In early 2011, as the Chicago Police Department began re-investigating a homicide involving a nephew of Mayor Richard M. Daley, a high-ranking cop had a secret meeting with the retired detective who didn’t solve the case seven years earlier, according to records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
The records show the meeting between Lt. Denis P. Walsh, a homicide case supervisor, and retired Det. Ronald E. Yawger took place in January 2011 — the same month Walsh reported Yawger’s original file on the David Koschman case was missing.
Months later, that missing file ended up in a safe inside Walsh’s Northwest Side bungalow, the Sun-Times has reported.
There’s no record of the meeting in police files that have been released on the Koschman case.
Nor is there any mention of the meeting in the 162-page report released in February by special prosecutor Dan K. Webb on Koschman’s death and two police investigations that found no cause to charge Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, who pleaded guilty early this year to involuntary manslaughter. Webb wrote that Walsh and Yawger had exchanged calls and text messages over several months and then met at a North Side police station in June 2011.
The revelation about the Walsh-Yawger meeting in January 2011 is buried in one of 900 emails on the Koschman case released to the Sun-Times by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
