Chicago City Hall. (Michael Izquierdo / WTTW News)

Chicago taxpayers should pay $4 million to the family of a man who spent 33 years in prison after he was wrongfully convicted of murdering a woman in 1989 in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, city lawyers recommended.

Lee Harris was 36 when he was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to 90 years in prison for murdering 24-year-old Dana Feitler, who was forced to withdraw $400 from an ATM after being kidnapped from the lobby of her apartment building in the city’s most affluent neighborhood.

Eight months after Harris was exonerated in March 2023, he died of natural causes, records show.

In all, Chicago taxpayers spent $201.8 million to resolve 43 lawsuits brought by more than three dozen people wrongfully convicted based on evidence gathered by the Chicago Police Department sin 2019, according to an analysis of city data by WTTW News.

The proposed $4 million settlement is set to be considered Monday by the City Council’s Finance Committee. A final vote of the City Council could come on Oct. 30.

Feitler was shot once in the back of the head in early morning hours of June 18, 1989, not far from Rush Street, the city’s most active nightlife district. Her death, 22 days after she was shot, touched off a political firestorm amid a surging murder rate in Chicago that hit an all-time high in 1992, records show.

Harris lived several blocks west of the Gold Coast in the Cabrini-Green complex, run by the Chicago Housing Authority. Harris helped organize youth programs and worked with former Mayor Jane Byrne and former Secretary of State Jesse White, who represented the area in the Illinois House.

Harris, who had been convicted of burglary, served as an informant for the Chicago Police detectives investigating Feitler’s murder. Eventually, Harris gave police more than 20 different versions about what happened the night Feitler was murdered. Harris said he wanted to get the $25,000 reward offered by Feitler’s family.

While serving as a police informant, officials paid for Harris, who said he feared for his safety, to stay in hotels. CHA officials moved Harris and his to an apartment on the south side of Chicago.

But detectives said they began to suspect Harris, who admitted he was present when she was killed by two other men whom he knew from Cabrini Green.

No physical evidence linked Harris to the crime, but he was tentatively identified by a woman walking her dog as one of three Black men she saw with a White woman she said was Feitler on the night she was killed. The jury also heard testimony from a man who said Harris confessed to the killing while both were being held at Cook County jail.

Harris’ lawyers, who described him as a petty thief and con artist, said his statements to police were based on media coverage and things he learned from detectives.

In 2004, the man who testified Harris confessed to him recanted, telling officials he had lied at the direction of Chicago police detectives in order to get favorable treatment.

The lead detective investigating Feitler’s murder was Richard Zuley, who was later found to have lied “in police reports and to his supervisors, physically abusing suspects and omitting exculpatory evidence from police reports,” according to the lawsuit.

Zuley served on the task force investigating the 1993 murder of seven employees at a Palatine Brown’s Chicken and Pasta and identified an informant who Zuley said identified the killer. That evidence was discredited after DNA evidence identified two other men in the slayings, and they were convicted.

Zuley also led the investigation into the murder of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis, who was shot and killed by a sniper at Cabrini-Green in 1992.

Zuley testified in 1994 that Anthony Garrett confessed to accidentally shooting the boy while firing at rival gang members from the 10th floor of a high-rise apartment building.

But Garrett later recanted that confession, which his attorneys came after he was beaten during an interrogation that lasted 24 hours. Garrett was convicted and sentenced to 100 years in prison.

A member of the U.S. Naval Reserve, Zuley later worked as a Guantanamo Bay interrogator after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture identified Zuley as the interrogator of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who said in his 2015 memoir that Zuley threatened to bring Slahi’s mother to Guantanamo to be raped.

The Senate report also described Zuley shackling Salahi in painful postures for extended periods of time and feeding him seawater as part of “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the administration of former President George W. Bush that amounted to torture.

Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]