Death Sentence

15

¶ Chicago, Dec. 26th— In a bizarre Christmas Day tragedy, a man who tried to rob Santa Claus was shot to death yesterday outside a church on Lake Shore Drive.

Witnesses leaving the First Methodist Church described the events. Claude Tunick, 54, dressed in a Santa Claus costume, was collecting donations on the sidewalk for a Methodist crippled children’s fund. At 12:45 p.m. the noon Christmas Service inside the church came to an end, and the first worshipers to leave the building were in time to see a youth with a knife in his hand accost Mr. Tunick and wrest the cylindrical donations box away from him. Several of the witnesses ran down the church steps, trying to catch the thief or frighten him off.

Suddenly a shot was fired. Witnesses have been uncertain where it was fired from; most of them believe it was fired from a passing automobile which then sped away. The bullet struck Mr. Tunick’s assailant, William O. Newton, 17, in the chest. Newton died less than twenty minutes later in an ambulance en route to city hospital.

A police spokesman said the death bullet had been fired from a .45 caliber automatic pistol. Ballistics technicians are comparing it with bullets of the same caliber which yesterday were reported as having killed two alleged burglars on the South Side.

“If the bullets match up,” the spokesman said, “we’ll regard it as a strong indication that the vigilante is still in operation. He may have traded in his .38 revolver for a heavier .45.”

The vigilante — whose existence is still disputed in some official circles — has been accused of at least eight killings in Chicago in the past week, all of them involving the deaths of convicted or suspected felons. If the three .45 caliber homicides can be linked to the eight committed with a .38 caliber revolver, it will raise the vigilante’s death toll to eleven.

Captain Victor Mastro, in a telephone interview last night, said, “Eleven homicides in a week isn’t unusual for Chicago, unfortunately. Sometimes we have eleven in a single day. But if all of these have indeed been committed by one man, then it’s not too strong a statement to say we’ve got a one-man murder wave on our hands. We’re doing everything in our power to locate and arrest whoever is responsible for these killings, whether it’s one man or half a dozen.”

Captain Mastro, of the Homicide Division, is in charge of the vigilante case. His closing remark may have been in reference to several heated statements made lately by members of civil rights organizations, religious leaders, spokesmen for community groups, and two members of the Chicago Crime Commission, one of whom, Vincent Rosselli, spoke up in a County Council meeting on Tuesday, demanding “an end to vigilante terrorism in the streets of Chicago.”