A Bohemian living on the Southwest side murdered a mother, a father and four children.
The police when the case was first brought to their attention as one worthy of investigation, it then being considered a strange havoc wrought by sudden deaths, laughed at the sincere efforts of a newspaper man.
They told him he was a dreamer and “hard up” for a story. The newspaper man after gathering all the circumstances and facts, all suspicious, went to the Coroner, over the heads of the police, and placed the case before him. The Coroner saw that all clews pointed to a horrible series of murders. He began an investigation, assured himself that he was right, and then “called” the police in and ordered the arrest of the murderer. The man was later found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. He escaped the gallows through a strange popular sentiment and was sent to the penitentiary for a life term.
That is a standard example of police inefficiency.
Another case that gives evidence of the lack of initiative in the police department came to light recently.
It occurred on the South side.
Two small children disappeared from their home on the South side. The mother was frantic with grief and sorrow and the father dogged the police day after day trying to arouse them from their lethargy to search for his two children. He received no encouragement.
In desperation he went to a newspaper office and stated the case. He told how the police had failed to make any strenuous efforts to find his children. A reporter was sent out who “stirred” the police to activity. Every possible clew was followed but to no effect. A physician declared that unless news of the discovery of the children, alive or dead, was soon forthcoming the mother would succumb to her grief.
A newspaper reporter suggested that the waters in the slip at Thirty-ninth street and the lake where the children were accustomed to play, be dynamited. It occurred to him and not to the police, that the two children might have fallen into the water. The lake was dynamited at that place by the police and the bodies found.
The police when compelled by the pressure of public opinion are obliged to resort to the bolstering of a case.