"At this they all got into the wagon and drove west on Bryn Mawr avenue until they reached the Evanston road. Then they started down Evanston avenue at a rapid gait and I lost sight of them. I noticed a long square box in the wagon, but it was very dark and I could not see plainly what it was. The fellow I talked to, however, I'll recognize and identify anywhere."
From a study of the surroundings, taken in connection with this story, the conclusion was arrived at by the police authorities that the trunk had been first taken to the lake, its contents thrown into the surf, and that it was then brought back into the road and dumped into the ditch. This, as was developed later, was the original intention of the murderers. The point on the beach where the tracks showed that the vehicle had made a halt was about as dreary and desolate a spot as could be found in the country. Sandy, covered with heavy timber, and removed nearly half a mile from a house or a shelter of any kind, it was just the place that a man or a party of men with a murderous job on their hands would have naturally selected.
To empty a trunk into the lake, or to dig a hole in the sand and drop a human body in it, would have been the work of but a few minutes, and all traces of the bloody crime might thus have been obliterated forever.
THE SEARCH REVEALS NOTHING.
For the next forty-eight hours the efforts of the authorities were re-doubled. All the livery stables on the north side of the city were visited for the purpose of ascertaining if a white horse and vehicle, as described by Mrs. Conklin and Frank Scanlan, had been rented out on the previous Saturday. Several white horses were owned by the liverymen in that section, but all, apparently, were satisfactorily accounted for. The one man, who, had he so chosen, could, by answering the question in the affirmative, have solved at least this portion of the mystery, preferred to hold his peace for the time being. Scores of men and boys waded through the pond in the German Catholic Cemetery, the river in the vicinity was dragged, nearly every sewer and sluice box in the city of Lake View was examined, and even the clay holes—which were as plentiful thereabouts as reefs in Lake Michigan—were hunted from end to end. As a last resort, and at the earnest solicitation of friends of Dr. Cronin, the Chicago River was dredged for a distance of six hundred feet at Fullerton avenue bridge, over which the wagon with the trunk was supposed to have crossed. This task, conducted by Captain Schaack and eight officers, occupied two days. Like the search in every other direction, however, it was utterly without result. The physician had disappeared as completely as though the earth had opened and swallowed him up, and the mystery of the trunk and its gory contents remained a mystery still.
CHAPTER III.
AN ACCIDENTAL CLUE—FRANK WOODRUFF'S ARREST—HOW HE WAS HIRED TO GET A WAGON TO CARRY THE MYSTERIOUS TRUNK TO LAKE VIEW—A CORPSE IS DUMPED OUT—HE THINKS IT WAS THAT OF A WOMAN—HIS SENSATIONAL CONFESSION—THE POLICE ON A WILD GOOSE CHASE.
Despite the small army of professional and amateur detectives at work on the case and the untiring labors of the missing man's friends, it was an accident rather than a clue that brought about the first important development of this sensational tragedy. On Thursday morning, May 9th, five days after the physician had disappeared as completely as though the ground had opened and swallowed him up, a stable owner named Foley, having barns on Fifteenth Street near Centre Avenue, entered the Twelfth Street Police Court while the hearing of a case was in progress, and informed Lieutenant Beck that a young man had been trying to sell him a horse and wagon and that he had agreed to purchase the rig for $10, in order that he might detain the supposed horse-thief until the police could be notified. Two officers, O'Malley and Halle, were at once sent to the barn. The man, upon being placed under arrest, at once fainted. Upon regaining consciousness, he was started for the station. His peculiar agitation was noticed by the officers, and one of them, in joking about a horse-thief having such a nervous temperament, made a slight remark in which he mentioned the name of Dr. Cronin. The prisoner evinced a strong tendency to faint again, and gasped: