Midwest newspapers last week splashed through such an orgy of Sex and Murder as rarely falls to the lot of a headline-writer. One was in Peoria, Ill.; two were in Chicago; the last was in Cleveland.
Peoria. The Trial of the Obscene Picture Man was straight Good & Evil. Good was Mildred Hallmark, 19, pretty, self-respecting hostess in a cafeteria who had been found stripped, raped and murdered in a Peoria cemetery ditch last June. During last week's trial Midwest newspapers temporarily promoted her from a cafeteria hostess to a night club hostess, reconsidered, returned her to the cafeteria. Her last night she had seen Public Hero No. 1 with a friend who had left her to go home alone in the rain.
Unconditional Evil was Gerald Thompson, 26, machinist, who noted in his diary some 83 women he had tried to seduce. To Peoria's pride, 67 of his attempts were unsuccessful. He had come along in his car in the rain, given Miss Hallmark a lift, liked her so well he choked her unconscious, hit her on the jaw and threw her into the ditch. The Press at first rated him "handsome, curly-haired, muscular." Then it came out that on his night-prowlings he carried scissors to snip women's underclothes, had made a New Year's resolution to get a new girl every week for a year and sometimes posed for obscene pictures. Thereupon Gerald Thompson became "pasty-faced."
While all Peoria scuffled and scratched to get into the courtroom, suspense hung on whether the defense could make the State produce Thompson's diary listing the 83 women. Headline: RIOT TO HEAR SEX SLAYER'S LOVE DIARY. Peorians tore down the courthouse doors. Headline: NAMES OF 83 GIRL VICTIMS WITHHELD.
Peoria and the Press frowned on defense attempts to show that Thompson was insane. His younger brother happened last week to be in jail on a charge of taking "indecent liberties" with a small boy. Briskly Gerald Thompson was found guilty of murder, sentenced to the electric chair.
Chicago No. 1. Day of the Thompson conviction in Peoria, Chicago produced for indictment two remarkable women. One was Mrs. Blanche Dunkel, 42, plain, heavy-jawed washwoman, a four-time widow. The other was her washwoman friend, Mrs. Evelyn Smith, 46, onetime burlesque dancer, prostitute and wife of a Chinese laundryman. Somehow, between them, they had murdered Mrs. Dunkel's son-in-law, a grocer's clerk named Ervin Lang, who after his wife's death last December was planning to remarry. Mrs. Dunkel promptly confessed that she had offered Mrs. Smith $500 for the job, paid $100 on account.
Comparatively stodgy was Chicago newspapers' first theory that Mrs. Dunkel had resented her onetime son-in-law's plan to marry so soon after her daughter's death. Better was the one that she had suspected him of killing her daughter. Best of all was the discovery that Mrs. Dunkel had been jealously in love with her son-in-law, might herself have killed her daughter.