Chicago City Wire

The latest instance in what appears to be a pattern of private detectives pressuring witnesses to change their testimony in wrongful conviction cases involves Destiny Rodriguez, a key witness in the 2011 murder of Chicago police officer Clifton Lewis.

An Elgin Police Department report obtained by Chicago City Wire shows that Rodriguez filed a complaint about contact she had with Jordan Scherer, a private detective who asked her to claim that the Chicago police bribed her to testify against Alexander Villa— one of the three convicted of Lewis's murder while he was working off-duty as a security guard at a West Side convenience store.

“I am one of the nice guys,” Scherer said to Rodriguez according to the November 8, 2022 police report, “and there are going to be some not so nice guys who will come looking for you.”

Rodriguez demanded that Scherer get off her property. Before leaving he said, “it was really easy for me to find you, how easy do you think it will be for other people to find you.”

The officer who interviewed Rodriguez and filed the report, identified as Special Agent Rodriguez, called Scherer on his cell phone. Scherer returned the call with a Chicago attorney identified in the report as Jennifer Flagg also on the line. 

An attorney named Jennifer Blagg is representing Villa in an attempt to get his conviction overturned. No attorney named Jennifer Flagg is listed in the Chicago area. Jennifer Blagg did not return a City Wire's email request for comment.

On the call, Scherer denied that he threatened Rodriguez, and that he had text messages from her showing that she did indeed want to talk about the case.

“They refused to send me pictures of the text messages,” Special Agent Rodriguez wrote in his report.

“I advised Jordan and Jennifer,” he continued, “that Jordan is no longer allowed on Destiny’s property and to have no contact with her. I advised them that they will need to move forward with their case without Destiny’s help.”

Scherer also did not respond to a request for comment.

Last August, Cook County Judge James Linn ruled against Blagg’s request for a special prosecutor in the Villa case, and against subpoenaing the assistant State’s Attorneys who prosecuted Villa. He also concluded that Villa received “a fair trial.”

In another instance reported recently by Chicago City Wire, a private investigator and a plaintiff’s attorney approached a witness in the 1987 arson murder of seven on the South Side, according to a 2000 deposition in a case against former Chicago police Commander Jon Burge.

Andre Council, one of two witnesses who saw the man convicted of the murders, Madison Hobley, buy gasoline the day of the murders testified that he was approached at his home by former DePaul law school professor, Andrea Lyon, now in private practice, and a man he identified as Ciolino. Council said that Lyon and Ciolino promised his daughter a free ride at DePaul, and that he would never have to work another day in his life if changed his testimony.

When asked about Council’s testimony, Lyon wrote in an email to Chicago City Wire, “that never happened.”

And in 2013 Chicago attorney James Sotos, in a letter to then Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, listed numerous instances where private investigators have allegedly pressured witnesses to change their testimonies. One of the most infamous surrounds Anthony Porter, convicted in 1983 of the murder of two teenagers in a South Side park. A 2014 documentary film of the case, “A Murder in the Park,” alleges that in 1999, private investigator Paul Ciolino pressured another man, Alstory Simon, to confess to the shootings.

The Simon confession resulted in Porter’s release from prison in 1999. A year before that Porter won a reprieve just two days before his scheduled execution. The public shock of Porter’s near execution for a crime that appeared he did not commit led to the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.

Ciolino worked the investigation with Northwestern University Journalism Professor David Protess, who at the time directed the Innocence Project, a Medill School of Journalism effort which identified and worked to free those who are wrongfully convicted. A group of Protess’ journalism students also aided in the investigation.

The case turned on its head again when in 2014, Alvarez ordered Simon’s release, saying at the time: "This investigation by David Protess and his team involved a series of alarming tactics that were not only coercive and absolutely unacceptable by law enforcement standards, they were potentially in violation of Mr. Simon's constitutionally-protected rights.”

In 2011, Protess left Northwestern after the University investigated his actions in a separate murder conviction, that of Anthony McKinney— another case cited by Sotos in his letter to Alvarez— from fall 2003 through spring 2006. At the time, Northwestern released a statement that said in part: “Protess knowingly misrepresented the facts and his actions to the University, its attorneys and the dean of Medill on many documented occasions. He also misrepresented facts about these matters to students, alumni, the media and the public.”

In 2018, Ciolino sued the makers of "A Murder in the Park" for defamation.