A Murder Mystery in Aledo, Illinois

 

Allie Dool

In September 1902, Aledo, Illinois, found itself plunged waist-deep into the biggest murder mystery the town had ever encountered. Marie Antoinette Dunlap (Tona) stood accused of killing her best friend, Mary Alma Dool (Allie), to get her $4.00 a-week job as a clerk at Felix’s Store.

At first, the authorities considered Allie Dool’s death an unfortunate accident. The coroner’s inquest said the same thing. It was accidental poisoning.

A few days later, suspicion centered on Tona Dunlap. 

State’s Attorney Will J. Graham questioned the decision of the coroner’s inquest and began looking into the details of Allie’s death. He tried to question Tona but met a brick wall. Every time he asked a question, she said her attorney advised her not to say anything. 

Then Dr. Carter, the pharmacist at Craig’s Drug Store, told Graham Tona bought five cents worth of strychnine on Sunday, August 3. 

That gave the state’s attorney the ammunition he needed to go after Tona Dunlap. The next person he spoke to was Margaret Miller. She told him about her shopping trip with Tona Dool the day Allie died.

The Murder of Cherry de St. Maurice At The Mysterious Cherry Club

 

Cherry de St. Maurice

Someone strangled Cherry de St. Maurice, the mistress of the mysterious Cherry Club, in her room on July 8, 1913. Cleo Sterling, a girl in the resort, discovered her nude body face down on the floor at 5:45 Tuesday afternoon. Maxine Meyers, another resort girl, heard a scream at about 8 a.m. but ignored it, thinking it might be the creak of a door.

Police Inspector Koening determined Cherry put up a desperate struggle for her life. She had bruises on her arms and shoulders, and the strangler’s fingers discolored her pretty pink neck.

Cherry always wore expensive jewelry and kept valuables in her room, so the detectives supposed the motive was theft. Newspapers reported she lived in constant fear of robbery. 

In 1911, her piano player, Jack Palmer, teamed up with another man to steal Cherry’s jewels. In between sets, Palmer piled a stack of jewelry and other valuables by a window in Cherry’s room. Unfortunately, his accomplice’s timing was off. He crawled through the window while Cherry came through the door. Both parties ran away.

Later that year, an “insanely drunk” Japanese man named Iwasaki shot it out with six patrolmen during an attempted robbery. No one got hurt in the incident, but the papers had a good laugh poking fun at the lawyers and businessmen who fled the club half-dressed.

Jake Lingle: Victim of a Double Life

 

Jake Lingle

When Alfred “Jake” Lingle, a crime-beat reporter with the Chicago Tribune, was murdered in the city subways on June 9, 1930, the police immediately blamed the city’s gangsters, declaring his death was a warning to newspapers. If they wanted to take on the criminals, they were fair game.

If that were the case, Lingle seemed the ideal target. He’d spent the last nineteen years prowling the city’s underbelly, exposing criminals, cozying up to cops and gangsters, and now they had silenced him.

All signs pointed to a mob hit.

Lingle followed his usual routine that day. He ate lunch at the Hotel Sherman, visited with friends in the lobby, going outside at about 1:15 p.m. He walked up Randolph Street toward the Illinois Central Subway Station. From all appearances, he planned to spend the day at the Washington Park Racetrack in Homewood. After the races, he was going to the reopening of Bugsy Moran’s Sheridan Wave Tournament Club, a gambling den on Waveland Avenue. The club had been closed after a raid in June 1929.

Lingle stopped at a newsstand near the library, where he grabbed a racing form. As he started walking away, a man in a roadster hollered, “Don’t forget to play Hy Snyder.”

Seven Must Read Books on the Civil War

 

Almost every question about America eventually leads back to the Civil War. Politics. Race. States’ rights. Federal power. Even some arguments we’re having today started over 160 years ago.

 

If you only wanted to read seven books on the Civil War, I’d recommend these as a good starting place. Some are military history. Some focus on Lincoln or Grant. One barely talks about battles. Together, they give you a pretty good feel for what the war was really about.

 

I’m not a historian. I just like good books. If it feels like a textbook, I’m probably not going to finish it. Every book on this list taught me something and kept me asking questions.

 

(One quick note. The links below are Amazon Associate links. If you decide to buy one of these books, I might make a few pennies on the sale. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, and it helps keep this website running. Thanks for your support.)

Broadway Butterflies and the Wolves Who Stalk Them

 

Louise Lawson

Louise Lawson came to New York from Walnut Springs, Texas, in 1918. She planned to make it big on the stage or to star in a Broadway musical. Instead, she wound up dead in her luxurious Wall Street apartment. 

The Buffalo Times said Louise had two personalities as widely divergent as the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal story.”

Back home in her Texas hometown, the folks saw Louise as an innocent, high-minded girl who met an unfortunate death while pursuing her life’s dream. However, her friends on Broadway knew her as “a sophisticated young woman. A girl who had chosen the easiest way and was living in idle, diamond-studded luxury by matching her smiles and kisses against the desires of men willing to pay high for them.”

The New York stage was not good to Louise. She played one or two-bit parts, but nothing that would bring her the wealth and fame she wanted. New York City had too many girls competing for the same dream.

D. W. Griffith paid her $20 to work as an extra in Way Down East, a film that starred Lillian Gish. But she had no more luck in the movies than on the stage, and music was no more promising. Back home in Walnut Springs, Louise had been a twelve-year-old piano prodigy who sang in the church choir. In Flo Ziegfeld’s Follies on Broadway, she was just another chorus girl who made fifty bucks a week.

The Cook County Lady's Murder Club

 

Florence Bernstein

“There is something intrinsically fascinating about the woman criminal,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “Men come and go, are arrested and released, follow the life or give it up, but there is seldom anything of a particularly startling nature.

“With women, it is different. There are not nearly so many of them, and they are much more protected.

“She is not ‘peached’ on. She goes free. She is the bane of the police.

“With women murderers, it is different. There is no professional class, for few women murder except for some strong reason, and then few women have more than one or two or even three murders laid at their door.

“And as for the conviction of women murderers—it seems to be a practical impossibility in Cook County at least. ‘Any kind of woman can kill at her pleasure in Cook County,’ said State’s Attorney Malato. ‘Then she can go into the court after the killing, shed a few tears, cast a few wistful glances at the jury, and she will be acquitted.’”

“Indeed,” said the paper, “women, when they take to murder, seem to single their husbands out for victims.”

The clergy expressed the same sentiment.

Could James Buchanan Have Prevented The Civil War?

 

President James Buchanan

Some say that James Buchanan was a “weak, timid, old man” who did nothing to prevent the Southern states from seceding. Some historians have even declared Buchanan was an “accessory after the fact.” He was a president, a Southern sympathizer, and a traitor.

But was he?

The obvious comparisons are Andrew Jackson and George Washington. Jackson stood firm during the South Carolina nullification crisis and threatened to kick the nullifiers in the ass and hang all the traitors from the nearest tree branch if they laid a single hand on federal property or fortifications. During the Whiskey Insurrection, George Washington marched 13,000 troops to western Pennsylvania to put down the rebellion.

By comparison, James Buchanan hid in the White House and issued this special message to Congress on January 8, 1861. “No state has a right by its own act to secede from the Union or throw off its federal obligations at pleasure. To [Congress] belongs the power to declare war or authorize the employment of military force....”