Chicago Triangle

Lila Valentine returned from a week in Jamaica ready to begin her next assignment. Not all the places she wrote about in Travel Time magazine were so inviting. The September issue, for instance, would be devoted to great American cities, and Lila was assigned to cover Chicago. She had hoped to get San Francisco, Miami or New York, but the senior writers had garnered those prizes. Still, she fared better than the rookies who had to cover places like Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland.

Armed with a notepad and a hot cup of coffee, Lila headed toward her desk. The bulk of the research could be done online. Then, once the text was drafted, she would spend a week in Chicago with one of the staff photographers visiting the main attractions and getting an overall feel for the city's atmosphere.

The journalist turned on her computer and began the tedious Internet search for background information on the Windy City. Naturally, she started at the beginning with the first settler: Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Haitian fur trapper who opened a trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River. Du Sable's trading post was later purchased by a man named Jean La Lime, who in turn sold it to John Kinzie. La Lime may have regretted his decision to sell, for Kinzie became a successful businessman and community leader. A bitter enmity developed between the two men that culminated in bloodshed. During a heated argument, La Lime drew his pistol and shot Kinzie in the shoulder. Although injured, Kinzie managed to stab his adversary to death.

Not a very auspicious beginning for a city, she thought, jotting down the names of people and places she wanted to research further.

As it turned out, the blood spilled by La Lime and Kinzie was but the tip of a vast iceberg. The early years of the city's history were marked by violence.

In 1803, the U.S. government established Fort Dearborn at a strategic location along the Chicago River. During the War of 1812, Potawatomi Indians attacked the fort; eighty-six settlers were massacred, twelve of them children. Reports of the incident told of savage acts including torture and mutilation. When the rampage was over, the natives burned the fort to the ground and left the dead where they had fallen.

The morning went by quickly as Lila poured through tales of the early days of Mud City (Chicago's oldest surviving nickname). The stories read more like a horror novel than a history of a great American city. For instance, in 1840, John Stone, a young Irishman with a long criminal record, was hanged for rape and murder, thus becoming the first man legally executed in Chicago.

The city laid claim to the first homicide in America solved by the use of fingerprint evidence when police arrested Thomas Jennings for the 1910 murder of Clarence Hiller. Although his lawyer appealed Jennings's guilty verdict, claiming fingerprint evidence was not recognized by the state of Illinois, the Supreme Court upheld both the conviction and the death sentence. Another first for Chicago occurred in 1925. Martin J. Durkin, a professional car thief with ties to the underworld, shot and killed FBI agent Edwin Shanahan, making him the first federal agent killed in the line of duty.

It was not only humans who met their death in the Windy City. The Union Stock Yards opened in 1865 to supply food and horses to the Union troops. Chicago went on to become the meatpacking center of the country—a giant slaughterhouse on the banks of Lake Michigan.

"How's your research coming?" Marina Thewlis, a fellow journalist at the magazine, asked when the two women met at the coffee machine in the cafeteria.

"All the grisly stories I've been reading about Chicago make me wish I never left Jamaica."

Back at her desk after the coffee break, Lila read an article about the Lager Beer Riot of 1855 in which over a thousand men armed with clubs, knives, hammers and guns marched on the Clark Street Bridge to protest the closing of saloons on Sundays. Although sixty people were arrested, there was only one death.

However, the next website she visited was dedicated to one of the most famous events in the city's history. Legend has it that the Great Chicago Fire was started in Mrs. O'Leary's barn on October 8, 1861. Although the true cause has never been proven, the extent of the tragedy cannot be denied. The fire raged for twenty-seven hours, destroying one-third of the city and killing an estimated three hundred people.

The account reminded her of the 1938 movie In Old Chicago, a fictionalized account of the O'Leary family and the fire, starring Tyrone Power, Alice Faye and Don Ameche. She made a mental note to rewatch the film when she went home that night.

Another disturbing chapter of the city's history—one not depicted in a movie starring a handsome Hollywood leading man—dealt with gang rivalry at the Walsh School between the Irishers and the Bohemians. Their brutal enmity resulted in the deaths of several school boys and gang members as well as numerous shootings, stabbings and beatings. Long before Columbine horrified America, students were carrying guns and knives to school in Chicago.

"I'm afraid the information I'm uncovering isn't likely to boost tourism," Lila confided in Marina Thewlis. "Surely, there must be some lighter moments in Chicago's history I can write about."

The journalist scanned historic headlines from the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and other newspapers, but the frequent recurrence of violence, accidental death and manmade disasters was disturbing.

A Google search produced several articles on violent labor disputes. In 1877, efforts to introduce the eight-hour workday in the farm equipment industry resulted in the Haymarket Riot, the bombing at an outdoor rally that killed seven policemen. More than sixty people were then wounded when police opened fire on the crowd. Another deadly labor strike broke out in 1894 when George Pullman lowered wages at his South Side railway car plant.

Apparently, even those with money and power weren't safe. In 1888, wealthy capitalist Amos J. Snell, known for being a ruthless businessman, was found murdered in his home. Five years later, in 1893, Mayor Carter Harrison was assassinated in his own home by Patrick Prendergast, who later pled innocent by reason of insanity.

Massacres, riots, fire and political assassination. What's next? Human sacrifice?

Back to browsing through newspaper headlines, Lila found articles on the 1937 Memorial Day massacre of steelworkers, the 1968 riots at the National Democratic Convention, the 1992 Great Chicago Flood and the 1995 heat wave in which record-high temperatures killed five hundred and twenty-five people.

"Why don't you take a break and join me for lunch?" Marina asked. "It's almost one o'clock."

When she returned to her computer, Lila narrowed her search, focusing on the 1920s, the decade when Chicago was overrun with gangsters, corrupt public officials and gangland warfare. Their names are legendary: Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, Bugs Moran, Dion O'Banion and many more. Among the crime families that stretched from the east coast to the west, there was a surprisingly large number of mobsters in the city. She traced the rise of Chicago-based gangs beginning in the 1890s with what started out as Ragen's Athletic and Benevolent Association and grew into a gang known as Ragen's Colts. The Colts were responsible for the deadly race riots of 1919 in which more than five hundred people were injured and thirty-five killed.

At about that same time, the Black Hand began its reign of terror with bombings, killings and extortion. The poor, working-class Italian immigrants were so plagued by these criminals that the tenement area in which they lived was nicknamed "Little Hell." From 1900 to 1920, four hundred murders were credited to the fifty or so Black Hand gangs in Chicago. These killings reached a peak in 1910 when thirty-eight victims were shot to death at the intersection of Oak and Milton Streets, a spot that became known as "Death Corner."

When Prohibition ushered in the Roaring '20s, bootlegging, bathtub gin, speakeasies and gang warfare spread across Chicago as rapidly as the flames that had started in the O'Leary barn fifty years earlier. The hope of rising in the ranks or the desire to take over a rival's territory resulted in the deaths of Diamond Joe Esposito, killed in front of his wife and daughter; Big Jim Colosimo, murdered because of his reluctance to enter the lucrative bootlegging business; Dion O'Banion, gunned down in his flower shop by Capone's gunmen; Earl "Hymie" Weiss, shot multiple times while crossing State Street; Unione Siciliane chieftain Samuel Samuzzo "Samoots" Amatuna, who met his end in a barber shop; Pasqualino "Patsy" Lolordo, killed in his living room by men he'd invited to dinner; Giuseppe "Joe" Aiello, riddled by fifty-nine bullets from a submachine gun; and "Mike the Pike" Heitler, burned alive after turning on Al Capone. Other gang-related casualties included three brothers ("Bloody" Angelo, Mike "the Devil" and Antonio Genna) and Giuseppe Nerone, a Genna family ally.

Undoubtedly, one of the most sensational and memorable crimes not only in Chicago but the entire country occurred on February 14, 1929, when seven members of Bugs Moran's gang were massacred inside the SMC Cartage Company on Clark Street. Seven years later, on February 15, 1936, "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, believed to have orchestrated the St. Valentine's Day Massacre on the orders of Al Capone, was assassinated by three men in a bowling alley.

Lila knew she should forget about gangland murders and labor riots and concentrate on sports arenas, cultural centers, art museums, restaurants and shopping districts, but there was a seductive quality about Chicago's darker history that she couldn't resist.

Let's see how violent a city it is, she thought and began searching for homicides and serial killings.

Nearly every major city in America has had its own Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Kemper, Ed Gein or Ted Bundy. They are often given catchy nicknames like the Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, the Night Stalker and the Zodiac Killer. But the number of mass murderers who called Chicago home seemed to be out of proportion with the number of killers from other metropolitan areas. In the 1890s alone, two notorious serial killers plagued what Norman Mailer referred to as "the Great American City." Johann Otto Hoch poisoned at least fifty women before being tracked down by a Chicago police detective. And most notably, a druggist named Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. Henry H. Holmes, said to be the most prolific murderer in history, built his own personal house of horrors on 63rd Street and turned it into a private abattoir. Mudgett was believed to have tortured and murdered over two hundred women.

Women were not always the victims of crimes; sometimes they were the perpetrators. In the early 1900s, Belle Gunness, who once owned a confectionary store in Chicago, later moved to Indiana but placed personal ads for a husband in Chicago's newspapers. She lured the prospective suitors to her home where she crushed their heads and butchered them like hogs. When Gunness's house burned to the ground in 1908, police found the bodies of fourteen men and one decapitated woman in the ruins.

Sounds like Belle was the Aileen Wuornos of her day, Lila thought and continued to read about members of the "fairer sex" who seemed to prove Rudyard Kipling's contention that "the female species is more deadly than the male." (Maybe not more deadly, but certainly just as deadly.)

In 1924, Beulah Annan, who became the inspiration for Roxie Hart in the musical play Chicago, shot her lover, Harry Kalstedt, in the bedroom she shared with her husband, while Kalstedt was putting on his hat and coat. She then drank cocktails and played a foxtrot record on her phonograph for four hours while she watched him die. That same year Belva Gaertner, the inspiration for the Velma Kelly character in Chicago, allegedly shot and killed her married lover, Walter Law. Belva, who was drunk at the time, couldn't remember what had happened, but Law was found dead on the front seat of Belva's car, and Gaertner's clothes were covered with blood.

However, the cases where women killed their lovers were tame by Chicago standards. A more bizarre incident involved the "Wizard of Chicago," hypnotist Herman Billik, who claimed to possess occult powers he inherited from his "witch" mother. Billik poisoned six people: neighbor Martin Vzral, his wife Rose and the couple's four daughters. Another killer who went beyond the pale was German sausage maker Adolph Luetgert who, in 1897, murdered his wife and boiled her body down in a sausage vat filled with lye.

She was surprised to discover that even the greatest unsolved murder mystery of all time had a tenuous link to Chicago. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, a one-time Chicago abortionist, was a suspect in the deaths of five prostitutes in Whitechapel. The hangman at London's Newgate Prison claimed to have heard Cream announce, "I am Jack the ..." moments before he was executed. However, since Dr. Cream was in prison at the time of the murders, he could not have been Jack the Ripper.

An American-born Jack the Ripper from Chicago! On that note, I'm going to go home, take a relaxing bubble bath and watch Tyrone Power.

Since morning traffic was light, Lila arrived at work forty minutes early. Rather than getting a cheese Danish from the cafeteria, she decided to put the time to good use. She brought her cup of coffee to her desk and turned on her computer.

The first story of the day concerned a 1935 murder committed by a former prostitute named Evelyn Smith and her friend Blanche Dunkel. The two women conspired to kill Mrs. Dunkel's son-in-law, Ervin J. Lang. Smith dosed him with ether and strangled him. She then cut off Lang's legs at the hip and stuffed the torso into a large trunk, which was dumped into a swamp near Wolf Lake.

The second article featured Thomas Fitzgerald, a middle-aged man with a fondness for young girls. In July 1919, he strangled six-year-old Janet Wilkinson when she refused to be lured into his house with candy. The crime occurred one day after the Wingfoot Air Express (a dirigible owned by Goodyear) crashed into the Illinois Trust and Savings Building, killing thirteen people and injuring twenty-seven, and five days before African-American teenager Eugene Williams drowned after being struck with a rock thrown by a white man who was incensed because Williams had inadvertently drifted into the whites-only section of a racially segregated beach. Fitzgerald was later convicted and hanged for the crime.

"Read any good news stories today?" Marina teased when she arrived at work. "Maybe one about a fireman rescuing a cat from a tree?"

"No, but how about this one?" Lila replied, reading from her computer screen. "In June of 1920, Carl Otto Wanderer killed his pregnant wife and a harmless vagrant in a staged robbery. Wanderer, a homosexual, wanted the insurance money so he could live with his male lover."

"All I can say is that I'm glad I was assigned to cover Philadelphia. The only places that can qualify as dark tourism sites are Eastern State Penitentiary and the Mütter Museum."

"Let me know when you feel like taking lunch," Marina said. "I'm going to be busy learning about Philly's professional sports teams."

"Will do," Lila said, returning to her own research that had nothing to do with the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bulls or the Blackhawks.

In fact, the next website she visited featured one of the most sensational murders in American history. Two wealthy, highly intelligent college students, both born to wealthy families, attempted to commit the perfect crime. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were defended by Clarence Darrow, planned and executed the murder of a young neighbor. At a time when murder was usually a crime of passion, hatred, greed or insanity, their intellectually calculated, cold-blooded killing of an innocent boy against whom they felt no malice or ill will shocked the nation.

To keep track of all the murders, Lila created a timeline, beginning with the 1812 death of Jean La Lime.

As the decades went by, Chicago's body count continued to climb. In the '30s, teenager Robert Nixon killed four women and a twelve-year-old girl by smashing their heads with a brick. In the '40s, University of Chicago student William Heirens, who became known as the Lipstick Killer, allegedly slashed one woman's throat, stabbed another to death and snatched a six-year-old girl out of her bedroom window. He then dissected her and scattered her body parts from sewer to sewer. In the '50s, grocery store owner Vincent Ciucci shot his wife and three kids in the head before setting their apartment on fire.

Then in 1966, another nationally prominent murder took place in Chicago. Richard Speck, whose motto "Born to Raise Hell" was tattooed on his arm, killed eight student nurses at their dormitory at South Chicago Community Hospital.

In the year of America's bicentennial, 1976, eighteen-year-old Patty Columbo, along with her thirty-eight-year-old boss and lover, Frank DeLuca, entered her family's house, shot her father four times and crushed his head, shot her mother between the eyes and stabbed her younger brother eighty-three times.

Another teenager, seventeen-year-old Henry Brisbon, Jr., was driving along I-57 in June of 1973, accompanied by three friends, when he pulled over a car and shot two total strangers in the back at point-blank range with a shotgun. Later in prison, Brisbon, without provocation, stabbed another inmate to death with a sharpened soup ladle. Brisbon also attempted to murder two other inmates with a sharpened piece of wire, but he was unsuccessful. Oddly enough, one of the inmates whose life he threatened was convicted murderer John Wayne Gacy, who tortured, molested and murdered thirty-three young men and buried their bodies in his basement crawlspace.

After seeing images of Gacy dressed as Pogo the Clown, Lila felt she needed a break from murder and mayhem and decided to stop for lunch. Over a tuna sandwich and a Diet Coke, she listened to Marina describe her attempts to housebreak her French poodle. It was not really an appropriate mealtime topic of conversation, but it was better than reading about a man murdering his wife and putting her body in a vat of lye!

After lunch, Lila returned to her research. Jotting down notes on her timeline as she read, she continued to scan the long list of Chicago's murderers. The next notation was for September 1972. The bodies of thirteen-year-old Carolyn Van Der Molen and seventeen-year-old Deborah Kozlarek were discovered in Washington Park; both were shot to death with .32 caliber bullets. No suspects have ever been arrested.

Lila turned to a new page in her notepad for murders that occurred in the 1980s.

During the period 1980-81, Charles Albanese, Jr., poisoned his mother, father and grandmother with arsenic to claim their inheritances. And in May 1988, mentally ill Laurie Dann walked into an elementary school on the North Shore and shot six children, killing eight-year-old Nicholas Corwin. After the shooting, she fled the scene, and hoping to avoid police, she entered a home and took two people hostage at gunpoint. When an assault team entered the house, they found Dann's body upstairs in a bedroom where she had shot herself in the mouth.

"Valentine," the editor called to Lila from her office. "How's that article on Chicago coming along?"

That's it, she decided. If I keep reading about murderers, I'll be out of a job.

She spent the rest of the afternoon researching Soldier Field, Lincoln Park Zoo, Grant Park, the Art Institute, the Magnificent Mile, Navy Pier and Wrigley Field as well as a score of other Chicago landmarks. By the end of the week, Lila had compiled a list of fine restaurants, top-rated motels and hotels and suitable attractions for all ages. She then contacted Jesse Gardener to schedule the photo shoots. Jesse was not only one of Travel Time's best photographers, but he was also a great traveling companion, which was why he was always her first choice on assignments.

On the flight to O'Hare, Jesse wanted to impress Lila with his knowledge of local trivia.

"Do you know how the airport got its name? It was named after Butch O'Hare, the first of only five World War II fighter pilots to win the Medal of Honor. After he was killed in 1943, the city named the airport after him, despite the fact that his father was Eddie O'Hare, a racetrack owner with ties to organized crime. Eddie was gunned down in 1939, but the case was never solved."

Since Jesse brought up the subject of murder, Lila showed him a summary of her research on the more violent history of Chicago.

"There might be something more to it. Like maybe the city is living under an Indian curse."

"I'm serious. I think you could be onto something here. Chicago could be like the Bermuda Triangle."

Lila and Jesse spent the next four days photographing the attractions mentioned in Lila's article. On the fifth day, Jesse purchased a street map of Chicago, and with both Lila and her list of murders in tow, he visited the sites of some of the grisly crimes. In many cases, the buildings were gone, but there was a lingering malevolence nonetheless.

"I hope I'm not sounding like a throwback to the Sixties, but there are bad vibrations here," Lila confessed.

"I know. You can almost smell death in the air. By the way, did you know that in 1998, Chicago was named the nation's murder capital?"

"Really? Thank God the article is finished. I'm ready to go home whenever you are."

Lila and Jesse spent the rest of the day adding to the already extensive list of murderers Lila had compiled from her Internet search.

At one point, Jesse looked up from his book and said, "Listen to this. In 1955, three young boys, John and Anton Schuessler and Bobby Peterson, disappeared on their way home from the movies. Their nude bodies were discovered three days later with adhesive tape covering their eyes. They had been sexually abused, beaten, strangled and thrown from a vehicle. The following year, Patricia Grimes, fifteen, and her thirteen-year-old sister, Barbara, also disappeared on the way home from a movie theater. The girls had been missing for twenty-five days when their frozen nude bodies were found on the bank of Devil's Creek."

"As I recall, John Dillinger was gunned down outside a Chicago theater. Remind me to stick to renting videos from Blockbuster," Lila joked.

"Here's a landmark you won't find in Travel Time: the Wynkoop Mansion, nicknamed 'House of Weird Death.'"

"The mansion, built in 1901, was believed to be cursed. The owner's daughter died there, and the owner's brother, a doctor, attempted to strangle his wife while staying in the house. The doctor later went insane, attacked a nurse and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution. But the house got its macabre nickname in 1933 when it was passed down to Dr. Alice Lindsay Wynkoop. Police found the body of the doctor's daughter-in-law, Rheta, lying face down on an operating table in the basement. Whether the bullet in Rheta's back was put there by her mother-in-law or by her philandering husband remains a mystery. The crime baffled the neighborhood since Dr. Wynkoop was a respected women's rights activist and pillar of Chicago society, admired for her charitable deeds. She wasn't the type to commit murder."

"That's true of a great many people on my list," Lila said. "But really, is there such a thing as a 'type' that commits murder?"

"Here's another strange one," Jesse said, not answering her question. "In August 1998, two boys, ages seven and eight, killed an eleven-year-old girl, supposedly to get her bicycle. These are the kinds of murders you read about in the tabloids. And it's not only homicides that occur here. Camp Douglas, nicknamed 'Eighty Acres of Hell,' was a Confederate prison camp located on the south side of Chicago. The death toll during the last three years of operation alone was estimated at more than six thousand men, almost one-third of the entire prison population."

Taking the part of devil's advocate, Lila pointed out, "The death toll was far higher in Andersonville, and that was located in Georgia, nowhere near Chicago. Besides, we're talking about Civil War prison camps. War wounds, diseases, malnutrition. It's a miracle anyone survived."

"But look at the the other weird shit that's happened in Chicago. Take fires, for instance."

Jesse ignored her comment and said, "In 1903, a fire broke out during a vaudeville show at the Iroquois Theater. The asbestos stage curtains that were meant to hinder the blaze got stuck while being lowered, and they actually fanned the flames out into the auditorium. The crowd ran for the exits, but the doors opened in, not out, and the press of people prevented them from being opened. Also, some of the side doors had been locked. Six hundred and two people died in that inferno. To this day, the passageway to the theater is referred to as 'Death Alley.'

"Here's another one. In 1909, the LaSalle Hotel opened, boasting in its advertisements that it was the 'largest, safest and most modern hotel in America outside of New York City.' The owners also claimed that the hotel was fireproof. But in 1946 a tossed cigarette started a fire in one of the hotel's elevator shafts. Within minutes, the flames were out of control. Turns out, the building was a firetrap. Smoke cut off the escape roots, and the fire ladders brought by the fire department only reached the eighth floor, making rescue of the victims above impossible."

"A year later, in 1910, a fire broke out in one of the warehouses at the Union Stock Yards. Twenty-one firemen, including the fire chief, and three civilians were killed when the building collapsed, making it the deadliest building collapse in American history.

"This one," he continued, "is heart-rending. In 1958, a fire broke out in Our Lady of Angels Catholic School. Whoever reported the fire gave the wrong address. The Fire Department's dispatcher sent the trucks to the church's rectory by mistake. When the trucks finally arrived at the school, the firemen had to break through a locked gate to get inside the grounds. Before the fire—which later became known as the 'fire that refused to die'—was finally extinguished, ninety-two children and three nuns were dead."

"Sorry, but I don't think these fires, no matter how tragic they are, prove your point that Chicago is somehow cursed. Lots of cities have had devastating fires: London, San Francisco and Halifax. And if you want to talk about weird fires, there's a town in Pennsylvania, called Centralia, that was condemned and torn down because the coal mines beneath it have been on fire since 1962."

"Let's forget about fires, then," Jesse argued. "How about boats? In 1860, the steamer Lady Elgin left the harbor in Chicago for a pleasure excursion on Lake Superior. Ten miles from land, it collided with the schooner Augusta, killing two hundred and ninety-seven people and becoming one of the most terrible disasters on the Great Lakes.

"Then in 1915, the steamer Eastland was one of several boats carrying employees of Western Electric and their families to a picnic. The Eastland was built to hold twenty-five hundred passengers, but that day there were at least thirty-two hundred aboard. As they were leaving the dock, many of the passengers went to the rails to wave at people on shore. The boat tipped over and capsized between the Clark and LaSalle Bridges. Eight hundred and thirty-five people died including twenty-two entire families."

As Jesse continued reading about natural and manmade disasters, Lila went back to studying local Indian legends. Each engrossed in their research, it was nearly closing time at the library before the two friends spoke again.

Lila looked up from her book and said, "Here's an old Sauk Indian legend that states that the land at the mouth of the Chicago River was regarded as sacred. The Sauk felt that the river emptied into the great lake at the same point where the land of the dead emptied out onto the land of the living."

"Maybe I was on the right track with my Indian curse idea. 'The land of the dead emptying onto the land of the living' may very well mean that the city was built on an Indian burial ground. I've got an idea. Tomorrow, let's visit a local college that offers a course in Native American studies. Maybe we can learn more about this Sauk legend from one of the professors."

Dr. Elias Hunter was an Algonquin Indian, who, with parchment-like skin and long gray hair worn in a single braid, looked to be anywhere from fifty to ninety years of age.

Jesse explained his theory that the proliferation of violence in Chicago's history might be the result of an old Indian curse.

Then his laughter stopped, and his face took on the stony expression of a statue.

"There was never a burial ground on this land. Somewhere along the line, the old Sauk legend was misinterpreted. The 'land of the dead' doesn't refer to the spirits of long-gone ancestors. The early spiritual leaders claimed that the land where the river emptied into the great lake was the entrance to what the white man refers to as hell. The medicine men warned their people to steer clear of this land since an evil spirit's influence often seeped out that entrance to take hold of the hearts and minds of men."

"You're pulling my leg, right? You don't really believe that Chicago was built around the gate to hell and that the devil is causing all the death and violence we've read about?"

"A few minutes ago you seemed ready to believe in ancient Indian curses. Why is this theory so much harder to swallow?"

"Because I don't believe in either hell or the devil," the photographer replied.

"Perhaps because you think of the devil as the stereotype we see on Halloween: the horned man wearing a red cape and toting a pitchfork, always eager to bargain for innocent souls. Maybe the devil is more of a force of nature than an actual being, a force that enters people and eats away at their compassion and humanity like a cancer, leaving nothing behind but hatred and the lust to kill. Have either of you ever heard of Hull House?"

"Yes," Lila answered. "I've included it in my article. It was the most famous settlement house in American history. It enriched the lives of hundreds of immigrants."

"But there was one story connected with the house that added a tinge of notoriety to its otherwise pristine image. Jane Addams, Hull House's founder, was the daughter of a wealthy merchant. After her father's death, young Jane went into a deep depression and decided to tour Europe to raise her spirits. It was while she was in the Whitechapel district of London that she got her calling."

"Yes. But I doubt that has any bearing on my story. Anyway, Jane came home and opened Hull House where she helped European immigrants adjust to a new life in Chicago. But people whispered that the settlement house also offered refuge to the Chicago 'Devil Boy.'"

"Supposedly, he was the child of a devout Catholic woman and her atheist husband. According to local gossip, he was born with pointed ears, horns, scale-covered skin and a tail. The father gave the baby to Hull House, and when the child was taken to be baptized, he supposedly escaped from the priest and began laughing. Jane was forced to keep the child locked in the attic where he eventually died."

"That's ridiculous," Jesse cried, although he wasn't quite as skeptical as he pretended to be.

"Maybe there was no truth at all to the matter," Hunter continued. "Or maybe it was only a case of superstitious lies being told about a deformed child."

Lila added, "Or maybe it was the devil trying to beget a human child, like in Rosemary's Baby."

"I still don't think we can attribute all these atrocities to demonic influence," Jesse insisted. "What about the concept of humans having free will and minds of their own?"

As Professor Hunter listened to his visitors debate the existence of a devil, he searched his bookcase.

"Ah, here it is," he said, taking down an old volume from the top shelf. "I, too, believe that man is born possessing a free will, but that will can be strongly influenced by the temptation to do the devil's bidding. This old book is a collection of writings by early Algonquins. One Potawatomi chief writes of the massacre at Fort Dearborn. He says here:

'The Dark One appeared before us, more shadow than man. Although he made no sound, we could understand his words. He tried to convince us that the pale men and women with strange clothes and strange ways were our enemies and, as such, must be destroyed. Many of my brothers and I tried to resist his urgings, for he was no medicine man or brother to us. Yet his words seemed to sound sweeter the more we heard them. It took all my strength to resist him. In the end, I was too weak, and I took my part in slaying the strangers among us.'

"He goes on to tell about the massacre and the victory of the Potawatomi. Then he concludes his writing by saying:

'The sun was setting. As I stood among the bloody, broken bodies of a few of my brothers and many more of the strangers, I could see the Dark One hovering above them, and I could hear his laughter in the wind. I realized that victory was not ours; it belonged only to him. This land where the river meets the great lake did not belong to either of the races of men whose blood seeped into the ground. This land had always and would forever belong to the Dark One whose menacing presence would continue to plant the seeds of evil in all who tried to dwell there.'"

Lila and Jesse left Chicago, convinced that the great city on the bank of Lake Michigan had not been placed under an Indian curse after all. The Potawatomi were victims themselves. The Devil Boy, Devil's Creek, Little Hell, Eighty Acres of Hell—these names were not exaggerations. Something evil pervades the land where the river meets the great lake, something that, to this day, leaves its mark on generations of Chicagoans.

Lila shuddered to think how many more innocent, unsuspecting lives would be claimed by the menacing force that inhabited what Jesse had half-jokingly nicknamed the Chicago Triangle.

Although this story is primarily a work of fiction, the crimes and disasters in this story are factual, based on published news articles, books, websites, etc. However, there is some doubt as to the guilt of a few of the murderers mentioned.

Additional Note: In June 2022, I visited Chicago for the first time. Although I did not see the entire city, the places I did visit were very nice, and I had a great time.

Salem once wanted to be a Chicago gangster, but I made him an offer he couldn't refuse: a 5-pound box of Godiva chocolates if he remained on the right side of the law.