FBI letter to the Attorney General, November 24, 1965: Murray Humphreys's perjury arrest and death (Vault Humphreys Part 24)

The Director’s letter of November 24, 1965 to the Attorney General (pp. 78-79) says that “Murray L. Humphreys, one of Chicago’s leading racketeers, was pronounced dead in his Chicago apartment between 9 and 10 p.m. on the evening of November 23, 1965,” after he had been released on bond following his arrest by FBI agents that afternoon. The arrest was on a warrant issued after a federal grand jury in Chicago returned an indictment that day charging perjury in his appearance before a federal grand jury the previous summer.

The letter gives the agents’ account that Humphreys pointed a .38 revolver at them before surrendering. It says he was found by his brother and “pronounced dead of natural causes, possibly as a result of a heart attack.” The Cook County coroner advised on November 24 that a neighbor physician pronounced death from a heart attack at 9:37 p.m. and that the autopsy confirmed it (pp. 126-127). A teletype of November 26 says the funeral was private, and that toxicology tests were pending; their result was not found in the pages read. A later Chicago memorandum (p. 154) closes the investigation because of his death.

The account of the arrest is the FBI’s. The same part holds newspaper clippings (p. 80 and after), which are not relied on. The Chicago report of 11/30/65 records remarks he made to agents; they are not repeated. “One of Chicago’s leading racketeers” is the Director’s description. This archive read the page through the Vault viewer’s OCR text layer. The scans are poor; names, dates and figures can be garbled, and many names are redacted under FOIA exemptions (b6, b7C, b7D).