Friday: A White Sox outfielder and an unlikely witness

Ray Demmitt hadn't spent much time in the spotlight.

During a lackluster seventh place season in 1914, the University of Illinois grad had patrolled left field for the White Sox. Then, nine games into the next season, he was gone, with hardly a mention in the press.

But on Jan. 27, 1924, Demmitt was surrounded by reporters. That day, he had the unpleasant task of identifying two relatives -- Lina Lincoln and Byron Shoup, the aunt and uncle of his wife -- by looking at their decapitated heads.

Lina's husband, Aurora florist Warren Lincoln, admitted to shooting them both, cutting up the bodies, encasing their heads in cement and dropping the blocks in the city dump.

"One glance was all I needed," Demmitt said. "I am positive that they are the heads of Aunt Lina and Uncle Byron, as my wife called them. Oh, what a sight!"

Lincoln, who fainted when the heads were found, had returned to good spirits, eating lunch with Aurora Police Chief Frank Michels and posing for pictures for the newspaper.

Warren told Michels he used the cement blocks to prop up his porch for months, until guilt motivated him to remove the evidence. It was another strange story.

"He has been telling first one wild yarn and then another to lay the foundation for an insanity defense," said Kane County Assistant State's Attorney J. Bruce Amell. "He has perfect comprehension of right and wrong. As a fact, the unusual action was dictated by the cunning of a crafty slayer."

Like any previously unimaginable tragedy, the public was horrified and captivated. How could someone commit a deed so gruesome? And, more importantly: Why? Reporters rushed to Michels, who had spent weeks with Lincoln, slowly coaxing a confession out of him. Surely, he had a sense of Lincoln's sanity. But the chief begged off.

"Men much more schooled in medicine than I will have to pass on this man," Michels said. "He may be a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in some moments timid and weak, and in others a man of tremendous cruelty and power and cunning. That he is of a most unusual type, all the world can tell."

At the October 1924 sanity hearing, Lincoln's lawyer said his client was "crazier than hell."

But the state portrayed Lincoln as a crafty killer. He is, Kane County State's Attorney Charles Abbott said, "the prince of prevaricators." It's not recorded whether the jury knew Abbott was just calling Lincoln a big liar, but they got the point. After less than two hours of deliberation, they declared Lincoln fit to stand trial.

Now jurors would be forced to answer the questions that confounded anyone who looks at an act of evil.

If so much planning had gone into the murders -- covering up the crime, evading police -- didn't that suggest a devious and rational mind?

But how could an act so repulsive be the work of a sane person? If Lincoln was sane, are we all possible of such unspeakable acts?

The debate was more than a philosophical one. If he was insane, Lincoln would spend his life in prison. Sane, and he'd be put to death.

Hundreds of people crammed into the courthouse in Geneva to see the trial.

Doctors for both sides took the stand to explain Lincoln's sanity. Even Lincoln testified, telling a shocked courtroom that in fact he hadn't killed anyone at all. Lina and Byron were alive, he assured his lawyer.

The jury must have been spinning trying to sort out whether this man should be put to death for a devil's plan or sympathetically removed from society, sent to prison for life. They needed someone calm and rational to explain a monster.

The witness the defense lawyers found was, at first blush, the most unlikely. But perhaps he was the perfect voice. He had seen it all, the worst and best of people, the craziest and most cold blooded.

For the first time in his 30 year career, Chief Frank Michels would take the stand for the defense.