‘Lost’ files in Daley nephew case ‘removed,’ then mysteriously returned
By TIM NOVAK AND CHRIS FUSCO Staff Reporters/tnovak@suntimes.com March 25, 2013 12:07AM
What was taken
These are the records that were taken from the Chicago Police Department’s file on David Koschman’s death and later returned, after the police closed the case without charges.
◆ The “investigative file inventory” — a one-page record that lists the documents in the file.
◆ A two-page “chronological table of contents.”
◆ A detective’s “general progress report” that contained a handwritten note that read: “V DAILEY SISTER SON” — an apparent reference to Koschman’s alleged assailant, Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, a nephew of then-Mayor Richard M. Daley.
◆ A “general progress report” from Detective Ronald Yawger that said Vanecko “becomes very aggressive” just before Koschman was hit. The statement is scratched out. This report says Koschman told Vanecko and others who were with him, “Yeah, you better back down.”
◆ A photo of a police lineup that included Vanecko.
◆ “A photocopy of the front of the file turned over by former Det. Yawger, which is miscellaneous names and phone numbers, as well as miscellaneous information.”
◆ Color photos from the Cook County morgue.
Related Documents
Chicago Police Department internal affairs report on missing documents
Article Extras
Updated: April 26, 2013 6:04AM
Key documents from a manslaughter case involving a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley that vanished from the Chicago Police Department and then mysteriously reappeared weren’t lost or misplaced — they were “removed” without authorization, apparently by someone in the department.
That’s according to a newly obtained report made by the police lieutenant who said he found the missing records, which included a handwritten note saying “V DAILEY SISTER SON.” That appears to have been a reference to Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, who was indicted in December on a charge of involuntary manslaughter as a result of a special prosecutor’s investigation into the 2004 death of 21-year-old David Koschman of Mount Prospect. But Walsh said the documents weren’t there until he found them on June 29, 2011. He filed a report with his boss three weeks later. “The file which was believed to have been lost was obviously not lost but had been removed and returned in violation of department rules and regulations,” Walsh wrote in the July 20, 2011, memo to Area 3 Cmdr. Gary Yamashiroya. According to the internal affairs findings, investigators don’t know when the records were removed from the case file, who took them or who returned them. The police previously released copies of the missing records, which also included a detective’s notation that Vanecko had been acting in a “very aggressive” manner before Koschman was struck during a drunken confrontation on Division Street near Dearborn early on April 25, 2004, causing him to fall and hit his head, leading to his death 11 days later from brain injuries.
Walsh, a second-generation Chicago cop, did not respond to requests for comment. According to the newly released reports, Walsh said the records reappeared at 9:39 p.m. on June 29, 2011 — four months after detectives closed the Koschman case without seeking charges, concluding that Vanecko punched Koschman but shouldn’t be charged because he acted in self-defense. The records surfaced as Joseph Ferguson, the City Hall inspector general, and his staff had begun investigating the police department’s handling of the case.
The day after Walsh wrote the memo to his boss about the no-longer-missing files, Sgt. Richard Downs of the department’s Internal Affairs Division opened an investigation that ended 35 days later with Downs saying he was unable to identify who took the records or returned them. No one was disciplined. Walsh “stated that this particular file along with other homicide files are not locked up and are kept in a filing cabinet in the Violent Crimes office and can be accessed by any Violent Crimes detectives who are working on murder cases,” Downs wrote in his report. Walsh “stated that he does not know who may have removed this particular file from the file cabinet and does not know who returned the file.” Walsh — who oversees detectives at Area 3, including Rita O’Leary, one of the original detectives on the Koschman case in 2004 — appears to be the only officer Downs interviewed. In 2004, Walsh was a field lieutenant in the department’s 18th District. Uniformed officers from that North Side district responded to the call that Koschman was lying unconscious in the street. Later that year, Walsh was arrested for attacking a female gas station attendant outside Kalamazoo, Mich. He received a 30-day suspension from the police department and was later convicted of assault and battery.
The original investigation of Koschman’s death ended with no charges and the police saying they could not identify who hit him. In early 2011, prompted by a Sun-Times investigation, the police re-examined the case, which had remained on the books for more than seven years as an unsolved homicide, closing it on March 1, 2011, without seeking charges but for the first time identifying Daley’s nephew as having struck Koschman.
Soon after, prompted by Sun-Times reports that questioned the police department and Cook County state’s attorney’s office’s conclusions and their handling of the case, Ferguson started looking into the case. Amid Ferguson’s investigation, the police acknowledged that some of their records had gone missing and said they turned up in June 2011. They were turned over to Detective James Gilger, who had closed the Koschman investigation four months earlier and said nothing in the newly discovered documents changed his conclusion. Gilger filed a report stating there were actually two sets of missing files: those Walsh found on the file-cabinet shelf and another set that Walsh had received from Ronald Yawger, a retired detective who led the original Koschman homicide probe in 2004. Yawger’s file included 38 pages of Koschman’s medical records and a crime-scene report, according to the police department. Early in his career with the Chicago Police Department, Yawger was indicted by a federal grand jury that charged him with having provided security to a drug dealer who sold cocaine to an undercover FBI agent. Yawger was found “not guilty” and never faced any disciplinary action from the police department. He is now an investigator in the attorney general’s office.
