From Front Lines to Front Page: The Story of Carl Wanderer

Love the movie “His Girl Friday”? It’s tied to a 1920 murder in Chicago where two newspaper men looked behind the headlines to get the real story of a double homicide in the entryway to a home. 

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The History of Murder

Executive Producer- Clare O'Donohue

www.clareodonohue.com

Executive Producer - Margaret Smith

Senior Editor - Steph Kelly 

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Social Media Manager & Design - Mikayla Bogus

https://mikayladesign.cargo.site/ 

IT Manager - Conor Sweeney

Marketing Consultant- Patrick Hackett

Sierra Wolf, Paul Durica, and Peter T Alter, Chicago History Museum 

Home - Chicago History Museum

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Patrick Moran (Carl) 

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Transcript

Clare (00:05.972)
Chicago, 1920. When we think of Chicago in the 1920s, we think of gangsters and the cops who tried to bring them down. There was another group with arguably more power and possibly corruption than either of them. And that group may have solved a murder. It's the History of Murder, and I'm your host, Clare O'Donohue.

(00:45.038)
At 10 p.m. on June 21, 1920, 25-year-old Carl Wanderer and his wife Ruth were returning to their home on Chicago's north side.

As they stepped into the vestibule, they were confronted. In the moments that followed, 10 shots rang out. And two people lay dead.

(01:12.654)
The crime shocked the city because although there were murders in Chicago in 1920, it isn't the way we think of this city in that era, according to Peter T. Alter. He's the chief historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History at the Chicago History Museum.

Peter T Alter
What Chicago is not like was maybe like the stereotypes that we think of the twenties, the roaring twenties or the jazz age. The sort of gangsterism of Chicago for lots of reasons gets massively overblown. Al Capone is not a known figure outside of certain organized crime circles in 1920, not by a long shot.

Clare (01:56.91)
But Chicago is not without its problems. There were a lot of people in the city, more than two and a half million, with more appearing every day. Blacks were coming up from the South in search of better jobs and living conditions, and refugees from World War I were arriving from Europe.

Although Chicago had been built by immigrants, the influx into the city and around the country put some people on edge.

Peter T Alter
People are like, we don't like immigrants. They have these funny values. They speak in languages that we don't understand. And so as early as 1921, there is anti-immigrant legislation that really tries to cut down or turn off immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and turn back on immigration from Northern and Western Europe.

Clare
It was, it seems, a time ripe for fear of strangers. And a fear of strangers was at the heart of the case involving Carl Wander.

He was born in 1895. His father was an immigrant from Germany who had arrived in the city many years before. Carl was set to have a life much like his father had created in Chicago, but that didn't happen. Paul Durica, the director of exhibitions at the Chicago History Museum, has spent time studying the case.

Paul Durica(03:18.254)
Carl Wanderer was born in Chicago. His family owned a butcher shop and he worked there in the butcher shop.

Clare
But he wanted more. He wanted adventure.

Paul Durica(03:31.192)
The most pivotal event in his life prior to the murder was the outbreak of the First World War. He signed up, joined the army, and then, having previously served in the American Expeditionary Force that went down to Mexico to combat Pancho Villa, he was then sent over to Europe, where he served by most reports with distinction.

Clare (03:50.348)
According to reports, Carl, quote, never lied, never drank, never smoked, never chewed gum, unquote. In fact, everyone who knew him then said he was a great soldier, a hero who'd served his country well.

Paul Durica
It seemed like he really kind of found his place in the military and so when he was discharged and returned to life in Chicago and went back to working at the Family Butcher store, he was apparently not content with that.

Clare
Once back in Chicago, he married Ruth Johnson. They'd grown up together. Ruth was three years younger than Carl and had been his girlfriend before the war.

04:32.654)
She was by all accounts a religious girl who'd sung in the choir at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. She'd quit the choir when Carl went to war, so no other man would ask to escort her home from practice.

(04:47.672)
Carl had only been back for a few weeks when the wedding took place. He would say Ruth was the only one for him.

Carl Wanderer
I never kissed a woman until Ruth came along. And never anybody else.

Paul Durica
She had been in love with Carl for a long time. She definitely was very much committed to the relationship and then to their future. And her family was very invested in relationship.

Clare
The couple moved into a two-flat owned by Ruth's family. They took one of the apartments, Ruth's mother lived in the other. Carl went to work at his father's butcher shop and nearly every penny went into an account Ruth had at a local bank. The need for their own home became important just a few months later when Ruth discovered she was expecting. Carl, according to friends, wasn't that happy about becoming a father so soon after the wedding.

Paul Durica
It certainly seems like he expressed to different friends and family members the desire to return to the army. And he was trying to kind of encourage his father to sell the butcher shop.

Clare (05:49.848)
but he would later say, none of this was an issue with Ruth.

Carl Wanderer
We never quarreled. A man's duty is to keep his wife happy.

Clare (06:01.088)
On Saturday, June 19th, just two days before the shooting, Carl and Ruth went to the bank and withdrew all but $70 from the savings account. It would have been about $1,500, around $36,000 in today's money. They put the money in a drawer in their bedroom, and then Carl stood guard. He would later say he'd seen a man, a ragged stranger, as he was described, eyeing Ruth.

It was one reason why he kept his army gun, Colt M1911, with him at all times. But when Monday came, he had to go to work and Ruth, tired of being cooped up in the household weekend, wanted to see a movie that night. Carl agreed and they went to see The Seawolf starring Noah Barry. Though the running time for the film is only 70 minutes, the couple left early and walked home.

(06:55.278)

Paul Durica
At some point, Carl glances back and he notices that there's this kind of shady looking individual that seems to be following them. At first, he doesn't pay much attention to this individual, but he does notice that this individual seems to keeping pace with them.

Carl Wanderer
My wife was opening the door, but she was having trouble with the key. I spoke to her about it. She said she was going to turn on the light. The man said, don't do that. He said, no, you don't. How about the money?

Clare
The three stepped inside the house's entry. The man yelled, how about that money? Before either Ruth or Carl could do anything, the man shot Ruth. Carl lunged at the man, shooting him.

(07:43.182)
Ten shots rang out in that small vestibule.

Paul Durica
The gunman ends up not hitting Carl but hitting Ruth instead. Carl shoots the gunman multiple times and then for good measure pummels him on the ground to make sure that he's dead.

Clare
Carl yelled for Ruth's mother to get help, but it was too late. Ruth was 21 years old, eight months pregnant. My baby's dead were said to be her last words.

(08:14.976)
Immediately, both the police and the Chicago newspapers called Carl a hero. He had fought in the war and less than a year later, faced a deadly stranger on the streets of his hometown.

Paul Durica
It's on the front page of the Tribune. It's on the front page of Chicago Daily News and both talk about him as a husband who is defending his wife and his unborn child as a war hero who kind of stepped up to take on this criminal directly. And that seems to be the impression that's left with the public.

Clare
Everyone in the city of Chicago seemed to grieve with him, except for a couple of newspaper men.

Paul Durica
So Chicago Daily News had writing for its time a journalist by the name of Ben Hecht.

Clare
Ben Hecht was born in 1894 in New York City. His family moved to Racine, Wisconsin when he was in high school. He was smart, but he lasted only three days at the University of Wisconsin before dropping out. Instead, still a teenager, he became a newspaper man working for the Chicago Daily News. Charles MacArthur was a year younger than Hecht, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He knew early that he wanted to write.

(09:24.768)
So we moved to the Midwest and he too became a newspaper man.

Paul Durica
And he's writing for a rival newspaper, The Herald Examiner. The Herald Examiner was, of the two papers, the more tabloid style and kind of reveled in its coverage of crime stories. And so the person who's covering the story for The Herald Examiner is Charles MacArthur.

Clare
Both men, like Carl, were veterans of the war and had come back to Chicago changed. Hecht would say about his time in the war. 

Ben Hecht
The decency and sanity of the human race is a small mask. It's one of the darkest facts I have learned in my life.

Clare
About a week after the murders, when Carl had already returned to work at his father's butcher shop, the case was focused on the other man in the vestibule that night, the so-called ragged stranger.

(10:17.678)
That nickname was the only name anyone could call him, at least for the time being. And whoever he was, now he was just a body in the morgue. The man was likely in his 20s, and he had just over $3 in his pocket. There were very few clues to his identity, but what there was, was confusing.

Paul Durica (10:36.654)
He was dressed, you know, very poorly, but it seems like his hair had been cut not long before his death. His nails had been, I mean, he received a professional manicure. Um, so that raised some suspicions as well. Was he maybe someone just sort of disguised as a shabbily dressed person? Interestingly, the Herald Examiner was able to get a hold of a photograph of the ragged stranger. They actually run it on page two of the paper, basically saying, do you know who this man is?

Clare
That photo was taken after his death, perhaps making an ID a bit harder to make. People came forward, an elevator operator, the head of a Catholic orphanage, alleged friends, but no one could identify him.

One lead, that he might have worked for a circus, was chased down and discarded when the real man was found to have been older and taller than the ragged stranger. Another suggested that he was the son of a wealthy New York businessman. That too, led nowhere.

Paul Durica
The papers would report fairly confidently that the case had been solved. And then in at least two instances, the person had been put forward, actually was still alive, and came down to Chicago and said that, clearly this person isn't me because I'm standing right here in front of you.

Clare (11:57.358)
Hecht and MacArthur, though working for different papers, were also troubled by the events of the night of June 21st. But instead of looking at the man in the morgue, they turned their attentions on Carl.

Paul Durica
Hecht, at that time, was a young journalist with literary aspirations and he's kind of on the crime beat. so he fairly early on becomes sort of suspicious of Wanderer's story. And like Hecht, MacArthur begins to kind of pick up on inconsistencies in Wanderer's story.

Clare
Newspapers had significant power in the 20th century. While the official line was that reporters stayed objective and did not make themselves part of the story, according to Hecht biographer Julian Gorbach, that would have struck Hecht and others as, a joke, if not a complete surprise. By 1920, newspapers had reporters working with rewrite men. The reporters would call in the stories using sources to get the scoop. The rewrite men would add additional information and write the story. It allowed newspapers to hire people with street smarts to get the information that could then be polished by the guys in the newsroom. But the group effort approach allowed some to play fast and loose with the facts without ever really owning the consequences. Reporters with the full knowledge and support of many newspaper publishers were known to plant evidence, pay off alleged witnesses and print stories they knew to be false, all chasing the most sensational headlines and with it, the most sales. Hecht saw it much the same. 

Ben Hecht
There was a feast all around us. We attended it as scavengers. Politicians were crooks. The leaders of causes were scoundrels. Morality was a farce full of murders, rapes and love nests. Swindlers ran the world and the devil sang everywhere. These discoveries filled me with great joy.

Clare (13:53.6)
In the days after the murders, Hecht made a point of visiting Carl Wanderer, and the two struck up a kind of friendship. Hecht would say that Carl seemed, in his words, impassive following his wife's death. He said Carl seemed almost happy.

Paul Durica
So he begins to develop a rapport with Wander. And so Wander feels comfortable talking with him and sharing details about the case. And so Huck begins to suspect that Wander may have been involved in the murder of this woman.

Clare
Hecht also found love letters in the bathroom during one visit. The letters, Hecht said, were written by Carl to a man named James. That point is controversial. Were there really love letters addressed to a man, or was that a reporter's invention to juice his story?

Paul Durica
There was real emphasis on telling the best story possible and attracting as many readers as you could. And it was a different era when there were like many papers being published in Chicago and they were all going after the readers. The Daily News wasn't as sensationalistic as the Herald Examiner, but that's not to say that in order to tell a good story, there might be a little exaggeration above some details. And Hecht, know, being a storyteller first and foremost would kind of appreciate the value of good
narratives and might embellish here and there.

Clare (15:13.28)
Carl would later deny the suggestion that he was getting and the love letters have never been presented. So there is no proof that they ever existed. The only person to allege their existence was Hecht and whoever was the rewrite man at the Daily News. The closest to any evidence of Carl's attraction to men happened later when psychiatrists who examined Carl pointed to what they called, quote, latent homosexual tendencies. They said his desire to return to the army and the company of other men as proof of those tendencies. 

Charles MacArthur was also suspicious of Carl, but he went another way. He looked at the guns used in the killings.

Paul Durica
It was a Colt 45. Mind you a fairly early model of the Colt .45, but the Colt gun was the sort of standard issue sidearm used by the US military, which is why Wanderer would have had it and would have felt comfortable using it because he was a veteran of the First World War.

Clare
But it wasn't just Carl who had that gun. It was also the Ragged Stranger.

The question MacArthur had was why had the man tried to rob a young couple when he owned a very expensive gun? The gun sold for $50 in 1920, almost $800 today. Had he known about the money they'd removed from the bank days before? And even if he had, why would he assume they'd taken the cash to the movies? And if he didn't know about the money, he would have chosen the couple at random. If that were the case, he could have pawned his gun for more money than he could ever hope to get rom mugging Carl Wanderer. And adding to that, 10 shots had been fired in the vestibule. had been shot twice. Three bullets were in the ragged stranger. The other five were in the walls. Carl had amazingly been missed by all 10 bullets that raced through that small space.

Paul Durica(17:07.041)
Presumably the stick-up man, the ragged stranger would be aiming at Carl because Carl's the person who's armed, not Ruth.

Clare
These two newspaper men, Hecht and MacArthur, put their questions about Carl's version in print, in direct opposition to other papers still calling Carl a hero. And it wasn't just to sell papers. Hector MacArthur brought their evidence directly to the police. They weren't just interested in headlines. They wanted justice. And maybe something more.

Paul Durica
Figures like Hecht and MacArthur, on the one hand, they were cultivating these relationships with law enforcement so they could get details from that perspective, but then they were also developing relationships with accused killers like Carl Wanderer to fill out the rest of the story. In some weird way, serving almost as a bridge between the accused and the investigators.

Clare
The investigator on the case was John Norton. He'd been on the force for 30 years. He said he'd become a detective because, quote I was a damn fool. Like all kids, I thought it would be grand to be a policeman, unquote. And in some ways, it was grand. Norton was part of some of Chicago's most famous cases. He was one of the detectives on the infamous H.H. Holmes case in 1895, a serial killer who committed crimes inside what the press would dub

(18:32.13)
the Murder Castle. Later in the 1920s and 30s, he'd tangle with the city's growing gangster problem, including raids on El Capone's criminal enterprise. But in 1920, he was focused on the shooting that had taken place in the entry to Carl Wanderer's home. And he, too, had questions about the gun.

Paul Durica
Police are able to quickly determine that the second gun actually had been in the possession of Carl's cousin, Fred, and that Carl in fact borrowed it from Fred the very day that the shooting occurred. And that makes them very suspicious. Why would this ragged stranger be in possession of a firearm that belonged to Carl Wanderer's cousin?

Clare
On July 6th, two weeks after the murders, Norton brought Carl in to see what he had to say about the evidence that had been uncovered. Norton had sat across from his share of suspects, and on the surface, this one didn't seem like a challenge. Carl was a slight man who was generally polite and soft-spoken. His years in the military had taught him to be respectful to authority. Still, given the number of Chicagoans who heralded Carl as a hero, this wouldn't be just any interview with any suspect. Norton knew he had to be careful.

Paul Durica
He stuck with the clues in the case and, in the instance of the Carl Wanderer story, I mean, he was willing to kind of dig deeper and then not kind of accept what seemed like the obvious solution at the outset.

Clare (20:02.828)
Norton, along with men from the state's attorney's office, spent hours with Carl. They showed him crime scene photos of his wife, talked about how he really didn't want to be a father, and confronted him with evidence about the gun. Carl, for his part, remained calm. He told Norton he didn't kill Ruth.

Carl Wanderer
My wife tells me she hasn't got the key. Then I start looking for mine, but it's under my cousin's automatic, which I have in my hip pocket. I borrowed it because Fred could have gotten into trouble for having a gun like that. While I'm reaching for it, the other man reached it and grabbed it. He shot my wife with it, and I shot back.

Paul Durica
Carl suggested now, actually on that night, he had both guns in his possession and as he was reaching into his pocket to remove the key to his house, the Ragged Stranger must have stuck his hand into the pocket and pulled out the gun. But fortunately for Carl, he'd gone that day to borrow the second revolver from his cousin Fred. So he was able to pull that one out and then they exchanged gunshots. And that's why the Ragged Stranger had the same model of a gun as Carl.

Clare
The interrogation lasted three days, sometimes 16 hours at a time. When he wasn't being questioned, was allowed to rest, but he was still in police custody. When he was talking, Carl's story kept changing. In one version, Carl took out his gun when the three were standing in the vestibule, but the stranger got it from him, then shot Ruth. In another, he and the stranger got into a physical altercation, during which the stranger must have found his gun.

(21:42.956)
Then Carl took out the second gun and the two exchanged fire. And in a third, Carl didn't even take out the second gun until after shots were fired and Ruth lay dying. But one thing stayed the same. He swore he had nothing to do with Ruth's death and only shot the ragged stranger in self-defense. 

Carl had an attorney. His family saw to that. And the attorney made clear that the police were running out of time. He was about to go to court and file a writ of habeas corpus, a motion to compel the police to bring Carl to court to let a judge determine if he was being held illegally. There was pressure in and outside of the police station to let Carl go. But Norton was determined to use every moment he could, and he had good reason. 

While Carl was telling his various versions of the story, the police were hearing something else. 17-year-old Julia Schmidt had read about the murder of Ruth Wanderer, and two days after Carl's arrest, she came to add her own version of events.

Paul Durica
She lived directly across the street from the butcher shop that the Wanderer family owned, and so she had known him for a number of years. And apparently they had gone adult four to six times prior to the murder. It seems like he often took her to Riverview, which is a popular amusement park in Chicago. And while their relationship wasn't platonic, it doesn't seem like it was overly physical either.

Clare(23:15.726)
She and Carl had been dating, she told police. They'd gone on dates both before and after Ruth's death. But she swore she didn't know he was married until after she read it in the papers. When confronted, Carl said Julia was imagining a relationship. She was just a kid who came into his father's butcher shop. But Julia had love letters Carl had written to her, including one written on July 6, the day of his arrest.

Clare
Sweetheart, I'm very lonesome tonight. The reason I would not meet you at your house is this. The people will talk about me. Someday I will tell you a whole lot more. I have been double crossed by some people. Good night, my little lover, and happy dreams to you. From Carl.

The letters to Julia and apparently other women were a problem for Carl, but he had a solution.

Paul Durica
Wanderer realizes that his extramarital relationships could potentially be used against him, right? And it kind of put forward by the police as a motive for as to why he might want to kill Ruth. And he's got an incriminating letter in his home and he's torn it up, but he's aware that it's still there and police investigators might find it. So he actually asks, you know, a journalist if he can like retrieve this torn up letter and dispose of it. And what happens of course is the letters just sort of stitch back together and publish it. And you see journalists playing an important role, not just in this particular case of Carl Wanderer, but throughout some of the major stories of the 1920s and early 30s.

Clare(24:59.118)
By the evening of the third day, just as police were running out of time to hold their suspect, Carl was ready to tell the whole story. After a shower and a shave, he sat down with Norton. He started with a definitive statement.

Carl Wanderer
I murdered them both.

Clare (25:20.642)
He decided to kill Ruth the morning of the murders, but admitted he'd been thinking about it for at least a week. He didn't want to be a father. He wanted to rejoin the army, and he wanted the money that had been put into Ruth's savings account. It was his money, after all, he said, money he'd earned in the army and at the butcher shop. The morning of June 21st, the morning of the murders, he came up with a plan.

Paul Durica
He goes down to the Loop on a Monday to purchase a new knife, he says, for his father's butcher store. And while he's down in the Loop making that purchase, he gets the idea to leave the Loop and head west to what is then kind of the city's sort Skid Row area. It's there that he meets the individual that he'll kind of enlist in this crime, not really letting that person know exactly what he has in store.

Clare
Carl offered him a job that paid $25 a week, about $380 today. He told the man to meet him that evening near the butcher shop where Carl worked. Once the pair met, Carl said he had another idea. He wanted him to pretend to rob him and his wife. It was a joke, he told the man. The ragged stranger waited for the couple as they walked home from the movie. Carl nodded to him as they passed him. This was the signal to follow them. The man did call out, how about that money? But he wasn't trying to rob them, Carl now said. He was asking about the money Carl had promised. But Carl pulled out his two guns and shot both his wife and the stranger.

Clare (26:55.426)
That should have been it. Carl had confessed. There are even photos of him signing his confession. But that wasn't it. Just three weeks later, when Carl was arraigned, he pleaded not guilty. The confession, he said, was untrue. 

In The Suburbanite Economist, they wrote that while in jail awaiting trial, Carl received letters from the public. Quote, many letters are being received by him. Some express sympathy and belief in his innocence. Many tell him that it will be a pleasure to the writer to read of his death on the gallows. He reads each and tosses it aside with a laugh. Carl's fate was not in the hands of the newspapers or in those who wrote him letters. There was a trial, or in his case, two trials. 

The first started October 4th, 1920. It was to determine if Carl had killed Ruth.

Paul Durica
It seems like the prosecution has a very strong case. have this confession. They have this motive of another woman as well as this desire to return to the army and his dissatisfaction with married life. And they have the, you know, the material evidence of the guy and some other evidence to draw upon.

Clare
Interestingly, her family believed in his innocence. They agreed with Carl's defense that the confession was the result of heavy police interrogation. But Carl's family took the opposite stance. His sisters thought if he were found guilty, he should hang. The one thing they suggested as a mitigating factor was Carl's mental state. He had once tried to end his life, and his mother had actually done so. Carl was then examined by two doctors who judged him sane.

At the trial, all the evidence the journalists and police had collected was presented. Julia testified, as did the psychiatrist.

Paul Durica (28:49.368)
But when the trial ends and it actually goes to the jury, that's when things become interesting.

Clare
The jury found him guilty and they sentenced him to 25 years. With good behavior, Carl could be free in 13.

Paul Durica
Because even though the jury wants to convict him, there seems to be some debate over culpability. Is Wanderer sane or not sane? So they're worried about judging him insane because they feel that if they do that and he's sent to an institution, he might be released within a couple of years if he's being cured and rehabilitated. And they don't want that to happen. Again. He might be slightly insane, so they don't want to just find him guilty and perhaps have him executed.

Clare
However, the jury saw it, it outraged everyone, except perhaps one person. Carl was understandably relieved.

Carl Wanderer(29:45.088)
I knew they'd never crack me. I knew I'd never swing.

Clare
He may have been getting ahead of himself. There was another trial scheduled for March 1st, 1921. This time, the trial would center on the murder of the ragged stranger. Carl's new lawyer had a new strategy. Instead of declaring him innocent, he asked for Carl to be committed to a hospital for the criminally insane. Carl's demeanor changed to match his new defense. He was agitated, pacing his cell. He told his jailers that his dead wife appeared to him.

Paul Durica
But the judge, this is interesting, the judge says that you can't really use seeing ghosts as evidence of insanity because plenty of sane people claim to have had experiences of a supernatural nature. He even cites Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, as evidence of this.

Clare
And there was another issue for Carl. Ruth's family was now firmly convinced their former in-law was guilty. They told newspapers they didn't wish her to be identified as Ruth Wanderer in their stories. They wished her to be called Ruth Johnson, her maiden name. But one thing did go his way. Julia didn't testify. The judge felt infidelity wasn't an indicator of guilt.

He said, quote, it does not follow that if a man seeks the society of other women, he must necessarily have tired of his wife. It is being done every day, unquote. No comment was found about how the judge's wife felt about that statement. There was one final change from the last trial. When the jury determined that Carl was guilty, the sentence was very different. For killing the ragged stranger, Carl would hang. His reaction. (31:32.258)
was to shrug.

Carl Wanderer
I hope my mother-in-law is satisfied. If she is, I am.

Clare
Whatever Ruth's family felt, the city was satisfied. Newspapers had completely changed their tune since the day of declaring Carl a hero. Headlines put their sympathies with the man who had died. He hired himself out to be killed, said one. Others called Carl evil. The turnabout was not surprising to Hecht and MacArthur. Ben Hecht would later say, 

Ben Hecht
Trying to determine what is going on in the world is like trying to tell time by watching the second hand of the clock

Clare
On September 30th, 1921, Carl faced his fate. He asked for an American flag to be behind him on the gallows. He wanted to be remembered as a military hero. His request was denied. He took the news well. While he was positioned in the noose, he sang a popular World War I ballad, Dear Old Pal of Mine.

Song (32:37.197)
Dearie I’m so lonely,
How I miss your smile,
And your tender loving way,
I just want you only,
Want you all the while
May God decree I have you back some day.
Oh, How I want you,
Dear old pal of mine,

Paul Durica (33:19.726)
What's fascinating about this story is that it's this kind of complicated sort of layered plot and yet Carl doesn't seem to be the most thoughtful or introspective individuals, right? It's fascinating in that it's fairly elaborate why you would go through all of these imaginations to murder your wife, but then also on the other hand, leave so many details not thought through as really perplexing.

Clare
Within a few years, Hecht and MacArthur both left Chicago and collaborated on a play, The Front Page, which centered on newspaper men risking everything to find the truth about a murderer.

Paul Durica
That play, you can see the ways in which the Wanderer case kind of shaped it. It really does kind of capture the energy and the vibe of Chicago journalism in that moment. And you kind of get a sense of how Hecht and McArthur sort of saw their own roles within the city as working journalists.

Clare
Hecht would become a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He was nominated for six Oscars and won two. After World War II broke out in Europe, he advocated strongly for the U.S. to enter the war, and he worked tirelessly to save Jewish children in German-occupied areas. MacArthur also became a playwright and screenwriter. He won an Oscar in 1935 for Scoundrel, which he wrote with Ben Hecht. He married actress Helen Hayes, and their son, James MacArthur, would make his own mark, playing police officer Danny Williams in Hawaii Five-O. Film critic Pauline Kale once wrote that Hecht and MacArthur were quote, ambivalently nostalgic about their youth as reporters and they glorified the hard drinking cynical newspaper men, unquote. Newspapers of course would continue their influence for decades to come, but most would clean up their acts.

Paul Durica(35:05.902)
In many ways, the Carl Wanderer case is just a sort of prelude to the violence that will unfold over course of the entire decade. Here he was this well-regarded soldier, this hero, and yet he didn't hesitate to concoct this plot when he tired his wife and his unborn child to murder them. How could that happen? And in some ways, did his service in the military allow him to develop this kind of callousness towards life? And so you kind of see the First World War kind of haunting both the city of Chicago and the United States throughout the 1920s, which is also interesting to consider because the way most of us remember the 1920s is as a decade of excess, as a decade of economic prosperity. But there's always this kind of darkness right on the edges of those stories.

Clare (35:54.478)
Ruth was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. Her marker reads, daughter, Ruth Anna. It does not list a last name. The Ragged Stranger has never been positively identified. He was buried in Hillside, Illinois without fanfare in 1920, but Faces of the Forgotten, a popular YouTube channel, raised money to give him a headstone in 2024. Carl Wanderer is buried in Chicago. His grave is unmarked.

Clare (36:29.334)
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