Getting Away With 11,000 Murders

Anyone with research targets in Chicago should spend a minute to check out Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930 -- not one more cutesy mass-market promo, but a searchable database from Chicago police records and the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, courtesy of director Leigh Bienen of Northwestern University, with a fat collection of scholarly papers from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology to go with it. Don't miss sociologist Roland Chilton's "Homicides among Chicago Families 1870-1930." Some 1,487 of the 11,000 Chicago homicides in the database were among family members, and of these "family homicides over the sixty-one-year period involved husbands and wives much more frequently than parents and children."

If you can spend just a minute you're better than me -- I got stuck there for most of an hour. No Chicagoans? Just curious? Search on "vampire."

Another searchable database in the same vein is at the Illinois State Archives: Cook County Coroner's Inquest Record Index, 1872-1911. The Archives also has its own index to the homicide records, which apparently includes only the victims' names.