Chicago City Wire

For former homicide Detective Kenneth Boudreau no other case is more an exemplar of the gaming of the civil justice system than that of Nina Glover, a known prostitute murdered in 1994 in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side.

Four teens, known as the Englewood Four, were convicted of raping and murdering Glover and tossing her body in trash dumpster behind a liquor store. Their prison sentences range from 30 years to 40 years.

Their convictions were vacated in 2011 after DNA evidence failed to link them to the crime. They sued for wrongful conviction, and Boudreau was named in the complaints even though his work on the case involved interviewing one of the four, Terrill Swift, for 20 minutes. Yet Boudreau’s name never appears in the depositions in the civil cases brought by the four.

His crime, Boudreau says, was working briefly under former Commander Jon Burge (now deceased) in the early 1990s, Burge was convicted in 2010 for perjury and obstruction of justice surrounding allegations that he tortured prisoners. The Burge connection made Boudreau a target for Englewood Four case, and other wrongful conviction cases he has since been named in.

“They claimed it was one big conspiracy that along with the state’s attorney’s office, and even the crime lab we framed these kids,” Boudreau said recalling the Englewood Four civil cases.

Along with claims of police intimidation - that they used "deceit, intimidation, threats, prolonged isolation and outright physical coercion" to elicit confessions - the legal strategy worked. In 2017, the City Council approved a settlement of $31 million for the four: Swift, Harold Richardson, Michael Saunders, and Vincent Thames.

But during his criminal trial in 1998 in Cook County Circuit Court, Terrill Swift said on three separate occasions that he was treated well by police.

One back-and-forth between prosecutor Robert Hovey and Swift:

Q. Were you mistreated by the police in any way?

A. I wasn’t mistreated at all.

Q. Did they beat you up or anything?

A. No sir.

Q. Did they verbally threaten you?

A. No sir.

Q. Were they pretty nice to you?

A. Yes Sir.

In finding Swift guilty, Judge Thomas Sumner acknowledged the scant physical evidence in the case but found the details of the crime iterated in Swift’s confession convincing. And he found the defense’s assertion that the confession was somehow extracted or fabricated by police to be absurd.

“But the defense in this case is, and this is rather novel, I must admit that the defense in this case is that we have a 22-page confession because the police were too nice,” Judge Sumner said. “I will tell you what. If that is true then the police have found a new method by which to get confessions and certainly eliminate any possibility of lawsuits and motions to suppress, by golly. I don’t know why they didn’t think of this before. All they have to do is just inundate the accused with niceties; feed him, treat him like a king and he’ll just come clean.”

Yet in a 2014 deposition in his wrongful conviction case Swift did a 180 on how he was treated by police:

“…and that's where various officers, like one at a time, they'll come in there and say, why did you beat this woman? Another one would come in and say, why did you guys strangle her? Then another one would come in and say, for that little bit of amount of money, you guys did this? Why did you, Mo-Mike, and all of the co-defendants, why did you guys throw her in the garbage? I'm like, what? I'm in a room. It's dark. I'm -- I'm crying. I don't know -- I -- I don't understand. I'm, like, what? What do you mean? And I had more threats. I had more threats at that point.”

The settlement infuriated prosecutors and police. Appearing before City Council’s Finance Committee in December 2017 then Chicago FOP Second Vice President Martin Preib argued against the settlement saying that “powerful evidence” exists that the Englewood Four “were indeed involved in this crime” and that the notion that investigating detectives framed the teens “defies the simple facts of the investigation and plain common sense.”

“To believe the theory of misconduct in this case, you have to believe that a collection of detectives would conspire to frame men they had never met before for the rape and murder of a woman knowing that in doing so, the real killer would still be walking about likely to rape and kill again,” Preib said. “How can these investigators be certain that the real killer wouldn’t be discovered in a few weeks with evidence that would reveal their frame-up?”

In 2021, one of the Englewood Four, Michael Saunders, was murdered in Calumet Park.