People v. Mrdjenovich

236 N.E.3d 613

2023 IL App (1st) 191699

The PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Anthony MRDJENOVICH, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 1-19-1699

Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, SECOND DIVISION.

June 27, 2023

Appeal from the Circuit Court of Cook County. No. 16 CR 0059, Honorable Marc R. Martin, Judge Presiding.

Douglas H. Johnson and Joanna P. Kluzowska, of Kathleen T. Zellner & Associates, P.C., of Warrenville, for appellant.

Kimberly M. Foxx, State’s Attorney, of Chicago (Enrique Abraham, Daniel Piwowarczyk, and Joseph Alexander, Assistant State’s Attorneys, of counsel), for the People.

OPINION

JUSTICE ELLIS delivered the judgment of the court, with opinion.

¶ 1 A jury convicted defendant Anthony Mrdjenovich of the first degree murder of Phillip Scheau. On appeal, defendant argues that his confession should have been suppressed on fourth and fifth amendment grounds (see U.S. Const., amends. IV, V), that the trial court denied him his due process right to present a defense by limiting his ability to elicit evidence of the circumstances of his confession and the fact that he was a "victim" of "human trafficking," and that his prior conviction, for aggravated robbery, should not have been admitted as impeachment evidence. We affirm.

¶ 2 BACKGROUND

¶ 3 I

¶ 4 Phillip Scheau was shot and killed in front of a Motel 6 in Schiller Park on February 27, 2015. A few months later, defendant told the police and a grand jury that one Timothy Dorsey was the shooter. Defendant later admitted that he lied about Dorsey and confessed that he was the shooter—only to recant his confession at trial and pin the shooting on a man named Rob Funteas. But no matter whom defendant named as the actual shooter in any given account, the driving force behind Scheau’s murder, as defendant would have it, has always been Dorsey.

¶ 5 Dorsey has not been charged as a codefendant, and his culpability for the murder, if any, is not at issue. Still, it was Dorsey’s "sex-trafficking ring" that set the stage for the tragic events that gave rise to this case. United States v. Dorsey, 830 F. App’x 479 (7th Cir. 2020) (nonprecedential disposition); see 18 U.S.C. § 2421 (2018). To put Scheau’s murder, the investigation, and defendant’s conflicting statements into their full context, we thus begin with a brief introduction to Dorsey and the sordid .criminal enterprise that has since landed him in federal prison.

¶ 6 When Scheau was murdered, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies were already investigating Dorsey’s operation. Briefly, based in the Chicago area, Dorsey would send his "masseurs" throughout the country to offer "massage" services—which often included sexual acts—to customers who booked appointments through Dorsey on the Internet site Backpage. Dorsey would set the terms of the appointments, arrange transportation, and generally collect half the proceeds. Dorsey’s workers typically were young men in desperate financial straits. On many accounts, Dorsey sought to maintain their fealty through manipulation, abuse, and threats of violence.

¶ 7 Scheau was—or had been—one of Dorsey’s "masseurs." He had recently quit Dorsey’s operation and began posting ads on Backpage for his own independent services. In short order, he turned up dead at the Motel 6, where he had booked an appointment with a customer. Or so he thought. It did not take long for the authorities to suspect that his murder was related to Dorsey’s operation. But details, and proof, were initially hard to come by. The shooter left behind little in the way of eyewitnesses or other actionable evidence.

¶ 8 II

¶ 9 Perhaps the first major development in the investigation came in August 2015, when defendant contacted Scheau’s sister, Anna, on Facebook. Defendant, then 19 years old, was also one of Dorsey’s "masseurs," based out of Dallas, Texas. He said he had information about the murder that he would share with the police in exchange for a "reward" and "protection" from Dorsey. Though they could make no promises at that time, the Schiller Park detectives leading the investigation, Frank DiSimone and Brian Norris, were of course eager to hear what defendant had to say. In mid-September, defendant agreed to come back to the Chicago area and meet with the detectives at a local restaurant, where he conveyed his first version of the events.

¶ 10 In sum, Dorsey was furious when he found Scheau’s ads. Dorsey told defendant that he shot Scheau in the back and head, with a .380-caliber handgun, at a fake appointment that he had booked. Defendant said he was in Texas at the time of the murder. The day after he first met with the detectives, defendant testified to these same facts before a grand jury.

¶ 11 Having no roots in the Chicago area, defendant immediately left town and was pulled over for speeding in Michigan. He was driving a rental car provided by Dorsey, who routinely dispatched his workers to their far-flung appointments in rental cars and on buses. Unbeknownst to defendant, the car had recently been reported stolen. Defendant was arrested, quickly accepted a plea deal, and spent 90 days in a Michigan county jail.

¶ 12 Detectives Norris and DiSimone visited defendant in jail in mid-November 2015. (The video recording of their conversation is included in the record.) They urged him to return to the Chicago area when he was released, where he could best help the detectives achieve everyone’s common goal: to "put [Dorsey] away." The detectives, in turn, could help defendant get his life in order. And not just for his own sake: this would also make him a far more credible witness in a case against Dorsey. But this mutual advantage would only pan out if defendant remained close by and in regular contact with the detectives.

¶ 13 Defendant was receptive to the idea. Perhaps it helped that Dorsey, as the detectives told him, was now in custody in Georgia (on a state-law pimping charge; his federal indictments would come over a year later, in 2017). Defendant told the detectives that he did have one friend in Chicago, someone named Freddie, with whom he hoped to stay.

¶ 14 After meeting with defendant, DiSimone went to Texas, where, among other things, he spoke to defendant’s adoptive parents. DiSimone told them that he and Norris wanted to help defendant, whom they viewed as a likely victim of Dorsey’s sex trafficking operation as well as a key witness in the murder. By the time defendant was released, his parents had purchased a bus ticket for him to return to the Chicago area.

¶ 15 While he was in Texas, DiSimone interviewed Ben Price and J.C. LaSoya, two more of Dorsey’s "masseurs." And the investigation took a new turn: Price put defendant at the murder scene with Dor- sey. Specifically, according to Price, defendant told Price that he drove up from Dallas, with Dorsey, and saw an unnamed third person—a "hired gunman"—walk up to the Motel 6. (Granted, Price’s account was hearsay, but so was defendant’s.) Price claimed he did not know who the victim was and thought that the murder happened in Chicago.

¶ 16 III

¶ 17 Defendant was soon released, in early December 2015, and returned to the Chicago area as planned. Given his recent history of flight and general rootlessness, the detectives were not about to let him disappear into the wild before they had a chance to confront him with Price’s statement. So they met him at the bus station and drove him directly to the Schiller Park police station for questioning.

¶ 18 Detectives Norris and DiSimone interviewed defendant on December 3, and then again on December 4. In due course, he would move to suppress these statements on fourth and fifth amendment grounds. The trial court granted in part the fifth amendment motion based on Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), though the ruling did not result in the suppression of any significant statements. We will return to these rulings and the pertinent details of the questioning later, as they become relevant to the issues before us. For now, it is the evolving content of defendant’s statements that matters.

¶ 19 At the outset of the December 3 questioning, the detectives confronted defendant with the fact that "some other people" were putting him in the Chicago area, with Dorsey, at the time of the murder. Defendant initially denied these allegations and stuck to his story: he was in Dallas.

¶ 20 About 20 minutes in, defendant admitted, for the first time, that he drove from Dallas to Chicago with Dorsey. In other words, he had lied to the police and the grand jury. But he did not yet admit that he was at the Motel 6. Rather, he said, the two drove to Dorsey’s apartment in Elk Grove Village, where Dorsey picked up a gun. Dorsey left defendant at the apartment sometime around midnight. (Scheau was shot shortly before 10 p.m.) When Dorsey returned, it was "late as hell," and they left immediately. All in all, defendant maintained, he "was pretty much there to help drive" from Dallas and back.

¶ 21 When Dorsey returned from the Motel 6, he allegedly told defendant that he had just killed Scheau: at the fake appointment, he ran up behind Scheau; the gun jammed, so he fired again, shooting Scheau in the back; Scheau ran around the corner of the motel; and Dorsey chased him, and fired again, this time shooting him in the head.

¶ 22 The detectives grew suspicious that truly second-hand information would be this detailed, not to mention consistent with the presence of live rounds found at the scene, suggesting that the gun had in fact jammed. And some glaring discrepancies remained between Price’s statement and defendant’s newly revised account. For one, DiSimone had been told that at least two, and perhaps as many as three, people were at the scene of the murder. Even more importantly, as he reminded defendant, "[p]eople are telling me you were there."

¶ 23 Pressed by the detectives, defendant’s story slowly morphed into a new one: Dorsey had defendan...