Evening Star, 23 February 1929, page 1: Missing witness in gang massacre found in Detroit

Front page of the Evening Star, Saturday, 23 February 1929. The story is credited “By the Associated Press,” datelined Detroit, February 23, and opens: “Dr. Loyal Tacker, kidnaped witness in the investigation of the Chicago gang massacre, was found at the corner of Library and Gratiot avenues in the downtown district here shortly after noon today.” The page image prints the name “Tacker”; the Library of Congress OCR reads it “Taeker.”

The report says he told police he had been drugged and unconscious most of the night. A second Associated Press item from Chicago, “DEATH CAR OWNER TRACED,” says the dentist had identified a photograph at the detective bureau as that of a man whose tooth he had extracted, a man police said was one of those who killed seven members of the George (Bugs) Moran gang; police declined to name him. It says police traced the car used in the killings to a buyer it calls “a mysterious and apparently fictitious “James Morton of Los Angeles,”” and that a woman reported seeing four people leave the garage where the car was found a few hours before the fire.

The account of the kidnapping is the witness’s own as reported, and the identification is a police statement. This archive does not take the identity of the photographed man from this page.