In May, high above the streets of the city he patrolled for years, often with honor and distinction, the alleged leader of the torture ring, Jon Burge—a burly, first-through-the-door, decorated Vietnam veteran—went on trial in federal district court in Chicago. Burge’s path to the Dearborn Street courthouse was blazed by the more than 100,000 words Conroy wrote over the years about the case.

But Burge, who is sixty-two, lives in Florida on a police pension, and is reportedly battling cancer, is not facing charges of torture. The statute of limitations on that charge ran out long ago. Instead, he is facing perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying in 2003 during a civil suit about his role in the torture ring. Burge has always maintained his innocence. One of his lawyers, Richard Beuke, refused to comment on the case or Conroy. Beuke said Burge would not comment either.

No journalist knows more about Burge, or the band of alleged torturers in blue he is supposed to have led, than Conroy. Yet, on the first day of jury selection in early May, Conroy didn’t have an assignment to cover the trial. He showed up in the twenty-fifth-floor courtroom anyway. Faith and stubbornness made him go. “I’ll probably cover it for somebody, hopefully not full of resentment for what I’m being paid,’’ he says. “Part of me is wondering why I’m doing this. I guess there’s this sense of seeing something through. And I actually think I could cover this case pretty well.’’

Conroy sat about twenty-five feet behind Burge. From behind, Conroy says, Burge looked much the same as he did when they first met in 1989. When Burge slowly got out of his chair and said, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’’ to the prospective jurors, Conroy says he recognized “the same gravelly voice.’’

When the proceedings finished for the day, Conroy lingered, hoping to have a word with Burge. But Burge and his lawyers left too quickly. “I would have said hello,’’ Conroy says. “I don’t know how he feels about what I have done. There are a lot of people out there screaming that Jon Burge is a monster, but I have not portrayed Jon Burge as a monster.’’ In a 2005 piece, for example, Conroy dug into Burge’s army record from the 1960s that described how the eighteen-year-old recruit went on to become a military policeman in Korea, “gathering five letters of appreciation from superiors that praised his loyalty, devotion to duty, outstanding performance, military bearing, appearance, attention to detail, tact, and extra effort.”

In 1968, Burge volunteered for Vietnam. He returned home in 1969 and soon joined the Chicago Police Department. In 1972, Conroy wrote, Burge prevented a twenty-two-year-old woman on the South Side from committing suicide by jamming his thumb into the firing mechanism an instant before she squeezed the trigger.

“I think if you were to look at the press coverage of Jon Burge and look who has written about the heroic things that he did on the job and in Vietnam, I’m pretty much solo,’’ Conroy adds. “If someone else did it too, they took it from my coverage.’’

As a young reporter in the mid-1970s, Conroy was about to leave his job at Chicago Magazine. Both man and magazine were young and raw, and he planned to move to South America to make his mark as a foreign correspondent. But a colleague convinced him to move instead to South Chicago, the land of steel mills and the tough people who worked them—Serbs, Croatians, Latinos, and African Americans. The colleague told him there were great stories to be told about urban politics, union conflicts, race, and the fading American dream. It was the gritty stuff of Upton Sinclair and Nelson Algren. Conroy agreed.

Don Terry is a 2009-2010 Encore Fellow at CJR. He has worked at the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the St. Paul Dispatch, and The New York Times, where he was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for the series "How Race is Lived in America."