Month: October 2022

Chicago Tribune Photo of Child Killers Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold

Charles Ford Heath – The Forgotten Victim of Child Killers Leopold and Loeb

Charles Ford Heath is a name that few remember when discussing the “Crime of the Century”  On May 21, 1924, 14 year old Bobby Franks did not come home from the Harvard School for Boys in Chicago’s elite Kenwood Neighborhood. Nathan Leopold, 19 and Richard Loeb, 18 were extremely intelligent sons of wealthy Chicagoans and …

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Otto Funk The Chicago Library Thief

Otto Funk The 19th Century’s Great Chicago Library Thief

As a book lover myself I was drawn to the story of Otto Funk, the most prolific book thief in Chicago history.  As most great stories, I had come across this one by sheer happenstance as I was researching an unrelated story concerning the Chicago Public Library.  It contains all the elements of a great …

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James E. Dukes Executed

The Last Death By Electric Chair in Chicago

On February 18th, sometime before the Pandemic, I was pondering what to write about and discovered that Italian Physicist Alessandro Volta was born February 18, 1745.  Volta is credited with inventing the first chemical battery and separating and identifying the odorless gas, methane.  You can probably deduce by his name that the term to describe …

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