CHICAGO'S HAUNTED POLICE STATIONS

A Ghostly Gathering of Strange Tales from 1907

Police stations, jails and prisons are not uncommon places to find ghosts, as has been detailed in earlier installments of my Dead Men Do Tell Tales series. However, in late 1906 and early 1907, a number of police stations – and even the old Cook County Jail – came to the Chicago public’s attention as being infested with ghosts.

In 1907, six Chicago police stations, officials said, were definitely haunted. Ghosts had been seen at many stations from time to time, but those six stations were regularly haunted. In one of the stations, a patrol driver resigned his position rather than continue in the “ghost-besieged” headquarters where he was assigned to duty. In another station, one of the patrolmen was attacked by a ghost while he was sleeping in the off-duty quarters upstairs. He was so frightened that he fired his revolver at the phantom and left six holes in the plaster wall. In still another station, a shadowy intruder so affected the mind of a patrolman that he went insane and had to be taken away to an asylum.

The Stockyards, Hyde Park, Grand Crossing, Englewood, Des Plaines and New City stations were all reportedly haunted. The Stockyards station was said to be the most spirit-infested and evidence of the spectral activity was vouched for by the commanding officer and the patrolmen. Desk Sergeant William Prindeville, who had been at the station since 1896, had seen so many ghosts in his time, he claimed, that he had become used to them and rather enjoyed their company.

The Stockyards

The first ghost made an appearance at the Stockyards station in the winter of 1902 and was seen on the night that followed his death in the basement of the building. The “old soldier,” as the officers described him, was worn out after tramping through the snow all day, came into the station, and asked to be allowed to spend the night there. Sergeant Prindeville, who was on desk duty at the time, told the man to go down to the basement, where they often allowed “bojacks,” as the homeless were known to the police, to sometimes spend the night. The old veteran made his way down to the warm basement and curled up on one of the bunks. Early the next morning, a number of “regulars” who had seen the old man come in the night before, found him dead on his bunk and reported it to the officers upstairs.

The Stockyards Police Station

It the early morning hours of the following day, as Sergeant Prindeville was dozing in his chair and waiting for dawn to end the night watch and send him home for breakfast, he heard a slight rapping on the door. He first thought the wind had caused the door to rattle, but listening carefully, he realized that it was a sound made by someone knocking. He went over to the door and opened it. As he turned the knob, a flurry of snow whipped into his face and in the dim light, he saw the faint outline of the old soldier who had asked him for a place to sleep on the previous night. Knowing that the man had died, Prindeville quickly realized that he was facing a ghost. He hurriedly slammed the door and went back behind his desk, unnerved by what would turn out to be the first of many such encounters.

When the shift changed later that morning, Prindeville told the other officers what he had seen. Not surprisingly, they refused to believe him, insisting that the swirling snow must have been playing tricks on his eyes. After that, however, Prindeville began watching for the ghost, and so did some of the other men. Nearly everyone at the station saw the ghost at one time or another, because he returned every winter whenever the snow would fly. Each night following a storm, a knocking would come at the door and when answered, officers would find the other soldier standing outside. Prindeville stated that he often spoke to the ghost when it appeared, but he never received an answer.

Hyde Park

According to an account from 1907, Detective John Shea, one of the most reliable and trustworthy officers at the Hyde Park police station, nearly shot out the back wall of the station house one night when a ghost invaded his sleeping quarters. Shea had gone to sleep just after midnight in the sleeping quarters on the third floor of the building. Just after 2:00 a.m., he reported, something began tugging on the bed covers, awakening him from a sound sleep. The room was pitch dark and Shea, who was only half awake, did nothing more at first than reach down and try and retrieve the disappearing blankets.

Detectives at the Hyde Park Station

A few minutes later, the bed covers were again pulled from the bed and the police officer, now thoroughly awake, thought that somebody was trying to play a trick on him. He decided that he would wait until it happened again, and if anyone appeared, he would fire off his revolver into the ceiling to frighten them and show that he too enjoyed playing pranks. As he lay there with his finger on the trigger, he was horrified to see a phantom shape step out from behind a clothes locker and approach the bed.

   

Shea later stated that the ghost was shaped like a woman, except that it only had one eye, which shined with a blue sort of light. It slowly approached the bed until it was only about a foot away, and then it reached out a hand toward him. By this time, Shea was as cold as an icicle and his hand was gripping the butt of his revolver so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. Slowly, the ghost’s fingers gathered up the corner of the bed quilts and gradually pulled them off onto the floor. Then, it seemed to draw backward, retreating to the place where Shea had first seen it, as it watched with its one blue eye as he pulled the bed covers back up again.

Shea declared that he stayed there looking at the ghost of nearly an hour. By that time, he said, his courage had returned to him and he raised the pistol in his hands and fired six times. The sound of the shots created a commotion downstairs, where some of the other night watch men were playing cards, and across the street at the Holland Hotel, where dozens of guests later reported hearing the sound of shots being fired. Shea’s fellow officers crashed up the stairs and burst into the room. The lights were turned on to see what was happening and all of the men saw Shea sitting on the edge of the bed with sweat beaded on his brow and smoke curling from the barrel of his gun. He pointed to the wall on the south end of the room, where six large holes had been bored by the bullets from his revolver.

He only uttered one word: “Ghost!”

A Chicago Police Patrol Wagon from the early 1900s

Grand Crossing

Patrol wagon driver Thomas Murnane quit his job at the Grand Crossing station rather than put up with the ghost that he, and others, claimed haunted the place. For an entire year before Murnane resigned, the ghost appeared regularly at the station every night and found its chief delight in removing the harness from the patrol wagon horses. As required by the rules of the department, one team of horses had to be kept harnessed all night, and Murnane declared before he left service that the black figure of a man entered the barn every night and calmly removed the harness from his team.

Murnane and two other men who worked on the wagon with him always went to sleep between night runs. One night, Murnane was lying on his cot, not asleep but thinking, when he saw a man walk into the stall occupied by the team and remove the harness from the horses. In the darkness, Murnane thought it was one of the police officers and that he had been wrongly told to keep the horses harnessed all night.

The next morning, he told the other men what he had seen and they only laughed at him and told him that his night visitor was probably “Johnny Reeves.” Murnane had never heard of the man, but not wanting to show his ignorance, he kept quiet and went on about his work. Later that day, though, he asked one of the police officers about Reeves and was told that he had been a tramp who had died one night while sleeping in the barn. Murnane became convinced after this that the figure he saw each night was that of a genuine ghost.

The sightings of “Johnny Reeves” continued and the patrol wagon driver, frightened out of his wits by the ghost, tried in vain to sleep as the other men did. Every night, he told them afterward, he lay in a cold sweat, watching the intruder. Finally, after he had worried himself sick, he wrote out his resignation, even though he knew that it meant never fulfilling his dream of being a police officer. Even that lifelong goal was not enough to convince Murnane to stay and brave the nightly visits from “Johnny Reeves.”

Englewood

According to police officials, Denny Lang, one of the detectives at the Englewood station was pushed out of bed and then chased down Wentworth Avenue for several blocks one night in the summer of 1906. Lang had been told that the ghost of a Polish laborer, who had been killed by a switch engine on the Rock Island Railroad tracks just behind the station, had taken up residence in the sleeping quarters on the station’s second floor. The ghost was said to carry a bag filled with bricks to attack anyone who came near it.

Lang didn’t believe the story and laughed at his fellow officers who were too scared to sleep at the station house. He was determined to prove that he was no coward. One night, about an hour after he had climbed into one of the iron cots offered for use by men on reserve duty, Lang was startled by a heavy thumping on the floor under his bed. He looked around, trying to determine where the disturbance was coming from, and was terrified to see a ghost standing in the far corner of the room. He claimed that it had eyes that glowed like fire and a bag filled with bricks – just as the other men had described it.

Lang’s courage immediately vanished and he ran to get out of the room. He pounded down the stairs and just kept running, out onto Wentworth Avenue and down the street. He reported that the ghost came after him, hurling pieces of bricks at him as it pursued him. Eventually, the ghost vanished but the experience was not lost on Lang and he never slept in the station house again.

A remodeling of the station in 1907 caused the ghost to appear less often than it had in the past. Even so, most of the men claimed they still wouldn’t sleep there alone.

Cops and prisoners at the Des Plaines Street Station

Des Plaines Street

The ghost that haunted the station on Des Plaines Street was said to be that of a tramp who had been killed there several years before. One night, two tramps were sleeping in Cell No. 3, having been given shelter from cold weather outside, and they got into fight that led to one of them choking the other to death. After that, men who slept in that cell, prisoners and tramps alike, claimed to be awakened by cold hands squeezing their throats. The cell was soon widely avoided and old timers, familiar with the story, stated that they would rather sleep on the cold Chicago streets than in Cell No. 3 at the Des Plaines Station.

New City Station

According to officers at the New City station, their resident ghost was that of a prisoner who died while trying to escape from his cell one night. After that, officers and prisoners were often aroused at night by an eerie sound like that of a file grating on an iron bar. They came to believe that the prisoner was still trying to escape from confinement, many years after his death.

Haunts of the Old Cook County Jail

In October 1906, startling reports reached Chicago readers of ghosts and hauntings that were taking place at the old Cook County Jail, a largely abandoned structure that had been built after the Great Fire in 1871 and had been recently replaced by a new jail. Chicago’s executions still continued to occur on the old gallows, though, and unfortunately, due to overcrowding, some of the cells in the old structure had been put back into use again – much to the dismay of the prisoners and of the guards assigned to watch over them.

Officers at the entrance to the Old Cook County Jail

Many stated that the haunting had already begun when the “Car Barn Bandit,” Peter Neidermeir, went to the gallows, but his final words on the scaffold did nothing to ease the minds of those who believed in spirits. Just before his execution, he declared, “You can’t kill me, you scoundrels. I will come back and when I do, you will be sorry for what you have done.”

Neidermeir was one of three men sentenced to hang for a series of robberies in Chicago and northern Indiana. Along with Harvey Van Dine and Gustav Marx, Neidermeir had earned his nickname of “car barn bandit” after the murder of two Chicago Street Railway employees at one of the company’s barns. He went to the gallows in 1904 and became the 45th man to die at the county jail.

Soon after, the haunting of the jail intensified, leading many to believe that Neidermeir had made good on his threat of coming back.

Even before his execution, though, prisoners often reported the sounds of hammers banging away at the gallows. The sounds always occurred at night, when no workmen were present.

Even the most skeptical admitted that the old jail at Dearborn and Illinois avenues, built after the fire and then closed off from view by the courthouse and the new jail, was the perfect setting for a haunting. The place had long since fallen into a state of decay and disrepair and was made up of four grim, brick walls without partitions of any kind. In the center, with corridors all around, were the four tiers of cells that were eventually abandoned. Overcrowding in the new jail put many of the cells back into use again and thank to the number of men who died within the walls of the old edifice, it was no wonder that whispers began to circulate of ghosts.

Before each hanging that occurred, the strange manifestations began. Prior to one execution, prisoners and guards came to believe that the resident spirits carried out an execution of their own. The carpenters had put the scaffold in place and made all of the preparations for a hanging to be carried out the next night at midnight. The old jail corridor was dark, the workmen had departed, and the lights were turned down low. Then, there suddenly came a loud noise that startled every prisoner in the building and caused the jail guards to come running --- the drop of the scaffold had fallen on its own.

No effort was made to investigate the situation that night, but when Jailer Whitman arrived the following morning, he sought to discover the reason for the accident. He found that the executioner’s rope, the line that leads back to the small box where a deputy sheriff awaits the signal to use his knife when the noose has been drawn around the neck of the condemned man, had been cut just as cleanly as if a deputy himself could have severed it.

Whitman was never able to explain the incident and, although he was not a believer in ghosts, he admitted there was something unaccountable about the affair. 

In October 1906, an anonymous reporter went inside the old jail to speak with the guards and the prisoners and to try and get to the bottom of the rumored haunting. He described the walls of the old structure as being devoid of paint and plaster, just bricks and the cement between them. The old building opened into the new jail, a large structure that faced onto Dearborn and hid the old jail, where the executions took place, from sight. A barred door and a second, steel door, separated the two jails, but at the time, only the barred door was being used because the old cells had been put back into service. Because of this, many of the strange sounds reported in the old building were being heard by inmates in the new one.

The reporter wrote, “Yet the prisoners in the new building have no fear, while in the cells of the squatty old structure the occupants are frightened and admit it frankly. They claim they are kept awake at night by poundings at their very heads. One of the prisoners said that almost every night a light was thrown over his eyes until he was awakened and that no sooner did he sleep than the demonstration was repeated. So many things have happened recently in the corridors of the old jail and down in the scaffold room of the basement that the belief has spread that the place is actually haunted. Along the 125 prisoners in the cells of the old structure this belief is supreme, and they assert the punishment by imprisonment is second to their punishment by fear.”

According to the guards, prisoners were startled by weird happenings on a nightly basis. Screams were often heard and men were seen suddenly sitting up on their bunks, their faces a mask of stark terror. When asked what was wrong, most attempted to laugh off their feelings, but invariably admitted to be frightened by the ghosts. Even the guards admitted to often being frightened themselves.

Chairs were moved from place to place in the night and papers often disappeared, only to turn up later in unusual locations. One of the jail guards stated firmly, “I don’t believe in ghosts but somehow I am getting creepy in this place. Last night, I sat here and heard someone pounding. I got up and the sound stopped. I went to the place I thought the sound had come from, but there was no one. I asked some of the prisoners and they said they had heard the pounding. So, what are you going to think about that? I wouldn’t say the place is haunted, that would make me look foolish, but I want to tell you that I wouldn’t stay in this place alone.”

The prisoners that the reporter spoke with freely admitted to being frightened and most volunteered their encounters with the ghosts. One prisoner stated: “I know there are ghosts here. A few nights ago, I woke up and there was a dim light over my cot. I felt a hand placed on my head, and then the light went out. I jumped up, but the cell door was locked. No living man could have possibly been in my cell. You ask me if this place is haunted – I know it is haunted.”

One prisoner, a young man, was so frightened by one night’s stay in the old jail that Jailer Whitman, upon hearing his story, had him removed to the new section of the building.

Whitman himself was hard pressed to believe in ghosts, although sometimes he wondered about the strange incidents in the old jail. He was sometimes inclined to believe in the ghosts but, usually, after an investigation, was able to explain most of the mysterious happenings with natural causes.

He told the reporter, “I know of no way to determine whether or not the old jail is haunted. Certainly, it is a likely place for ghosts, if such things exist. Forty-five men have been hanged in those old corridors, and one, at least, vowed to come back and do us injury. I would keep no prisoners in the place if it were not absolutely necessary. The new jail is full and there are 125 prisoners being kept at present in the old jail. They are frightened at night, every sound disturbs them, and while I know that it is true that they have a creepy feeling the old place is haunted, I am unable to relieve them, except as vacancies are made by discharges from the new jail. When some person more superstitious than others is brought in, I seek to make a place for him that will not cause undue fear.

“And while I personally have no belief in ghosts, I must admit there are some strange happenings in the old jail.”

For more stories of ghosts and hauntings related to crime, jails and prisons, see Troy Taylor’s Dead Men Do Tell Tales series, available as Kindle titles or [ClickHere to see autographed editions of the books]

The Murder of Dr. Peacock

THE MURDER OF DR. PEACOCK

THE STORY THAT STUNNED CHICAGO

One of Chicago’s most heartbreaking and puzzling murders occurred on this date, January 2, in 1936. It was the brutal slaying of Dr. Silber Charles Peacock, one of Chicago’s most respected physicians. The strange case was made even more confusing by the fact that there was not a hint of scandal or impropriety linked to the 40-year old doctor’s name and despite the fact that his killers were eventually captured, there are a number of questions that remain unanswered, even after all of these years.

Dr. Peacock was born near Beverly in Adams County, Illinois in 1896 and received his early education there. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army Intelligence unit and worked closely with British Naval Intelligence. When he returned from the war, he attended Knox College in Galesburg, where he met his wife, Ruth Pearce, who was also a student. He graduated from Knox College in 1922 and was married after graduating from Rush Medical College in Chicago. He then interned at the Presbyterian hospital before going into private practice. For ten years prior to this death, he spent countless hours researching deadly childhood diseases like scarlet fever and diphtheria and maintained a suite of offices in the Uptown National Bank building at 4753 Broadway with three other well-known physicians. He was also on the staff of the Children’s Memorial, Henrotin and Ravenswood Hospitals. By 1936, Dr. Peacock, his wife and their 7 year old daughter, Betty Lou, lived at the fashionable Edgewater Beach Apartments at 5555 North Sheridan Road. Located near the famous hotel of the same name, it was one of the finer addresses on the North Side.

The famed Edgewater Beach Hotel and apartments on Chicago’s North Side. 

 Peacock was a man of regular habits but was also considered one of the most skillful doctors in the city in the field of pediatrics, which made him often in demand. He was on call 24 hours a day and in those times, it was not uncommon to be called to the bedside of a sick child at unusual times. Peacock was in the process of no longer accepting house calls, which made what happened on the night of his death even stranger.

On the night of January 2, Peacock picked up his wife, who was pregnant with their second child, and his daughter from Union Station. The first of what would be two mysterious telephone calls reached his apartment building switchboard at 7:30 p.m. The caller was a woman and she refused to leave her name with the operator. At the time of the call, the Peacocks were having dinner at a North Side restaurant. His wife and daughter had just returned from a funeral in Bowen, Illinois, which was Ruth’s hometown. They had gone to dinner after Dr. Peacock had picked them up from the train station.

Ruth and her daughter were anxious to settle in for the evening when they finally reached home, but for some reason, Dr. Peacock stepped out of the house around 8:30 p.m. When they had arrived at the apartment, the switchboard operator stated that a call had come in for the doctor earlier in the evening, but the caller had not left a name. Could he have been returning a call? No one knows for sure, but it is known that he did make a telephone call from the payphone in the drugstore that was located in the lobby of the apartment building. There is no indication as to why he left to make the call when there was a telephone in the apartment. This is just one of the lingering mysteries in the case.

A few minutes later, Dr. Peacock returned to his family’s apartment and started to get ready for bed. He was in his pajamas when the telephone rang at 10:15 p.m. The switchboard operator later said that the caller was a man. Mrs. Peacock did not hear the voice of the caller but she recalled afterward the words of her husband’s side of the conversation: “The name… G. Smale, 6438 North Whipple Street.. a sick child.. the telephone number… Oh no, the telephone… usually $5… yes.” Dr. Peacock scrawled the name and address of the caller on a piece of paper near the telephone.

Peacock quickly dressed, grabbed his coat and left the apartment. It was the last time that his wife ever saw him alive. When he had still not returned home by 1:30 a.m., Ruth made a frantic call to Cook County State’s Attorney Thomas Courtney, who was a personal friend of the Peacocks. The police were notified of the situation and a missing persons report was filed. According to the Chicago Tribune, this might not have been the first bogus emergency call made to a doctor. In 1933, Dr. Benjamin Garnitz was lured from his home by a fake call and was shot to death by three young robbers. This must have been a concern of the police when they got the call about Dr. Peacock that night.

Detectives from the Summerdale district tracked down “G. Smale”, whose name Dr. Peacock had written on the paper, but he lived at 6438 South Washtenaw Avenue, 16 miles from the address on Whipple, literally at the opposite end of the city. Neither Smale nor the seven families who resided in an apartment at the Whipple address knew Dr. Peacock.

However, he did apparently arrive at the building. Two of the tenants, Ben Noble and a Mrs. Goldman, said that they heard an automobile outside of the apartment house at about 10:30 p.m. on that Thursday evening. A car door slammed; there was the sound of footsteps in the snow, and then voices in the lobby of the building. Shortly afterward, both witnesses reported two slamming automobile doors and the car’s motor as it drove away. If it was Dr. Peacock that drove up to the apartment building, who had he met there and did that person leave with him? Detectives found six crushed cigarette butts and a discarded matchbook outside of the Whipple Street building, making them believe that someone had been impatiently waiting for the doctor’s arrival. Did he hurt, or kill, Peacock when he arrived?

Another bit of information that also puzzled the detectives was given to them by Dr. Peacock’s private secretary, Katherine Maloney. She told them that Peacock rarely ever answered a night call from a patient, and when he did, it had to be one of his regular clients since he was not accepting new patients at the time. In addition, when he did go out,, his fee for such a call was usually $7, although he mentioned the amount of $5 in the phone conversation that his wife overheard. So, why would he have gone out on this night?

Twenty-one hours passed and then a young man named Jack Dietrich noticed a parked car with its headlights on in front of a three-story building at 6236 North Francisco. Dietrich went over and peered into the window a saw the lifeless form of Dr. Peacock hunched over the steering wheel. The contents of his medical bag were spread across the front seat. He had been murdered by two gunshots to the head and seven separate knife wounds. According to a coroner’s report, Peacock fought his killers. The knuckles of both of his hands were bruised and swollen, as though he had struck several blows with his fists, and a rail behind the front seat of the car had been cracked, apparently after being struck with a heavy object. Detectives surmised that a hard blow had been aimed at Dr. Peacock’s head and hit the rail instead. No bullets were found in the car but there were bloodstains on the hand throttle and the instrument panel. The police believed that Dr. Peacock had been killed in the car, but that the killer had driven it after his hands were stained by the doctor’s blood.

The police believed that the violent nature of the crime suggested that the killer had a personal motive and they began investigating from that angle. Investigators pursued the idea that perhaps the doctor had been killed by a patient, or a patient’s parent, out of revenge, so all of his files were taken from his office to the Summerdale police station so detectives could go through them. There were so many questions in the case that detectives hardly knew where to begin:

- Who disliked the physician enough to want to kill him? As far as everyone could tell, the young doctor had many friends and no enemies to speak of. He was a beloved children’s doctor and was respected by everyone the police interviewed.

- What was the significance of the name “Smale” and the address of “6438”. Peacock had been lured out his home to an address on North Whipple Street and yet the only “G. Smale” in the city lived at 6438 South Washtenaw, at the other end of the city. The real G. Smale was interviewed by the police and not only offered a verifiable alibi, but did not know Dr. Peacock. He gave police a list of every person he had given his business card to, but the lead came up empty.

- Who was the woman that called the Peacocks’ apartment at 7:30 p.m. on the night of his death? To whom did Peacock speak when he made a call from the payphone in the drug store of the apartment building’s lobby? Who made the mysterious “mercy call” at 10:15 p.m. that night?

- Why did Dr. Peacock rush out to answer the call when he usually referred night calls to other doctors and only accepted emergencies from his own patient list?

- Was Dr. Peacock killed by someone who knew him? Or was he lured to his death by thieves? During a canvass of the area around Whipple and Devon, they spoke to a woman named Mrs. Helen Meyers, who told of riding past a car resembling Peacock’s at the corner of Whipple and Devon around 10:30 p.m. on Thursday night. As the driver of her car slowed down to look at a street sign, she said that she noticed two men lurking nearby who “looked like robbers”.

The mystery deepened when a friend of the doctor, Reverend Dr. Kenneth A. Hurst, told police that Peacock had two very influential enemies who wanted him dead. Hurst’s wife was cousin of Ruth Peacock and on good terms with the family. Dr. Peacock had dined with the Hursts while his wife and daughter were out of town, which is when he had told his friend about his personal problems. One of the enemies was a man named Arthur St. George, who allegedly accused Peacock of performing an illegal abortion on his wife, Arlene Johnson Thompson. But when investigators brought St. George in for questioning, they found this was not the case at all. Apparently, Dr. Peacock had been kind to his wife and Arlene had mistaken his kindness for something more than it was and she had left her husband as a result – or so St. George believed. Arlene denied everything and the police found nothing in her story to suggest adultery as a possible motive for the doctor’s murder. The newspapers played up what was thought to be a compelling lead for days, but in the end, nothing came of it.

The killer of Dr. Peacock remained at large.

The real killers turned out to be four teenage street criminals, who had killed the doctor for $20 and the sheer thrill of murder. The killers, Robert Goethe, Durland “Jimmy” Nash, Michael Livingston and Emil Reck, were arrested almost by accident. The police knew nothing of their connection to the Peacock murder until accounts of their past crimes began to unravel, including the murder of a tailor named Peter Payor and the beating of an elderly man named Matthew Holstein and his daughter, Christine, during a home robbery. Two police officers had run into Jimmy Nash on the street on March 25 and had questioned him about a missing girl named Doris Robbins. She was the third girl to go missing on the North Side in a matter of weeks. The other two girls were Evelyn Tveden and Patsy Dean, who was allegedly dating Nash at the time. The cops believed the young man knew something about her disappearance. When questioned about Doris Robbins, the police officers didn’t like Nash’s answers, so they took him to the West North Avenue police station. There, after questioning, Nash said that he didn’t know where Doris was, but that he remembering meeting her at his friend Robert Goethe’s house.

Goethe, Livingston and Reck were also brought in for questioning and the police began connecting them to other crimes in the area, including the robbery of several doctors who had been lured out into the night by phony emergency calls. With the Peacock still being actively worked, detectives were quick to make the connection. The young men quickly confessed to the murder, although Emil Reck had to be taken to the hospital after his confession. The Chicago Tribune reported that an old stomach ulcer began to bleed, forcing him to be placed under medical care. However, it would later be learned that Reck’s bleeding came after he was severely beaten in the interrogation room – a common method of obtaining confessions in those days. All three of the boys had been shuttled back and forth between police stations all night and Reck, who was partially retarded with the intelligence of a child of about 10, began vomiting up blood after repeated blows to the chest and abdomen.

According to the confessions, the four teenagers had met at Phil’s Pool Room on Division Street a few hours before the killing. Goethe had looked through a classified telephone book to find a doctor on the North Side. They had already committed similar robberies and believed that a doctor on the lake shore might carry more money with him. Dr. Peacock had been picked at random and the first time they called, he was not home. It is believed that the switchboard operator believed that it was a woman calling because of the high-pitched voice of one of the teenage boys. Goethe called again and this time, spoke with the doctor and told him that he needed help with a sick child. Nash, who was the first to confess, could not explain how Goethe had picked the address and name. He only knew that the other boy had once lived in that neighborhood and may have remembered it in that way. The boys had stolen a car and after luring Dr. Peacock from his residence, he was beaten and shot to death on Whipple Street after putting up a terrible struggle.

After taking the $20 that the man had in his wallet, Nash told the doctor to walk with them to his car. Nash told police, “This started him to fighting. Gee, he was tough. I hit him with the butt of my gun. Livingston slugged him with his fist. Reck took a knife out of the medicine case and slashed the doctor on the head with it. None of those things stopped him. He hit all of us and kicked Goethe in the groin. He got so tough that Goethe shot him in the head. He went down but he got up again, still battering and hollering: ‘Don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me’. I clouted him on the head again and this time he passed out.”

The boys decided not to leave the body in front of the Whipple Street apartment building because it would be found too soon. They wrapped the doctor in his overcoat and bundled him into his car, which three of the boys drove to Francisco Avenue, where it was eventually discovered. Livingston followed in the gang’s stolen car and they drove away. Nash said that he later asked Goethe why they had to kill this doctor when they had only robbed all of the others and he replied, “I been to Bridewell [the new Cook County Jail that had been built in 1929] and I ain’t going back again.”

It was soon learned that Robert Goethe was the son of Rose Kasallis, a brothel madam who was sitting in the county jail after being arrested for running teenage prostitutes and a “school for crime” out of her apartment at 1339 North Maplewood. It came out during the trial that she had plied her son and his friends with alcohol and women and that she was a cunning promoter of theft, vandalism and murder. When she was arrested, the police had taken twenty-five of her girls away in a paddy wagon. In a statement from jail after her son’s arrest, Rose cried that “Bobbie” was a “regular church-goer” who had never been in trouble.

Goethe and Nash both entered guilty pleas and accepted a sentence handed down by the court of 199 years in prison. During the trial for Livingston and Reck, it was established that Goethe had fired the fatal shots that killed Dr. Peacock, but that Reck and Livingston – by their own admissions – had struck the doctor repeatedly. Assistant State’s Attorney John Boyle was demanding the death penalty against the boys and with their guilt a foregone conclusion, defense attorneys shifted their arguments away from the crime itself and focused on what they claimed were illegal extortions of confessions by Chicago detectives. In addition to being beaten, they said, Emil Reck had been kept incommunicado and without the benefit of an attorney for nearly eighty hours. The jury was not impressed by their arguments. This was simply the way that things had to be done sometimes in those days and both Reck and Livingston were convicted on May 20, 1936, barely escaping the electric chair. Having no active role in the murder, Livingston was sentenced to 30 years. Reck’s punishment was set at 199 years, just like the other boys.

But the story of Emil Reck simply refused to go away. In 1961, the American Civil Liberties Union presented oral arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the mentally challenged man and in a 7-2 decision; the high court threw out Reck’s confession and ordered the case to be re-tried. The new charges against Reck were dismissed for lack of evidence, bringing this strange and tragic case to a close – and leaving behind an impression of brutality and corruption that still haunts the Chicago police department to this day.