Miller drove quickly to Touhy's sister's
house. He was worried about making the curfew so he didn't take the precaution
of driving around the block as he usually did. They were running late and it
was a bitter eight degrees outside with an ugly wind whipping across the
street.
He parked and the two men slowly walked up
the six steps of Ethel's porch, Miller's hulking frame towering over the
limping and bent Touhy. The only sound that could be heard was the occasional
passing traffic on Washington Boulevard a half a block away. Then Roger heard a
call from one of two men running toward him. "Wait, hold on, we're police
officers!"
Roger and Miller turned their heads as one.
Instinctively, Miller reached for his service revolver but it was too late. The
men were running toward them, leveling their shotguns as they sprinted across
the frozen street. With a policeman's eye, Miller noticed that one of the
killers stood at least six feet tall. He was wearing a topcoat. The other was
perhaps three inches shorter. Miller aimed at him and fired.
The killers fired back. Miller raised his
left arm to cover his face and nearly had it blown off at the elbow. Dozens of
pellets lodged into his back and legs. The transom over the door was shredded
by shot pellets and the vibration from the blasts had shattered the glass in
the front door.
Before the blasts knocked him to the ground,
Miller was able to get off a total of five shots. Two shots landed in the
windshield of a car parked on the opposite side of the street, two more
grounded themselves into the front lawn and one found its way into the leg of
one of the assassins.13
Almost at the exact moment that Miller was
blown backward, two huge blasts from the killers' shotguns knocked Roger across
the porch and then smashed him face first into the ground. Pellets tore a hole
in Touhy's inner left leg, the other pellets dug into his right upper rib cage.
His leg was barely attached to his body.14
In all, the killers fired at least seven
blasts with their shotguns and probably three more with an automatic pistol and
then they were gone.
The murder had taken less than forty-five
seconds.
Miller crawled over to Touhy and said,
"Say an act of contrition, Rog."
Ethel was in the kitchen drying the dinner
dishes when she heard the blasts. She had been half listening for her brother's
footsteps on the front porch, but when she heard the blasts, she knew he was
dead. She had been expecting it.
She ran out to the front steps and saw
Roger, twitching violently in a massive pool of his and Miller's blood.
She bent down over her brother and tried to
pick up his head.
Roger held her hand and moaned, "It was
two cops."
Patrolmen Robert Peters, Henry Sullivan and
Daniel Stillwagon were the first on the scene. They didn't try to stop the
blood because it didn't seem possible. Their only thought was to rush Touhy to
a hospital.
Two ambulances were called, but there wasn't
enough time to wait; Peters could see that Touhy was bleeding to death in front
of his eyes.
When a third squad car pulled up, Peters
placed Roger in the back seat and drove him to nearby Saint Anne's hospital.
Miller, who was conscious but in agony,
volunteered to wait for an ambulance and told the cops to get Roger to a
hospital.
Peters rode in the back seat with Touhy,
holding his hand and making a valiant but hopeless effort to stop the gush of
blood from the gaping holes in the dying old man's legs.
Roger kept nodding his head at the cop and
saying, "I'm all right, I'm okay."
But he wasn't. He was losing too much blood
from the shotgun pellets drilled into his leg, in the place where his knee had
been just a few minutes before. They arrived at the emergency room at 10:35 P.M.
where a shock trauma team headed by Dr.
Patrick Vitullo placed Roger
under an oxygen tent and wheeled him into an operating room.
Dr. Vitullo applied a tourniquet to the
upper portions of Touhy's legs in a fruitless effort to stop the bleeding just
as Chief of Detectives John Archer stepped into the room, slipping and almost
falling to the floor that was slippery with Touhy's blood.
Dr. Vitullo leaned over Roger's face to
check his breathing.
"Mr. Touhy, who shot you?"
"Two men."
"Do you know them?"
"No."
"Where is your identification?"
"I never carry any."
"Do you have any money on you?"
"About $200.00."
"Where is it?"
"Right front pocket."
Then he faded.
"Mr. Touhy, you must try to stay
awake."
There was no reply. A nurse rifled through
Roger's bloody pants' pockets and found $240, a pack of non-filtered
cigarettes, a pair of reading glasses and two drawings from his sons, done
twenty-six years before.
The doctor worked frantically, but knew his
patient would never survive the massive loss of blood. Father Richard
Birmingham was brought into the room and gave Roger Touhy the last rites of the
Catholic Church which he completed at 11:23 P.M. Two minutes later, at 11:25,
Roger Touhy expired.
Ray Brennan came into the emergency room
just as the nurse pressed down Roger's eyelids for the final time and pulled
the sheet up over his head. "Rotten bastards,"he whispered over and
again. The killing shook Chicago and the question all
over town was
"Why?"...Why kill a rumpled, halfcrippled old man? Why, as Newsweek
put it, kill the "not so Terrible Touhy"?
Nobody in Chicago really wanted an answer,
but they had to make it look as though they did. By now, 701 mob murders later,
going through the motions of showing outrage, was standard practice.
Mayor Daly was awakened by his aides who
told him that Roger Touhy had been killed. Daly climbed out of bed and ordered
Police Commissioner O'Connor to personally investigate the killing.
O'Connor ordered his police to pick up
Marshal Ciafano and Sam Teets Battaglia. Ciafano and Battaglia were the mob's
favorite hit men, both were former 42 Gang members who had fought against Touhy
in 1932, and both had been arrested by Walter Miller a few years before on
armed robbery charges.
Marshal Ciafano was found at the Trade Winds
bar by detectives who dragged him screaming, off his bar stool and carried him
by his arms and legs to a waiting squad car, tossed him into the back seat and
drove him to police headquarters for questioning.
They found Battaglia in his expensive home in
Oak Park and hauled him in for questioning but then let him go.
Neither Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Murray
Humpreys15 nor Sam Giancana were ever questioned for their role in Touhy's
murder.
Several days after the murder, John Factor
testified at the coroner's inquest with an enormous diamond ring glittering
from his pinky finger. Police ushered him into a waiting room where Ethel sat
in a corner with Tommy Touhy Jr., her face buried in a Persian lamb coat, her
eyes hidden by dark glasses. The room was small. Factor, always amiable, turned
to the Touhys and nodded and smiled. They glared at him. Then he realized who
they were. He turned his face to the wall and waited for police officers to move
him to another room.
Before he left Chicago for Los Angeles,
Factor was allowed to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence. This was
the same type of test Touhy wasn't allowed to take to prove his own innocence
more than twenty-four years earlier. Chief of Detectives Archer watched the
test being administered and announced to the press mob waiting on the street,
"Factor had nothing to do with the shooting and no knowledge of the
participants or the reasons. We have no further reasons to question him."
Reporters tracked down Tubbo Gilbert who met them with his standard, "I
have no comment," but then, as always, he talked anyway; "I have no
idea who would want to do this either."
Perhaps not realizing the blatant stupidity
of the question, Tubbo asked "I'll say this, if Touhy was so innocent, why
did he need a bodyguard?"
Roger's body traveled from the Alexian
Brothers Hospital to the Cook County Morgue-the same route that John
Dillinger's and Frank Gusenberg's gunned down bodies had taken back in 1936.
While Touhy's dead body was waiting for
transport to the morgue, a scant two blocks from his childhood home on South
Robie Street, a photographer snapped a photo of the corpse, his face frozen in
terror and pain, the mouth pried open in one last frantic breath for life.
Roger's grief-stricken sister was left with
the awful task of identifying her brother's body a few hours later.
The next morning, at 8:30 A.M., a solitary
hearse bearing Touhy's body in its coffin, slowly pulled out of the back alley
of the funeral parlor. It was decided Touhy would be buried at the family grave
at Chicago's Boot Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel. Not far from his gravesite were
the tombs of Dion O'Bannion, Frank Nitti, the Genna Brothers, Paul "Needle
Nose" La Briola, A1 Capone and by 1992, Tony Accardo. The tombstone would
bear the name TOWEY, the Anglo-Irish spelling of his family name, in the
northwest corner of the burial ground where his brothers Johnny, Joe, James and
Eddie were entombed.
Secrecy surrounded the funeral. Chief of
Detectives Archer, who had been planning an observation detail for the funeral
which he expected to take place the following week, was caught completely off
guard and was told about it by a Chicago Tribune reporter.
Arriving at the site only minutes after the
coffin, Archer watched from the warmth of his car as Clara and her sons, Roger
Jr. and Tommy, stood in the bitter winter cold while the funeral director
recited Roman Catholic prayers over the coffin. Nearby, six workmen stood by
with their shovels at ready. There were no other mourners, no flowers, no
pallbearers. The service ended in seven minutes and a weeping Clara was led
away to a car by Tommy. A freezing wind picked up and swept across the yard as
the workmen lowered Roger Touhy's coffin in its grave.
Archer walked up to the gravesite and one of
the workmen paused from shoveling dirt and asked, "Is it true they only
gave him twenty-eight days of freedom?"
Archer nodded, that it was.
"That hardly seems enough,"the
workman said. "Just doesn't seem right."
13. The Chicago Police had been
telling reporters that they "were searching high and low" for
Giancana, to question him about the Touhy murder, but were unable to find him. Several
days later, reporter Sandy Smith went to the home of Sam Giancana and
interviewed the crime boss about the killing. Smith, who interviewed Giancana on his front
lawn, noted that the gangster's foot was wrapped in bandages and he limped.
It's possible that Giancana, a former 42 Gang member who was noted for his
fantastic driving skills, may have been the third gunman that Miller saw and
Touhy hadn't seen. Miller reported that he shot at least one of the gunmen and
heard him scream out "Son of bitch!"
14. Police officer Daniel
Stillwagon said later, "They blew that guy apart; you could see that the
leg was just hanging on by some veins and some skin."
15. A recently declassified FBI document reveals that on January
28, 1960, Humpreys discussed Touhy's killing with labor goon Joey Glimco. The
informant who reported the conversation said it was conducted mostly in
whispers. Suspecting that he would be arrested by the U.S. Treasury, which was
investigating Touhy's murder, for his role in the killing, Humpreys said,
"Dirty bastards, if I ever want to dispute them, I didn't keep it all to
myself, see?... I figure, if they're gonna get real hot on me, they want to
fuck with me like they did on that shit, they're not gonna give me shit. So, I
just keep still, 'cause I got the answers for them
He also added that, "He (Touhy?) was
dying a long time ago. He was on a stretcher, you know?"