City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (22 page)

Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack
,

Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!

To some, that “awful day” of armed conflict in Chicago that the
Broad Ax
had warned about in early May was seeming ever more plausible in July.
¹⁶

Recognizing the dire situation in the city, the
Chicago Evening Post
made its recommendation known in a plainspoken editorial in its late edition, under an all-caps headline reading simply: “
THE MAYOR SHOULD RETURN
.” “One way to boost Chicago is to go bronco-busting,” the
Post
observed. “Another is to stay on your job when your city is threatened.… Mayor Thompson should not go to Cheyenne; he should turn in his tracks and come back to face his difficult and important duty at the City Hall.”

But this advice was much too tardy. Big Bill and his crew were already in Wyoming, kicking up their heels in fine fashion. Dressed in a cowman’s Stetson, a colorful silk shirt, and shaggy black chaps, the mayor had already led the Frontier Days parade through the Cheyenne streets, showing off his skills with a lariat. “From noon to dewy eve,” wrote Charles MacArthur in the
Tribune
, “the Mayor and his Chicago boosters roped steers … and carried on in real Wild West style. Chicago was talked of, sung of, and boosted of as long as their voices held out, which was until about four o’clock.” MacArthur, later to achieve fame as Ben Hecht’s collaborator on the play
The Front Page
(and as husband of the actress Helen Hayes), was making plenty of ironic hay with the mayor’s visit, using the event to comment obliquely on the politics back home: “Excitement was caused during the afternoon by the disappearance of Fred Lundin from the
grandstand before the last event,” MacArthur wrote. “He was discovered beneath the stand in earnest conference with Hole-in-His-Sock, an ancient Indian chief. In return for some lore of the northland, Mr. Lundin was instructing the chief how to vote his tribe.” MacArthur also took delight in pointing out that Big Bill seemed particularly adept at lassoing attractive young ladies.
¹⁷

Whether the mayor ever heard about the chastising
Post
editorial is unclear. Even if he had, however, he likely would have ignored it. With the weekend at hand and their return to Chicago scheduled for Monday morning, Thompson and his entourage saw little reason to curtail their stay. After all, their goodwill mission, frivolous as it may have seemed, had the highly laudable purpose of boosting their illustrious hometown. And besides, if they were to leave now, they’d miss the Saturday night gala and parade.

A
LL
C
HICAGO
S
EEKS
S
OLUTION
of Missing Child Mystery,” the
Chicago Daily News
reported in its early-Saturday edition. The headline was hardly an exaggeration. The entire city, it seemed, was now engaged in a gruesome guessing game, appalled and yet intrigued by the ongoing Janet Wilkinson case. The
Daily Journal
, calling the girl’s whereabouts “the biggest question in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans today,” outlined its four working hypotheses: that Janet had drowned in the lake; that she had been hit by an automobile whose driver then carried her away in a panic; that a lonely, childless woman had abducted her; or that Fitzgerald (or some other person “of low moral type”) had murdered her.
¹

By the time the
Tribune
announced an additional $2,500 reward for a productive lead, the Chicago Avenue station was already being flooded with calls, telegrams, and letters by the hundreds. Some merely sought corroboration for one of the many wild rumors running through the city; others offered purported leads, most of which the police did their best to check out. One tip—that Janet was seen on a Chicago-bound train now en route from Benton Harbor—was taken especially seriously. John Wilkinson and a police detective rushed to the Dearborn Station to meet the train. They discovered that a young girl of Janet’s age was indeed among the passengers, but it wasn’t Janet.
²

The close of business at noon made many additional volunteers
available to scour the streets for any sign of the girl. As Janet’s classmates at Holy Name Cathedral School finished summer classes for the weekend, their sister superior urged them to join the search. “Don’t waste your time in the playgrounds or [on] the beaches,” she said. “Go look for Janet.” It was a call that many adult Chicagoans also heeded, joining police and other city workers in what had now become a regionwide hunt. “Boatmen began dragging the lake for a third time at daybreak,” the
Evening Post
reported. “Police and volunteer searchers are once more going over the double stone building at 112–114 East Superior Street.… Other searchers are covering every foot of the weed-grown vacant property in the neighborhood. Men from the street department are looking in sewers and catch basins near the Wilkinson home.”
³

Detectives received a shock that afternoon when a dredging tool used to probe the Virginia Hotel sewer came up filled with crushed bones. Chief of Detectives Mooney sent them over to a Dr. W. A. Evans for identification (there was no official medical examiner for Cook County until 1976, so police often had to rely on private doctors for such tasks). After a brief examination, however, Dr. Evans determined that they were a combination of chicken joints and the bones of “an animal far larger than a human being”—probably a cow.
⁴

At the Chicago Avenue station, investigators were now questioning Fitzgerald’s coworkers, and this new testimony only strengthened their conviction that they had the perpetrator—of whatever crime—in their custody. Marie Pearson, a Virginia Hotel chambermaid, told police that Fitzgerald had once attempted “familiarities” with her. William Harris, a chef, claimed that the night watchman had nearly fallen asleep over his supper on Tuesday evening, six hours after Janet’s disappearance, and that he complained of not having slept all day. Engineer W. J. Hogan claimed that Fitzgerald had mysteriously sent him from the hotel boiler room on Tuesday night on “some
trivial business.” When Hogan returned, Fitzgerald was still in the boiler room. The engineer had been gone long enough, police concluded, for Fitzgerald to dispose of the child’s body in the furnace.

Most incriminating, however, was an incident described by Michael Kezick, a fireman at the hotel. Kezick claimed he saw a girl fitting Janet’s description sitting in Fitzgerald’s lap in the boiler room a few days before her disappearance. Fitzgerald tried to insist that it had been another girl—the daughter of hotel employee Florence Howe—but Kezick wouldn’t back down. “No, it was Janet, I am sure.”

Fitzgerald shook his head at this, making a show of “pitying the ignorance” of his accuser. “Mike,” he said, “you are mistaken.”

“I am not mistaken,” Kezick said vehemently. “I know the [Howe] girl.”
⁵

The incident was typical of Fitzgerald’s ever more brazen intransigence. Despite the wealth of evidence against him, the man continued to flatly deny all accusations, often adopting a tone of outraged condescension toward witnesses against him. Now facing his fourth day of round-the-clock interrogation, he apparently had yet to request a lawyer, and no attorneys had voluntarily come forward to offer their services. According to the
Evening Post
, this was unprecedented in Chicago: “Ordinarily, the arrest of a suspect in any case is followed by a rush of lawyers to the station. So brutal does this case appear, however, and so strong is the circumstantial evidence against Fitzgerald, that no offers of legal aid have been made.”

At any time since his arrest, an attorney could have insisted on Fitzgerald’s release, since no formal charges had yet been brought against him. That the prisoner seemed unaware of his basic rights was fortunate for police, who, in those days before Miranda warnings, were naturally in no hurry to enlighten him. Even so, Lieutenant Howe had a backup plan, should any effort be made to free him. John Wilkinson was reportedly willing to press charges based on Fitzgerald’s alleged assault of Janet the previous December—although
without a victim or firsthand witness to testify against him, holding the suspect on those hearsay charges might have been problematic as well.
⁶

Certainly any conscientious lawyer would have objected to the manner in which the suspect was being questioned. Forced to stay awake for days now, slapped or shouted at whenever he tried to sleep, Fitzgerald had broken down at least once in a fit of hysterical weeping. But for the most part, he was maintaining a cool, almost haughty, sometimes taunting demeanor under questioning, once even interrupting an interrogation to tease Captain Mueller about a new straw hat he was wearing. Lieutenant Howe, who must have been near weeping in frustration himself by now, was nonetheless still sure that a confession was imminent. “He is the most stubborn and one of the shrewdest men I have ever questioned,” he told reporters after a morning session with the suspect. “He misrepresents about the most trivial and unimportant details, apparently just to be contrary. But I am sure he will come off his high horse before many more hours. He will have to give in.”
⁷

Hoping to overwhelm Fitzgerald with a rush of new accusations, Howe decided to bring in five North Side women and their daughters to see him. Each mother had recently complained about a strange man bothering her child, and authorities thought that at least one or two might recognize the prisoner. But not one of the girls identified Fitzgerald as the man who had accosted her. The tactic thus backfired on the lieutenant, further emboldening Fitzgerald in his stonewalling campaign. It also raised a disturbing question: If Fitzgerald was not the molester of these girls, who was? Just how many men were out there victimizing Chicago’s children?

By late afternoon, word had gone out to police to be on the lookout for “another moron” at large in the city streets.
⁸

*   *   *

Day four of the
Wingfoot
inquest was proving to be no less confounding than the previous three sessions. Yet another new expert witness—Major John York, an officer in the army’s wartime balloon service in France—was called to testify, and he produced yet another new theory of what had actually caused the disaster. “From an examination of the bag,” he said, “I believe that the fire was a result of friction between the fabric and the finger-shaped patches that attach the bag to the cables supporting the car. A bumpy condition of the air could have jiggled the car up and down and caused such friction.”

Apparently noting confusion among the layman’s jury, Goodyear attorney Mayer interrupted him. “Your evidence is interesting from a scientific standpoint,” he said to the witness, “but come down to earth and explain it so [that] this jury of businessmen will know what you mean.”

Major York flushed red and asked for a pencil and paper. He carefully drew a diagram of the connection patches and showed how air turbulence might generate the friction he described.

“I think,” an increasingly testy Coroner Hoffman said then, “these businessmen will understand now.”
⁹

Perhaps the jury did grasp York’s theory, but they definitely seemed more interested in the sparking-engines scenario described so vividly by Benjamin Lipsner the day before. When H. T. Kraft, chief pilot for Goodyear, was called next, he was peppered with numerous questions about the engines and their behavior on the first two flights of the day. But Kraft maintained that he had seen no sparks during the blimp’s preliminary tests, which he had conducted himself. “You know it is possible to test a dirigible on the ground—something that cannot be done with an airplane,” he pointed out. “The motors started with the first swing of the stick [that is, the propeller] and there was no backfire. They worked beautifully.” He also argued that sparks would not have been a danger even if the rotary engines had created some. It was virtually impossible for exhaust emissions
to ignite the balloon gas, he insisted, since any hydrogen from the bag, being much lighter than air, would quickly rise away from the engines.
¹⁰

Which explanation, then, should the juries accept? Clearly, no one was entirely satisfied with any of the theories offered so far. The consensus was that no finding should be made until the juries heard directly from Harry Wacker, the only survivor besides Boettner of the blimp’s third flight. “I have made an effort to see Wacker,” Coroner Hoffman announced, “but he was [still] too sick.… The jury will go to Wacker’s bedside as soon as he is sufficiently well.”