Kym Worthy
Richard Wershe Jr., aka "White Boy Rick," has long insisted that Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy fought his parole on behalf of her good friend, homicide investigator-turned city council member, Gil Hill.
Coincidentally or not, after Hill passed away in 2016, she stopped opposing his parole from a Michigan prison. In 2017, the Michigan Parole Board paroled him after about 30 years behind bars. He was then transported to the state of Florida, where he's serving a sentence for being part of a car theft ring while he was behind bars there. His parole date is December 2020.
For the first time, she speaks publicly about Wershe, and tells WDIV's Kevin Dietz, that she never blocked his parole on behalf of Hill. Wershe alleges that Hill was mad at him for cooperating with the feds in a probe against crooked cops. Wershe also told the feds Hill took bribes.
"I think there is no doubt that it's related to my cooperation about Gill Hill and about police corruption in Detroit," said Wershe, who is 48.
Worthy says of Hill and Wershe's parole:
"We never even talked about the case. I never made any promises to him about anything. And even if he was my best friend I would never do that for anyone. The day you start compromising your cases, your beliefs, when you have a job like this, that's the day you need to quit."
"It was strictly a friendship. He was someone I admired greatly. He was head of homicide and I supported him in his run for mayor."
She said she opposed Wershe's parole, thinking that he couldn't be law abiding on the outside. Wershe was serving a sentence of life with the possibility of parole for a cocaine trafficking conviction as a teenager.
But in 2016, she said she had a change of heart when the Supreme Court ordered all prosecutors to look at juvenile lifer murder cases.
"When you compare someone who tortures a 9-month-old baby or someone who kills four people, and you look and you try to compare, when this case kept coming up, then I had to take a second look," she said.
