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Obit of the Day (Historical): St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1929)

At 10:30 a.m. on February 14, 1929 shots rang out in the Lincoln ParkLinc neighborhood of Chicago. Witnesses saw four men carrying, two dressed as police, run out of the SMC Cartage Company garage at 2122 N. Clark Street and into a police sedan, complete with sirens.

Thirty minutes later when the Chicago Police Department arrived they found seven men dead in the warehouse, apparently lined up against a wall and executed. Six of the men killed were all members of George “Bugs” Moran’s gang: James Clark, Frank Gusenburg, Peter Gusenburg, John May, John Snyder, and Albert Weinshank. The seventh was Reinhardt Schwimmer was an optometrist who had no criminal record but liked hanging out with gangsters. (The Chicago History Museum during their old tour of Lincoln Park referred to him as “an optometrist with unsavory connections.”)

The immediate suspect in the massacre was Al Capone, main rival of Mr. Moran. Unfortunately the murderers were never captured and Mr. Capone was hundreds of miles away in Florida at the time of the murder. 

One historical note: Because many people believed the police were involved in the event, it was imperative that the Chicago PD exonerate their own men while simultaneously trying to track the killers. So they turned to Calvin Goddard a doctor from New York who was becoming the premier crime scientist in the country. Dr. Goddard tested the casings of bullets fired from the eight machine guns owned by the police against those found at the scene. He determined that the department’s guns were not used in the crime. In addition, he later matched bullets from Capone hitman Fred Burke’s guns and found that they matched. It was not evidence that could be used to convict Burke but Goddard’s work was so impressive that Chicago hired him as the head of the nation’s first crime lab.

Capone would be arrested and sentenced for tax evasion in 1931. He was released in 1939. He would die in 1947 of syphillis. 

Sources: Chicago Tribune, New York Times (the original article from 1929), and The New Yorker