The 1926 Orland Park Murder Mystery by Matthew T Galik

Author:Matthew T Galik [Galik, Matthew T]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Criminals & Outlaws, History, United States, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI), Photography, Subjects & Themes, Historical
ISBN: 9781467139915
Google: gj1sDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2018-01-15T00:43:57+00:00

In an image that appeared in the Chicago Tribune, law enforcement officials are seen with Dr. McMahan’s recovered Ford coupe on the evening of April 14, 1926. Author’s collection.

CHAPTER 9

“A GRUESOME DISCOVERY”

After Al Hruby got the panicked reports from three customers who had just left his roadhouse that there was a bloody, crumpled heap in Twenty-Second Street a few blocks from his place, he decided to investigate with two buddies, Fred Karpel and Charley Rimek. As Hruby got out of Karpel’s open-top car and approached the neatly dressed corpse of Santo Calabrese that night, he saw a shattered figure—one that had been completely riddled by bullets and whose head had been ruthlessly crushed, likely by the unseen car tire that left a grisly smear in the road with Calabrese’s blood. In the night’s darkness, the restaurant owner couldn’t tell whether Calabrese, lying on his side, was alive or dead. Lacking a better idea, Hruby heaved the lifeless form off the asphalt into Fred Karpel’s auto, bunching up Calabrese’s overcoat under his smashed-in head for good measure.

At around 11:30 that night, and from that spot between Third and Fourth Avenues, Hruby, his friends and their grim cargo rushed the short drive to Broadview’s Speedway Hospital at Ninth Street and Roosevelt Road. Along the way, they were intercepted by Broadview police officer Joe Huszar in his Ford coupe; he had already received a report of the body. The group made it to Seventeenth and Twenty-Second Streets, where they halted and spoke to the lawman, to whom Hruby glibly uttered, “Joe, the fellow looks bad.”90 Still unaware of how Calabrese had received his wounds, Huszar escorted them to the hospital, where another officer examined the man upon arrival and declared him to be dead.

Before a doctor could wheel away Calabrese’s body, Huszar attempted to gain some sort of gleaming as to his identity. Among $1.10 in cash, a pocketknife, a razor and a pawn receipt that turned out not to be Calabrese’s, Huszar also came up with the key to cracking his identity: an October 1924 telegram receipt to Europe bearing Calabrese’s full name.91 His old address, 1452 Flournoy Street on Chicago’s south side, was also found among his pocket litter. Standard fingerprinting was done of the corpse’s hands, which sealed the identity.

After the deposit of his remains to the morgue, the grim duty of the postmortem examination began. Aside from the skull damage done by the car that ditched him on Twenty-Second Street, Calabrese’s body was found to have been pierced by at least three bullets. The fatal round was determined to have been fired into his head by an unknown killer, while two other superficial bullet holes were found to be in his back and hand.92 Oddly, the lesser wounds were off a different caliber handgun than the headshot, and as the details of the entire episode made their way into the Chicago papers, Sergeant William Bokholdt of the Cook County Highway Police nonchalantly mentioned to the Chicago Daily News that

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