How to go
What: Guns used in St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
Where: Heritage Center of Clark County
When: 2 p.m. Feb. 11
Cost: $5 for general admission, free for Clark County Historical Society members
Reservations (required): (937) 324-0657
Note: an earlier version included the wrong date for the exhibit.
If you want to get your valentine the same lame flowers and chocolate again this year, have at it.
Guys and gals who want to treat their darlings to something special will take them to the Heritage Center of Clark County at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11, for a look at the Thompson submachine guns used in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
The weapons will be the centerpiece of the presentation, “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: The Origin of CSI Forensics,” by Lt. Michael Kline of the Berrien County, Mich., Sheriff’s Department.
General admission is $5, and it’s free to Clark County Historical Society members. Reservations are required and can be made by calling (937) 324-0657.
The killing of seven gangsters in a garage in Chicago’s Lincoln Park on Feb. 14, 1929, remains one of the nation’s most notorious unsolved mass murders, Kline said. Calvin Goddard, the man known as “the godfather” of modern forensics, long ago cleared up any mystery over the weapons used.
In the 50-60 presentations Kline gives annually, he has had to correct his audiences about the weapons he displays.
They aren't "like" the ones used when Al Capone's Southside Chicago gang were suspected of slaughtering seven members of rival Bugs Moran's crew, said Kline, "these are the two that were used."
The connection was made after Berrien County deputies found the guns among a huge arsenal of weapons on Dec. 14, 1929, while investigating the shooting death of St. Joseph, Mich., police Officer Charles Skelly.
A getaway
Located in southwest Michigan, about 90 miles from Chicago, Berrien County was a place some of Al Capone’s lieutenants fled to when they wanted time away from the city.
“They started procuring homes,” Kline said, and the “they” included Fred ‘Killer’ Burke, who lived under the alias Fred Dunn.
Wanted for questioning by Chicago police in connection with the massacre, Burke ran afoul of the law in “St. Joe,” as the locals call it, 11 months later on Dec. 14, 1929.
“He’d been drinking most of the day and had a fender bender with a local resident, which led to a confrontation with a police officer,” Kline said.
In an account posted on the Berrien County Sheriff’s website, writer Chriss Lyon says St. Joe Officer Charles Skelly, who had been on foot patrol, was riding toward police headquarters on the running board of Burke’s car to sort out the accident when Burke fatally shot him.
Burke wrecked his car while fleeing toward his cottage south of St. Joseph, found police at his home as he approached, then escaped and eluded authorities for two years.
Upstairs, in a locked closet of what Lyon describes as Burke’s “stylish bungalow,” police found “ammunition, four bulletproof vests, revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, hand grenades, tear gas bombs and two Thompson submachine guns,” she writes.
The arsenal and $320,000 in bonds stolen from a Wisconsin bank led them to connect the monogrammed FB shirts they also found there with Fred Burke.
Back to Chicago
Berrien County authorities forwarded most of the arsenal to Chicago for inspection by ballistics expert Goddard.
“He didn’t invent the comparisons microscope” in which experts compare bullets for matching wear, Kline said, but Goddard established that the markings can identify bullets as being fired from the same gun.
Kline said Goddard test-fired the weapons found in the bungalow and, through bullet comparison, tied them to the gangland crime.
Goodard “would eventually have gotten some recognition” for his work, Kline said, but his work on the era’s most infamous crime catapulted his cause.
“He gets huge funding, he expands his laboratory at Northwestern University,” Kline said, and the science romanticized in today’s series of crime scene investigation shows began to grow.
He also attracted the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who not only sent agents to study with Goddard but established FBI regional crime forensics labs.
Said Kline, “That all stems from Burke being drunk in downtown St. Joe, Burke shooting Skelly and us confiscating these weapons.”
An ending
Kline said that at the outset of the 1920s, when the nation was trying to ignore prohibition, “the music was getting faster, the dresses were getting shorter (and) everybody thought the war to end all wars had been fought,” gangsters were seen as romantic figures.
But coming just before the economy skittered into Depression, the brutal images of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre alienated the public.
When they roared to life in that Chicago garage in 1929, the two machine guns that will come to Springfield on Feb. 12 may have been the symbolic final roar of the Roaring ’20s.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
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