After opening arguments, the prosecution’s first witness is likely to be Anthony “Satan” Holmes. In the chronology of victims assembled in the last 20 years, Holmes is the first to have alleged he was given electric shock at Burge’s hands. Unlike other victims whose claims became known through documents filed by the victim or his attorney, Holmes’s story became public because of a chain of events, set in motion by an anonymous police officer, 16 years after Holmes was wired up. In February, 1989, Andrew Wilson’s civil suit against Burge and the city was in full swing in federal court. Wilson, who’d killed two police officers, alleged he’d been given electric shock at Area 2. Few people believed him. The People’s Law Office had taken him on as a client and were arguing his case when anonymous letters, clearly written by an Area 2 insider, began arriving at the PLO’s headquarters. The author of the letters indicated that Burge’s electrical devices had been used before and directed the PLO to talk to Melvin Jones, a prisoner at Cook County Jail. When the PLO’s emissaries arrived, Jones told them that Burge had shocked him on the penis, foot, and thigh with an electrical device nine days before Wilson was also shocked. Afterward the PLO located a seven-year-old transcript of a court hearing at which Jones had described the torture. In the transcript he indicated that Burge had asked him if he knew “Satan” and “Cochise.”

A. I told him I have heard of them; I didn’t know them personally. Q. What if anything did he say to you at that time? A. He said, they both had the same treatment, you know. He was telling me what kind of guys they was as far as supposed to be being, you know, kind of tough or something. They crawled all over the floor.

The PLO thereafter went in search of “Satan,” whom they were able to identify as Anthony Holmes. They found him in Stateville serving time for murder. He indicated he’d been given electric shock in 1973, nine years before Wilson and Jones made the same charge. In 1973, Holmes had the build of a champion weightlifter, and when Burge arrested him he was a leader of a gang called the Royal Family, believed to be responsible for murder and a series of other felonies, and he also a high ranking member of the Black Gangster Disciples. In an unsworn statement given to Taylor and a court reporter in 2004, Holmes recalled his session with Burge 31 years earlier. In that statement, Holmes said that Burge had a black box device from which the detective took two wires. One was hooked up to a set of handcuffs on Holmes’s ankles, the other to cuffs on his wrists. Then a plastic bag was put over Holmes’s head and the shocking began.

“It feel like a thousand needles going through my body,” Holmes said. ""¦.it feel like something just burning me from the inside, and I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out.”

Once revived, the process was repeated.

“They did that I don’t know how many times”¦.I said to myself, man, he trying to kill me. And I thought I was dead”¦.they was lifting me off the floor trying to pump air into me”¦.” Q: “Did Burge make any comments to you while this process was going on?” A: “Only thing he said to me then was.”¦you going to talk, nigger, you going to talk. ”¦.When they got through with me, I didn’t care what it was. If they said I killed Bob or the President or anybody, I would say, yeah, how do you want me to say this?”

In April, 1975, Burge and fellow detectives Michael Hoke and William Wagner were issued department commendations for their “skillful questioning” of Holmes, whose confession had resulted in the arrest of other members of the Royal Family who, according to the commendation were charged with five murders, an armed robbery in which a policeman had been shot, and other felonies. Holmes was convicted of participating in a murder, his confession the only evidence against him. He was paroled in 1983, arrested six months later for selling drugs, and released on parole again in 2004. While he tells a compelling story, he has no transcript from the time period of the torture and no medical evidence to back him up. However, Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin, one of Holmes’s attorneys in 1973, is on the prosecution’s witness list, and it seems likely he will back up Holmes’s claim in some way when he is called to the stand. Thus Holmes’s story came to light because cop killer Andrew Wilson’s civil suit moved an anonymous officer to put fingers to keyboard. If Wilson had not filed suit, if the unknown cop had not written, if Burge had not boasted of breaking Satan, we’d probably not be in court today.