The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

by Wilkes, Roger

  “In this prep school and college, Lingle learned a great deal the ordinary citizen may, or may not, suspect. He learned that sergeants, lieutenants, and captains know every handbook, every gambling den, every dive, every beer flat and saloon on their districts, that a word from the captain when the heat is on will close any district tighter than a Scotsman’s pocket in five minutes, that they know which joint owners have ‘a friend in the hall or county’, and which haven’t. Few haven’t. He learned that the Chicago police department is politics-ridden.”

  Pasley’s view is that Lingle’s undoing was gambling—“he was a gambling fool”. He never bet less than $100 on a horse, and often $1,000. In 1921, when he was earning only fifty dollars a week, he took a trip to Cuba and came back loaded with gifts for his friends and colleagues, including egret plumes then coveted by women for hat decorations. His big spending and general prodigal way of life began to attract comment, and he gave it to be understood that he had just inherited $50,000 under his father’s will (examination of the probate court records in June 1930 showed that the estate was valued at $500). Later he invented a couple of munificent rich uncles. Pasley’s deduction is that it was in 1921 that Lingle “began living a lie, leading a dual life”, that the course of his income was not at this time Capone but possibly someone in the Torrio ring—gambling rake-off, slot-machines or police graft. Additional information about his life after office hours was given by John T. Rogers in a St Louis Post-Dispatch series. Pointing to the “mysterious sources of the large sums of money that passed with regularity through his bank account”, Rogers wrote: “If Lingle had any legitimate income beyond his sixty-five dollars a week as a reporter it has not been discovered … He lived at one of the best hotels in Chicago, spent nearly all his afternoons at racetracks and some of his winters at Miami or on the Gulf Coast … At his hotel he was on the ‘private register’. His room was No. 2706 and you could not call it unless your name had been designated by Lingle as a favoured one … All inquiries for Lingle were referred to the house detective. ‘Sure, he was on the private register,’ the house officer said. ‘How could he get any sleep if he wasn’t? His telephone would be going all night. He would get in around two or three and wanted rest.’ ‘Who would be telephoning him at that hour?’ the writer inquired. This question seemed to amaze the house officer. ‘Why!’ he exclaimed, ‘policemen calling up to have Jake get them transferred or promoted, or politicians wanting the fix put in for somebody. Jake could do it. He had a lot of power. I’ve known him twenty years. He was up there among the big boys and had a lot of responsibilities. A big man like that needs rest.’ ”

  This sketch of Lingle’s function seemed to be confirmed by a check made of outgoing telephone calls from his suite. They were mostly to officials in the Federal and city buildings, and in city hall.

  That Lingle had operated as liaison officer between the underworld and the political machine was the conclusion of Attorney Donald R. Richberg, who said in a public address: “The close relationship between Jake Lingle and the police department has been published in the Chicago papers. Out of town newspapers describe Lingle even more bluntly as having been ‘the unofficial Chief of Police’. But Lingle was also strangely intimate with Al Capone, our most notorious gangster. Surely all Chicago knows that Samuel A. Ettelson,9 Mr Insull’s political lawyer, who is corporation counsel for Chicago, is also chief operator of the city government. Thompson is only a figurehead. Are we to believe that there existed an unofficial chief of police associating with the most vicious gang in Chicago, without the knowledge of Mr Ettelson—who is neither deaf nor blind but on the contrary has a reputation for knowing everything worth knowing about city hall affairs?”

  That he had been on intimate terms with Lingle, that Lingle was “among the big boys”, was readily conceded by Capone himself. He was interviewed on the subject at Palm Island by Henry T. Brundidge of the St Louis Star, who on 18 July 1930 published this report of their conversation:

  “Was Jake your friend?”

  “Yes, up to the very day he died.”

  “Did you have a row with him?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “If you did not have a row with Lingle, why did you refuse to see him upon your release from the workhouse in Philadelphia?”

  “Who said I didn’t see him?”

  “The Chicago newspapers.”

  “Well, if Jake failed to say I saw him—then I didn’t see him.”

  Asked about the diamond-studded belt Lingle was wearing, Capone explained: “A Christmas present. Jake was a dear friend of mine.” And he added: “The Chicago police know who killed him.”

  Who in fact had killed Lingle? That aspect of the case seemed to have been temporarily shelved while the fascinating data of his financial state was, bit by bit, exposed for examination. By 30 June 1929 two-and-a-half years of business with the Lake Shore Trust and Savings Bank was on the public record. In that period he had deposited $63,900. But, obviously, many of his deals had been in cash, for only one cheque for $6,000 related to the purchase of his $16,000 house. He also carried a large amount of cash on his person—he had had $9,000 in bills in his pocket when he was killed. In March 1930 he paid insurance premiums on jewellery valued at $12,000, which was never located. During that two-and-a-half years he drew cheques for the sum of $17,400 for horse-track and dog-track betting.

  Another interesting branch of his activities that came to light were his “loans” from gamblers, politicians and businessmen. He had “borrowed” $2,000 from Jimmy Mondi, once a Mont Tennes handbookman, who had become a Capone gambling operator in Cicero and the Loop—a loan, the report read, which had not been paid back. He had $5,000 from Alderman Berthold A. Cronson, nephew of Ettelson, who stated that the loan was “a pure friendship proposition”; it had not been repaid. He had $5,000 from Ettelson himself, who could not be reached but who sent word that he had never loaned Lingle anything at any time, although he “had a custom of giving Lingle some small remembrance at Christmas time, like a box of cigars”. He had a loan of $2,500 from Major Carlos Ames, president of the Civil Service Commission, and Ames stated that this loan “was a purely personal affair needed to cover market losses”. He had $300 from Police Lieutenant Thomas McFarland. “A purely personal affair,” declared McFarland, as he had been “a close personal friend of Lingle’s for many years”. Additionally it was alleged that Sam Hare, roadhouse and gambling-parlour proprietor, had loaned Lingle $20,000. Hare denied it.

  Yet further enlightenment thrown by the investigation upon the private operations of Lingle was that he had been in investment partnership with Police Commissioner Russell, one of his five separate accounts for stock-market speculations. This particular one was opened in November 1928 with a $20,000 deposit, and was carried anonymously in the broker’s ledger as Number 49 Account. On 20 September 1929—preceding the market crash in October 1929—their joint paper profits were $23,696; later, a loss of $50,850 was shown. On all his five accounts his paper profits at their peak were $85,000; with the crash these were converted into a loss of $75,000. Russell’s losses were variously reported as $100,000 and $250,000.

  “As to the source of the moneys put up by Lingle in these stock accounts and deposited by him in his bank account,” the report commented with grim formality, “we have thus far been able to come to no conclusion.”

  But the Press and the public had come to conclusions—and they were the drearily obvious ones, the ones that again confirmed that they were the inhabitants of a city that lived by spoliation, that they were governed by dishonourable leaders and venal petty officials. As had happened so monotonously before, the dead hero changed into a monster in this fairy-story in reverse. The newspapers continued to theorize why Lingle had been eliminated, and the public were, flaccidly, interested to know; but the fervour, the righteous wrath, had waned. Both the most likely theories identified Lingle as a favour-seller, and both circumstantially indicated Capone’s opposition, the Moran and Aiel
lo merger. One story which had percolated through from the underworld was that Lingle had been given $50,000 to secure protection for a West Side dog-track, that he had failed—and kept the money. Another implicated him in the reopening of the Sheridan Wave Tournament Club which had been operated by the Weiss-Moran gang, but which, after the St Valentine’s Day massacre, and the fragmentation of the gang, had closed. After recouping, Moran had for eighteen months been trying to muster official help for a reopening. It had been in charge of Joe Josephs and Julian Potatoes Kaufman. It was stated that Kaufman, an old friend of Lingle, had approached him and asked him to use his influence to persuade the police to switch on the green light. The Chicago Daily News alleged that then, Boss McLaughlin—who on another occasion had threatened Lingle for refusing to intercede in obtaining police permission for the operation of another gambling house—was commissioned by Moran to make direct contact with the State’s Attorney’s Office. Kaufman and Josephs separately approached a police official, who agreed to let the Sheridan Wave Tournament open, if Lingle was cut in.

  Following this, according to the report, Lingle called on Josephs and Kaufman and demanded fifty per cent of the profits. Kaufman abusively refused. So the club remained closed.

  Another newspaper, the Chicago Herald and Examiner, carried a similar story. According to their version Lingle demanded $15,000 cash from Josephs and Kaufman, and when this was refused, retorted: “If this joint is opened up, you’ll see more squad cars in front ready to raid it than you ever saw in your life before.”

  Three days before Lingle was killed, State’s Attorney Swanson’s staff of detectives, on the orders of Chief Investigator Pat Roche, raided a gambling house in the Aiello territory, the Biltmore Athletic Club on West Division Street. Within an hour after the raid, Lingle was repeatedly telephoning Roche, who refused to talk to him. Next day Lingle accosted him in person and said: “You’ve put me in a terrible jam. I told that outfit they could run, but I didn’t know they were going to go with such a bang.”

  Meanwhile, Kaufman and Josephs had made up their minds—doubtless after consultation with Moran—to restart the Sheridan Wave Tournament Club in defiance of Lingle. It was widely advertised that it would be opening on the night of 9 June—the day on which Lingle set out for the races for the last time.

  An equally plausible theory was that he had got too deeply tangled up in the struggle for money and power in the gambling syndicate. For years there had been bitter war between Mont Tennes’s General News Bureau, a racing news wire service which functioned entirely for the purposes of betting, and the independent news services. As an appointed intermediary, in January 1930 Lingle brought the two opposed factions together and a two-year truce was agreed upon. The truce may not have extended to Lingle, whose services perhaps did not satisfy all the parties.

  Possibly all are true: it was simply that Lingle, like so many before him, had gone too far out in these barracuda waters of gang-business.

  THE SECRET JANET TOOK TO THE GRAVE

  (Janet Brown, 1995)

  David James Smith

  The circumstances of Janet Brown’s death are as mysterious as the details of her life. Few people knew her in the remote English village where she lived. One spring evening in 1995, an intruder burst into her quiet farmhouse. Her body was later found naked and gagged. Ten years on, Janet Brown’s murder remains unsolved. This account comes from the author and journalist David James Smith [b. 1956] who writes for the Sunday Times Magazine and who has published books on the James Bulger and Jill Dando murder cases.

  If I tell you that there was nothing special about Mrs Brown, that is not to demean her life or her importance to those who loved and were loved by her. It could be true of any or most of us, is the only point I’m trying to make. What will people find to say about you and I when the time comes and we are no longer around to speak for ourselves? We can all hope that time does not come prematurely and horribly, as it did for Janet Brown.

  People have spoken to me about her because they hope to help catch the person who killed Janet Brown in her home on an April evening in 1995. After all these years the circumstances of her death and the motive behind it remain a mystery and a puzzle to the police.

  Naturally, the police have considered that the secret of her death lies in the detail of her life. They have talked to everyone they can find who knew Mrs Brown and have discovered how little a woman can disclose to those around her. It does not appear that she had anything to hide, except herself. Likewise, the neighbours, friends and colleagues I’ve spoken to have wanted to assist but have sometimes struggled to find things to say about her.

  She liked to buy clothes at Whispers in Oxford. She suffered the occasional migraine. She was good at her job and was liked and respected at work. She was slight in build but not timid by nature. She was determined. She once left her husband and children behind to take an adventurous holiday in Peru, but that was a long time ago now. Perhaps there are photographs in an album or a drawer somewhere from this holiday, but I haven’t seen them.

  The photograph of Janet Brown that was published in the newspapers and shown on television was from her last foreign holiday with Mr Brown, in Kenya. The photograph shows a fifty-year-old woman in late bloom; a woman with shining eyes and long, feline eyebrows. She is smiling for the camera and appears relaxed. Though she is wearing a casual sweater in the photograph those who knew her say she was generally well dressed and careful about her appearance. They say she was fond of wearing jewellery, like the gold earrings in the photograph.

  The thing most people have said about her was that she was self-contained, not confiding; she was polite, jolly and thoroughly nice but kept herself to herself; was reserved in a typically English way.

  The Browns lived in a typically English little place called Radnage, a village without a shop on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. To reach Radnage you leave the M40 motorway at junction five, take the left turn just beyond Stokenchurch and enter a standstill world of curling lanes. In some places these country lanes are dauntingly narrow and funnelled by high hedgerows, and in others they reveal the up and down landscape of the Chilterns, with its fields and woods and scattered farm buildings and cottages.

  Eventually you will come to a fork in the road where a turn to the right curves around to the Radnage parish church of St Mary. Mrs Brown is buried here, just outside the low wall of the churchyard. Before the ground settled sufficiently for a headstone to be erected, a temporary short stick was pushed into the earth at the top of the grave and “J. Brown” painted on it in casual white lettering.

  The left hand of the fork leads into Sprigs Holly Lane where Janet Brown lived and died. It rises and falls over one of the highest spots in the Chilterns, but is one of those country roads that goes nowhere in particular and is not much used by through traffic.

  When I drove there, as I did on numerous occasions over a three-week period, I would invariably see the same things. A red pick-up passing by, which was, I learned, driven by Nick, the local builder. The farmer’s dad lumbering along in a tractor. A white-haired woman, old Mrs Fox, walking her dogs or standing nattering at the side of the road with a neighbour. A couple or more women and youngsters on horseback, snaking down the lane in single file. A few pheasant pecking at the verges.

  The lane is largely flanked by vast tracts of open farmland, creating an idyllic rural landscape which can be beautiful by day, harsh in winter, and black at night, when there is no streetlighting and the wind is moaning through the holly trees. “There’s only the parish lantern”, one local farmer told me enigmatically, raising his eyes at my ignorance when he had to explain that he was referring to the moon.

  After Janet Brown was killed newspapers reported that the lane was known locally as Volvo Alley but I could find no one who knew that name and the implication of a uniform wealth among the occupants of the houses dotted along its length does not stand up to close inspection. True, the property developer in the big h
ouse set back from the road had comings and goings by helicopter. A helicopter is also the preferred means of arrival for some of the more flamboyant guests at the expensive Sir Charles Napier restaurant further up the lane. But there is no one conspicuously aristocratic, or even noble, as you might find elsewhere in the shires and most people are working rather than idly rich.

  Perhaps it is the grand property names that are deceiving. This House, that Hall, the something Farm. There are no humble street numbers at all. The Browns’ home is called Hall Farm, disguising its lowly origins as a small farm workers’ cottage once inhabited, as I was told, by a family “only one up from gypsies”. It had long ago been known as Cabbage Hall Farm, but the Cabbage had been dropped many years before the Browns moved in and they had only continued a process of extending and developing the property into a larger family home befitting its fine-sounding name.

  Though the farm stands closer to the lane than many of the other houses along Sprigs Holly it is set in several acres of land. The farm is remote but it would be wrong, even now, to try and attach any sinister quality to its appearance. From the outside, at least, it reveals nothing of the Browns’ tragedy nor of the enduring enigma of Mrs Brown’s life and death.

  At the time of Janet Brown’s murder the family had been living at Hall Farm for a decade and had been trying to sell and move on for a year or two. The sale had been hampered by problems of subsidence, requiring underpinning, but a buyer had finally been found for £340,000 and they were no more than a week or two away from completion.