Death Sentence

31

¶ Chicago, Jan. 5th— Last night, for the second time in little more than 24 hours, Chicago’s vigilante struck again, killing one man and injuring two others.

The dead man apparently was an innocent bystander, the intended victim of a robbery allegedly committed by the two wounded men.

Two men who allegedly had been rolling drunks near several bars in the Loop were found by police officers on Wabash Avenue shortly after 1:00 a.m. this morning, bleeding from .45 caliber bullet wounds, while a third man lay dead nearby.

According to Sergeant James Anderson of the Central District Patrol, the dead man has been identified as Peter A. Whitmore, 43, of 4122 Albion in Lincolnwood. Apparently Whitmore was on his way from a Balbo Avenue bar to the Harrison Street El-station, on foot, when he was accosted on Wabash Avenue by the two alleged robbers, whose identities have been withheld by police pending further investigation. The two men allegedly knocked Whitmore down and were going through his pockets when they were fired on from a passing car.

One of the men was shot in the shoulder, the other wounded twice, in the hip and in the collarbone. The bullet which passed through the second man’s hip barely grazed the flesh, according to police, and it continued on its trajectory, killing Whitmore almost instantly when it struck him in the temple.

According to Sergeant Anderson, the two men said the car from which the shots were fired never stopped moving, and they did not see the gunman’s face or note the type or license number of the car.

Captain Victor Mastro, charged with investigating the series of vigilante shootings, said last night in a telephone interview from his home that ballistics analysis on the bullets recovered from the dead and wounded man had not yet been completed. “But we’re proceeding on the assumption they were fired from the same .45 caliber automatic pistol that’s been used in several other vigilante cases.”

At a press conference yesterday afternoon, Captain Mastro revealed for the first time the specific descriptions of the two known handguns that have been identified by ballistics studies as having been used in the so-called Vigilante killings. One has been identified as a .45 Luger automatic, Captain Mastro said, and the other has been identified as a .38 S&W Centennial revolver. Laboratory study of the bullets recovered in several cases led to these identifications, according to Captain Mastro.

Such identifications are made possible by the fact that each different firearm model possesses a distinctly machined bore. When a bullet fired from the weapon passes through the barrel, the “lands and grooves” of rifling that have been machined into the steel, in order to spin the bullet, leave their imprint on the bullets. Microscopic examination of fired bullets can provide, in most cases, the exact make and model of the weapon from which they were fired. Later, of course, if a weapon is recovered by police, a sample bullet can be fired from it and compared with those used in earlier shootings, to determine whether the specific handgun in possession was used to fire the earlier bullets. Such ballistics identifications are as positive and exact as fingerprint identification, according to Captain Mastro; no two handguns will leave exactly the same markings on a bullet fired from them.

The two wounded men in last night’s shooting are being held in custody in the jail wing of County Hospital, according to a Central District spokesman. They are being questioned further about the incident.

Last night’s shootings bring to twenty-one the toll attributed to the vigilante. Of those, only four have survived their injuries. The death last night of Peter Whitmore marks the first time an innocent bystander has been shot by the vigilante, according to police. “Apparently he didn’t intend to shoot Whitmore,” Sergeant Anderson said. “He was shooting from a moving car, as far as we can tell, and his aim may have been disturbed by hitting a bump or something.”

“You could call it an accident,” Captain Mastro agreed in the telephone interview last night, “but according to law it’s first-degree murder. The felony-murder statute specifies that any homicide committed during the commission of another felony — in this case the assault against the two alleged robbers — is automatically classified as first-degree murder, even if the homicide took place accidentally.”

In any case, Captain Mastro remarked, “He’s got enough scores against him so that when we catch him we won’t have to worry very much about the technicalities of this particular homicide. He’s got a lot more than that to answer for. But this type of so-called ‘accident,’ involving the violent death of an innocent party, is all too typical of what happens when vigilantism rears its head.”