1918
On June 22nd, 1918 the Hammond Circus Train wreck happened about 5.5 miles east of the city, killing 86 people and injuring 127.
about 0:03:50The story
Hammond, Indiana, lies in the north-west of the state, about thirty minutes from Chicago and technically one of its suburbs. In 1983 it was a city of some 83,000 people already in decline, and it is the setting for one of the most brutal murders the hosts have covered. Paul Sr drank from the morning, had emphysema and a recent heart operation, and beat his wife and son. Paul Jr later said his father had beaten a stutter into him, had held a gun to his head and had once chased him down the street threatening to shoot him in the back. The police treated the violence as a domestic disturbance.
The couple lived on drugs and theft, sometimes on the run from the Chicago police, and their son Jason was left with his grandparents.
She did not object, asking only that it be done away from the house so that she would not have to clean it up. They considered shooting Paul Sr outside his bar but decided it was too public. Next they substituted rat poison for his pills, and again he was ill without dying. A second dose of nitroglycerine failed when food poisoning left him too ill to take his pills.
At one o'clock in the morning on March 20, 1983, the pair let themselves into the house. The cause of death was decapitation.
She filed a missing person report and then told the police he was dead and cut up in bags by the lake, which they took for a joke until they walked the shore and found the remains in half a dozen plastic bags fifty feet from the water.
The first 2,300 volts left him breathing; the current was applied again and three more times before he was pronounced dead seventeen minutes later.
Paul Jr was freed again in 2010, was nearly killed in a bicycle crash that left him in a coma for 22 days and required seven operations, and lost his suit against the city when the court found he had been drunk and riding the wrong way.