FOR DECADES THE LARGE, leather-trimmed volumes sat in the recesses of the archives of the Chicago Police Department, with nary a visitor. Then, in the summer of 1998, researcher Leigh Buchanan Bienen spotted an article by Tribune reporter Charles Madigan describing the volumes and their contents: detailed records of every murder in the city between 1870 and 1930.
That fall, after weeks of negotiations with the police bureaucracy, Bienen entered the archives and first opened the pages of the aging volumes. Out poured a treasure trove of historical information so elaborately detailed and rich that it left her giddy. The handwritten pages, recorded by an unknown clerk writing with descriptive precision, a flair for the English language and long, elegant Victorian penmanship, chronicle 11,439 homicides in that 60-year time period, and rank as one of the great historical finds in recent memory.
“I knew right away it was a really important set of data,” Bienen says. But even she initially underestimated just how important it would become.
Under Bienen’s direction, that data has become the centerpiece of The Chicago Historical Homicide Project, an ongoing scholarly effort that seeks to understand the history of Chicago through the stories behind the homicides.
A Web site containing the murder chronicles and a staggering amount of other data went up in 2005 (http://homicide.northwestern.edu/database/) and drew 77,000 hits in its first three days. The site is searchable in a variety of ways and now gets 40,000 hits a month, from the general public as well as from criminologists and other scholars.
More than a few inquirers have spotted a long-dead grandfather or uncle in its pages. Indeed, complete historical accounts offering this level of detail are rare. The stories told are richly informative, full of pathos and surprising facts
“The records are so expressive … in part because they were handwritten,” says Bienen, who is a lecturer at Northwestern University Law School. “Record-keeping now has become so depersonalized. This database tells the story of people’s lives.”
The frequency of murders in robberies and street fights, during the wee hours at saloons, or involving prostitutes– often genteelly referred to as “cyprians” by the record keeper–attests to a fast-moving city of lively but often reckless and volatile energy.
As the years wear on, the number of automobile deaths predictably rises and the number of horse-related deaths falls, but the stories of many of the killings have a familiarity even if their details offer tragic surprises.
Domestic disputes are commonplace. For instance, the tempestuous marriage of Kalmer Balogh and his wife ended abruptly on June 27, 1921. According to the record keeper’s notes, Kalmer was “accidentally stabbed to death in the kitchen of his home at 9430 Burnside Avenue by his wife, Helen, while struggling for possession of a knife with which he had threatened her.” He adds: “Helen was exonerated by the coroner.”
In 1903, 23-year-old Sophia Herman was rushed from her Wilmot Avenue home to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. The culprit was not a boyfriend or spouse but a professional midwife, Harla Faustman, who was arrested for performing an illegal abortion.
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While all the cases are tragic, some are especially poignant: In April 1885, a newborn infant was strangled at home at 350 Wells St. by its mother, Hannah Benson, who “gave as a reason for her act that she was too poor to care for it and naming as its father John Nelson, of Batavia, Ill., from which place the woman came three days previous.”
In their episodic narrative, the records capture a fascinating period in the life of the city: the great migration of African-Americans, the rise of the packing industry, the Columbian Exposition, the Haymarket Riots, the influenza epidemic and continuing waves of immigrants that made Chicago a living–and often violent–experiment.
“Homicides happened on the busy thoroughfares,” Bienen writes, “in living rooms and kitchens, in expensive bedrooms, in the mansions and on the factory floors, in armed confrontations with the police and National Guard, at labor meetings by the lake and on picket lines.”
Bienen’s interest in homicide and criminal law stems not from a gruesome fascination or personal brush with death but rather extends back to her days in law school when she traveled to Nigeria and wound up conducting research on murder there.
Homicides can divulge sociological data, but they also reveal things about the law, the courts, the prisons and all sorts of important social indicators. “It tests norms and establishes sanctions,” she says. “Society reveals itself through its criminal law.”
She returned to the U.S. and taught at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Berkeley, and later practiced law in New Jersey’s public defender’s office, making criminal defense her specialty. She came to Illinois to help reform capital punishment.
Bienen, who is married to Northwestern University President Henry Bienen, says she doesn’t watch murder shows on TV, has never seen an episode of “Law and Order” or “CSI,” but suspects that our culture’s repetitive and callous portrayal of homicides in video games and newscasts “trivializes it, and tells people that its OK.”
There is one constant, Bienen says, that links homicides of yesteryear with homicides of today: Nine of ten perpetrators are men, and 7.5 victims are men and 2.5 are women.
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MURDERERS’ ROW
Ten notorious Chicago homicides of the 1920s
1. “BIG JIM” KILLED
May 11, 1920: A month after divorcing his wife and marrying a singer, the diamond-wearing, brothel-operating “Big Jim” Colosimo was shot in his cafe. Many suspected his ex-wife, but the hit was ordered by mobster Frankie Yale.
2. A COVER-UP EXPOSED
June 21, 1920: Initially hailed as a hero for killing a bum who attacked and killed his wife as they walked home one evening, Carl Wanderer was later discovered to have hired the man and shot his wife with his own gun.
3. A LOVERS’ QUARREL
March 1, 1921: Following a night of heavy drinking and arguing at The Green Mill, Herbert Ziegler broke down the apartment door of his lover, Cora Orthwein. Orthwein, formerly a St. Louis society woman, fired a revolver and killed him.
4. SELLER BEWARE
Sept. 10, 1921: After receiving a brand-new Packard from two dealership employees, Harvey W. Church brought them to his basement and beat them to death before dumping one in a river and burying the other in his garage.
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5. THE $50 MURDER
No. 1, 1921: While visiting his sister-in-law, Betty, the recently laid-off and penniless Thomas Catherwood saw some bills in Betty’s purse. He strangled her to death with a rope and took the money–a total of $50.
6. LEOPOLD AND LOEB
May 21, 1924: Affluent “THRILL KILLERS” Richard Loeb, 18, and Nathan Leopold, 19, stopped 14-year-old Bobby Franks while he was walking home and clubbed him to death. Following a nationally prominent trial, the men were sentenced to life.
7. MURDER OF A FLORIST
Nov. 10, 1924: While arranging flowers for the funeral of gang affiliate Mike Merlo, florist and bootlegger Dion O’Banion, notorious for his erratic and murderous behavior, turned to greet three men. They shot him six times.
8. THE PEOPLE V.S. FISHER
July 26, 1925: During a robbery of the Franklin Trust and Savings Bank, robber Irving Fisher was shot and killed by night watchman Yates Fisherman, who was later exonerated. The case was considered an example of proper justice.
9. MOBSTER RAMPAGE
April 27, 1926: After a four-month period in which 29 mob murders took place, Asst. State’s Atty. William H. McSwiggin was killed outside a Cicero saloon. The hit generated public criticism of the mob and the cops.
10. ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE
Feb 14, 1929: The operation involved luring Bugs Moran and his men into a garage to buy whiskey, then staging a police raid. The fake police lined the bootleggers up and shot them to death. But Moran never showed up.