For the Thrill of It Read online

  In one sense the arrival of a ransom letter provided a measure of relief, however minor, for Bobby’s parents. It confirmed that he was still alive and provided instructions for his recovery. The writer of the letter, George Johnson, promised that Bobby was “at present well and safe. You need not fear any physical harm for him providing you live up carefully to the following instructions…. Make absolutely no attempt to communicate with either the police authorities nor any private agency. Should you already have communicated with the police, allow them to continue their investigations, but do not mention this letter.

  “Secure before noon today $10,000. This money must be composed entirely of old bills of the following denominations: $2,000 in $20 bills, $8,000 in $50 bills. The money must be old. Any attempt to include new or marked bills will render the entire venture futile. The money should be placed in a large cigar box…and wrapped in white paper. The wrapping paper should be sealed…with sealing wax.

  “Have the money thus prepared as directed above and remain home after one o’clock P.M. See that the telephone is not in use. You will receive a future communication instructing you as to your future course.

  “As a final word of warning, this is a strictly commercial proposition, and we are prepared to put our threats into execution should we have reasonable ground to believe that you have committed an infraction of the above instructions. However, should you carefully follow out our instructions to the letter, we can assure you that your son will be safely returned to you within six hours of our receipt of the money.”14

  The family felt a tremendous sense of relief. Here was assurance that Bobby was still alive. Merely for the payment of a trivial sum, a bagatelle, they would soon have Bobby back, safely home. Samuel Ettelson was sanguine—this was a professional kidnapping gang, no doubt about it; the boy was not, as he had feared, the victim of a child molester. There was now no apprehension that Bobby would end up dead.

  SEVERAL MILES AWAY, TONY MINKE, a recent immigrant from Poland who worked as a pump man for the American Maize Company, walked along a path that ran parallel to the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks near Wolf Lake. Few people ever ventured out to this remote part of Cook County. Farsighted action by the state legislature a decade earlier had led to the creation of the Forest Preserve district southeast of Chicago as an area of natural beauty, and by 1924 more than 20,000 acres of wetlands and marshes had been permanently set aside. It was an ornithologist’s paradise—the thick brush and low trees provided a safe haven for migratory wading birds, and during the spring and fall it was possible to spot such exotica as the yellow-crowned night heron and the snowy egret. Pawpaw trees, shingle oaks, spicebush, sycamores, and hawthorn trees were everywhere; wild prairie roses ran alongside the few paths through the wilderness; and occasionally one might discover dewberry and raspberry patches in the meadowland openings. The Forest Preserve was a magical spot, yet its distance from the city and a lack of public transportation rendered it inaccessible to most Chicagoans. Occasionally one might see a hunter, and on the weekends schoolboys would come out with field glasses to observe the migrating birds passing overhead, but otherwise the Forest Preserve remained inviolate.

  Tony Minke lived nearby, on the edge of the Forest Preserve, but he did not usually take this route home. That morning, Thursday, 22 May, he was coming from the factory where he had worked the night shift. Now he was on his way to Hegewisch to pick up his watch from a repair shop before returning home to sleep. The sun was at his back, and as he passed a large ditch on his left, he looked down momentarily. The sun’s rays shone into the ditch, and Minke looked more closely: was that a foot poking out of the drainage pipe? Minke stopped and looked closer—he peered into the pipe. Inside, he could see a child’s body, naked and lying face downward in a foot of muddy water.15

  In the distance, Minke could see four men, railroad workers, on a handcar traveling slowly along the tracks in his direction. He climbed the embankment and, as the handcar approached, he signaled to it to halt. The handcar came to a gradual stop. As the workmen climbed down, Minke walked a few steps toward them, pointing back at the ditch. “Look,” he exclaimed, “there is something in the pipe, there is a pair of feet sticking out.”16

  As the men pulled the body out of the pipe and turned it on its back, Minke could see immediately that the boy had been killed: there were two large wounds on the forehead—deep gashes, each about an inch long—and toward the back of the head he could see large bruises and swelling. And those marks on the boy’s back? What had caused those scratches running down the back all the way from the shoulders to the buttocks? But the most peculiar aspect was the appearance of the face—there were distinctive copper-colored stains around the mouth and chin; and the genitals also—they were stained with the same color.17

  As his fellow workers were carrying the body to a second handcar on the tracks, Paul Korff, a signal repairman for the railroad, glanced over the scene. He wondered if any of the boy’s clothes were lying around; if so, they should gather them up and take them along. Korff could see nothing—no shirt or trousers, or even shoes and socks—but he did find a pair of eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames, lying on the embankment, just a few feet from the culvert. Perhaps they belonged to the boy; Korff put them in his pocket and joined his comrades waiting by the handcars.18

  At around ten o’clock that morning, Anton Shapino, the sergeant on duty at the Hegewisch police station, took charge of the body. Paul Korff had handed him the tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and Shapino, assuming that they belonged to the boy, placed them on the child’s forehead. Later that morning, at the morgue at 13300 South Houston Avenue, the undertaker, Stanley Olejniczak, laid the body out; as he did so, he noticed the unusual discoloration of the boy’s face and genitals and the bruises and cuts on the head—someone had obviously beaten the child violently.19

  JACOB FRANKS WAS LOOKING FORWARD to seeing his son again. He had spent that morning in the Loop, the city’s business district, obtaining $10,000 ransom from his bank. The teller was surprised at the request for “all old, worn bills” but said nothing; it was not his place to question such a customer as Franks.20

  Back at Ellis Avenue the family waited. They expected the kidnappers to call sometime after one o’clock, but time dragged on—two o’clock passed and still there was no call. Jacob Franks continued sitting in his armchair staring out of the window onto Ellis Avenue; his wife sat by his side, quietly crying.21

  Samuel Ettelson stayed in the library answering calls and talking with visitors. Ettelson was annoyed that the press had learned of the kidnapping—but it was perhaps his own fault. After Ettelson had asked the phone company to put a trace on incoming calls the previous evening, the family had discovered that the company’s telephone operators had been gossiping about the tracing of calls. No doubt someone had alerted the press to Bobby’s disappearance.

  Even now, there was a reporter from the Chicago Daily News, James Mulroy, badgering him about the body of a boy found earlier that morning, out near the Indiana state line near the Forest Preserve. Of course, this was not Bobby—Mulroy had said that the boy was found wearing eyeglasses and Bobby had never worn eyeglasses in his life—but perhaps someone from the family should go down to the morgue and ensure that it was not Bobby lying on the undertaker’s slab. Ettelson turned to Edwin Greshan, the brother of Flora Franks and Bobby’s uncle: would he mind driving to South Houston Avenue with the reporter?22

  2. THE DRAINAGE CULVERT. Tony Minke, a workman for the American Maize Company, discovered the body of a naked boy in this drainage culvert on Thursday, 22 May 1924.

  And if, by some chance, Ettelson continued, it was Bobby at the undertaker’s, he should say only one word—“Yes”—over the phone, and nothing more. There was a telephone extension in the living room; Ettelson did not want Flora Franks to overhear the news of her son’s death.

  Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. Ettelson picked up the receiver. He recognized Greshan’s voice. Only one word no
w mattered—“Yes.” The phone clicked off at the other end and Ettelson walked deliberately to the living room.

  Flora had left the room but Jacob was still sitting in his armchair, gazing out of the window. He looked exhausted, pale and tired and crumpled; his right hand twitched and fidgeted aimlessly with a loose thread in the arm of the chair.

  Ettelson leaned over to speak softly into Jacob’s ear: “It looks pretty bad, Jake. It looks to me as if the worst has happened.”

  Jacob Franks glanced up into his friend’s eyes: “What do you mean?”

  “That your boy is dead.”23

  At that moment the phone rang. Ettelson picked up the extension:

  “Hello?”

  “Hello…. Is Mr. Franks in?”

  “Who wants him?”

  “Mr. Johnson wants him.”

  “Who is that?”

  “George Johnson.”

  “Just a minute.”

  As he passed the receiver to Jacob Franks, Ettelson whispered that it was the kidnapper, but Jacob was still in a daze. He was stunned at the unexpected news of his son’s death. How could he tell Flora that Bobby was dead? She was already in shock at her son’s disappearance; his death would break her heart.

  “Mr. Franks?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is George Johnson speaking…. There will be a yellow cab at your door in ten minutes…. Get into it and proceed immediately to the drug store at 1465 East 63rd Street.”

  “Couldn’t I have a little more time?”

  “No, sir, you can’t have any more time; you must go immediately.”24

  What was this? Bobby was dead—but the kidnapper still expected to get the ransom money? Perhaps, Ettelson thought, Edwin Greshan had misidentified the body in the morgue and Bobby was still alive.

  And, look, there at the front gate, there was a yellow cab pulling up at the curb. What should they do? If Jacob Franks got into the cab, could they still save Bobby’s life? Or would that also put Jacob in danger?

  The cab was waiting in the street, its engine running. Ettelson was struggling with the possibilities. Jacob Franks was exhausted—he had gone more than thirty-six hours with very little sleep. And he was flustered and confused, shocked and sad; so perhaps it is not surprising that, by the time Ettelson turned back to speak to him, Franks had forgotten the address of the drugstore—he remembered only that it was on 63rd Street.

  Samuel Ettelson pleaded with Jacob to recall the location of the drugstore. Had the kidnapper identified it by name? Was there any other detail that Jacob could remember?

  No. Jacob struggled to remember, but it had gone. Ettelson paid off the cabdriver and stood silently on the sidewalk, watching the cab drive down Ellis Avenue; eventually it disappeared and Ettelson sensed that their last chance to rescue Bobby had disappeared with it.25

  THE HUNT WAS NOW ON for the killers. Morgan Collins, chief of the Chicago police department, promised that he would commit all his resources to tracking down the murderers. Collins undoubtedly exaggerated when he described the killing as “one of the most brutal murders with which we have had to deal. Never before have we come in contact with such cold-blooded and willful taking of life.” His exaggeration was for effect; Collins was a political appointee, selected the previous year by Chicago’s Democratic mayor, William Dever, with a mandate to enforce prohibition. Collins could not possibly, in a city such as Chicago, end the liquor trade—better to divert attention to a crime more tractable. “The children of our schools must be protected against the possibility of any such crime as this…. We intend to hunt down the slayers if it takes every man in the police department to do it. I have assigned some of our best men to the job and told them that I would supply every aid necessary. They can have as many men as they want.”26

  Fortunately, Collins already had his eye on a group of likely suspects: the instructors at the Harvard School. In the early hours of the morning, around three o’clock on Friday, 23 May, the police began rounding up the Harvard teachers. Walter Wilson, the instructor of mathematics; Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher; and Richard Williams, the athletics coach, were dragged out of bed and taken to the Wabash Avenue station. Within the next two days, the police brought in Fred Alwood, the chemistry teacher; George Vaubel, the physical education instructor; Charles Pence, the school principal; and Edna Plata, the French teacher.27

  The teachers were suspects because they had access to the boy; because they knew that Jacob Franks was wealthy and able to afford a $10,000 ransom; and, tellingly, because the ransom note was flawless. The letter contained few grammatical errors and no typographical mistakes; only an educated person could have composed it. Hugh Sutton, an expert with the Royal Typewriter Company, thought that the kidnappers had used an Underwood portable typewriter, probably less than three years old; the typist had used two fingers to compose the letter. “The person who wrote this letter,” Sutton concluded, “never had learned the touch system…. The touch system strikes the keys pretty evenly, with an even pressure on the keys. The man who wrote this was…a novice at typing…. Some of the letters were punched so hard they were almost driven through the paper, while others were struck lightly or uncertainly.” The kidnapper had written Jacob Franks’s address on the envelope in block letters; handwriting experts determined that the letters displayed a uniform slant, and a regular spacing and character; it was obviously the penmanship of a capable writer.28

  Since the kidnappers were educated and literate, the murder was clearly not the work of the Black Hand kidnapping gangs linked to organized crime in Chicago. And the motive? The instructors at the Harvard School may have taught at one of the city’s most prestigious private schools, but they were paid startlingly low salaries: the typical teacher received less than $2,000 a year—the $10,000 ransom was thus equivalent to five years’ salary.29

  As the police questioned the Harvard School staff throughout Friday, clues began to emerge to indicate the leading suspects. Walter Wilson, the mathematics teacher, had shown an unusual interest in the Franks children. Several months earlier, he had taken Bobby Franks and his younger brother, Jacob Jr., on an excursion to Riverside and had not returned with the boys until one o’clock in the morning. Was Wilson, the police wondered, a pedophile? He was single and had no girlfriend; he admitted to the police that he did not “know any young ladies around Chicago.” Wilson had visited the Franks home that Wednesday evening after Jacob Franks had phoned him with the news of Bobby’s disappearance; then, not long after Wilson had left the house, Flora Franks had received the first phone call from one of the kidnappers—had Wilson made that phone call?30

  Both Richard Williams, the athletics coach, and Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher, were held in police cells for five hours that Friday; the police beat both men with a rubber hose to force them to confess. The detectives had searched Williams’s apartment and found four bottles of brown liquid. There had been copper-colored stains on Bobby’s face; could the liquid in Williams’s possession be the poison with which the murderer had killed the boy? Williams protested his innocence. The liquid, he explained, was merely a liniment which he used to rub on the boys’ muscles after strenuous exercises. But his explanation did him no good; the athletics instructor remained a leading suspect.31

  The revelation that Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher, had a semiannual mortgage payment due the day of the kidnapping hardened the suspicions of the police. When the detectives learned that the mortgage on Mitchell’s house was exactly $10,000—the kidnappers had demanded precisely that amount—they felt sure they had the murderer. Mitchell had taught at the Harvard School for fourteen years and was popular with the boys—perhaps, Charles Pence hinted, too popular. “He always impressed me as being a very fine man,” the principal informed the police. “He was interested in his work and his pupils. Why, whenever one of the boys was ill at home he always sent flowers.” The police dug up the sewers around Mitchell’s house in a search for Bobby’s clothes but found
nothing; they questioned Mitchell again and again about the killing, but he was obdurate. He insisted on his innocence.32

  Fortunately for the teachers, they all had alibis for the evening of Bobby’s disappearance. Mitchell’s neighbors could testify that he had been working in his garden at the time of the kidnapping; Richard Williams had had dinner at the Delphi Restaurant on 47th Street near Lake Park; and Walter Wilson’s landlady stated that her boarder had been home the entire evening. For friends, neighbors, and acquaintances it was impossible that any of the three should have killed the boy: the three teachers were conscientious, irreproachable, and considerate—perfect gentlemen.33

  Robert Crowe, the state’s attorney for Cook County, was still suspicious. True, he had no evidence linking any of the teachers to the crime. The police held the suspects for four days and beat them regularly yet were unable to force a confession. The men’s lawyers, Charles Wharton and Otis Glenn, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on Monday, 26 May, alleging police brutality; Glenn pointed out that there was little justification for their clients’ continued detention. “The police have nothing on them and I don’t see why they should be held.” But Crowe insisted to the judge, Frederic Robert DeYoung, that he needed to keep them in the police cells: “We feel they can help us materially in solving the mystery surrounding this murder. It is true we have no warrants for these men, but we are very desirous of questioning them further and getting what aid we can from them.” Perhaps, Crowe slyly suggested to DeYoung, the judge would continue the case to enable the police to hold them for a few days more; but that, the judge replied, would run counter to the law. If Crowe did not have the evidence to charge the teachers with murder and kidnapping, then there was no basis for their continued detention. “Under the law,” DeYoung stated, “these men are entitled to their liberty. There is no escape from it.”34