The Jewish community in Chicago, one of the wealthiest in the world, has always exercised an extremely powerful degree of behind the scenes influence in the Windy City, an influence just as pervasive and powerful (if not more so) as that of the Italian organized crime syndicates, all the more sinister for being far less visible.
In October of 1955 four White children, two young boys who were brothers and two teenaged sisters, were abducted and murdered in a manner which was suggestive of Jewish ritual sacrifice, the liturgical object of which is to obtain Gentile blood to mix with the matzoh used in several esoteric Jewish religious ceremonies such as Purim, Passover, and Kol Nidre at Yom Kippur. These were the Schuessler boys and the Grimes girls. Both cases remain officially unsolved despite hundreds of man-hours of investigation by the Chicago police. The Grimes case in fact featured on an episode of UNSOLVED MYSTERIES several years ago, but the show produced no further leads.
The cases shared certain characterstics in common. Both the boys, aged six and eight respectively, and the girls aged thirteen and fifteen were found nude, and yet none had been sexually assaulted. According to the pathologists' reports they had been kept alive for some time after they were reported missing, although the unusually cold weather in which the bodies were exposed impeded fixing an exact time of death. The corpses showed ligature marks on the wrists and ankles, indicating that they had been tied or restrained. All the victims had been tortured with mostly small, shallow cuts and puncture wounds, none sufficient to cause death of itself. The official cause of death was listed as blood loss and shock due to blood loss and exposure; the childrens' bodies were "drained of blood".
Further peculiarities were observed in the PATTERN of the torture. The two female victims had been tormented by repeated puncture wounds on the upper torso, thighs and buttocks, suggesting a sadistic sexual element in the killers' motivations, but the two young male victims had been transfixed through the hands, wrists, and feet by larger weapons similar to nails or a carpenter's awl, inflicting wounds very similar to the so-called stigmata, the wounds of Christ.
What is interesting about these cases is not the unsolved murders themselves, but the view which for once we are given of the lengths to which the Jews will go to cover up suspected ritual murder cases. In view of the intense public interest in the case there was of course a lot of media reporting. The Chicago Daily News published an afternoon edition detailing the ritualistic nature of the wounds inflicted on the Schuessler boys, comparing it to an earlier case wherein a boy named Peterson had been found dead with the same kind of wounds, and speculating that members of a "religious cult" might be involved. Within ten minutes of the edition hitting the street, trucks were sent out to bring them all in; all copies were ripped off the newstands and taken back to the News building where they were burned.
Eight copies of this issue were obtained by a woman named Mrs. Lyle Clark Van Hyning who published a conservative journal called Women's Voice. When she called the Daily News office to ask why the paper had been recalled she was told that there had been "complaints" about it and it was likely to cause "racial unrest". Mrs. Van Hyning had her own suspicions and sent the father of the two murdered boys, Arnold Schuessler, a copy of Arnold Leese's definitive work JEWISH RITUAL MURDER.
Schuessler read the booklet and was stunned by what he learned. He then made the mistake of going to the police and demanding that the possible ritual murder angle in his sons' death be investigated. The Cook County Sheriff of the time was a Jew named Sam Lohman, and he immediately placed Mr. Schuessler under arrest on suspicion of killing his own children. A Jewish deputy named Horowitz was sent to the Schuessler home with a party of men; having ransacked the house looking for "evidence" Horowitz then placed Mrs. Schusssler and her family under virtual house arrest, forbidding them to leave the house or speak with anyone on the phone lest they "spread rumors about the Jews."
Arnold Schuessler took a lie detector test which completely cleared him, as well as proving that he had an ironclad alibi for the murders. Instead of releasing him, the authorities committed Arnold Schuessler to a private mental institution in Des Plaines, Illinois operated by a Dr. Leon Steinfeld. Mr. Schuessler was rushed right into electroshock treatment, where he died the same afternoon he arrived at the "sanitarium".
There was sufficient public outcry over the bereaved father's strange death so that a public inquest into Schuessler's case was held and Dr. Steinfeld forced to testify. He stated that Arnold Schuessler was suffering from "hallucinations" and "paranoid delusions" that "certain people were out to get him." In 1955 there were still a few honest public officials left, one of them being the Cook County Coroner, a crusty old Irishman named Dr. Thomas McCarron who was also a qualified psychiatrist. McCarron knew Dr. Steinfeld of old. During World War Two, Steinfeld had been prosecuted for giving Jewish boys facing the draft callup various legal and illegal drugs which would give them heart fibrillations, fill their lungs with liquid to simulate tuberculosis, give them noxious skin conditions, etc. so they could avoid military service. Steinfeld allegedly collected $2000 per head for each Yiddish Mama's Little Bubbeleh he spared from having to go face the Nazis' cold steel and hot lead.
Dr. McCarron called Steinfeld a liar and a charlatan and turned all the documents in the case over to the district attorney, recommending that Steinfeld be prosecuted for perjury and murder. He also denounced Steinfeld to the newspapers and publicly stated his view that Arnold Schuessler had been murdered. In response he received an official order from the district attorney to make no more public comment on the case. Several nights later, to emphasize the serious nature of the warning, a small bomb blew the front door off McCarron's house.
But there was at least some belated justice. Several days after the inquest closed, Leon Steinfeld fled the country. He flew to Switzerland for a "rest cure" and one morning was found hanging in his hotel room, an alleged suicide. Jewish newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet established a "sympathy fund" and shortly thereafter presented Arnold Schuessler's widow, the mother of the murdered children, with $100,000 raised from Chicago's Jewish community---an immense sum of money in 1955-56, worth easily a couple of million today, and a very strange gesture for Jews to make to a Gentile crime victim, a German at that, unless it was to buy silence.
There may have been one final murder connected with this ghastly case. British author Arnold Leese was provided with massive amounts of news clippings and information, including a transcript of the inquest, by his correspondents in Chicago, and he was at work on a definitive account of the Schuessler case as one of the best documented incidents of Jewish ritual murder in modern times when he suddenly died in the spring of 1956. None of the Schuessler papers, which he had been working on and which he showed to a number of friends and visitors, were found anywhere in his possession when his effects were inventoried after his death. The last loose end was tied up.
One looks at those sad little faces on the milk cartons today, and one can't help but wonder...
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