The Englewood Five
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s office had dropped all charges against CWC Client Terrill Swift and three co-defendants who, as juveniles, confessed to a 1994 rape-murder they did not commit. Although the case officially ended only today, the innocence of the men, known collectively as the Englewood Four, has been apparent since last May when DNA testing identified the perpetrator of the crime as a now-deceased serial killer.
Swift was one of five teenagers who were charged with the raping and strangling Nina Glover, a 30-year-old woman known to engage in prostitution and drug use. During an investigation led and orchestrated by Detective James Cassidy, all five teenagers confessed in March 1995. Cassidy is known to have taken multiple proven false confessions, including the two from the Englewood children originally charged in the infamous Ryan Harris murder. In Swift’s case, pre-trial DNA testing excluded all five teenagers as the source of the semen recovered from the victim, yet four of the five were still convicted and remain in custody.
In September 2010, the CWC requested additional DNA testing in an attempt to match the unknown semen to an individual in the national database of offenders. In its motion, the CWC laid out in detail that since the time of Swift’s convictions, new details have been learned about previously unknown serial killers who preyed on prostitutes in Englewood and surrounding communities. In a written objection to our motion, the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) claimed that a hit to one of these serial killers would be a “red herring.” After pressure from the Chicago Tribune, the prosecutors dropped their objection to testing, but still maintained that the results could never prove the teenagers innocent.
In May 2011, the CWC learned that the semen recovered from Nina Glover hit to Johnny Douglas. In November 1994, Douglas was twice the age of the charged teenagers and had no connection to any of them. He was not mentioned in the confessions of the teenagers — which is the only evidence of their guilt. According to police reports, Douglas was interviewed at the scene of the crime on the day the victim’s body was recovered from a dumpster.
Most significantly, Douglas is a serial killer who has a history of assaulting and strangling prostitutes, a history that was unknown at the time of Glover’s murder. In 2001, after DNA connected him, Douglas pled guilty to the 1997 murder of Gytonne Marsh, a prostitute who was strangled to death, and was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. Subsequently, in 2002, DNA connected Douglas to the 1995 strangulation of Elaine Martin, another prostitute that turned up dead. The State charged Douglas with Martin’s death, initially seeking the death penalty. During the prosecution, the CCSAO sought to admit not only evidence of the Marsh murder for evidence of Douglas’s modus operandi of strangling prostitutes to death (which was granted), but also evidence that Douglas committed five other assaults of prostitutes. Douglas was acquitted of the murder of Martin. In 2008, Douglas was killed by Minosa Winters, who claimed self-defense and was eventually acquitted. During that prosecution, the court admitted evidence that Douglas committed both the 1995 and 1997 murders to support Winters’s argument that Douglas had a known reputation for violence.
In May 2011, within days of learning of the hit to Douglas and in conjunction with the attorneys representing the co-defendants, the CWC moved to vacate the four teenagers’convictions. While claiming to investigate, the CCSAO has otherwise remained mute over the last six weeks. They have, however, opposed our discovery request for police reports relating to Douglas’s murders of Marsh and Martin, arguing that evidence relating to Douglas’s past crimes is “irrelevant.” Of course, the evidence was very “relevant” when the CCSAO sought admission of six of Douglas’s past crimes during the prosecution of the 1995 murder, and the court found the evidence was “relevant” when it admitted it during that prosecution as well as the prosecution of Winters for the murder of Douglas.
