What's Done in the Dark

A feat of reporting and writing by an award-winning journalist, What’s Done in the Dark tells the story of a shocking pattern of police misconduct in Chicago and the group of working-class women who fought for two decades to expose it

In April 1999, the mothers, sisters, and aunts of men imprisoned for murders they swore they didn’t commit gathered in a neighbor’s living room to share their stories and console one another. Almost instantly, a common thread in their loved ones’ cases emerged: a detective named Reynaldo Guevara, who, like most of them, hailed from Humboldt Park, a predominantly Latino neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest side.

In Guevara’s wake were stories of coerced confessions, pre-arranged identifications, interrogation room beatings, and suspiciously convenient phone calls from anonymous informants in numerous cold cases. Though his fellow officers and even some prosecutors had either directly witnessed or heard testimony regarding these methods, he faced little scrutiny—let alone disciplinary action—from the Chicago P.D. The women of Humboldt Park wouldn’t let it go so easily.

Almost overnight, what began as an informal support group of factory workers, janitorial staff, and a school lunch lady morphed into an action committee. They sent leaflets to prisons across the state, amassing accounts from dozens of men regarding Guevara’s behavior. They fundraised and protested, contacted elected representatives, federal law enforcement, and legal organizations—anything to make their voices heard. But the biggest obstacle wasn’t gathering or presenting the evidence. It was overcoming the entrenched bias of the criminal legal system toward one of their own, and getting someone in a position of power to listen.

Following three families—the Rodríguezes, the Serranos, and the Almodóvars—over the course of a nearly twenty-year quest for justice, What’s Done in the Dark sheds much-needed light on the largely unseen role of working class women in righting the wrongs of the criminal legal system. The gripping story of a crooked cop and the system that insulated him, it is also a celebration of a group of extraordinary women who refused to give up until their loved ones walked free.