Gil Hill as Inspector Todd in "Beverly Hills Cop" (1984).
Gil Hill as Ins. Todd in "Beverly Hills Cop" (1984).
Tim Kiska recalls sage guidance from Gil Hill, head of homicide, in the early 1980s when Kiska was a Detroit Free Press rporter. Hill, who went on to become Detroit City Council president, died Monday at age 84.
Kiska, now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, recounts in a guest column in the Freep how one week he witnessed Wayne County Morgue personnel unroll a carpet with two bodies inside:
The bodies were transported downtown, and I watched as the bodies were removed from the carpet. They were mere teenagers, dead for a week. It was mid-winter and their faces were frozen in horror. I was a young Free Press reporter on the courts beat. What I saw bothered me. A lot. I consulted a psychiatrist, who told me my shock proved I was human, not crazy.
A week later I was I was having a beer with Gil Hill in Greektown. I asked him about the case, and told him how the murders really got to me. Especially the faces.
Tim Kiska"Man, I thought you were smarter than that,” Hill said. “You never look at the faces.” Hill was not uncaring or callous. He, too, was bothered by the murders. The dead were two blossoming criminals who started running with a more experienced crook who, for no particular reason, killed them in his basement and dropped the bodies off in the park.
The task, Hill argued, was to figure out what had happened. The faces would only introduce static into that process. You did more good by bringing the killer to justice than by whining to a psychiatrist. I am guessing Hill looked at the faces, but had seen enough that it didn’t get to him.
