Robert Melock, framed and wrongly branded a monster by police, spent more than 30 years in prison before being exonerated.
WAUKEGAN, Il. – It was described as one of the most brutal crimes Lake County had ever seen: Robert Melock, 22, was charged with raping and murdering his own 72-year-old grandmother, Augustine Melock, who had been found stabbed, strangled, and sexually assaulted in January of 1989.
In his first trial, a jury sentenced Mr. Melock to death, as prosecutors branded him “a lying, raping, murdering man” with no remorse, beyond the possibility of redemption. When that conviction and sentence were reversed on appeal, the judge in the second trial, in 1993, sentenced Mr. Melock to nearly a century behind bars—effectively a death sentence. “He doesn’t deserve light at the end of the tunnel,” prosecutors argued. “He doesn’t deserve hope.”
But, somehow, Mr. Melock never gave up hope, and never stopped insisting on his innocence, even as he spent more than three decades of his life in Illinois prisons branded a murderer and a rapist. His numerous appeals and requests for post-conviction relief were unsuccessful until 2023, when newly discovered evidence demonstrated the extent to which the Waukegan Police Department had lied, manufactured evidence, and brutally coerced false statements from Mr. Melock in order to implicate him in this horrendous crime. In December 2023, the court finally vacated his conviction, and the State dismissed all charges against him.
Today, attorneys for Mr. Melock filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf against the City of Waukegan and nine former officers of the Waukegan P.D. Additionally, the lawsuit names as a defendant the firm of John E. Reid and Associates, the controversial for-profit corporation that provides interview and interrogation training to police forces around the world. John Reid had a contract to provide such consultation to the Waukegan P.D., and part of Mr. Melock’s interrogation was conducted by police and Reid employees at Reid’s Chicago offices.
As the lawsuit alleges, these interrogations were brutal, relentless, and coercive, employing some of the controversial techniques that John Reid developed. Police rousted Mr. Melock from his bed in the early hours and proceeded to interrogate him for the next 17 hours straight, moving him from location to location in an effort to exhaust him. When Mr. Melock continued to maintain his innocence, the officers and Reid employees subjected him to a polygraph test and pressed him with repetitive and accusatory questions about his grandmother’s murder and sexual assault. Finally, when he continued to maintain his innocence, they lied to him and told him that he had failed the polygraph, and that—based on its results—they were “150 percent” certain that he had committed the crime. In reality, the polygraph showed no such thing.
Mr. Melock was a vulnerable 22-year-old, who had not been read his Miranda rights and had no attorney present. Though he continued to maintain his innocence, his interrogators eventually coerced him into signing a fabricated confession. The officers quickly realized that this first confession lacked sufficient details about the crime, and so they fabricated a second and forced him to sign that one as well.
These coerced confessions were not the only evidence Waukegan P.D. fabricated to secure the wrongful conviction of Mr. Melock. At his trial, prosecutors also presented evidence of a supposed spontaneous confession Mr. Melock gave to a fellow inmate, Susan Holloway, while locked up in county jail the day after his interrogation. It was not until decades later, during his exoneration process, that attorneys discovered Susan Holloway had never been in lockup with Mr. Melock. Another woman was, but this woman had refused to lie to implicate him.
There was never any physical or forensic evidence linking Mr. Melock to the crime, and in fact, the lawsuit contends, the officers concealed or destroyed evidence that would have cleared him. His conviction rested entirely on the coerced and fabricated confessions and the word of a supposed jailhouse snitch who never even met him.
Attorney David Brodsky was an Assistant Public Defender for Lake County when he took Mr. Melock’s case is 1989, and he was incensed enough about the police tactics that he drew a contempt charge from the judge by referring to the polygraph test in his opening statements. After Mr. Melock was sentenced to death, Brodsky stayed with the case through the appeal and the second trial, converting his client’s sentence from death to life. Brodsky was named Chief Public Defender in 1997, and he was appointed to the bench for the 19th Judicial Circuit in 2007, but he never forgot the injustice done to Robert Melock. After his retirement from the bench, Brodsky took up the case again, and tirelessly helped Mr. Melock secure his long-overdue exoneration.
“I am beyond thrilled to finally see Robert Melock released from prison and beginning to heal,” says Judge Brodsky. “It is long past due that the system that incarcerated him acknowledged Robert’s innocence, and that he receives some form of justice for what was done to him.”
This is not the first time Waukegan police and John Reid & Associates have been jointly sued for manufacturing wrongful convictions. In 2015, they were parties to a $20 million settlement paid to Juan Rivera, who spent two decades in prison after being coerced into falsely confessing to the rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in 1992. At the time, Rivera’s settlement was the largest ever awarded to a single wrongful-conviction plaintiff in U.S. history. At least four of the individual defendants named in today’s lawsuit—Lucian Tessmann, Donald Meadie, Richard Davis, and Phillip Stevenson—were also involved in framing Juan Rivera.
Attorney Steve Art of Loevy + Loevy represents both Melock and Rivera.
“These cases are travesties of justice from any perspective,” Art says. “Just as they did with Juan Rivera, Waukegan and John Reid framed Bob Melock, an innocent man, and stole decades of his life. In doing so, these corrupt law enforcement officers let the men who really committed these horrendous crimes go free. Bob Melock suffered immeasurable damage and was nearly killed by the state, but at the same time the people of Waukegan suffered as well, because their police department cared more about manufacturing phony convictions than catching rapists and murderers.”
In addition to Mr. Art, Mr. Melock is represented by attorneys Jon Loevy, Roz Dillon, Wally Hilke, and Fatima Ladha of Loevy + Loevy.
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A copy of the complaint in this lawsuit, Case: 1:24-cv-12679, can be found here.
For photos of Mr. Melock, or for interviews with Mr. Melock and his attorneys, members of the media should contact Michael McDunnah at 312.371.5871 or mcdunnah@loevy.com.
Contact:
Steve Art, Partner, 773.580.2766, steve@loevy.com
Jon Loevy, Partner, 617.596.6349, jon@loevy.com
Roz Dillon, Attorney, 312.579.0039, dillon@loevy.com
Wally Hilke, Attorney, 312.243.5900, hilke@loevy.com
Michael McDunnah, Comms Director, 312.371.5871, mcdunnah@loevy.com
