At around two-thirty in the afternoon on May 8, 1993, Marshall Morgan left his mother’s house, on the South Side of Chicago, and drove off in her light-blue Chevrolet Cavalier. Morgan was borrowing the car and, in return, had agreed to get it washed. It was a warm day, and he wore denim shorts, a black-and-white pin-striped shirt, and black sneakers. After he got the car cleaned, he planned to return home and spruce himself up: he had a date with his girlfriend that night.

Morgan was a twenty-year-old sophomore at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he played point guard on the basketball team. The season had just ended, and he had performed notably well, averaging eighteen points and three steals a game; he had been the runner-up for the Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference’s most-valuable-player award. His coach, Ed McQuillan, told me recently that Morgan was a “great kid” and a complete player, who was “quicker than hell, great on defense—he could shoot long, and he could drive and penetrate.”

When Morgan didn’t come home, his mother, Marcia Escoffery, grew worried. She and Morgan were close: she became pregnant at fifteen and brought him up, an only child, on her own. “All we had was each other,” Escoffery told me.

Morgan’s father, Marshall Morgan, Sr., had recently come back into his life, after an absence of seventeen years. He had attended his son’s basketball games and made other efforts at reconciliation: that day, he had booked a room for Morgan and his girlfriend, Lorena Peete, at a local Days Inn. Escoffery had warned her son to be wary of such gestures, but he welcomed them. “He would never back off from family,” Peete told me.

Escoffery stared at the phone for hours. Morgan always called to say that he’d be late. After nightfall, she notified the police that her son was missing.

Morgan’s disappearance made the Chicago evening news. Police created a toll-free number to encourage leads and plastered the South Side with photographs of him. Nine days after Morgan disappeared, the Cavalier was found parked in front of a run-down building on South Michigan Avenue, near Fifty-eighth Street. Neighbors had reported a putrid smell escaping from a cracked rear window. A forensic team arrived to find a decomposing male corpse on the floor, between the front and back seats, with a .38-calibre gunshot wound in the stomach and two more in the back. The body was naked, except for a black-and-white pin-striped shirt. Dental records confirmed that it was Morgan.

Homicide investigators from Area One, the branch responsible for the neighborhood around Fifty-eighth and Michigan, took up the case. Even in a city that was averaging three murders a day, Area One detectives were exceptionally busy. Their territory included the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, twenty-eight public-housing towers whose stairwells were controlled by drug gangs. Robbery, rape, and murder were commonplace. “They were killing people left and right,” Kenneth Boudreau, a veteran detective who served in Area One, told me. The neighborhood was overwhelmingly black, but the police force was overwhelmingly white, and it struggled to establish authority. Tenants, seeing police below, sometimes threw trash from their windows. Many crimes went unsolved.

Cases that attracted significant media attention, however, often became known as “heaters,” drawing the resources necessary to make arrests and secure convictions. According to a 1992 article by Myron W. Orfield, Jr., a law professor at the University of Minnesota, heater cases were diverted to “judges statistically far more likely to convict.” Some cops tried to avoid the stress of such cases: in 2005, a retired detective told the Chicago Tribune, “You pray to God not to give you a heater case.” Others, like Boudreau, didn’t shirk the challenge.

Morgan’s case was a heater. Crime-lab technicians dusted the Cavalier, and three days later they pulled fingerprints from a Miller High Life bottle and a Löwenbräu forty-ounce that had been found in the car; the prints matched a set on file for Tyrone Hood, a resident of a South Side neighborhood eight miles away. Two detectives immediately began searching for him.

Shortly before 4 P.M., Hood was walking from his house to a corner store, the Munch Shop, when the officers, in an unmarked police car, pulled up alongside him. They informed him that his prints had turned up at a murder scene. Hood, who was twenty-nine, had a full, unpicked head of hair, and a tattoo of his nickname, Tony, on his left forearm. A married father of three, he cobbled together a living through temporary auto-repair jobs, construction gigs, and clerical work. He had grown up in a chaotic home, the eighth of ten children. An older brother had served time for robbing McDonald’s restaurants. When Hood was seventeen, two thieves shot and killed his father. Not long afterward, Hood was arrested twice for aggravated assault—one of the incidents involved unlawful use of a firearm—and once each for marijuana possession, battery, and theft. He had served a year on probation for the weapons charge. Now, facing the cops, he dismissed the possibility of his prints being at the scene. (“Someone must have put them there,” he later declared.) But he agreed to answer questions at the police station, to “clear his name.”

On May 8th, Hood said, he had spent the day at home with his family; that evening, he had watched “Cops” with his wife, Tiwanna. Later in the interrogation, though, he said that several people had come over, among them his friend Wayne Washington. When Hood was asked about his whereabouts on May 9th—Mother’s Day—he initially said that he had been with his mom. Then he said that he had stayed home with Tiwanna.

Kenneth Boudreau and his partner, John Halloran, took over the interrogation the next day. Boudreau considered himself an expert at separating a man from his secrets. “I have spent a lot of time learning how to interview people, and have been trained by the F.B.I.,” he told me recently. “You don’t have to beat people to get them to talk.” Chicago cops, however, have long been criticized for being overly aggressive. In 1931, a White House commission warned that the “third degree”—methods that “inflict suffering, physical or mental, upon a person in order to obtain information about a crime”—was “thoroughly at home in Chicago”; one preferred tactic involved beating a suspect in the head with a phone book, since it could “stun a man without leaving a mark.” In the late sixties, Chicago police officers shot and killed a Black Panther activist while he was in bed; his relatives received a large wrongful-death settlement. In 1982, a lieutenant named Jon Burge was accused of torturing Andrew Wilson, an alleged murderer of two police officers, who was in his custody. A doctor who examined Wilson found “multiple bruises, swellings, and abrasions,” and several “linear blisters.” Wilson claimed that he had been cuffed to a hot radiator and that “electrical shocks had been administered to his gums, lips, and genitals.” Burge was eventually fired for “systematic” misconduct.

Boudreau, a solidly built man who is now in his mid-fifties, told me that he had never relied on physical intimidation during interrogations. At the time of his encounter with Hood, Boudreau was an Army reservist. In 1990, during the Gulf War, he had deployed to Saudi Arabia; after the September 11th attacks, he had participated in the Ground Zero rescue effort. When he discussed interrogations with me, he spoke like a student of cognitive science. “It’s all right-brain, left-brain,” he said. “When someone is recalling something, they look left. But when they’re creating an answer they look right.” He claimed that people who spoke with their hands near their mouths were acting suspiciously, and theorized that “when someone’s tapping their leg you can see that if they had full movement they would be running away.”