by Gary Krist
This was too much for the grieving father to stand. “You hound!” he allegedly shouted in his heavy Scottish burr. Without warning, he sprang on Fitzgerald and started strangling him, “driving his fingers tightly into his throat.” Howe and another detective rushed to pull Wilkinson off the much smaller man, who sank to the floor in a swoon.4
Later in the day, other witnesses were brought in for questioning. Edward C. Watson, another roomer in the Fitzgerald boardinghouse, and S. C. Darby, an old family friend who had dropped by the apartment “acting in a peculiar manner,” were both detained and subjected to a grilling. One issue of concern was the whereabouts of Mrs. Fitzgerald. Her husband claimed he didn’t know how she could be contacted—that she had gone to Michigan at the invitation of some friends who owned a cottage there, but he didn’t know exactly where. Oddly, Edward Watson knew that the cottage was in Bangor. Suspecting a kidnapping conspiracy (as well as an illicit relationship of some kind between Mrs. Fitzgerald and her boarder), Howe had Watson send her a telegram asking her to return to Chicago; Howe himself then spoke to her via long-distance telephone and gave her the details. Insisting that her husband was innocent of any wrongdoing, Mrs. Fitzgerald promised to catch the first train back to Chicago, at which time she would prove to police that her husband had nothing to do with Janet’s disappearance. Howe wasn’t convinced. After the conversation, he had a picture of Janet rushed to police in Bangor in order to initiate a search for the girl there.5
By afternoon, Howe thought that he might actually be making progress with Fitzgerald. A box of stale chocolate candy had been found in the boardinghouse, and although the suspect initially denied that it was his, he later recanted, admitting that he had bought it two weeks ago from a Chicago Avenue druggist. Having thus caught the suspect in one lie, Howe hoped that more admissions would follow. He cleared the interrogation room and pressed Fitzgerald further, questioning him in classic good-cop fashion by trying to play on his sympathies. “Think of that child’s mother,” he said to the prisoner, “worried, hysterical, dying for news of her baby. If you have any idea where she may be, where her body may be found, tell us and relieve the mother’s suspense.”
At this point, Fitzgerald apparently wavered. He opened his mouth and his eyes “took on a peculiar beaten expression.” To Howe, he appeared ready to give in and finally tell what he knew. But at that instant a door opened and a station porter stuck his head into the room. The moment was lost. Fitzgerald “shut up like a clam” and refused to utter another word.6
At an afternoon press conference, Detective Sergeant Powers could barely conceal his frustration. “It is possible Fitzgerald lured [Janet] into his home on the promise of giving her some of that stale candy,” he told reporters, “but then what happened? And where is the girl? If she was killed, where is the body? It was daylight. The slayer couldn’t have taken her on the roof unless he went up the fire escape in front. He would have been seen.”
The obvious alternative was that Fitzgerald had taken the body to the basement of the duplex building. But Powers dismissed that possibility: “We searched [the basement],” he said. Then, becoming perhaps more graphic than was absolutely necessary, he added, “There was a fine fire in the boiler, but there always is. Janet’s body was too big to shove through the boiler door, unless it was dismembered, and there were no blood spots anywhere.”
In short, the police were baffled. “It is possible that Fitzgerald could have got away from his work Tuesday night, before he was arrested, to dispose of the body—if you accept the theory that he murdered the little girl. His employers admit that. But so far as they know, he remained at work all that night.”7
As the interrogation of Fitzgerald continued without a break, scores of anonymous calls were coming into the Chicago Avenue station from people who claimed to have seen Janet. One person alleged she had witnessed Janet being abducted in an automobile by a well-dressed woman. An iceman’s son reported that he had sold the girl some ice. Someone else was certain she had seen Janet playing on a Logan Square playground. Police dutifully checked out these and numerous other leads, but without success. One tipster called the station insisting that the girl could be found in room 400 of the Morrison Hotel. Police rushed to the scene only to find that the hotel had no room 400. They searched the entire building nonetheless.8
The case took a sensational turn late in the day when Muriel Fitzgerald walked into the Chicago Avenue station at 6 p.m. A slender, well-dressed woman with delicate, attractive features, she appeared to be significantly younger than her husband. In her meeting with Lieutenant Howe, she again expressed confidence in Fitzgerald’s innocence. “The reports about his peculiarities are born in the brains of gossiping people,” she maintained. “I shall stand by him until he is vindicated.”
Lieutenant Howe, having become convinced of Fitzgerald’s guilt over the course of forty hours of continuous interrogation, was skeptical. When Mrs. Fitzgerald asked to speak to her husband privately, Howe agreed, but he first made sure to send Detective Sergeant Powers to conceal himself behind the prisoner’s cell. When Mrs. Fitzgerald was led to the basement and left alone with her husband, Powers was ready with pen and pad in hand. What the detective heard next was remarkable:
“You did it, you did it,” Muriel Fitzgerald hissed to her husband the moment she thought they were alone. “When I received that telegram telling me to come home, I knew what was the matter. You stick to your story and all will come out all right.”
Fitzgerald, apparently seeing his wife as his only ally, pleaded for her help, though he admitted nothing explicitly. “Go to the package room of the Virginia Hotel and get a small package I left there,” he told her. “Whatever you do, Muriel, stand by me!”
When Mrs. Fitzgerald left the basement, she was immediately seized by two police detectives. She objected vehemently, but then Howe showed her the notes that Detective Sergeant Powers had taken. When she could offer no plausible explanation for her words, she was formally arrested and taken to Women’s Detention House No. 1 to be held overnight.9
Eager to follow this new clue, police rushed to the Virginia Hotel to search for the package. At first, they could find nothing, though they apparently examined every parcel in the room. Eventually, they brought Fitzgerald himself over to the hotel, and he reluctantly showed them where to look. The package was found and opened. Inside was a brand-new .32-caliber revolver, nestled in a soft chamois case. Every chamber was loaded. A quick inspection indicated that the gun had never been fired.
This discovery convinced Lieutenant Howe that the case might be a kidnapping after all, and that Janet could still be alive. Moving quickly, he dispatched a pair of police detectives to Michigan to retrace Muriel Fitzgerald’s movements in the days after Janet’s disappearance. But he insisted that there be no letup in the local investigation. Police continued to follow up on all tips, which were coming in with increasing frequency, especially after John Wilkinson announced a $500 reward for any information leading to Janet’s recovery.10
By now police were also dealing with a flood of another kind of report as well. Inspired by the publicity of the Wilkinson case, parents across the city were coming forward in astonishing numbers to complain that their own children had been assaulted by strange men. An Anna Clark of West Pierson Street claimed that her daughter Florence had been attacked by an older man on July 17. A Helen Lipschutz reported a similar incident with her five-year-old daughter, Anna. Apparently this problem—until now largely suppressed by parents unwilling to expose their children to unwanted publicity—was far more widespread in Chicago than anyone had imagined. By late Thursday, there were rising cries for Deputy Chief John Alcock, acting as chief in Garrity’s absence, to immediately arrest and institutionalize all suspected “morons” (1919 parlance for “mentally deficient deviants”), at least until some plan for the protection of the city’s children could be devised. Whatever the ultimate explanation of Janet Wilkinson’s disappearance, the “moron problem” i
n Chicago was seemingly out of control. As in the Wingfoot disaster on Monday, Chicagoans had been suddenly and brutally awakened to an insidious new urban danger—and in this case, the source of that danger was apparently their very own friends and neighbors.11
EARLY ON FRIDAY MORNING, Muriel Fitzgerald was released from Women’s Detention House No. 1 and escorted to a police vehicle waiting at the curb. The day was already hot, with temperatures forecast to climb into the mid-nineties after several days of temperate highs in the seventies and low eighties. Once inside the vehicle, the prisoner was driven north through crowded streets to the Chicago Avenue police station, where she would be questioned by Captain Ernest Mueller and several detectives.
By prior arrangement, John Wilkinson was seated in the office when she arrived. Mrs. Fitzgerald immediately ran to him and put her hands on the stricken man’s shoulders. “Oh, Mr. Wilkinson, I don’t know where your little girl is,” she cried. “I feel so sorry for you and would do anything in the world to help you find her.”
Unmoved, Wilkinson reached up and removed her hands from his shoulders.
Apparently upset by this rebuff, she turned to Captain Mueller and said, “When I [first] received word that my husband was in trouble, knowing his weakness as I do, I was positive that it was in connection with some little girl.…”
“Do you think your husband guilty then?” asked one of the detectives.
“What can I believe?” she exclaimed. “All evidence shows that he is guilty. [But] he needs someone to stand by him.” After a pause, she reconsidered: “I cannot think of him having strength of mind enough to murder a child.” She proceeded to tell them the story of her marriage—how she and Fitzgerald were wed when she was just seventeen and he was over thirty. “I knew of my husband’s having trouble. My life with him has been a living hell since I discovered his weakness.… He is subnormal, and I have not lived with him as his wife for seven years. But I always have been kind to him, and he needs my help more than ever.”
She burst into tears then. “I have been living in horror,” she cried, “and dreaded this very thing would happen.”1
But what exactly did happen? Throughout the interview, Muriel Fitzgerald continued to insist that her husband could not have hurt the little girl they both knew and liked. And yet, if he had not harmed her, where was she? Certainly the circumstantial evidence was mounting against the suspect. More and more accusers were coming forward with stories about the Fitzgeralds, some of them outright bizarre. A Helen Hedin of Sedgwick Street claimed that, just a week before Janet’s disappearance, Fitzgerald had exposed himself to her ten-year-old daughter. According to the girl, the night watchman had stood naked in his front window, blowing kisses to her as she passed on the street below. Then a vaudeville actor known as “the Handcuff King” reported that a person named Fitzgerald had kidnapped his four-year-old the previous year at Benton Harbor, Michigan. The child had been returned only when the vaudeville troupe was scheduled to leave for another town. Yet Fitzgerald continued to deny everything. “I’m not the man,” he would insist, even when positively identified by eyewitnesses.2
Lieutenant Howe was exasperated. “In my 25 years of police experience,” he told reporters at a news conference, “I never knew a suspect so cunning.” But the lieutenant was still confident of a confession: “He is weakening,” Howe said. “He is nervous and haggard and on the verge of a breakdown. I believe he will be glad to talk soon and tell what he knows.”
Howe and the other interrogators had been trying numerous tactics to force the suspect to confess. They’d kept him awake now for two and a half days straight, hoping to wear down his resistance. They’d brought in an alienist (that is, a psychiatrist) to examine him. They’d even tried showing him a picture of Janet with her arms out in supplication. “Look at that picture, see those hands stretched out to you,” Detective Sergeant Powers had said to him. “She is pleading. Tell me where you have hidden her body. Where did you hide it?”3
Investigators were having no greater luck searching for the girl. One team of police was now scouring the streets of the North Side with a borrowed pack of bloodhounds. Another was sifting through the ashes of the enormous Virginia Hotel furnace. In late afternoon, a fisherman reported seeing a child’s body floating in Lake Michigan off Oak Street. “The police rode around in the water for hours while Janet’s father paced the beach,” the Tribune reported, “but there was no sign of the body.”4
Every newspaper in town was dwelling on the sorrows of the frantic parents, filling columns with sob-sister stories of the most maudlin kind. “For two days and two nights, Mrs. Wilkinson has not taken off her clothing or tasted a morsel of food,” the Daily Journal reported. “When she is not running up and down the lake shore with her husband, she sits in the parlor of the little flat, constantly praying. ‘Just send my baby back to me,’ she moans. ‘That is all I will ever ask.’ ”
Reporters found easy poignancy in the image of Janet’s favorite plaything—a much-battered doll sitting in a little red chair in a corner. The week before, Janet had complained that the doll was “losted.” “I had put [the] baby doll away from her,” Mrs. Wilkinson allegedly keened, “for she was such an ugly doll. No wig—it had been torn off—[and] nothing but a shabby skirt.… And now it’s my baby doll who is lost.”5
When Muriel Fitzgerald appeared at the apartment (with a police escort), reporters were there to record the scene:
When [Mrs. Fitzgerald] entered the door, she stood a moment on the threshold, looked fondly at the mother who was lying in her bed, and then rushed over, fell on her knees, and threw her arms around the unfortunate woman’s neck. The two began to weep.
Mrs. Fitzgerald sobbed: “Is there anything in the world that I can do for you?”
The answer she got was a sad nod of the head.
The glance of the two women then fell on the chair and doll, and they became silent.6
Such manipulative reporting did little to quell Chicagoans’ increasingly strident calls for a rapid solution to the “moron problem.” And when on Friday afternoon another molestation report came in—of an attack by a fifty-year-old man on a nine-year-old girl—Deputy Chief Alcock, under enormous pressure, decided to take action. “I have ordered the arrest of all half-wits and subnormals, because they are a danger to every woman and girl in the city,” he announced to reporters. “They are responsible for almost all of the attacks that are reported to the police, and they should have been rounded up long ago and sent to institutions where they can be cared for.”7
Precisely how these “subnormals” were to be identified was not specified by the acting chief. The order, in fact, was almost certainly unconstitutional, and would probably have failed to stand up under even the permissive law enforcement standards of the day. But the citizens of Chicago, roused by the spectacle of little Janet, would not be restrained by such legal niceties. According to the Herald and Examiner, an aura of mistrust now hung over the entire North Side, turning every unusual occurrence into a source of suspicion. The danger to the city’s children was obviously very real, and it was imperative that something—no matter how drastic—be done about it.8
* * *
At the Wingfoot inquest—which reconvened on Friday at 11 a.m., after its one-day recess—the shouting began even before the first witness was called. The coroner’s jury of experts had requested to hear Captain Benjamin B. Lipsner, first Chicago superintendent of the U.S. Air Mail Service. Lipsner had allegedly spoken to injured mechanic Harry Wacker in the hospital shortly after the crash. According to rumors that had been sweeping the city for days, Wacker had made some alarming admissions to Lipsner at the time. But Goodyear’s attorneys were determined that the jury would not hear this testimony until pilot Jack Boettner had given his version of events. “What this man [Lipsner] has to offer is hearsay,” attorney Elias Mayer objected. “It is our idea to let Boettner tell first how the blimp was conceived and built, and then exactly what happened before and during
the fire.”
At this there was much squabbling among lawyers and jury members, but Coroner Hoffman was adamant. “My jury of engineers has elected to hear Lipsner,” he said firmly. “He will testify now.”
When Lipsner finally took the stand, it was immediately obvious why Goodyear wanted to delay his testimony. “Wacker told me that he was nervous and scared throughout the flight,” Lipsner claimed. “He said that the blimp acted up from the time they started on the first trip from White City to Grant Park, and that he was mighty glad when they made the first landing.… He said that the motors were working badly—that they were throwing oil and sparks and that there was no water ballast in the ship.”
This was damning enough, but then Lipsner went on to describe the airship’s final flight: “Wacker said that Carl Weaver, one of the victims, had control of the blimp at the time of the accident, and that just before the machine went down he was continually calling [to Weaver], ‘Too much gas! Too much air! This isn’t right!’ ”
“He [also] told me,” Lipsner went on, “that Boettner jumped first. He himself warned the others to jump, and after seeing Norton, the newspaper photographer, jump, Wacker slid over the side with his chute burning. He told me he reached up to extinguish the flames with his hand.…”
This last detail finally gave Goodyear’s attorneys something to pounce on. “Fabrication!” Mayer shouted, as arguments broke out among the spectators.
