AS IF TO RATIFY Big Bill’s decision to leave town on nonessential business, the city turned relatively quiet on Thursday. Transit talks remained at a standstill. Traction company owners, union leaders, and the Lowden commission held several meetings throughout the morning, but no one was budging on the question of the eight-hour day, and the unions were refusing even to broach the topic of wage concessions until that issue was settled. The Wingfoot inquest, meanwhile, was on hiatus while funerals for seven of the victims were held at various locations across the city.

Shortly before noon at the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, all business came to a halt for five minutes to honor the dead. As the Tribune later reported, “Not a typewriter clicked, not a pencil moved, and the telephones went unanswered. The employees rose to their feet and bowed their heads—a silent tribute to their coworkers who were killed.”¹

A few hours later, officials at Goodyear, rising to the occasion, issued a public apology for the accident and announced the naming of a special three-man committee to arbitrate all claims for compensation from the families of the victims. They requested only that Goodyear and its employees be given a fair hearing. “In justice to our men,” the company said in its statement, “we respectfully ask a suspension of public judgment as to their responsibility until the facts are reliably established.”²

Legislators were meanwhile acting to ensure that accidents like the Wingfoot crash would not be repeated. In Washington, D.C., Illinois’s own Senator Lawrence Sherman introduced a federal bill designating specific lines of aerial traffic that would steer clear of crowded downtown districts. Closer to home, the Chicago City Council, having passed its emergency resolution on Monday, was now working on legislation to give the symbolic measure a more enforceable form. Even Mayor Thompson, still en route to Cheyenne, made sure to chime in on the topic. Speaking to reporters at a brief stopover in Omaha, the mayor was apparently eager to appear “still on the job.” “I am going to do everything I can to help establish laws for the regulation of airships of every kind when they fly over Chicago,” he told the press corps. “I am opposed to permitting any airship which uses inflammable and explosive gases to pass over a city.”³

Even the Janet Wilkinson case was stalled for most of the day. Despite being subjected to round-the-clock interrogation—including relentless “man-to-man questioning” by Lieutenant Howe—Thomas Fitzgerald stubbornly maintained his innocence throughout the early-morning hours of Thursday. Toward dawn, Howe brought John Wilkinson, Janet’s father, into the basement interrogation room. When Wilkinson reminded the prisoner of Janet’s claim that he had harassed her last winter, Fitzgerald shook his head vigorously and insisted that the child had been misquoted. Wilkinson, he told Lieutenant Howe, “has it in for me and is telling lies.”

This was too much for the grieving father to stand. “You hound!” he allegedly shouted in his heavy Scottish burr. Without warning, he sprang on Fitzgerald and started strangling him, “driving his fingers tightly into his throat.” Howe and another detective rushed to pull Wilkinson off the much smaller man, who sank to the floor in a swoon.⁴

Later in the day, other witnesses were brought in for questioning. Edward C. Watson, another roomer in the Fitzgerald boardinghouse, and S. C. Darby, an old family friend who had dropped by the apartment “acting in a peculiar manner,” were both detained and subjected to a grilling. One issue of concern was the whereabouts of Mrs. Fitzgerald. Her husband claimed he didn’t know how she could be contacted—that she had gone to Michigan at the invitation of some friends who owned a cottage there, but he didn’t know exactly where. Oddly, Edward Watson knew that the cottage was in Bangor. Suspecting a kidnapping conspiracy (as well as an illicit relationship of some kind between Mrs. Fitzgerald and her boarder), Howe had Watson send her a telegram asking her to return to Chicago; Howe himself then spoke to her via long-distance telephone and gave her the details. Insisting that her husband was innocent of any wrongdoing, Mrs. Fitzgerald promised to catch the first train back to Chicago, at which time she would prove to police that her husband had nothing to do with Janet’s disappearance. Howe wasn’t convinced. After the conversation, he had a picture of Janet rushed to police in Bangor in order to initiate a search for the girl there.⁵

By afternoon, Howe thought that he might actually be making progress with Fitzgerald. A box of stale chocolate candy had been found in the boardinghouse, and although the suspect initially denied that it was his, he later recanted, admitting that he had bought it two weeks ago from a Chicago Avenue druggist. Having thus caught the suspect in one lie, Howe hoped that more admissions would follow. He cleared the interrogation room and pressed Fitzgerald further, questioning him in classic good-cop fashion by trying to play on his sympathies. “Think of that child’s mother,” he said to the prisoner, “worried, hysterical, dying for news of her baby. If you have any idea where she may be, where her body may be found, tell us and relieve the mother’s suspense.”

At this point, Fitzgerald apparently wavered. He opened his mouth and his eyes “took on a peculiar beaten expression.” To Howe, he appeared ready to give in and finally tell what he knew. But at that instant a door opened and a station porter stuck his head into the room. The moment was lost. Fitzgerald “shut up like a clam” and refused to utter another word.⁶

At an afternoon press conference, Detective Sergeant Powers could barely conceal his frustration. “It is possible Fitzgerald lured [Janet] into his home on the promise of giving her some of that stale candy,” he told reporters, “but then what happened? And where is the girl? If she was killed, where is the body? It was daylight. The slayer couldn’t have taken her on the roof unless he went up the fire escape in front. He would have been seen.”

The obvious alternative was that Fitzgerald had taken the body to the basement of the duplex building. But Powers dismissed that possibility: “We searched [the basement],” he said. Then, becoming perhaps more graphic than was absolutely necessary, he added, “There was a fine fire in the boiler, but there always is. Janet’s body was too big to shove through the boiler door, unless it was dismembered, and there were no blood spots anywhere.”

In short, the police were baffled. “It is possible that Fitzgerald could have got away from his work Tuesday night, before he was arrested, to dispose of the body—if you accept the theory that he murdered the little girl. His employers admit that. But so far as they know, he remained at work all that night.”⁷

As the interrogation of Fitzgerald continued without a break, scores of anonymous calls were coming into the Chicago Avenue station from people who claimed to have seen Janet. One person alleged she had witnessed Janet being abducted in an automobile by a well-dressed woman. An iceman’s son reported that he had sold the girl some ice. Someone else was certain she had seen Janet playing on a Logan Square playground. Police dutifully checked out these and numerous other leads, but without success. One tipster called the station insisting that the girl could be found in room 400 of the Morrison Hotel. Police rushed to the scene only to find that the hotel had no room 400. They searched the entire building nonetheless.⁸

The case took a sensational turn late in the day when Muriel Fitzgerald walked into the Chicago Avenue station at 6 p.m. A slender, well-dressed woman with delicate, attractive features, she appeared to be significantly younger than her husband. In her meeting with Lieutenant Howe, she again expressed confidence in Fitzgerald’s innocence. “The reports about his peculiarities are born in the brains of gossiping people,” she maintained. “I shall stand by him until he is vindicated.”

Lieutenant Howe, having become convinced of Fitzgerald’s guilt over the course of forty hours of continuous interrogation, was skeptical. When Mrs. Fitzgerald asked to speak to her husband privately, Howe agreed, but he first made sure to send Detective Sergeant Powers to conceal himself behind the prisoner’s cell. When Mrs. Fitzgerald was led to the basement and left alone with her husband, Powers was ready with pen and pad in hand. What the detective heard next was remarkable:

“You did it, you did it,” Muriel Fitzgerald hissed to her husband the moment she thought they were alone. “When I received that telegram telling me to come home, I knew what was the matter. You stick to your story and all will come out all right.”

Fitzgerald, apparently seeing his wife as his only ally, pleaded for her help, though he admitted nothing explicitly. “Go to the package room of the Virginia Hotel and get a small package I left there,” he told her. “Whatever you do, Muriel, stand by me!”

When Mrs. Fitzgerald left the basement, she was immediately seized by two police detectives. She objected vehemently, but then Howe showed her the notes that Detective Sergeant Powers had taken. When she could offer no plausible explanation for her words, she was formally arrested and taken to Women’s Detention House No. 1 to be held overnight.⁹

Eager to follow this new clue, police rushed to the Virginia Hotel to search for the package. At first, they could find nothing, though they apparently examined every parcel in the room. Eventually, they brought Fitzgerald himself over to the hotel, and he reluctantly showed them where to look. The package was found and opened. Inside was a brand-new .32-caliber revolver, nestled in a soft chamois case. Every chamber was loaded. A quick inspection indicated that the gun had never been fired.

This discovery convinced Lieutenant Howe that the case might be a kidnapping after all, and that Janet could still be alive. Moving quickly, he dispatched a pair of police detectives to Michigan to retrace Muriel Fitzgerald’s movements in the days after Janet’s disappearance. But he insisted that there be no letup in the local investigation. Police continued to follow up on all tips, which were coming in with increasing frequency, especially after John Wilkinson announced a $500 reward for any information leading to Janet’s recovery.¹⁰

By now police were also dealing with a flood of another kind of report as well. Inspired by the publicity of the Wilkinson case, parents across the city were coming forward in astonishing numbers to complain that their own children had been assaulted by strange men. An Anna Clark of West Pierson Street claimed that her daughter Florence had been attacked by an older man on July 17. A Helen Lipschutz reported a similar incident with her five-year-old daughter, Anna. Apparently this problem—until now largely suppressed by parents unwilling to expose their children to unwanted publicity—was far more widespread in Chicago than anyone had imagined. By late Thursday, there were rising cries for Deputy Chief John Alcock, acting as chief in Garrity’s absence, to immediately arrest and institutionalize all suspected “morons” (1919 parlance for “mentally deficient deviants”), at least until some plan for the protection of the city’s children could be devised. Whatever the ultimate explanation of Janet Wilkinson’s disappearance, the “moron problem” in Chicago was seemingly out of control. As in the Wingfoot disaster on Monday, Chicagoans had been suddenly and brutally awakened to an insidious new urban danger—and in this case, the source of that danger was apparently their very own friends and neighbors.¹¹