Death Sentence

41

Chicago, Jan. 7th— The Chicago vigilante is dead. He died as he lived, by the gun.

The body of Orson B. Pyne, 47, of 2806 Reba Place, Evanston, was found last night riddled with bullets in a side street off Lafayette Avenue in South Chicago after police received two telephone reports that shots had been heard in the area.

(For story on Pyne’s background, see page 14.)

Found in the dead man’s possession were a .45 caliber Luger automatic pistol and a .38 S&W Centennial revolver. The Luger had been fired four times, according to the police. The Centennial had not been fired.

Pyne was killed by several shots from a small-caliber weapon, according to Captain Victor Mastro of the Chicago Police Department’s special Vigilante Squad.

Mastro said, “He finally ran into a criminal who was faster than he was.”

Police are searching for the man who killed Pyne but if there are clues to his identity, the police are not revealing them. Captain Mastro said, “He was found on a very dark side street. Probably he went in there to entice a mugger to follow him. The mugger was armed — preliminary ballistics reports indicate it was probably a .25 caliber automatic with dum-dum bullets — and evidently there was a gun-fight. The entry angle of the death bullets indicates that the assailant was flat on the street when he fired, which may mean he’d ducked for cover or may mean he was wounded himself, although we doubt that’s the case, since any injury from that .45 Luger would have torn him up pretty badly and he wouldn’t have gotten away. We found no blood on the scene that couldn’t be traced to the dead man.”

Both guns found in Pyne’s possession were rushed immediately to the police laboratory. Captain Mastro said, “There’s absolutely no doubt that these are the two weapons that were used in all the vigilante cases.”