It’s always interesting when two crime stories intersect – and in a real way, not another case of the newspapers making wild stabs at a game of “connect the dots” with criminals (like the attempts to connect Johann Hoch to HH Holmes, Louis Thombs, and every other criminal of the day). In 1920, Carl Wanderer…
Tag: crime
Chicago and the first Fingerprint Evidence
Here’s a story I’ve been telling a brief version of on tours lately: In 1910, a robber named Thomas Jennings was making a run from the scene of a burglary – the Englewood home of Clarence Hiller, who had once been chief clerk of a local railway. During his escape, Jennings fired two shots at…
John Wayne Gacy and the bus station
In my first year or so of tours, I was mostly repeating the stories I heard from other guides and “ghosts of Chicago” books. A major task of mine since then has been to filter out all the misinformation. Some of the stories were completely made up. Others were just a little bit off –…
An Unsolved Mystery: The Body in the Box
Just before Halloween on in 1903, a man called the 50th street police station to inform authorities that men excavating a gravel pit at 56th and South Park Avenue had struck a box containing a body. The police borrowed a gasoline-powered torch from a nearby fruit stand and searched the gravel pit. In it, they…
Here we go again…H.H. Holmes Goes to College!
Well, it’s been a while – we’ve been busy working on a new series of Smart Aleck’s Guides and preparing for the November release of a couple of novels around here. But Halloween is coming, and our Smart Aleck’s Guide to Grave Robbing E-book is coming very soon, so….why not talk about H.H. Holmes? Holmes…
Grave Robbing Week: The Barrel of Syrup
New Episode!Grave Robbingin Lincoln Park Download mp3from archive.org More Podcasts Rotters by Daniel Kraus. Father-son grave robbing! Amazon IndieBoundDan’s page Adam and Daniel are a part of the same violence gang: The Brothers Delacorte More on City Cemetery In ROTTERS, the book pictured on the left, and in our recent podcast, author Daniel Kraus says…
Grave Robbing Week: A Wagon Full of Corpses (1867 and 1872)
New PodcastEpisode:Grave Robbingin Lincoln Park Download mp3from archive.org More Podcasts Rotters by Daniel Kraus. Father-son grave robbing! Amazon IndieBoundDan’s page Adam and Daniel are a part of the same violence gang: The Brothers Delacorte Say what you will about how disgusting and depraved people are nowadays – I don’t recall ever seeing an item in…
Grave Robbing Week: The Scandal of 1857
New Podcast Episode: Grave Robbing in Lincoln Park Download mp3from archive.org More Podcasts Rotters by Daniel Kraus. Father-son grave robbing! Amazon IndieBoundDan’s page Adam and Daniel are a part of the same violence gang: The Brothers Delacorte More on City Cemetery Q: How do you enjoy the work?A: Well, it wasn’t very pleasant at first,…