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Jewish Ritual Murder - Chicago, 1955

The frightening story of white children and the real possibility of a ritual Jewish killing. Five children , their father , a Jewish Doctor and a pre-emanate historian on Jewish rituals met untimely deaths.

Blood Letting By Rabbis

Murder Most Foul

Common plaque on European buildings

Rabbis slit the throat of a child

t of young child

Five Children Were Ritually Murdered

Anton Schuessler And His Sons

Five children murdered
Between October of 1955 and December of 1956, a total of five white children, three young boys including two brothers and a friend and two teenaged sisters, were abducted and murdered in a manner which was suggestive of Jewish ritual sacrifice.

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Grimes sisters and Schuesslers

Chicago 1955

The murder of five children shook the city. As rumours spread of 'Ritual Murders' parents refuse to allow their children to enter Jewish neighborhoods on Holloween.

Three Boys And Two Girls Are Dead

The murder victims were John and Anton Schuessler, Jr., Robert Peterson, and Barbara and Patricia Grimes, and both cases remain officially unsolved to this day.

	The Schuesslers The three boys and the Grimes sisters were all found nude, and drained of blood. Oddly none had been sexually assaulted.


Kept Alive According to the pathologists' reports they had been kept alive for some time after they were reported missing, although the unusually cold weather in which the girls' bodies were exposed impeded fixing an exact time of death. The corpses showed ligature marks on the wrists and ankles, indicating that they had been tied or restrained. All the victims had been tortured with mostly small, shallow cuts and puncture wounds, none sufficient to cause death of itself. The official cause of death was listed as blood loss and shock due to blood loss and exposure, although 14 year-old Bobby Peterson appears to have resisted his attackers and was beaten on the head with a blunt instrument and strangled into unconsciousness by strong hands with "fingernails like claws" which left marks on his throat.

Ritual Murder

The two female victims had been tormented by repeated puncture wounds on the upper torso, thighs and buttocks, suggesting a sadistic sexual element in the killers' motivations, but the two youngest male victims, the Schuesslers, had been transfixed through the hands, wrists, and feet by larger weapons similar to nails or a carpenter's awl, inflicting wounds very similar to the so-called stigmata, the wounds of Christ.

The eyes and mouths of the boys had also been mutilated in a manner never publicly released.

Wealthly Killers

Forensic experts the boys' wounds contained traces of an unspecified grain, a form of matzo.

Floor mat patterns imbedded in the flesh of one victim indicated that his body had been transported in a Packard automobile, a luxury car popular among the wealthiest people of the time.



	Newspaper cover up The Chicago Sun Times published an afternoon edition detailing the ritualistic nature of the wounds and speculating that members of a "religious cult" might be involved. Within ten minutes of the edition hitting the street, trucks were sent out to bring them all in; all copies were ripped off the newsstands and taken back to the News building where they were burned.
Eight copies of this issue were obtained by a woman named Mrs. Lyle Clark Van Hyning who published a conservative journal called Women's Voice. When she called the Daily News office to ask why the paper had been recalled she was told that there had been "complaints" about it and it was likely to cause "racial unrest". Mrs. Van Hyning had her own suspicions and sent the father of the two murdered boys, Anton Schuessler Sr., a copy of Arnold Leese's definitive work JEWISH RITUAL MURDER. [Available by e-mail from NSNet]

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Sheriff Joe Lohman

Police Corruption

Schuessler read the booklet and was stunned by what he learned. He then made the mistake of going to the police and demanding that the possible ritual murder angle in his sons' death be investigated.



The Detective Harry Gloss The Cook County Sheriff of the time was a Jewish man named Joseph Lohman, and he immediately placed Mr. Schuessler under arrest on suspicion of killing his own children. Lohman appointed a Jewish detective, Harry Gloss, to investigate both murders.

The Schuessler Family Threatened By Police

A Jewish deputy named Horowitz was sent to the Schuessler home with a party of men; having ransacked the house looking for "evidence", Horowitz then placed Mrs. Eleanor Schuessler and her family under virtual house arrest, forbidding them to leave the house or speak with anyone on the phone lest they "spread rumors about the Jews."

Detectives say " Evidence was destroyed "

The two Chicago detectives in charge of the case, Irish lieutenants James Lynch and James McMahon, later complained angrily that Lohman's Cook County investigators had destroyed evidence, threatened and tampered with witnesses, and generally impeded their efforts to solve the case at every turn. 4

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Dr Steinfeld

Instead of releasing him, the authorities committed Arnold Schuessler to a private mental institution in Des Plaines, Illinois operated by a Dr. Leon Steinfeld.

Schussler Given Electro Shock
Mr. Schuessler was rushed right into electroshock treatment, where he died the same afternoon he arrived at the "sanitarium"



	Anton Schuessler Sr mysteriously dies There was sufficient public outcry over the bereaved father's strange death so that a public inquest into Schuessler's case was held and Dr. Steinfeld forced to testify. He stated that Arnold Schuessler was suffering from "hallucinations" and "paranoid delusions" that "certain people were out to get him." Steinfeld claimed that the elder Schuessler had died of a heart attack. (Schuessler was 42 years old and had no previous history of heart trouble.)

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Chicago coroner says " Schussler was murdered "

Dr. Thomas McCarron, the Cook County Coroner, knew Dr. Steinfeld for a liar and a charlatan. He turned all the documents over to the district attorney, recommending that Steinfeld be prosecuted for perjury and murder.

The DA order no more public comments, and someone used a bomb to blow the front door off McCarron's house.

Sold draft exemptions

Steinfeld had been prosecuted for giving Jewish boys facing the draft callup various legal and illegal drugs which would give them heart fibrillations, fill their lungs with liquid to simulate tuberculosis, give them noxious skin conditions, etc. so they could avoid military service.

Steinfeld allegedly collected $2000 per head for each Yiddish Mama's Little Bubbeleh he spared from having to go face the Nazis' cold steel and hot lead.

Stienfeld found hung

Steinfeld after a blackmail attempt had to flee to Switzerland, where he was found hanging in his hotel room.

The Newspapers
Jewish newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet established a "sympathy fund" and shortly thereafter presented Arnold Schuessler's widow, the mother of the murdered children, with $100,000 raised from Chicago's Jewish community-- an immense sum of money in 1955-56, worth easily a couple of million today, and a very strange gesture for Jews to make to a Gentile crime victim, a German at that, unless it was to buy silence.

Another strange death

Arnold Leese, the premier researcher on blood libel, and this case in particular, which was the most documented incidents of Jewish ritual murder in modern times, suddenly died in the spring of 1956.




	Thousands of missing kids a year None of the Schuessler papers, which he had been working on and which he showed to a number of friends and visitors, were found anywhere in his possession when his effects were inventoried after his death. The last loose end was tied up. One looks at those sad little faces on the milk cartons today, and one can't help but wonder.....

Researchers claim the murder scene is haunted

They were dumped in a forest preserve

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Haunted Ground

The site of the murders has become one of the country's most paranormal attractions

A Marker Where The Killings Happened

The local Jewish community wants it removed.

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