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From the Chicago Reader of December 3, 1999 Pure Torture Police lieutenant Raymond Patterson couldn't believe his son Aaron was a gangbanger. He was wrong. Then he didn't believe that police officers had forced Aaron to confess to a double murder. He may have been wrong about that too. By John Conroy Lieutenant Raymond Patterson has a bank of war stories accumulated during the 26 years he spent on the Chicago police force, but the most tragic is almost certainly the tale of the younger of his two sons. "As a kid, Aaron was the one that most mirrored myself," the retired lieutenant said in an interview with the Reader in 1996. "I was always an outdoors person, I was really into sports and things of that nature, and he expressed an interest in it. So if I couldn't find somebody to go play tennis with me, for example, he always wanted to go. He liked to fish and things like that, the outdoorsy-type things that a man likes to do with his sons. And he was a good fisherman. We would go fishing and nobody would catch fish but Aaron." The bond between the two began to rupture after Aaron began high school at De La Salle. Although Aaron studied periodically, his interests were elsewhere, and he began hanging out with a crowd of young men from less ambitious families who attended less distinguished schools. "I remember getting calls from police saying Aaron was gangbanging or Aaron was among several people standing in front of a grocery store and the owner asked them to move and he was the only one that caused a problem. And to show you how I was, I would not allow police officers to bother him. I went so far as to tell them that they had no reason to mess with my son. I made one of them bring him home one night. 'You got my son? Well, bring him home.' And then when he brought him home, I jumped all over the officer verbally, because I figured that they were harassing my son for no reason. I mean after all, 'I am a sergeant of police, why are police officers out there messing with my son?' "That is how blind I was. I was acting as a father. No officer could convince me that Aaron was doing any of the things that they say he did. Because whenever the police had him I would always ask, 'Did you do what they say you did?' He would say no. That was good enough for me." According to Patterson, this denial lasted several years, and though the relationship between father and son became testy, with regular arguments over Aaron's choice of friends, Ray Patterson continued to believe that his son was no gangster. Finally, sometime in the mid-1980s, Aaron's father received a call from an officer whom he knew fairly well. "He was working tactical unit at that time, and he called me in the middle of the night and asked, 'Did Aaron just run into the house?' I said, 'Yeah.' Because about five minutes before he called I heard Aaron run into the house and back into his bedroom. And this officer said, 'Raymond, I got to talk to you.' So I said, 'Come on over.' "And he said, 'You know you been denying that Aaron is a gangbanger, and we are probably going to lose friendship over this, but I just got to tell you, not only is he a gangbanger but he is the leader. He has a street name of Ranger, and he is with the Black P Stone Rangers'—or whatever offshoot of that organization—'and he wears it.' "When he said that a little light went on—'You're talking about a tattoo.' You think you know your kids, but how often do you really look at them? I mean up close. I went back to his room and told him, 'Take your shirt off.' Took his shirt off. Both sides, emblazoned there on his upper arms, 'Apache Rangers.' On one side it had his name, 'Ranger.'" At that moment, Patterson said, he could have crawled into a hole no bigger than a quarter. "I felt like a fool. I felt low. I felt embarrassed. I just could not reconcile myself with what I had just discovered." He would come to feel a whole lot worse. In the spring of 1986 Aaron was charged with three attempted murders and a brutal double homicide in which an elderly couple were stabbed 34 times. That October he was found guilty of one of the attempted murders and six months later he pled guilty to the other two. In 1989 Aaron was convicted of the double murder and was sentenced to death. Aaron was not meek by any means—a psychologist hired by his lawyers in 1987 to do a forensic psychological assessment described him as arrogant—and after his arrest for the double homicide he made what seemed to be an audacious claim about his treatment by detectives at Area Two. He claimed to have been tortured—suffocated with a plastic typewriter cover—until he agreed to say whatever the detectives wanted him to say. Aaron maintained that he had never killed anybody, and since then he has argued that the real killer has gone on to rob and stab and maim. The elder Patterson knew some of the officers involved—some he knew personally, others he knew by reputation—and he could not believe them capable of torturing a policeman's son. He walked away. If his son was on death row, perhaps he belonged there. In 1996, ten years after Aaron's arrest, his father drove to Menard Correctional Center to see him. The lieutenant was by then an enlightened and sorrowful man. He'd concluded that Aaron's wild claims of suffocation were mere statements of fact. He'd concluded that he had devoted his working life to an organization that could torture his son and protect the torturers. He'd concluded that detectives framed the wrong man, and that the man he believed to be the actual killer had recently stabbed another woman 25 times. And he'd realized that when his son's need was greatest, he had abandoned him. Aaron had betrayed him, but he had in turn betrayed Aaron. Raymond Patterson entered the Chicago Police Academy on March 17, 1969. Over the years he served as a patrolman, as a member of a tactical unit, as a sergeant and watch commander in a south-side district. He proudly recalls that in the mid-1980s the department selected him to attend Northwestern University's prestigious Traffic Institute, an executive training course for police officers. Not long after attending the course, he achieved the third-highest score on the Chicago police lieutenants exam. He subsequently served in the inspection and personnel divisions and as a field lieutenant in districts Five and Six. He retired in January 1996. As he rose through the ranks, he and his wife Jo Ann came to live a middle-class life in South Shore. Jo Ann worked as a teacher in the Chicago public schools and later became assistant director of education at a private school. Their first son, Raymond Jr., had been born in July 1963, and Aaron a year later. Raymond became an athlete who ranked seventh in his graduating class at De La Salle. He spurned Stanford and Princeton to attend Washington University in Saint Louis, and now holds a master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a well-paying corporate job in Indianapolis. Aaron took a different path. In letters written from death row he disputes his father's recollection of the revelation that he was in a gang. Aaron recalls the phone call from the tactical unit officer, but he places it in 1982. He denies that he shed his shirt at his father's command and thinks that his parents knew he was involved with gangs much earlier than that. In Aaron's view, the first time his parents found out he was in a gang was in 1969. He was then five years old and was sent home from kindergarten for hanging out with older gang members and cursing in the schoolyard during recess. He believes that spot of trouble prompted his parents to send him to a Catholic grammar school. Aaron remembers settling down for a while after that but says he got involved again in gang activity in 1976, when he was 12. In the course of the next few years, Aaron recalls, when friends of his were arrested they would sometimes ask for Officer Patterson, hoping for a break. Those requests infuriated his father, he says, and certainly should have revealed to him that Aaron was a fellow traveler. Aaron says there was no precise day when he suddenly decided to be a gang member, that no one in particular sold him on the idea, that it just came naturally given that so many people he knew, including uncles on his mother's side, had been or were members of street gangs. His brother seemed to have been inspired at De La Salle, but Aaron says he found it boring. "I was footloose and adventurous, I always wanted to live on the edge, push the envelope. Street life fascinated me." His choice of friends, he says, was determined in part by his curfew. The "middle class negro[es]"—his term—who attended De La Salle lived too far away. Aaron recalls that if he went to a party on the weekend, he had to be home by the time the city's curfew took effect, lest he incur his father's wrath, which he says was considerable. He recalls sneaking out of the house through the basement door after his parents thought he had gone to bed, a ploy that worked until he was 17 and had no curfew.