(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — The New Year was less than two hours old when Chicago had its first murder victim of 1974.
Gilbert Glass, 60, was fatally shot at 1:20 a.m. Jan. 1 during a home invasion at a South Shore apartment. Two young suspects ransacked the place and made off with $300, according to a Chicago Tribune article headlined “1974 is murder-free—80 minutes.”
Robbery was the suspected motive a couple of days later when cab driver Joseph Skold was felled by a shotgun blast in West Englewood after someone made a phone call to lure him there.
Skold’s wallet, which contained $130, was untouched, though witnesses said a group of young men searched the cab before fleeing.
“It seems to me like a senseless murder,” Homicide Investigator Joseph Curtis told the Chicago Sun-Times.
It was only the beginning of a befuddling year in which a record number of Chicagoans — 970 of them — were slain.
As much as people may complain about lawlessness today, 1974 remains Chicago’s official benchmark for the most murders in an annual period.
This is not to be confused with “murder rate,” a calculation comparing crime data with a city’s population. Chicago’s worst “per capita” homicide year was 1992, when 940 people were slain but when the city had 600,000 fewer residents. The murder rate then was 34 victims per 100,000 people.
If you are talking about sheer volume of homicides, 1974 is it.
“More killings here than Belfast,” a pessimistic Sun-Times editorial headline read in late December, after police officer Harl Gene Meister was killed in a robbery attempt that left his 8-year-old son seriously wounded. Meister was off-duty and doing some last-minute Christmas shopping when he and the boy were confronted by a group of juveniles in a store parking lot on the Southwest Side.
“Other than avoiding high-crime areas,” the editorial said, “most people view crime statistics through a glass darkly: if they are careful, the violence will not touch them. And everyone else can watch out for themselves.”
Sound familiar?
Officials of the day blamed the usual suspects for so many killings: easy access to firearms, including the cheap but lethal “Saturday Night Special,” and a court system that critics said treated offenders too leniently.
James Rochford, Chicago’s $34,500-a-year police superintendent, complained that thousands of suspects his officers arrested in the past year were out on bond for similar crimes. He said the average hardened offender was wise to this revolving-door system.
“He knows he will be the beneficiary of plea bargaining, probation and parole. He knows lenient bail bond procedures give him an advantage,” Rochford told aldermen at a November Finance Committee hearing, The Chicago Tribune reported.
A spokesman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office faulted police for bringing cases with weak evidence, and one criminal court judge also pushed back at the top cop, saying, “Bond is not supposed to be oppressive.”
This, of course, mirrors today’s ongoing public spat among Mayor Lori Lightfoot, State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx and Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans whenever the topic of repeat offenders rears up.
The number of murders in Chicago had already exploded by the late-1960s and early-1970s. In fact, the city marked a homicide record in 1973, when 864 people were killed. Then, as now, local authorities stressed things were bad all over, not just in Chicago.
“Official FBI figures for 1974 disclose that, among the 56 largest cities in the United States, 38 experienced more crime per capita than Chicago,” the Chicago Police Department said in a report the following year.
Then, as now, Chicago homicides disproportionately affected people of color in economically depressed neighborhoods. Black Chicagoans comprised at least 70% of murder victims each year from 1965 to 1973, according to an article published by Northwestern University School of Law around that time.
Urban League Executive Director James W. Compton freely criticized police for neglecting minority communities. But he also urged Black residents to be a part of the solution by reporting crimes and “showing concerns for their neighbors and neighborhoods,” the Tribune reported.
Dick Simpson, a University of Illinois-Chicago professor who was a North Side alderman in 1974, said certain areas of the city indeed bore the brunt of violence while his Lake View neighborhood was comparatively calm.
In retrospect, he said, researchers have concluded that Chicago’s uptick in killings 50 years ago was driven by warring street gangs that were taking over the drug trade previously controlled by the mob.
“At the time, we only knew that there were a lot of shootings and that there were a lot of street gangs. We didn’t understand the mechanisms that were involved,” Simpson said in a recent phone interview.
An array of social problems long identified as root causes of Chicago violence have remained, says Bill Cameron, a retired broadcast reporter who was covering City Hall for WMAQ-AM in 1974.
“It is the one huge problem in all my years at City Hall that they’ve never been able to solve. They keep trying, with new bureaucracies and more people on the street doing social work and putting more resources into the high-crime areas,” he said. “It’s a complex problem that takes a generation, if not generations, to solve.”
Dangerous living
Chicago police said the murderers of 1974 and their victims were usually acquainted with each other, a talking point authorities use today when discussing some crimes. The subtext: Bad things happen to people in bad circumstances, rather than the public at large.
The year’s 897th murder victim was Englewood’s Adam Bradshaw Jr., “a man who drank too much, suffered from epilepsy and spent much of his time sleeping in hallways,” the Chicago Defender reported Dec. 7. Bradshaw was found dead — a bullet wound to the chest — in an apartment building corridor. Cops theorized he may have been slain by a “drinking buddy.”
But many murders in 1974 did not follow the narrative of people dying while living dangerous lives. As with the slaying of Meister, the off-duty police officer, a number of that year’s homicides were instances of criminals brazenly killing strangers, either in the course of another crime or maybe even for the thrill of it.
In March, a 55-year-old travel agent and her two 65-year-old neighbors were found tied up and stabbed to death after a presumed burglary in a sixth-floor apartment near Lincoln Park. “These people certainly were not capable of much resistance,” one police official said, according to the Tribune. “It was the cowardliest sort of crime.”
In July, church volunteer Josephine Hack, 68, was shot in the neck as she was running an errand near St. Ailbe’s Roman Catholic Church, 9015 S. Harper.
Mortally wounded, she staggered into the rectory and told a priest, “Father, they shot me, they shot me,” according to a Chicago Defender account. Her purse was still slung around her arm and nothing appeared to have been taken from her, police said.
Despite the embarrassment of these cascading murders, the Chicago Police Department claimed a “clearance” rate of about 80% for 1974 (today’s rate is less than 50%, according to recent published reports).
Police commander Jon Burge’s sideline of torturing confessions from suspects would not be known for years, but the CPD of 1974 was beset by corruption scandals that included indictments against dozens of officers. Also, several top police officials flunked lie detector tests as Supt. Rochford sought to reorganize the command structure with clean cops.
It should be noted that the CPD paid a terrible price that year, too. Four on-duty police officers died after being hit by gunfire: James W. Campbell, 33, on Feb. 9; Bruce Garrison, 29, and 28-year-old William Marsek, on Feb. 27; and Robert J. Strugala, 29, on June 16. Two police officers, including Meister and Otha LeMons, were fatally shot while they were off-duty.
Looking ahead, backwards
William McCarthy, the police veteran tasked with overseeing murder investigations, developed ulcers and was reassigned to CPD’s auto-theft unit after less than a year on the job, according to the Tribune. Rochford replaced him with rising star Joseph DiLeonardi, 42, himself a future top cop under Mayor Jane Byrne.
The ace detective, interviewed by the paper early in 1975, had little to say about Chicago’s murder problem. Or, maybe he spoke volumes when he simply said: “We are a sick society. Life today has become cheap.”
Chicago is on track to end 2021 with roughly 800 murders, a slight increase over last year. Given the city’s current population of 2,746,388 this would put the murder rate at 29 killings per 100,000 people.
First, the good news: This is significantly lower than Chicago’s record 1992 murder rate of 34 murders per 100,000 residents.
The bad news: The murder rate for today’s Chicagoans is equal to or maybe even a shade higher than the horrible year of 1974.
Editor’s note: Core information for this article was compiled from annual reports issued by the Chicago Police Department and from digital archives of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender and microfilm of the Chicago Sun-Times at the Chicago Public Library.
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