Springfield Weekly Republican, 14 October 1926, page 5: Police expect rum gangs to continue machine gun warfare

Page 5 of the Springfield Weekly Republican for 14 October 1926 carries two Associated Press dispatches from Chicago under the headline “Chicago Police Expect Rum Gangs to Continue Machine Gun Warfare.” The first, datelined October 11, says W. W. O’Brien, a former assistant state’s attorney, was shot and probably fatally wounded, “two notorious gangsters were killed and two other men were wounded.” It places the shooting “on the near North side almost in front of Holy Name cathedral” and “only a short distance from the flower shop of Dion O’Banion.”

The second dispatch, datelined October 12, prints the street: “operated a machine gun last night from an apartment building window opposite Holy Name cathedral on North State street, killing ‘Hymie’ Weiss and Paddy Murray.” The page names Earl “Hymie” Weiss and Paddy Murray as the dead and Sam Pine and Benny Jacobson as two of the wounded. It says the police held “several theories” and had no clue to the gunmen. No house number appears in either dispatch.

This archive cites the page for the place the paper names, Holy Name Cathedral on North State Street, and for the date. The motives are police theories as printed, and the page does not establish who fired. Line-break splits in the Library of Congress OCR are joined in the quotations above.