Ex-Chicago Det. Richard Zuley denies torturing out confession to 7-year-old Dantrell Davis’s murder

A retired Chicago Police detective who is accused of orchestrating torture at the U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, insisted on Wednesday afternoon he used no coercion to elicit a man’s confession to the 1992 murder of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis.

Richard Zuley, 79, testified for about three hours at Cook County’s Leighton Criminal Courthouse as a witness for State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s office, which is fighting Anthony Garrett’s bid for a retrial. The ex-detective said threats and physical abuse were less effective at getting information from suspects than developing a trustful connection.

“Rapport building is the only thing that works and the only thing that’s reliable,” Zuley said, denying he so much as raised his voice while extracting Garrett’s confession.

The testimony contrasted with alleged Zuley ties to coercion in numerous other Cook County cases. It also clashed with a Sept. 11 terror suspect’s testimony that Zuley, as a Naval reservist, helped lead months of torture at Gitmo in a case made famous by the 2021 film drama starring Hollywood’s Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Around 9 a.m. Oct. 13, 1992, Dantrell was walking to school with his mother when a sniper shot him from an upper floor of a building at Cabrini Green, a former North Side public housing complex.

Zuley and his partner arrived on the scene that day at 10:30 a.m., he testified Wednesday.

Officers, he testified, told him their “subject” was Garrett. Zuley admitted Wednesday the designation was based on hearsay: One of Dantrell’s relatives had told police a woman known as “Hollywood” had stated she saw Garrett climbing the building’s stairwell carrying a rifle shortly before 9:00 a.m. Hollywood was never identified.

Once police found Garrett, Zuley testified, a security guard told the officers they had the wrong man.

But Zuley said he and his partner drove Garrett to a detective station at Western and Belmont avenues. Garrett ended up in an interrogation room with an eyebolt drilled into the wall for shackling people.

Zuley said Garrett named witnesses who could corroborate he was on a Cabrini playground when the shooting took place. And the former detective acknowledged that three witnesses said they had seen Garrett outside, not upstairs.

“But it was after the shooting, after he had fled the scene and went downstairs,” Zuley testified.

Later in the day, Zuley said, “we told him he was under arrest because his alibi witnesses didn’t hold up.”

Zuley testified that he and Garrett then had a 45-minute “conversation” in which the two discussed something they had in common: military experience. The detective was a Marine veteran; the suspect had served in the Army.“He was a gentleman,” Zuley said. “He was respectful. He was responsive. And, for lack of a better word, I liked him.”

In that exchange, according to Zuley, Garrett shared information relevant to Dantrell’s killing. “He said he was a shot expert with the M-16,” Zuley said, referring to a military marksmanship rating and an assault-rifle model that was “consistent with ammunition recovered from the scene.”

Zuley said those details convinced him Garrett was the sniper.

Zuley insisted he didn’t handcuff Garrett to the eye bolt or know of any one else at the station doing so. He said the room’s temperature was comfortable. He said he brought Garrett meals. He denied any physical or mental abuse.

But Garrett claims various mistreatment. At one point, he says, two large men in sports jerseys entered the room while he was handcuffed to the eyebolt. One of them, he says, repeatedly struck Garrett with a black rubber hose on his leg, where he had a steel rod implanted due to a 1984 gunshot wound that shattered the bone.

Zuley left other detectives in charge of Garrett overnight. He returned the next morning and told the suspect, “I don’t believe you deliberately shot a little boy.”

Zuley said Garrett, with head bowed, “spoke in this little, weak voice” and confessed, saying he fired in short bursts at members of a rival gang near Dantrell.

“He was remorseful,” Zuley testified.

The interrogation lasted nearly two days. Garrett eventually signed a handwritten statement admitting to Dantrell’s murder. He was convicted in 1994.

Imprisoned at downstate Centralia Correctional Center, Garrett, 67, is not scheduled for release until 2039, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections.

He entered Circuit Judge Adrienne E. Davis’s courtroom Wednesday in a blue button-down shirt issued by the prison. At the sight of family members waving from the gallery, he broke into a big smile.

Garrett’s proceedings stem from a 2023 referral by the Illinois Torture and Relief Commission that detailed an “overwhelming” history of “lengthy and consistent” complaints alleging psychological and physical torture involving Zuley, who was hired by the police department in 1970 and who worked more than three decades for the department.

To win Garrett a new trial, his attorneys are trying to show a “pattern and practice” of Zuley coercing confessions. In court filings, his attorneys have listed a string of Chicago murder cases between 1987 and 2003, in which a suspect alleged coercion involving Zuley.

Judges have vacated at least four murder convictions involving Zuley. The exonerees include Lathierial Boyd, Lee Harris, Carl Reed and David Wright.

One of Garrett’s attorneys, Eric Bisby, pressed Zuley about several of these cases and about a 1993 massacre at a Brown’s Chicken restaurant in Palatine. Zuley testified he served a one-day suspension from the Police Department for filing a false report about that case.

Alleged torture at Gitmo

In 2003, more than a decade after Dantrell’s murder, Zuley took leave from the police department and went to Guantánamo as a Navy reservist.

President Trump’s administration has blocked Garrett’s attorneys from questioning Zuley about his work there.

In November, however, the attorneys called Sept. 11 suspect Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 55, to testify via Zoom from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he was naturalized in 2024.

Slahi said Zuley led “enhanced interrogation techniques” for months in 2003.

The torture allegedly included isolation, temperature extremes, beatings, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, barking dogs and a mock execution at sea. Round-the-clock sessions allegedly included strobe lights and a looped recording of the U.S. national anthem that, Slahi said, kept him from sleeping and praying.

After 70 days of Zuley-orchestrated torture, Slahi testified, the detective convinced him that U.S. authorities were allowing his mother to be kidnapped and raped.

Slahi, who knew Zuley as Capt. Collins, described an all-night boat ride and salt water forced down his throat.

After the boat ride, Slahi testified, “I was taken on a bumpy road to a [detention] cell. Mr. Zuley said, ‘I told you not to f- - - with me.’

“He said, ‘I don’t give a f- - - about fairness. I care about saving lives.’ ”

Slahi admitted he never saw Zuley lay a hand on him but added, “I don’t know because I was blindfolded. … I began to lose my mind.”

After months of this, Slahi testified, he confessed to anything his interrogators fed him, starting with plans to attack Toronto’s CN Tower.

“Zuley came to me and said, ‘I’m very happy with you. You gave us 80%, and we need the 20%,” Slahi said.

From there, Slahi said, he falsely confirmed that many individuals had Al Qaeda links.

Slahi was held at Guantánamo for 14 years without charges. He was released to his native Mauritania in 2016.

His memoirs about those years were published as a book that led to the film, “The Mauritanian,” directed by Kevin Macdonald.

At the November hearing, Assistant State’s Attorney William Meyer pressed Slahi about visits to Afghanistan in the early 1990s.

Slahi answered he was working for U.S. allies there and cut ties from Al Qaeda years before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.