Greetings from the dark side. I love Chicagoland. I'm its biggest cheerleader. We have a Great Lake, four seasons, the Cubs, reliable public transportation, broad front lawns, world class theater, museums and restaurants ... I don't know why anyone lives anywhere else.
But when things around here get dark, they go inky black. Here are 13 times the Chicagoland area garnered national attention for something other than Michael Jordan.
1. H. H. Holmes. (1890s) America's first serial killer targeted women during Chicago World's Fair in 1893. He was the subject of the best-selling book Devil in the White City. I started to read that book but got too scared.
2. The Black Sox Scandal (1919). Members of the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series. They were paid by bookies to let the Cincinnati Reds win. A national loss of innocence and baseball's original sin. Players can come back from a lot – including alcohol, drugs and domestic violence – but not gambling. The stain is so great that when my grandfather came over from Germany and landed in Chicago more than a decade later, he became our family's first Cubs fan. As Cub fans we've watched as much bad baseball as good, but we've all always trusted that the games were honest.
3. Leopold and Loeb. (1924) Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two University of Chicago students who killed a 14-year-old boy just to prove they could. They believed they were so brilliant that a) they were entitled to do it and b) they could get away with it. While they were certainly depraved, they were not criminal masterminds. It took the Chicago Police less than 10 days to solve the crime, even with 1920s-era forensics. Legal genius Clarence Darrow famously saved them from the gallows. This case has inspired everyone from Alfred Hitchcock (Rope) to TV's Columbo to Sandra Bullock and Ryan Gosling (Murder by Numbers).
4. St. Valentine's Day Massacre. (1929) Seven mobsters were lined up in front of a garage wall and executed by rival gangsters, masquerading as Chicago cops. Now here is where Al Capone differs from Leopold and Loeb (see above). Though it's universally understood that Capone was responsible, no one – not even any low-level members of his gang – went to trial for the murders. They not only left no witnesses, there was no physical evidence to tie the crime back to Al (who was vacationing in Florida at the time).
5. John Dillinger. (1934) John Dillinger became a national folk hero for robbing banks and eluding law enforcement. The FBI gunned him down in front of The Biograph Theater, burnishing J. Edgar Hoover's legend. (Though I find it more than a little disturbing that agents engaged him in a shootout on a city street.)
6. Richard Speck. (1966) Oh! The nightmares little me had about Richard Speck! He broke into a dormitory and killed 8 of the 9 student nurses living there. He used a gun to force them into a bedroom where bound and gagged them, taking them one by one to another room to strangle or stab them. He unwittingly left a witness. He was so high he lost track of how many he held captive and how many he killed. Corazon Amurao slid under the bed and stayed perfectly still and silent for hours. I didn't have to look up her name, since I'll never forget her. When morning came, she wriggled out from under the bed and screamed out the window until help arrived. She described Speck in detail to police, including his "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo. During the citywide manhunt, he attempted suicide and she was taken to the hospital to identify him, and that tattoo. She faced him again in court. A new immigrant from the Philippines, she endured terror I can't imagine and behaved courageously, impeccably, to bring him to justice. I know she went back home, where she became a nurse, a wife, and a local politician. I pray she found peace.
7. The Democratic National Convention. (1968) This is when the phrase "Daley Cop" was born. Mayor Richard J. Daley (aka "Da Mare" or "King Richard I") was completely freaked out by the notion of protesters disrupting the Convention. So what did he do? Deployed literally tens of thousands of cops and National Guardsmen. Anti-war protesters were roughed up. McCarthy delegates were roughed up. Even CBS correspondent Dan Rather was roughed up. Now I don't mean to imply that the all the protesters were "angels" – that was the phrase: "it's not like they were angels." A lot of what they did was really gross (I remember there was proud public peeing). But what the country saw on TV was police brutality, and it did happen. Way too often. The DNC didn't hold another convention here until 1996.
8. John Wayne Gacy. (1970s) John Wayne Gacy was a contractor who killed at least 33 people. Twenty-nine of his victims were found decomposing in the crawlspace under his home. (Hence the local joke: How's the weather at Gacy's house? 29 below.) Gacy lured young men and some boys still in their teens to his home with whatever it took. Some were promised booze or drugs, others money in exchange for sex, some thought they interviewing for summer construction jobs. Then he raped and killed them. In real time, this case sensitized me to LGBTQ issues. Gacy was able to carry on like this for years because some of the boys were gay runaways disowned by parents who never reported them as missing. Some bodies were identified but never claimed. That's how appalling parents can be when it comes to a child's sexuality. Better dead than gay. Yes, Gacy is the one who killed them and he was a monster. But these parents! How very Christian to deny your child a Christian burial.
9. Patty Columbo. (1976) Patty was a pretty 19-year-old with feathered Farrah hair who seduced an older man and got him to help her kill her parents and her 13-year-old brother so she could inherit all the money. Because she appeared so normal, and the crime took place in a lily white village where brutality just doesn't happen, the nation was riveted. Patty
and I are approximately the same age, and my family had a connection to
the case – my mother's high school classmate was her public defender. My mom had some very juicy gossip about it that I shant repeat here but Patty was not a nice girl, nor was she especially sorry when not in front of the jury. She is still serving her 200 year sentence. I don't believe in the death penalty, but I'm fine with her staying exactly where she is.
11. Tylenol. (1982) Every time you wrestle to open your OTC meds, think of Chicago. Somebody tampered with Tylenol capsules and put the bottles back on store shelves throughout the area. Seven people – including a little girl – died of cyanide poisoning. No motive was ever established, no one ever went to trial for these unsolved murders. But you feel the effect of it today. First of all, there are fewer powder-filled capsules and more solid tablets on store shelves. Then there's the packaging. Now boxes are sealed shut and foil has been added to the mouth of each bottle so it's evident if it's been tampered with.
12. Jon Burge. (1980s-1990s) A
very bad cop. This police commander participated in or approved the
torture of suspects that resulted in over 100 false confessions. Men in
his custody were beaten, burned with cigarettes and shocked with a
cattle prod. I have a personal connection to this case, too. My dear
friend John served on a jury that sentenced a man to death for murdering four people one night in 1984. John was raised
Catholic and imposing the death sentence weighed heavily on his
conscience. Still, he reasoned, the law is the law and the defendant
had confessed! Well, guess what: That confession
came after hours of torture at the hands of Burge himself, who applied
electric shocks to the balls. (Yes, you read that right.) Fortunately
Burge was brought to justice and the ten (10!) men put on Death Row
by Burge were pardoned. But that trial, and his role in it, really
messed with my friend John. Imagine walking around knowing you could have
helped put an innocent man to death. John was a victim of Burge's, too.
There's such a ripple effect to these stories. PS The phrase "Daley Cop"
resurfaced when Burge's bad deeds were revealed in the 1990s, for
Richard M. Daley, aka King Richard II, was Mayor at the time.
13. Heather Mack. (2014) A teenage girl doesn’t want to wait to control her $1 million trust fund. So she brings her boyfriend, Tommy, along on a vacation with her widowed mother. Destination: Bali. Explanations for what happened next differ, but this is indisputable – Mom's bloody body was stuffed into a suitcase and left in Balinese taxi as Heather and Tommy tried to return to Chicago. The body was discovered before they could board their flight. To make matters juicier, Heather announces she's pregnant. Tommy thinks he's being a stand-up guy by saying he acted alone but no one believes him. Both were tried and sentenced to an Indonesian prison, where Heather's baby was born. This story is ongoing, and if you're interested, just plug her name into the Google Machine or ask the AI of your choice. I'm just so sick of Heather!
How about your town? Do you have a hall of shame?
Please join us for THURSDAY THIRTEEN. Click here to play along, and to see other interesting compilations of 13 things.
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