The Chicago Trunk Murder

2011-09-01
The Chicago Trunk Murder
Author: Elizabeth Dale
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1609090446
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On November 14, 1885, a cold autumn day in the City of Broad Shoulders, an enthusiastic crowd of several hundred watched as three Sicilians—Giovanni Azari, Agostino Gelardi, and Ignazio Silvestri—were hanged in the courtyard of the Cook County Jail. The three had only recently come to the city, but not long after they were arrested, tried, and convicted for murdering Filippo Caruso, stuffing his body into a trunk, and shipping it to Pittsburgh. Historian and legal expert Elizabeth Dale brings the Trunk Murder case vividly back to life, painting an indelible portrait of nineteenth-century Chicago, ethnic life there, and a murder trial gone seriously awry. Along the way she reveals a Windy City teeming with street peddlers, crooked cops, earnest reformers, and legal activists—all of whom play a part in this gripping tale. The Chicago Trunk Murder shows how the defendants in the case were arrested on dubious evidence and held, some for weeks, without access to lawyers or friends. The accused finally confessed after being interrogated repeatedly by men who did not speak their language. They were then tried before a judge who had his own view and ruled accordingly. The Chicago Trunk Murder revisits these abject breaches of justice and uses them to consider much larger problems in late-nineteenth century criminal law. Written with a storyteller's flair for narrative and brimming with historical detail, this book will be must reading for true crime buffs and aficionados of Chicago lore alike.

The Chicago Trunk Murder

2011-09-01
The Chicago Trunk Murder
Author: Elizabeth Dale
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1501757660
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On November 14, 1885, a cold autumn day in the City of Broad Shoulders, an enthusiastic crowd of several hundred watched as three Sicilians—Giovanni Azari, Agostino Gelardi, and Ignazio Silvestri—were hanged in the courtyard of the Cook County Jail. The three had only recently come to the city, but not long after they were arrested, tried, and convicted for murdering Filippo Caruso, stuffing his body into a trunk, and shipping it to Pittsburgh. Historian and legal expert Elizabeth Dale brings the Trunk Murder case vividly back to life, painting an indelible portrait of nineteenth-century Chicago, ethnic life there, and a murder trial gone seriously awry. Along the way she reveals a Windy City teeming with street peddlers, crooked cops, earnest reformers, and legal activists—all of whom play a part in this gripping tale. The Chicago Trunk Murder shows how the defendants in the case were arrested on dubious evidence and held, some for weeks, without access to lawyers or friends. The accused finally confessed after being interrogated repeatedly by men who did not speak their language. They were then tried before a judge who had his own view and ruled accordingly. The Chicago Trunk Murder revisits these abject breaches of justice and uses them to consider much larger problems in late-nineteenth century criminal law. Written with a storyteller's flair for narrative and brimming with historical detail, this book will be must reading for true crime buffs and aficionados of Chicago lore alike.

H. H. Holmes

2019-04-02
H. H. Holmes
Author: Adam Selzer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 645
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1510740856
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America's first and most notorious serial killer and his diabolical killing spree during the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, now updated with a new afterword discussing Holmes' exhumation on American Ripper. H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil is the first truly comprehensive book examining the life and career of a murderer who has become one of America’s great supervillains. It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century. Though Holmes has become just as famous now as he was in 1895, a deep analysis of contemporary materials makes very clear how much of the story as we know came from reporters who were nowhere near the action, a dangerously unqualified new police chief, and, not least, lies invented by Holmes himself. Selzer has unearthed tons of stunning new data about Holmes, weaving together turn-of-the-century America, the killer’s background, and the wild cast of characters who circulated in and about the famous “castle” building. This book will be the first truly accurate account of what really happened in Holmes’s castle of horror, and now includes an afterword detailing the author's participation in Holmes' exhumation on the TV series, American Ripper. Exhaustively researched and painstakingly brought to life, H. H. Holmes will be an invaluable companion to the upcoming Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio movie about Holmes’s murder spree based on Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.

Return to the Scene of the Crime

1999
Return to the Scene of the Crime
Author: Richard Lindberg
Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781581820133
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A region-by-region tour of Chicago that describes significant crimes that took place in each area and chronicles the changes--such as laws, real estate development, and industrialization--that have influenced crime in the city.

The Kosher Capones

2019-10-15
The Kosher Capones
Author: Joe Kraus
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501747339
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The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago's Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin "Zuckie the Bookie" Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate's "Jewish wing." These two men linked the early Jewish gangsters of the neighborhoods of Maxwell Street and Lawndale to the notorious Chicago Outfit that emerged from Al Capone's criminal confederation. Focusing on the murder of Zuckerman by Patrick, Kraus introduces us to the different models of organized crime they represented, a raft of largely forgotten Jewish gangsters, and the changing nature of Chicago's political corruption. Hard-to-believe anecdotes of corrupt politicians, seasoned killers, and in-over-their-heads criminal operators spotlight the magnitude and importance of Jewish gangsters to the story of Windy City mob rule. With an eye for the dramatic, The Kosher Capones takes us deep inside a hidden society and offers glimpses of the men who ran the Jewish criminal community in Chicago for more than sixty years.

Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871–1971

2016-05-25
Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871–1971
Author: Elizabeth Dale
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2016-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501757504
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In 2015, Chicago became the first city in the United States to create a reparations fund for victims of police torture, after investigations revealed that former Chicago police commander Jon Burge tortured numerous suspects in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. But claims of police torture have even deeper roots in Chicago. In the late 19th century, suspects maintained that Chicago police officers put them in sweatboxes or held them incommunicado until they confessed to crimes they had not committed. In the first decades of the 20th century, suspects and witnesses stated that they admitted guilt only because Chicago officers beat them, threatened them, and subjected them to "sweatbox methods." Those claims continued into the 1960s. In Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871–1971, Elizabeth Dale uncovers the lost history of police torture in Chicago between the Chicago Fire and 1971, tracing the types of torture claims made in cases across that period. To show why the criminal justice system failed to adequately deal with many of those allegations of police torture, Dale examines one case in particular, the 1938 trial of Robert Nixon for murder. Nixon's case is famous for being the basis for the novel Native Son, by Richard Wright. Dale considers the part of Nixon's account that Wright left out of his story: Nixon's claims that he confessed after being strung up by his wrists and beaten and the legal system's treatment of those claims. This original study will appeal to scholars and students interested in the history of criminal justice, and general readers interested in Midwest history, criminal cases, and the topic of police torture.

The Chicago Way

2008-07-08
The Chicago Way
Author: Michael Harvey
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2008-07-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307386287
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Private detective Michael Kelly is hired by his former partner to solve an eight-year old rape and battery case long gone cold. But when the partner turns up dead, Kelly enlists a team of his savviest colleagues to connect the dots between the recent murder and the cold case it revived: a television reporter whose relationship with Kelly is not strictly professional; his best friend from childhood, a forensic DNA expert; and an old ally from the DA's office. To close the case, Kelly will have to face the mob, a serial killer, his own double-crossing friends, and the mean streets of the city he loves.

The Rule of Justice

2001
The Rule of Justice
Author: Elizabeth Dale
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814208670
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The Rule of Justice explores a sensational homicide case that took place in Chicago in 1888. Zephyr Davis, a young African American man accused of murdering an Irish American girl who was his coworker, was pursued, captured, tried, and convicted amid public demands for swift justice and the return of social order. Through a close study of the case, Dale explores the tension between popular ideas about justice and the rule of law in industrial America. As Dale observes, mob justice -- despite the presence of a professional police force -- was quite common in late nineteenth-century Chicago, and it was the mob that ultimately captured Davis. Once Davis was apprehended, the public continued to make its will known through newspaper articles and public meetings, called by various civic organizations to discuss or protest the case. Dale demonstrates that public opinion mattered and did, in fact, exert an influence on criminal law and criminal justice. She shows, in this particular instance the public was able to limit the authority of the legal system and the state, with the result that criminal law conformed to popular will. The Rule of Justice is sure to appeal to historians of criminal justice, legal historians, those interested in Chicago history, and those interested in the history of race relations in America.

Blood Runs Green

2015-03-09
Blood Runs Green
Author: Gillian O'Brien
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 022624895X
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On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Chicago's Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and most curious crimes in civilized history. The dead man, Dr. P. H. Cronin, was a respected Irish physician, but his brutal murder uncovered a web of intrigue, secrecy, and corruption that stretched across the United States and far beyond. O'Brien tells the story of Cronin's murder from the police investigation to the trial-- and the story of a booming immigrant population clamoring for power at a time of unprecedented change.