February, all 180 minutes of them denying that he tortured Anthony into confessing. He denied physically assaulting him. Denied verbally abusing him. He even denied even raising his voice. “He was a gentleman,” Zuley testified about Anthony. “He was respectful, he was responsive and for lack of a different word, I liked him.”

I liked him.

Talk about gaslighting.

Here is a man who helped secure a confession in a murder case that rocked a city, and thirty-three years later he recalls the accused — a man who has long said he was tortured into signing that confession — as polite, cooperative, even likable.

If that’s not enough, Zuley also testified that Anthony was with police voluntarily and that once he was in the interrogation room, there was “absolutely no reason” to handcuff him. His explanation was simple: he was trying to build rapport. “Handcuffing him to a wall isn’t going to do that,” he said.

But Anthony’s account has always been…different.

He has said he was held in a small, windowless room. Denied sleep. Denied meaningful access to counsel. Handcuffed to an eyebolt. Beaten until he agreed to sign a confession.

In 2023, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission found enough evidence to send Anthony’s torture claim for judicial review, which is how he found his way back into court in the first place. The Commission cited Zuley’s pattern-and-practice history and the lack of physical or eyewitness evidence tying Garrett to the crime. It also noted that Zuley was identified in a U.S. Senate report on Guantánamo torture and that reporting by The Guardian identified him as the chief architect of the enhanced interrogation plan for Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who we interviewed extensively for the episodes about Anthony.

The February testimony placed two competing stories before the court.

In Zuley’s version, Anthony Garrett was not a man being broken. He was a cooperative man voluntarily speaking with detectives, treated respectfully by an investigator who liked him and believed in rapport. In Zuley’s telling, Anthony eventually confessed in “this little weak voice,” saying he had not meant to kill Dantrell Davis.

In Anthony’s version, he was not there by choice. He was the kind of suspect the system knew how to use: a man with gang ties, a record, and weapons charges, pulled into the center of one of the most politically explosive murders in Chicago history. Then he was isolated inside a police station until, after hours of pressure and alleged abuse, he became the answer the city needed.

Then came April.

Two months after Zuley asked the court to believe that rapport was his method, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that taxpayers could face a $9.5 million settlement tied to Carl Reed, a mentally disabled man who spent nearly nineteen years in prison after what he said was a coerced confession involving Zuley and another detective.

Reed alleged that during “at least 55 hours” in a police interrogation room, he was handcuffed to a ring on the wall and forced to sit and sleep on an eighteen-inch-wide metal bench. The city also acknowledged that its case was weakened by the absence of Reed’s DNA on the murder weapon or in the victim’s apartment, and by allegations that Reed, who was diabetic, had been denied insulin.

Reed’s case is not Anthony Garrett’s case. Different man. Different charge. Different decade. But the room, the hours, the ring on the wall, the confession — the circles overlap so much it is hard to tell where one story ends and the other begins.

By Monday’s closing arguments, the question before Judge Adrienne Davis was not simply whose version of what happened in an interrogation room three decades ago should be trusted. It was whether the court was willing to see the pattern that seems to deepen each time another Zuley-linked case comes to the surface.

In court on Monday, Jennifer Blagg — who Crying Wolf listeners might remember as Lee Harris’s lawyer — argued that Zuley coordinated Anthony’s alleged torture. She placed his case within a broader string of alleged Zuley-led coercion cases between 1987 and 2003, including four murder convictions that were later thrown out.

As Jennifer put it in closing arguments: “He’s never in the room when the worst stuff happens, but he doesn’t have to be [because the officers] are all working together.”

That is the theory.

Zuley’s power, in Jennifer’s telling, was the power to structure the room. To coordinate the pressure. To benefit from what others did. To appear after the worst part was over and ask whether the suspect was ready to talk. To build rapport with broken people — and call that kindness.

The state, meanwhile, urged the judge to disregard the other Zuley cases as allegations rather than findings and emphasized inconsistencies in Anthony’s account. “His account shifts,” prosecutor Armando Sandoval said. “That’s important.”

If by “shifts” he meant Anthony recanted as soon as he was finally allowed to speak with a lawyer, then sure. O.K. But it has been thirty-three years, and Anthony’s core claim has not changed: he did not kill Dantrell Davis, and his confession was coerced.

That is the legal fight now. The state wants the court to see shifts. Jennifer wants the court to see pattern.

So I called her.

I wanted to know what it felt like after all these years. After the filings, the allegations, the reporting, the delays. After never being able to get him on the stand in Lee Harris’s case. What did it feel like to finally examine Richard Zuley under oath?

Jennifer’s answer surprised me a little.

As she packed for a much needed vacation with her partner, she told me that it was never going to be the case that Richard Zuley got on the stand and confessed. He was not going to repent. He was not going to offer the court some late-life reckoning wrapped in regret.

He did exactly what she expected. Deny it all. Which was why she had built her case and her cross-examination around that. The point, she explained, was to let him deny. Let the denial stretch itself out in public. Let the categorical nature of it become its own evidence. Let him perform the same charm offensive, the same posture of reasonableness, the same insistence that he was the kind of detective who built rapport, not fear.

As Jennifer put it to me, the best version of his testimony for Anthony’s case may be the outrageousness of it. The denial becomes so complete that it asks the court to believe not only that Anthony is lying, but that a veteran Chicago detective moved through interrogation rooms without ever encountering the basic architecture of custody. No handcuffs. No pressure. No fear.
No control. Just a clean room with polite people working through minor disagreements.

A fantasy.

I have never met Richard Zuley. I have read about him. Studied the cases connected to him. Listened to people describe what they say happened in rooms where his name appears in the record. But I have never sat across from him, and it’s important for me to remind myself of that.

I have, however, sat across from another aging former detective whose name became attached to a long trail of overturned convictions: Louis Scarcella.

I interviewed Scarcella at length for The Burden, the true crime podcast I co-hosted with Steve Fishman about the wrongful convictions and the machinery that enables them. And what I remember most vividly from those conversations was his charm.

Louie was warm. Funny. Disarming. He knew how to tell a story. He knew how to make you feel, for a moment, as if the whole thing had been misunderstood by people who did not understand the work, the streets, the pressure, the job.

And he denied everything.

The years I spent with Louie Scarcella taught me something about denial. For some, it becomes the house they build around themselves so they can keep living inside the story they need to believe. And after years, that denial accumulates furniture, appliances, junk it stores away in closets. It gets decorated with anecdotes, jokes, small acts of charm, old awards, war stories, and the approving memories of people who still pat you on the back and call you a good detective.

Louie Scarcella has consistently denied wrongdoing, even as case after case tied to him has unraveled. At this point, claims and settlements connected to people wrongfully convicted in Scarcella-linked cases have cost New York taxpayers more than $110 million.

That is what came back to me when I looked at the photograph of Zuley leaving court in February.

Frail. Sickly-looking. His face swallowed behind a mask, tucked beneath a baseball cap. He is seventy-nine now — an age when a person might hope to be relishing a life well lived, surrounded by the softer rewards of age. Instead, he was in court, answering questions about alleged acts committed more than thirty years ago. Instead, he was still decorating his house of denial. Still trying to make it feel warm inside.

Jennifer told me Zuley approached her in court and struck up a conversation. “He came up to me and said we had a mutual friend.” He even said the friend spoke highly of her.

In another world, this would be a small gesture. But in a court room, and just moments before the two were set to joust, what he was up to wasn’t lost on Jennifer. Rapport and charm are not just personality traits for Zuley. They are professional tools. They can open a door. Lower a guard. Clean up the room after force has already done its work. They can make denial sound reasonable. They can make harm sound like misunderstanding.

Judge Davis has set the next status hearing for July 14. She has not said when she will rule on Anthony’s petition for a retrial. Jennifer was heartened by the seriousness with which the judge seemed to be handling the case, even as the wait stretches on.

Before I let her get back to packing, I asked how Anthony was doing. Jennifer said he was calm. Cool. Collected. But it was more the way she said it. But it was more than what she said. It was how she said it — almost as if she was in awe of him.

That sounds like the man I got to know last year.

In our conversations, Anthony had a way of speaking from inside of an unimaginable ordeal without surrendering himself to it. He could be funny one minute. Blunt the next. Reflective. Matter-of-fact about things no person should ever have to become matter-of-fact about.

And through all of this, he keeps telling Jennifer the same thing: “I’m riding with you.”