The story behind Call Northside 777
Anne W.
Jimmy Stewart as a reporter who re-opens an 11 year old murder case,
eventually coming to the conclusion that an innocent man was
convicted. (Good movie, btw. I'm just about to listen to the
commentary.)
Call Northside 777 was based on a true story. I did a web search &
found the article below. Too bad the other guy in the case didn't
have a mother scrubbing floors for him--he had to wait 15 more years.
From the Center on Wrongful Convictions--
Perjury led to Joseph Majczek’s wrongful conviction for the murder of
a Chicago policeman in 1933
A crusade by the Chicago Times — predecessor of the Chicago Sun-Times
— led to the 1944 exoneration of Joseph M. Majczek, 11 years after he
had been wrongfully convicted of the murder of Chicago Police Officer
William D. Lundy. The case became the basis of a popular 1948 movie
entitled “Call Northside 777” starring James Stewart.
The story began unfolding the morning of October 10, 1944, when a
classified advertisement appeared in the Times: “$5,000 reward for
killers of Officer Lundy on Dec. 9, 1932 Call Gro. 1758, 12-7 p.m.” A
cub reporter noticed the ad and called it to the attention of the city
editor, who asked a seasoned police reporter, James McGuire, to find
out what the ad was about. From clippings in the Times morgue, McGuire
learned that Officer Lundy had been gunned down on the specified date
and that Majczek, 24, and Theodore Marcinkiewicz, 25, had been
convicted of the crime in 1933 in the Cook County Superior Court.
One eyeball
The convictions — which had been affirmed by the Illinois Supreme
Court, People v. Majcek, 360 Ill. 261 (1935) — rested primarily upon
the testimony of a single eyewitness, Vera Walush, who was referred to
throughout the legal proceedings as the operator of a “delicatessen”
where the crime occurred. The defendants presented an alibi defense.
Two relatives and a deliveryman placed Majczek at home at the time of
the crime. Four witnesses placed Marcinkiewicz at his home at that
precise time, and two others placed him a little later at a
neighborhood saloon where he could not have been had he taken part in
the crime.
When McGuire called Gro. 1758, a woman answered and identified herself
in broken English as Tillie Majczek, Jospeh’s mother. McGuire realized
he had material for the front page when he elicited that Mrs. Majczek
had scrubbed floors on her hands and knees for more than a decade, six
nights a week, at Commonwealth Edison Company to save the $5,000 she
now offered for information about who killed Officer Lundy.
‘A nice little human interest story’
Like many Chicago reporters of the era, McGuire did not write stories
himself. The writing was left to a rewrite bank, comprising a half
dozen or so facile writers who began work in the afternoon and banged
out most of the local copy for the next morning’s paper. One
rewriteman, who wandered into the Times newsroom a little early on
October 10, 1944, was John J. McPhaul. The city editor, Karin Walsh,
called him over and said, “Mac’s got a nice little human interest
story.”
“I wrote a story making the 60-year-old scrubwoman the heroine, tossed
in a couple of lines from Kipling’s ‘Mother o’ Mine,’ and figured that
was that,” McPhaul recounted. That, however, was not that.
Curious leniency
McGuire suspected that something was amiss in the case. It was
curious, he told McPhaul, that Majczek and Marcinkiewicz had not
received the usual sentence for murder of a policeman — death in the
electric chair. That their lives had been spared, said McGuire, might
indicate the judge had doubted their guilt.
On October 11, the day after the jointly bylined story appeared in the
Times, McPhaul read a thirty-page statement of facts that Majczek had
typed in prison. Had McPhaul not been aware of McGuire’s suspicion he
might well have disregarded a passage in which Majczek asserted that,
after the jury found him guilty, the trial judge, Charles P. Molthrop,
took him into his chambers and promised him a new trial, saying he
thought there had been a miscarriage of justice. Moreover, wrote
Majczek, there had been a witness to the conversation — James Zagata,
a coal truckdriver who, having just made a delivery to Vera Walush,
had witnessed the crime and knew that the wrong men had been
convicted.
New witness found
It seemed preposterous to McPhaul that a judge would host a private
conversation with a convicted cop-killer. And, if true, why had not
the judge fulfilled the promise? Molthrop could not be asked because
he died in 1935. Despite the dim prospect that anything would come of
pursuing the angle, McPhaul and McGuire nonetheless thought it worth
tracking down Zagata. McGuire found him, still employed as a coal
truckdriver and, as luck would have it, most cooperative. Zagata fully
corroborated Majczek’s account of the conversation in Molthrop’s
chambers, as the Times explained, in the classic style of the era, on
October 12:
Is Mrs. Majczek’s battle for Joe’s vindication based on anything more
than a mother’s blind faith in a son? Is there anything in the history
of Policeman William D. Lundy’s murder or Majczek’s trial that might
indicate she has sound reasons for believing in her son’s innocence?
The Times has undertaken an investigation to determine whether there
are any facts — hidden or overlooked — that may be regarded as
supporting the mother’s contention?
As a beginning, the Times is able to reveal today that Timesmen have
obtained corroboration of an astounding statement by Majczek that the
trial judge who sentenced him to serve 99 years doubted his guilt.
The statement was given to the Times by James Zagata, coal
truckdriver. It is his first public statement on the case since the
trial in November 1933, and his first public disclosure that he
believes Majczek is innocent.
Zagata was in the delicatessen owned by Mrs. Vera Walush on the
afternoon of December 9, 1932, when Policeman Lundy was shot and
killed by two holdup men.
Zagata viewed Majczek at a police station shortly after the latter’s
arrest. The witness said he had not been able to see the faces of the
killers clearly and could not make an identification. He repeated this
at the trial of Majczek and Theodore Marcinkiewicz.
Subsequently, Zagata told the Times, he pondered the matter and
concluded that neither of the convicted men fitted in with his
recollection of the killers. He said he was particularly sure that
both bandits were much taller than Majczek, a short-statured man.
A few days after the verdict, the truck driver said, he was summoned
to the chambers of Judge Molthrop. The judge, he said, questioned him
anew about his identification.
“I told the judge,” Zagata said, “that I was now sure that neither of
the men had been involved in the murder.”
According to Zagata, Judge Molthrop replied: “I am sure there has been
a miscarriage of justice concerning the identification of both boys. I
am going to see that they get a new trial . . . ”
‘Delicatessen’ was a speakeasy
In successive days, the Times disclosed that Vera Walush, whose
testimony had been the sole evidence against Majczek and the principal
evidence against Marcinkiewicz, initially had told police, after
viewing the suspects in a lineup, that they were not the men. The
paper also reported that Walush’s “delicatessen” actually was a
speakeasy, that Walush had been threatened with arrest for bootlegging
if she refused to testify against Majczek and Marcinkiewicz, and that
the reason Judge Molthrop had failed to grant the defendants new
trials was that he had been warned by prosecutors that granting a new
trial would end his career in politics.
There invariably is political pressure to solve a police officer’s
murder, but it was particularly strong in Officer Lundy’s case. The
same week he was killed, there were five other murders in Chicago —
all unsolved. The Century of Progress exposition, envisioned by its
boosters as a pivotal event in the Second City’s emergence from the
Depression, was scheduled to open in just five months. A delegation of
businessmen, worried that the international perception of Chicago as a
place of rampant violence would hurt attendance at the exposition and
discourage tourism in the meantime, met with Mayor Anton Cermak to
demand action. The mayor had been elected in 1931 on a promise to
clean up the city’s reputation for lawlessness. After meeting with the
business delegation, he called a press conference and, the police
superintendent at his side, announced — these were his very words — “a
war on crime.”
Coerced testimony
As McPhaul and McGuire dug into the case, they learned how Majczek and
Marcinkiewicz had come to be suspects in the first place. Although
Vera Walush at first told police she had no idea who the killers were,
after several hours of interrogation she said one them could have been
a man she knew only as Ted. When police discovered that Theordore
Marcinkiewicz lived in the neighborhood, he became a prime suspect,
but he was nowhere to be found. Two weeks after the crime, by which
time it was well known on the street that he was being sought, a
bootlegger who lived in the neighborhood was arrested with a case of
whisky in his car. In exchange for not being charged, he told police
that Marcinkiewicz had been staying with the Majczek family. When
police went to the Majczek home on December 22, 1932, they did not
find Marcinkiewicz — but did find Joseph Majczek, whom they took into
custody.
Majczek had asserted in the typed statement of facts that he provided
the Times that Vera Walush, after viewing him in two separate lineups
on December 22, had stated unequivocally that he was not one of the
killers. The next day, however, something apparently happened to
improve her memory and she positively identified him. The police
thereupon wrote a report falsely stating that Majczek had been
arrested on December 23, the day Walush had identified him. When
Marcinkiewicz surrendered exactly a month later, on January 23, 1933,
she positively identified him as well.
Times hires a lawyer
Searching through records at the police warehouse, McGuire found the
original arrest report, corroborating Majczek’s contention that he had
been arrested on December 22. When the State’s Attorney’s Office
refused to reopen the case based on McGuire and McPhaul’s dramatic
disclosures, the Times hired a well-known lawyer to seek a pardon for
Majczek, ignoring the similarly situated Marcinkiewicz. The lawyer,
Walker Butler, at the time was a Democratic member of the Illinois
Senate and, certainly not coincidentally, a supporter and confidant of
Governor Dwight H. Green.
In addition to claims based on the Times disclosures that Majczek
appeared to have been framed, Butler developed a substantial claim
that Majczek’s trial attorney, W.W. O’Brien, had performed
incompetently. Two witnesses of dubious credibility provided damaging
testimony against Marcinkiewicz. One of these, Bessie Barron, claimed
that a few days before the crime Marcinkiewicz had told her “he was
going to make the joint,” meaning Vera Walush’s establishment. The
other, Bruno Uginchus, testified that the evening after the Lundy
murder Marcinkiewicz told him he “had a little trouble.” Although
there was nothing to connect these statements to Majczek, O’Brien
failed to object to their admission. O’Brien, of course, also failed
to cross examine Vera Walush based on Majczek’s claim that he had been
arrested on December 22, when she had failed to identify him. These
issues had not been raised on appeal because O’Brien handled the
appeal.
Full pardon
On August 15, 1945, based on Bulter’s petition, Governor Green granted
Majczek a full pardon based on innocence. Marcinkiewicz, a seemingly
forgotten man, remained in prison with no one championing his cause.
Shortly before Green left office in 1949, he offered to commute
Marcinkiewicz’s life sentence to seventy-five years, which would have
made him eligible for parole in 1958. Marcinkiewicz indignantly turned
down the offer. He was wise to do so, for he would be legally
exonerated through a state habeas corpus proceeding in 1950.
The Illinois legislature approved special appropriations to compensate
both men for the time they spent in prison — $24,000 for Majczek and
$35,000 for Marcinkiewicz — but again there no calls from the press
for reforms that might prevent such miscarriages of justice in the
future, or to sanction those who framed the two innocent men — a
head-in-the-sand syndrome that persisted into the twilight years of
the Twentieth Century.
The foregoing account was written by Rob Warden, executive director of
the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Permission is granted to reprint,
quote, or post on other web sites. The account is based substantially
on information Jack McPhaul provided in interviews with Warden in 1980
and 1983. McPhaul died shortly after the second interview. Most of the
facts related here were presented in a different form in an article by
Warden entitled “A Nice Little Human Interest Story” in the July 1983
issue of Chicago Lawyer. That account, as well as the one above, drew
from an account of the case in a delightful book by McPhaul —
Deadlines & Monkeyshines: The Fabled World of Chicago Journalism,
Prentice-Hall, 1962.
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/exonerations/Majeczek.htm
--
Anne W.
indigoace at goodsol period com
http://www.goodsol.com/cats/
Anne W.
wrote:
>I just finished watching Call Northside 777, a 1948 movie starring
>Jimmy Stewart as a reporter who re-opens an 11 year old murder case,
>eventually coming to the conclusion that an innocent man was
>convicted. (Good movie, btw. I'm just about to listen to the
>commentary.)
>
>Call Northside 777 was based on a true story. I did a web search &
>found the article below. Too bad the other guy in the case didn't
>have a mother scrubbing floors for him--he had to wait 15 more years.
Ack! My mistake: the 2nd guy (Marcinkiewicz) got out in 1950 which
was 5 years after Majczek was released, not 15.
Oops.