It has left its fingerprints on every major crime in the city since the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. That’s when the Chicago Crime Lab was established as the first of its kind in the nation.
But the world-famous institution-with its balky elevators, noisy plumbing and crowded quarters-is to join the ranks of some of its infamous subjects, including gangster Al Capone and bank robber John Dillinger.
The storied lab at 11th and State Streets occupies the same weary building as police headquarters, which is to be demolished after a new campus of law-enforcement facilities is built on the West Side. The deal was announced last month by Mayor Richard Daley and Gov. Jim Edgar.
The state will take over operation of the lab from the Police Department, and a spacious, modern facility is promised by 1996 at Roosevelt Road and Damen Avenue. In the meantime, the state will pay the $9 million yearly tab to run the old lab.
The news has set off a wave of grumbling and reminiscing among many longtime employees, who say a new building is no substitute for one whose halls have echoed with the grisly details of thousands of notorious deeds of murder, passion, anger and greed.
In the 1930s, the lab was an important resource for Untouchables federal agent Eliot Ness.
In 1958, it helped convict some of its own by helping crack the police robbery ring linked to the Summerdale scandal.
And in 1966, its technicians helped solve what was then considered the crime of the century by lifting two fingerprints from a bedroom door. The prints, linking drifter Richard Speck to the gruesome murders of eight student nurses, made national news when they were featured on the cover of Life magazine.
But those glory days are past.
Besides some fears of job security and seniority, many lab veterans see the state takeover as the closing of an important, much-cherished book.
“It just won’t be the same,” says Richard Chenow, a firearms expert for more than 20 years. “There’s so much history in this place.”
Chenow pulled out a scrapbook that begins with graphic photos of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Seven men were mowed down by machine-gun fire that morning in a Clark Street garage. Chenow knows every victim’s name, history and probably each shoe size.
New York firearms expert Calvin Goddard, a retired Army colonel who was one of the country’s foremost, if not only, ballistics expert was called in. His expertise so dazzled city fathers that he was asked to stay in Chicago to continue his research. The nation’s first crime lab was born, spawning a new breed of investigator.
With all the glee of students in a show-and-tell session, Chenow and his partner, tool-mark expert William Sherlock, also a 20-year crime lab veteran, began to pull out their treasures, each accompanied by a tale of malicious intent.
Sherlock’s specialty is examining impressions made by a suspect’s weapons, tools, tires and footwear. He pulled out a closeup of a head that suffered a fatal blow and a transparency of a gun butt that when placed over the photo proves it to be the murder weapon. Chenow displayed a newspaper clip crediting him with helping solve a murder by identifying a bullet from a liquor store cooler.
An aging ledger with elaborate penmanship that has been squirreled away by the pair reveals that the first gun to be processed by the lab was confiscated in Kankakee County. It was one of 20 guns brought to the lab in 1938.
The 1993 total was some 20,000.
Almost on cue, a shopping cart was wheeled into the room. The cart, filled with at least 50 manila envelopes, appeared to be a mail delivery-except two of the envelopes were wrapped around the barrels of sawed-off shotguns. Each envelope contained a firearm that was confiscated, found or turned in to police.
“That’s just this afternoon’s shipment. We had just as many come in this morning,” said Chenow, barely breaking stride in his history lesson.
The initial lab was funded by a $60,000 grant from businessmen and run as a school in conjunction with Northwestern University’s Law School on East Ohio Street and then East Superior Street.
In those days, one of the most advanced methods to examine murder evidence was to put the victim’s clothing in a bag, shake it and then examine the dust under a microscope.
This technique was employed in 1934 to help solve the murder of a 22-year-old Rock Island woman whose body was found in a sack on the ice of the Rock River near Moline. Microscopic soap flakes in her clothing led police to her killer, a laundry owner.
Such sleuthing was so advanced for its day that the Chicago Crime Lab held the first classes in scientific crime detection. Among its graduates was a U.S. Department of Justice employee who returned to Washington to open the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s lab. Other crime labs in major cities and states soon followed.
The Chicago lab was taken over by police in 1938 for $25,000 and moved to its present location a few years later.
The lab had its own machine shop to craft instruments, and its employees wrote some of the first books on evidence collection, including some of the earliest on polygraph tests.
Its tradition of innovation continued through the late 1960s with the develpment of clear, tamperproof evidence bags in response to the French Connection case, when $74 million of heroin was replaced with another substance in a New York crime lab. About 10 years later, the Chicago lab helped develop the Vitullo Sexual Assault Kit to help hospitals tllect rape evidence.
But by the mid-1970s, the crime lab began to lose some of its luster. It became overwhelmed with the escalation of street violence, the proliferation of guns and drugs, and the court system’s growing reliance on scientific data.
Short-staffed, overcrowded and underfunded, the lab fell so far behind that it was cited by the Chicago Bar Association in 1979 for contributing to delays in felony trials.
Administrators didn’t do much to fend off negative publicity, hoping that it would alert city officials to the desperate need for additional employees and funds, said Marian Caporusso, assistant lab director.
Although the unfavorable attention eventually got the lab what it wanted-more funds and technicians-it never fully recovered. It’s a sore point for just about everyone in the lab.
Caporusso, hired in 1965, said there has been continuing pressure because of the relentless pace of technological advances. She has seen the advancement of blood identification from general A-B-O typing that could place a suspect’s probability of being on the scene to 1 in 20 to today’s DNA tests that narrow that identification down to 1 in 20 million.
Despite its cramped quarters, the lab is still considered first-rate because of the quality of its technicians, who shouldn’t have to worry about keeping their jobs, according to lab director Robert Stacey.
Stacey came to Chicago from the Michigan state crime lab system about a year ago to help guide the transition to state control, which he sees as simply another chapter in the Chicago lab’s long history. There will be eight state-run labs after the change.
“This is a positive move,” said Stacey, adding that with the new lab the Illinois system will rival the FBI’s crime lab in Washington.
To veterans such as Chenow, that translates as more red tape.
“There won’t be the same communication with the officers on the street,” he lamented. “The new lab might be bigger. It might be more modern. It might be a lot of things. But it just won’t be the same. It’s the real end of an era.”
