Chicago Crime and Punishment

In 1947, James Hickman shot and killed the landlord he believed was responsible for a tragic fire which took the lives of four of his children on Chicago's west side. Prosecutors sought a death sentence for Hickman, but a vibrant defence campaign - which included the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead and acclaimed artist Ben Shahn - exposed how poverty and racism led to his crime and ultimately helped Hickman win his freedom. In the best tradition of true crime drama and narrative non-fiction, Joe Allen unearths the compelling story of that campaign.

Based on an analysis of nearly 6000 homicide cases in Chicago, this text examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence.

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 publicwas 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.

"Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else." So begins a chapter of this sharp, fearless collection from a master storyteller. Revisiting seventeen Chicago murder cases--including that of Belva and Beulah, two murderesses whose trials inspired the musical Chicago--Michael Lesy captures an extraordinary moment in American history, bringing to life a city where newspapers scrambled to cover the latest mayhem. Just as Lesy's book Wisconsin Death Trip subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so Murder City exposes the tragedy of the Jazz Age and the tortured individuals who may be the progenitors of our modern age.

In October 1955, three Chicago boys were found murdered, their bodies naked and dumped in a ditch in Robinson Woods on the city's Northwest Side. A community and a nation were shocked. In a time when such crimes against children were rare, the public was transfixed as local television stations aired stark footage of the first hours of the investigation. Life and Newsweek magazines published exclusive stories the following week. When Kenneth Hansen was convicted and sentenced for the murders, the case was considered solved--until questions were raised about Hansen's presumed guilt. Shattered Sense of Innocence: The 1955 Murders of Three Chicago Children tells the gripping story of the three murdered boys--thirteen-year-old John Schuessler, his eleven-year-old brother, Anton, and thirteen-year-old Bobby Peterson--and the quest to find and bring to justice their killer. Authors Richard C. Lindberg and Gloria Jean Sykes recount the bungled 1955 police investigation, the failures of multiple law enforcement agencies, and the subsequent convictions of Kenneth Hansen, in 1995 and 2002, and present new information concerning two suspects overlooked by police for five decades. The authors deftly examine all sides of this tragic story, drawing on exclusive interviews with law enforcement agents, with horse trainers affiliated with the so-called horse mafia, and with the man convicted of the murders, Kenneth Hansen. This intensely intimate account offers a rare glimpse into one community and examines how these atrocious crimes altered public perceptions nationwide. Shattered Sense of Innocence, which is also a story of political controversy, a determined federal agent's quest for justice, and a community's loss of innocence, includes fifty illustrations.

A Promise of Justice tells the story of the case the Ford Heights Four, the worst miscarriage of justice since the Scottsboro trials in Alabama in the 1930s. Four innocent black men collectively spent 64 years in Illinois prisons -- two of them on death row -- for a crime they did not commit. Based on police and prosecutorial misconduct, perjured testimony, and the ineptitude of court-appointed defense lawyers, these four boyhood friends were convicted of the abduction, rape, and brutal murder of a young white couple. The Ford Heights Four professed their innocence, and only two men listened: journalist Robert Warden and Professor David Protess. The two joined forces and enlisted the help of three of Protess's journalism students. They not only proved the men's innocence but also found and helped convict the real murderers. A Promise of Justice is an unflinching look into the workings of justice and punishment in America, and proves more spellbinding and emotional than even the best crime fiction (Touchstone Pictures has already optioned major motion picture rights).

Addressing the relationship between cultural narratives and social reality, Nathan considers the media's coverage of the Black Sox scandal, from front-page attention to scathing commentaries and cartoons, when the story broke in 1920 and in the following years.

An Italian immigrant who spoke little English and struggled to scrape together a living on her primitive family farm outside Chicago, Sabella Nitti was arrested in 1923 for the murder of her missing husband. Within two months, she was found guilty and became the first woman ever sentenced to hang in Chicago. Journalist Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi leads readers through Sabella's sensational case, showing how, with no evidence and no witnesses, she was the target of an obsessed deputy sheriff and the victim of a faulty legal system. She was also--to the men who convicted her and the reporters fixated on her--ugly. For that unforgiveable crime, the media painted her as a hideous, dirty, and unpredictable immigrant, almost an animal. Lucchesi brings to life the sights and sounds of 1920s Chicago--its then-rural outskirts, downtown halls of power, and headline-making crimes and trials, including those of two other women (who would inspire the musical and film Chicago) also accused of killing the men in their lives. But Sabella's fellow inmates Beulah and Belva were beautiful, charmed the all-male juries, and were quickly acquitted, raising doubts among many Chicagoans about the fairness of the "poor ugly immigrant's" conviction. Featuring an ambitious and ruthless journalist who helped demonize Sabella through her reports, and the brilliant, beautiful, twenty-three-year-old lawyer who helped humanize her with a jailhouse makeover, Ugly Prey is not just a page-turning courtroom drama but also a thought-provoking look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, and the American justice system. 

It was a crime that shocked the nation: the brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were intellectuals--too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. When they were apprehended, state's attorney Robert Crowe was certain that no defense could save the ruthless killers from the gallows. But the families of the confessed murderers hired Clarence Darrow, entrusting the lives of their sons to the most famous lawyer in America in what would be one of the most sensational criminal trials in the history of American justice. Set against the backdrop of the 1920s--a time of prosperity, self-indulgence, and hedonistic excess in a lawless city on the brink of anarchy--For the Thrill of It draws the reader into a world of speakeasies and flappers, of gangsters and gin parties, with a spellbinding narrative of Jazz Age murder and mystery.

Among the criminal celebrities of Prohibition-era Chicago, two well-educated Jewish boys from wealthy South Side families were notorious. Revealing secret testimony, this book separates fact from myth as it unravels the crime, the investigation, and the trial, in which they were defended by the era's famous attorney, Clarence Darrow.

Excerpt from The Holmes-Pitezel Case: A History of the Greatest Crime of the Century and of the Search for the Missing Pitezel Children It is not possible to find in the annals of crim inal jurisprudence, a more deliberate and cold blooded villain than the central figure in this story, nor would the most careful research among the records of the prominent murder trials that have absorbed public attention during the past century, disclose the careful planning that made possible the apprehension of Holmes, the prosecution to an almost miraculous ending of the search for the missing children, or the equal of the forensic skill and cunning that wove the close web in which this man of many names and many murders was eu tangled. That Holmes' committed four murders has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, and that his timely arrest prevented three more mur ders is equally sure. If the Chicago Castle could give up its guilty secrets, there is more than a strong suspicion that the list of Holmes crimes would be materially lengthened. We do know that fraud, deliberately planned and coolly executed, the blackest treachery toward his associates, a long term of brutal cruelty toward the helpless woman and her children who were in his clutches, and the marvel ous duplicity and falsehood practiced upon the three women who each believed herself to be his lawful wife, are to be added to the list. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A New York Times Bestseller, Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, A Library Journal Best Book of the Year -- Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. Daniel Hudson Burnham, a renowned architect, was the brilliant director of works for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor, was the satanic murderer of scores of young women in a torture palace built for the purpose near the fairgrounds.

On July 14th, 1966, Richard Franklin Speck swept through several student nurses' townhouse like a summer tornado and changed the landscape of American crime. He broke in as his helpless victims slept, bound them one by one, and then stabbed, assaulted, and strangled all eight in a sadistic sexual frenzy. By morning, only one young nurse had miraculously survived. The killer was captured in seventy-two hours; he was successfully prosecuted in an error-free trial that stood up to appellate scrutiny; and the jury needed only forty-nine minutes to return a death verdict. Here is the story of Richard Speck by the prosecutor who put him in prison for life with a brand new introduction by Bill Kunkle, the prosecutor of the infamous John Wayne Gacy Jr. In The Crime of the Century, William J. Martin has teamed up with Dennis L. Breo to re-create the blood-soaked night that made American criminal history, offering fascinating behind-the-scenes descriptions of Speck, his innocent victims, the desperate manhunt and massive investigation, and the trial that led to Speck's successful conviction.