The Helpful Press

Chicago, which has swallowed as much violence without blinking as any other big city, draws the line at child murder. Ever since Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for the fun of it back in 1924, Chicago newspapers greet any child murder with a special kind of front-page fury. It sells papers, and, in the view of editors, may also help to keep crime investigators on their toes. Last week Chicago's newspapers had another chance to show the process at work.

The body of a five-year-old girl was found strangled in a weed patch near suburban Wheeling. The story was frontpage news in all four Chicago papers, as it would be in most cities; but in Chicago, for days afterward, the story shoved aside everything else.

Soon the reporters swarming over the story were exceeding the investigators in zeal. Two days after the child's body was found, the Cook County sheriff's office took a 13-year-old boy out to the scene of the crime. He had broken out of a detention home on the day of the murder and had been caught several hours later.

The police apparently did not consider the boy a hot suspect, but the press did. Next day, the Chicago Tribune ran a staff artist's drawing of a youth, based on descriptions furnished by friends of the little girl, who had seen the youth talking to her just before she disappeared. The portrait was a remarkable likeness of the 13-year-old boy the "police were holding. Over at the Daily News, Reporter Jack Lavin, 30, wangled an interview with the boy and shot an abrupt question at him: "Why did you kill that girl?" According to Lavin, the boy answered: "What will happen if I tell you I killed her?"

OUR REPORTERS SET STAGE FOR SOLUTION, bragged the Daily News. The Tribune, with equal modesty, credited breaking the case to its staff artist. It was all in the best Front Page tradition.

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