“THE STRANGE MYSTERY OF THE EDDY BROTHERS” and More True, Dark Stories! #WeirdDarkness

On June 8, 1908, an unmarried immigrant nurse named Sarah Koten finally had enough. After she lured the doctor that she worked for to an abandoned house, she shot and killed him. Never once did she believe that her actions were wrong. In the investigation that followed, it was discovered that her boss, Dr. Martin Auspitz, had raped her at work and she had become pregnant. When the police and courts refused to help her, she took matters into her own hands and carried out a sentence of death. Sarah’s story became a national sensation. The press portrayed her as a powerless woman who had no other choice than to shoot her attacker, but Sarah saw things differently – she was an avenger who killed her attacker before he could hurt other women.

“When I thought of my broken life and the lives he might break, well, I felt it was my duty to kill him,” she told a reporter. But Sarah was soon on trial for her life – what would the courts decide?

In 1907, Sarah Koten was working at a sanitarium in New York City. Like many staff members of the day, she also lived at the hospital. She was training to be a nurse under Dr. Martin Auspitz. He was bullying, aggressive, and threatening to her but Sarah was determined to stick it out. Dr. Auspitz promised her that she would become a trained nurse if she stayed in his employ. “I was frightened and did not want to stay,” she later explained, “but the doctor wanted me to stay.”

One morning, Auspitz broke into Sarah’s room. He chloroformed her and while she was unconscious, he raped her. The rape resulted in a pregnancy. When he found out that Sarah was pregnant, the doctor pressured her to have an abortion. Sarah refused and quit her job but struggled to find new work. She had immigrated from Russia in 1902, and now she was an unmarried, pregnant woman with no means to support herself.

In 1908, she took Auspitz to court. She brought a suit charging him with rape and demanding financial support for the unborn child. Auspitz denied the accusation and used his brother and brother-in-law to attack Sarah’s reputation. They claimed she had a poor character, implying that she had seduced Auspitz and initiated a sexual relationship with him.

The judge ruled in favor of the doctor and dismissed the case. Sarah then went to the police for help, but they turned her away. She then visited the district attorney, who told her that there was no legal recourse that could be taken against Sarah’s rapist.

That’s when Sarah decided “to be my own judge.”

On June 8, she lured her rapist to the home of a pretend patient. When Auspitz arrived, she shot him through the heart. She didn’t protest when the police took her away. Never did she proclaim her innocence. She simply stated that her actions had been justified – she’d done it to protect other women.

She was correct, at least as far as that went. Sarah had not been Auspitz’s only victim. It was later discovered that Auspitz had a history of “wronging” women. Before Sarah killed him, at least two other women brought complaints against the doctor. One woman, Agnes Deffa, tried to attack Auspitz in court when he claimed that she had initiated a sexual relationship with him. The other woman, Anna Jensen, had been a patient at Auspitz’s sanitarium. After Auspitz raped her, she burst into his office with a gun. She tried to shoot him but the cartridge in her revolver failed to fire. This attempted murder happened only a few months before Auspitz raped Sarah.

The police had been aware of the incident and yet, still did nothing to help Sarah when she lodged her complaint against the doctor.

As Sarah waited in prison for her trial, her case became a media sensation. At first the stories were negative – she was called “wretched,” “a frenzied girl,” and “a total wreck.” The stories painted a picture of “hysteria and criminality,” an immigrant who was naturally a vicious killer. But all that changed after she gave birth to her son, Abraham, in prison. The newspaper now told a new story of a women who must be innocent. Abraham was the proof of her story. The evil doctor had tried to pressure her to abort the baby and Sarah’s refusal made her popular with the public. She was a model mother, they said, who was only defending her honor.

Reporters compared her case to the “unwritten law” that applied to gentlemen in the nineteenth century. If a woman’s honor was at stake, gentlemen were allowed to retaliate, even if it violated the law. By the turn of the twentieth century, that same law began to apply to women themselves. Women had little power to stop men’s aggression and violence, the unwritten law argued, so it was acceptable for women to protect themselves in any way they could – even with a gun.

At the end of Sarah’s trial, Judge James A. Blanchard accepted her plea of insanity. He gave her a suspended sentence, sending her to the care of the Council of Jewish Women.

Sarah’s defense inspired other women. In early 1909, a woman named Elizabeth coerced Charles Schmidt into marrying her, saying if he didn’t, she would “blow out his brains like Sarah Koten did.” Sarah Comiskey attempted to kill her father for abandoning his family. Nellie Walden killed her ex-boyfriend for running off. These women claimed they were inspired to violence because of Sarah Koten.

As for Sarah herself, she walked out of prison after her trial and vanished from history. The Council for Jewish Women helped her to find a suitable home “where she might change her name and rear her child in ignorance of the crime its mother had committed.” The Council concluded its statement on Sarah’s case with this:

“While no one can consistently condone murder, or any other offense against the law, it is gratifying to know that this suffering woman is not to be cast into prison for a crime that she primarily was not to blame for.”

On December 18, 1931, gangster and bootlegger, Jack “Legs” Diamond, was shot to death in a rooming house in Albany, New York. Diamond had already survived five attempts on his life between 1916 and 1931, causing him to be known as the “clay pigeon of the underworld.” In 1930, Dutch Schultz, an enemy of Diamond, remarked to his gang, “Ain’t there nobody that can shoot this guy so that he don’t bounce back?”

This time, Diamond didn’t “bounce back.”

Diamond, whose real name was John Moran, was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1897. His parents, John and Sara, were Irish immigrants. In 1889, a younger brother, Eddie, was born. The two boys struggled through grade school, while their mother suffered from health problems. She died on December 24, 1913, and their father moved them to Brooklyn soon after. Jack almost immediately fell in with some of the young street gangs of the era, notably the Boiler Gang. His first arrest for burglary occurred when he broke into a jewelry store on February 4, 1914. More than a dozen arrests would eventually follow. After a brief stint in a juvenile reformatory, he was drafted into the military during World War I. Not surprisingly, he deserted after less than a year and was sent to Leavenworth.

When he got out of prison in 1921, he returned to New York, where he began associating with Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who was then a young, but up and coming gangster. Diamond did odd jobs for Luciano, who introduced him to gambler Arnold Rothstein, who was the most powerful mobster in the city at the time. He eventually became Rothstein’s personal bodyguard and was cut in on the new heroin racket, which was making a lot of money.

Diamond, who had taken in his younger brother Eddie, was now making a lot of cash and the brothers decided to start their own bootlegging business. It was a common practice at the time to hijack liquor shipments from other gangsters and then sell it, hurting the competition and making a huge profit. Unfortunately, the brothers decided to hijack truckloads that belonged to Owen “The Killer” Madden and “Big Bill” Dwyer, two of the most ruthless Irish mobsters in the city. They were also connected to a larger syndicate that was run by Dutch Schultz, Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and others. Once word got around that the hijackings had been carried out by the Diamonds, the brothers lost any protection that they might have had and became targets for everyone.

On October 24, 1924, Diamond was driving his Dodge sedan along Fifth Avenue and stopped at the intersection with 110th Street. A large black limousine pulled up next to him. A shotgun appeared from the back window and, according to witnesses, opened fire on Diamond. He ducked down and hit the gas. He drove an entire block without looking over the dashboard. When he did, he saw that the black car was gone. He drove himself to nearby Mount Sinai Hospital, where doctors removed shotgun pellets from his head and face. When the police questioned him, he shrugged the whole thing off. They must’ve thought he was someone else, he told them.

It was obvious to Diamond that he needed protection, so he turned to Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen, a Jewish gangster who ran several rackets in Lower Manhattan. The main thing that he had going for him, as far as Diamond was concerned, was that he was one of the few people who didn’t want to kill him. Orgen wanted to increase his own power base so that he could compete with Luciano, Lansky, and the rest. Diamond would provide some of the muscle that he needed. Jack and Eddie became Orgen’s bodyguards and, in turn, Orgen cut them in on his liquor and narcotic rackets.

Then, on October 15, 1925, Orgen and Diamond were finishing their daily meetings and collections rounds and were approaching the corner of Delancy and Norfolk Streets in Lower Manhattan. Three men approached them and started shooting. Orgen was fatally wounded in the head and Diamond was hit twice on the right side. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital for emergency surgery and eventually recovered. He refused to tell the police anything and they tried to charge him with murder, but couldn’t make anything stick. Orgen’s murder was never solved, although it was believed to have been arranged by Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and his partner, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. They wanted to take over Orgen’s rackets and it’s believed that Diamond may have been in on the plot. After he was released from the hospital, he took over Orgen’s liquor operation, while Buchalter and Shapiro took over the dead man’s narcotics and other rackets.

With cash now pouring in, Diamond became a regular on the nightclub circuit and his picture started showing up in the newspapers. He was never portrayed as a gangster, though, only as a “wealthy man about town.” The public loved him and so did the ladies. Although married, he was a womanizer and his best-known mistress was showgirl and dancer Marion “Kiki” Roberts. His flamboyant lifestyle kept him out at the clubs at night and this may have been how he obtained the nickname “Legs.” He was a great dancer and was part owner of the Hotsy Totsy Club, a dance spot on Broadway. So, the nickname could have come from this or, as others have suggested, from his uncanny ability to escape death.

On July 14, 1929, violence came to the Hotsy Totsy Club. Two brothers, Pete and William “Red” Cassidy, along with a friend named Simon Walker, started a fight at the club after bartenders and staff members refused to serve the already drunk men. When a waiter told them to quiet down, Red turned on the waiter and began arguing with him. Walker grabbed club manager Hymie Cohen by the arm, demanded service, and threatened to destroy the club if they didn’t get it. He then shoved Cohen to the floor. Diamond and one of his cronies, Charles Entratta, saw the exchanged and stepped in. He told Walker, “I’m Jack Diamond and I run this place. If you don’t calm down, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

Walker turned to Diamond and snarled, “You can’t push me around.” Those turned out to be his final words.

Diamond and Entratta both pulled their guns and shot Walker and the Cassidy brothers. Red was hit three times in the head, once in the stomach, and once in the groin. Walker was hit six times in the stomach. Both men were dead when they hit the floor. When the police arrived, Pete Cassidy was lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs with three gunshot wounds. Guns were found on all three of the men, who had extensive arrest records.

There were more than 50 people in the club when the incident took place – but no one saw a thing. Their backs were turned, they told detectives, or they were in the bathroom. Within six weeks of the shooting, Cohen, the waiter, two bartenders, and the club’s hat-check girl all disappeared. The waiter’s bullet-ridden body was later found in New Jersey. No trace was ever located of the others.

No witnesses ever came forward, so Diamond and Entratta were never charged. With the heat on him, though, Diamond closed down the club and moved to Greene County in upstate New York with his long-suffering wife, Alice. But he was only in Greene County for a short time before he sent word to New York that he was planning to return soon and reclaim what was his. When he had left the city, Schultz and Madden had quickly taken over his rackets. His planned return made him an immediate target and earned him the moniker of “clay pigeon of the underworld.”

In 1930, while preparing for his move back to the city, but also while establishing a bootlegging operation in Greene County, Diamond and two others kidnapped Grover Parks, a truck driver, who had been hauling liquor. They wanted to know where he was picking up his alcohol shipments, but Parks refused to tell them. Oddly, they set him loose. A few months later, Diamond tried the same thing with another driver, James Parks, and this time, he was arrested and charged with kidnapping. He was later acquitted at trial.

In late August 1930, Diamond traveled to Europe. He told reporters that he was on his way to Vichy, France, where he would take a mineral water “cure” for his health. The real reason for the trip, though, was to establish a German liquor source. He was planning to smuggle alcohol from Europe to reestablish his New York operation.

But nothing went according to plan. When the ship docked in Belgium, he was taken into custody by the police. After several hours of questioning, he was put on a train to Germany. When he arrived there, he was arrested by the German Secret Service and put him on a freighter that was bound for Philadelphia. It arrived on September 23 and he was immediately arrested by the Philadelphia police. At a court hearing on the same day, Diamond was told that he would be released if he left for New York within the hour. The weary gangster readily agreed.

In New York, he moved into the Hotel Monticello in Manhattan and began trying to take back his rackets in the city. Hardly anyone was happy to have him back. On the morning of October 10, 1930, Diamond was wounded by three men who forced their way into his hotel suite and shot him five times. Still in his pajamas, he staggered out into the hall, where he collapsed. He was rushed to Polyclinic Hospital, where he slowly recovered enough to be discharged on December 30. When asked how he had managed to make it to the hallway with five bullets in him, Diamond said that he had already had two shots of whiskey for breakfast.

On April 21, 1931, Diamond was arrested again, this time on assault charges that dated back to the Parks beating in 1930. Two days later, he posted bond and was released.

A week later, however, he was shot and wounded again. He was at a roadhouse called the Aratoga Inn, near Cairo, New York, which was owned by Jimmy Wynne. Wynne had numerous underworld connection and the nightclub was a popular hangout for gangsters. Diamond had just finished eating with three companions and was waiting on a telephone call from his attorney. As he walked to the front door to get some fresh air, three gunmen who were dressed as duck hunters, opened fire on him. Diamond was hit several times. A local man drove him to a hospital in Albany, where he was treated for his injuries.

His troubles continued. On May 1, while he was still in the hospital, New York State Troopers seized beer and liquor worth more than $5,000 from one of Diamond’s hideouts in Cairo. He was charged with bootlegging and sentenced to four years in state prison. He appealed the conviction and remained free on bail while he awaited the outcome of the appeal.

Meanwhile, Diamond still had to face the music in the Parks case and later that year, he went to trial. He was again acquitted on the assault and kidnapping charges. He left court a free man on December 17, 1931.

In the mood for a celebration, he and his family, along with a few friends, celebrated at the Rainbow Room of the Kenmore Hotel, the best hotel in Albany. At about 1:00 a.m. on December 18, he left the party and went to his see his mistress, “Kiki” Roberts, who was staying at another hotel. Roberts had attended the celebration party, but had left before midnight. Diamond stayed in her room until about 4:30 a.m. and then was driven to 67 Dove Street, a private rooming house where he had been staying during his trial. He entered the locked front door with his key, went upstairs to his room, and fell asleep on the bed.

Witness reports say that a large black car, which had been parked down the street for some time, pulled up to the rooming house soon after Diamond arrived. Two men got out and entered the front door, using a key, and quickly went upstairs. When they got to Diamond’s room they either used a key or, as some believe, Diamond drunkenly left his own key in the lock, and entered the room. Diamond was asleep on the bed. While one man held him down, the other shot Diamond three times in the head.

They ran out of the room, but when they were halfway down the stairs, one of the gunman rack back up, went back into Diamond’s room, and shot him a few more times – apparently, just for good measure. The landlady, Laura Woods, awakened by the shots, overheard the second gunman call out, “Oh hell, that’s enough, come on!” The men left the house and drove away in the black car.

A few minutes later, at 5:00 a.m., Mrs. Woods telephoned Alice Diamond, the contact that Jack had given her in case there was any trouble. Within minutes, Alice, one of Diamond’s men, and Diamond’s eight-year-old nephew, Eddie, arrived at the house. Alice entered the room and began to scream. She frantically wiped blood from his face with a towel while the police and an ambulance were called.

Like most gangland slayings, the murder was never solved. In this case, there were just too many suspects since almost everyone seemed to want Diamond dead, from Dutch Schultz to the New York Syndicate, relatives of the Cassidy brothers who had been shot at the Hotsy Totsy Club, and even local politicians who wanted Diamond out of the Albany area. It didn’t seem to matter to most who had killed him – there weren’t many who were going to miss him.

Diamond was buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Queens on December 23. There was no church service of graveside ceremony. The burial was attended by Alice, her sister and brother-in-law, three nieces, a cousin, about a dozen reporters, and more than 200 curiosity-seekers. There were no known gangsters in attendance and, against the custom of the day, none of them sent flowers either.

Diamond may have gotten what he deserved, but there was one sad footnote to the story. On July 1, 1933, Alice Diamond was found shot to death in her Brooklyn apartment. It was speculated that she was killed by her husband’s enemies to keep her quiet, but no one knows for sure. Her murder, like the murder of Jack “Legs” Diamond, was never solved.

On June 6, 1992, two Missouri teenagers and one teen’s mother vanished without a trace after a graduation ceremony and have never been seen again. It was a shocking and tragic end to what should have been the event of a lifetime and it remains a haunting, unsolved mystery to this day.

Best friends Suzanne “Suzie” Streeter, 19, and Stacy McCall, 18, had just graduated from Kickapoo High School and they spent the evening celebrating with friends. They visited several different graduation parties and then decided to go to Suzie’s house – which she shared with her mother, Sherril Levitt, a 47-year-old cosmetologist – for the rest of the night. Sherrill was probably happy to see them. Her night had been quiet. She had been on the phone with a friend, talking about painting furniture, until about 11:15 p.m.

What happened after that remains a chilling puzzle.

Since all of Suzie and Stacy’s belongings were later found at Sherrill’s house – purses, clothes, makeup, etc. – it was assumed that they did make it there. Their cars were also in the driveway. But when friends arrived at the Levitt house the next morning, Suzie, Stacy, and Sherrill were missing.

A group of graduating friends all planned to go to the Whitewater water park the next day, so friends Janelle and Kirby came to the Levitt house at 8:00 a.m. on June 7. They knocked, but there was no answer. They went home and then returned at noon, thinking that perhaps the two girls had left for the water park without them. As they approached the house, they saw that the porch light was broken. They swept up the glass – trying to be helpful – but unknowingly contaminated a crime scene.

Janelle and Kirby checked the door – it was unlocked. That was their first inkling that something might be wrong. When they entered the house, though, everything seemed intact. There were no signs of a struggle. The house was just empty as if they had simply walked away. But to where? The cars were all parking in the driveway, but Suzie, Stacy, and Sherrill were nowhere to be found.

Just before the two teenagers left, the telephone rang. Janelle answered. The caller didn’t identify himself but began making lewd comments, so Janelle hung up, assuming it was a prank call. She and Kirby left the house.

A little while later, Stacy’s mother, Janis McCall, arrived at the house. She had tried to call, but there was no answer, so she had driven over. She hadn’t heard from her daughter since early the previous evening. There was no answer when she knocked, so she went inside. She looked around and found Stacy’s belongings. Her daughter’s underwear and t-shirt were missing, but the rest of her clothes were neatly folded on a chair. It looked like both girls had removed their makeup in the bathroom the night before. Janis also found all three of the missing women’s purses lined up on the floor outside of Suzie’s room, which seemed odd. The television was on, and Janis saw there was a message flashing on the answering machine. When she tried to listen to it, she accidentally deleted it.

She was convinced that something was wrong. It had been 16 hours since the three women had been seen. Janis and her husband decided to contact the police. When the authorities arrived, they tried to nail down just how many people had been inside of the house, possibly contaminating the crime scene, and tried to figure out what had happened. It was a baffling situation but suspects soon emerged.

The first suspect was Sherrill’s son, Bartt Streeter, who had recently argued with his mother and sister about his drinking problem. But Bartt had a solid alibi and was soon ruled out. Authorities also questioned Suzie’s ex-boyfriend, Dustin Recla. He’d been in trouble before. A short time back, he and a friend were arrested for vandalizing cemeteries. Suzie had given a statement to the police that stated that the boys had been digging up graves and stealing gold teeth from the corpses. Threats had been made against Suzie and her mother. When questioned, though, the boys were cooperative and also ruled out as suspects.

The investigation then focused on Robert Craig Cox, an Army veteran who had been arrested and convicted of a woman’s murder in Florida. The case was overturned due to a lack of evidence. In 1985, Cox was convicted of two different abduction attempts and sentenced to nine years in prison. His case was appealed and overturned in 1992 when a judge ruled that the evidence only gave the suspicion of guilt rather than proof of it. He was released in 1992 and sent to live with his parents in Springfield, Missouri – which put him in the right place at the right time to have been potentially involved in the disappearance of the three women.

Cox worked as an electrician, which the police speculated could have given him an excuse to enter the home. They also found that Cox had previously worked with Stacy’s father at his car lot. Cox’s girlfriend gave him an alibi at the time but, years later, she admitted that she lied. Cox had convinced her to make up the story if the police asked where he was during that weekend in June. Her story seemed solid, so the police had no choice but to let him go.

But Cox found it impossible to stay out of trouble. A short time later, he was arrested again for an unrelated crime. Detectives still believed that he had something to do with the missing women and took the opportunity to question him again. Cox laughed at them. He said that he knew the women were dead and, he claimed, he knew where their bodies were buried. Was he telling the truth? The police didn’t know. Cox loved attention, and this was the perfect way to get it. He was their most promising suspect, but he wouldn’t talk, and they had no hard evidence against him. Eventually, the case went cold.

The case of the “Springfield Three” officially remains open. Tips and stories have led to nothing but dead ends over the years. Theories abound. Some say they were victims of sex trafficking, while others claim they were carried off by a satanic cult. One tip – claiming that the women were buried in the foundation of a parking garage at a local hospital – was so convincing that the authorities tore up the concrete to look for them. And they found nothing.

What happened that night in 1992? There was no sign of a struggle. The three women were simply gone. They were declared legally dead in 1997 but the questions that linger still weigh heavy on surviving family members and on detectives who refuse to close the case.

Where are the “Springfield Three?” After all these years, no one knows.

On June 5, 1930, the body of Chicago mobster Eugene “Red” McLaughlin was found floating in the Chicago River, despite the baling wire that was wrapped around his body and the 75-pounds of metal that had been used to try and sink him to the bottom. The murder was actually one in a number of mob-related killings during what the Chicago papers called “Slaughter Week.” Like most mob hits of the Prohibition era, it was never officially solved.

It had already been a rough year, prior to the events of late May and early June. In January, a gun battle occurred in which Frank McErlane – the mobster responsible for introducing the “tommy gun” to Chicago – received partial payback for the murders of at least nine victims of gangland slayings that he was reportedly responsible for. Coroners had often listed him as a cause of death in autopsy reports. He had been indicted for two murders a short time before, but charges were dismissed. McErlane had been recently restless. He had fought over shares with his partner Joe Saltis and had transferred his allegiance to the South Side O’Donnells.

During the ambush on January 28, he was struck in the right leg by a bullet. While recovering at the German Deaconess Hospital, he had two unexpected visitors, who walked into his room and opened fire. McErlane, imprisoned by splints, did the best he could. He reached under his pillow and pulled out a .38 caliber revolver, which he fired five times. The intruders ran, leaving McErlane still alive. Two full chambers had been fired at him but McErlane was only hit three times and none of the wounds were fatal.

He was interviewed by the police but, of course, did not name his attackers. He did, however, hint angrily that this would not be the end of the matter. One of the gunmen had been John “Dingbat” O’Berta, a ferocious little man who was the chief gunman for McErlane’s old partner, Saltis. On March 5, O’Berta and his driver, Sam Malaga, were taken for a ride in Dingbat’s own Lincoln sedan. He was shotgunned to death. O’Berta’s funeral was a two-day wake, attending by 15,000 admirers from the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood on the South Side, where O’Berta had earned a name for himself as an influential young politician.

Dingbat’s widow had previously been the wife of Big Tim Murphy, the racketeer controller of the Street Sweeper’s Union, who had been machine-gunned in front of his Rogers Park home in June 1928. She and O’Berta had met at Murphy’s funeral. She had her second husband buried next to her first husband in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. She told reporters, “They were both good men.”

Then, in the last week of May 1930, the guns roared again, kicking off what some news scribblers dubbed “Slaughter Week.” On Saturday, Peter Gnolfo — who had once worked for the defunct Genna operation and switched his allegiance to Joe Aiello – was shotgunned by the Druggan-Lake gang, allegedly on orders from Al Capone. Within hours, the Aiellos struck back and three died in the reprisal. A party of five was sitting on the terrace of a small resort hotel on Piskatee Lake during the early hours of Sunday morning. They were Joseph Bertsche, who since being released from the Atlanta Penitentiary had been working for the Druggan-Lake mob; Micheal Quirk, a labor racketeer and beer runner; George Druggan, Terry Druggan’s brother; Sam Peller, an election strong-arm man from the Twentieth Ward; and Mrs. Vivian McGinnis, the wife of a Chicago lawyer. A full drum of machine gun bullets shattered the glass and slaughtered the group at the table. Peller, Quirk, and Bertshe died on the spot. Druggan and Mrs. McGinnis were both injured. The assailants vanished into the darkness.

No arrest was made and newspapers explained the attack as a quarrel that had developed because some of the Druggan-Lake boys were muscling in on the Fox Lake area, which was then supplied by Aiello and Moran breweries.

The reprisals continued and on Tuesday, Thomas Somnerio, an Aiello man, was found dead in an alley at the rear of 831 West Harrison Street in Chicago. He had been garroted and his wrists were tied with wire. He appeared to have been tortured for information.

Four days later, a tugboat passing along the drainage canal at Summit, on the Southwest Side, bumped into the body of Eugene “Red” McLaughlin, a Druggan-Lake gunman who had been named four times as a murderer and twice as a diamond thief and yet had never seen the inside of a prison. He had been shot twice in the head and dumped in the river. His wrists had been tied behind his back with baling wire and 75 pounds of iron had been stuffed in his pockets. It hadn’t been enough to keep him from floating up from the bottom of the canal.

Two weeks later, his body was identified by his brother, Bob McLaughlin, who was president of the Chicago Checker Cab Company. He had taken over the office from Joe Wokral, who had run into a nasty accident while running for re-election – he had been shot in the head. Before he died, he named Red McLaughlin as his attacker, a lead that was ignored by the police. A mournful Bob McLaughlin spoke to reporters after the grim task of identifying his brother’s corpse. He said: “A better kid never lived. He was friendly with all the boys, the West Side outfit, the North Siders, and the bunch on the South Side, Capone, too… I don’t know, I don’t know…”

Red McLaughlin was just another casualty of the wars over territory in Chicago in the waning days of Prohibition. The identity of his killer remains unknown.