I found this on page three of the Washington Times this morning. Knowing that some of you have commented before about covering the Durkin trial, I thought seeing this historic trial on page three was interesting. And it wasn’t even about the trial but rather his good looks and the women in the trial.

This trial has been well covered, but for those of you unfamiliar here’s the short version. His name was Martin Durkin. Twenty-five years old. A car thief from Chicago. The paper puts him dead center in a five-photo spread and asks, right there in the caption: does this look like a man who would keep the police departments of the entire country on alert?

I’ll answer the rhetorical question. It does not if we’re going on stereotypes. Although having done this a while, most criminals that got high profile coverage were all good looking. That seemed like part of the obvious allure for the newspapers.

Eight months before this page, Durkin walked into a Chicago garage and shot Special Agent Edwin Shanahan in the chest. Shanahan was the first FBI agent ever killed in the line of duty. He was thirty-one years old. He left behind a wife and a son named Denis.

J. Edgar Hoover, newly appointed director of the FBI, took it personally. Every resource the bureau had went into finding Durkin. He kept moving. Chicago to California to Texas to New Mexico to St. Louis. Five states in three months. The whole country was watching.

They caught him in January 1926 when a Cadillac dealership tipped off the FBI about a suspicious customer. Agents stopped his train just outside St. Louis. He didn't reach for his gun.

Today, June 3rd, 1926, his trial began. Jury selection is already proving difficult. Thirty prospective jurors examined in two days. And only one selected so far by the defense. The paper notes that the spectators filling the courtroom are mostly flappers.

Durkin gets one photo. Center of the page.

His wife Irma gets four.

The paper tracks her across the spread like chapters in a very short book. First she is introduced as his bride, daughter of a village blacksmith from Cornell, Illinois. Then she showed little concern at his arrest. Then she collapsed and had to be restrained. Then her loyalty is wavering. Then the future worries her.

That last caption is the one that hit me most not knowing this case very well.

It turns out the future worried her for a specific reason. She had just learned that Martin Durkin was still married to his first wife. The man she had stood by through the arrest and the headlines and the collapsed courtroom days had never been legally hers at all.

Durkin was convicted. He got thirty-five years in Illinois state prison and an additional fifteen years in federal prison for transporting stolen vehicles across state lines. He was released in 1954. He died in 1981 at eighty years old.

Here is the thing that shocked me when I started digging. When Durkin shot Edwin Shanahan in that Chicago garage in October 1925, killing an FBI agent was somehow not a federal crime. There was no law. The case had to be tried in state court because federal court had no jurisdiction over the murder of a federal agent.

That law was written in 1934. Nine years after Shanahan died. Martin Durkin is basically the reason it exists.

Edwin Shanahan's service weapon is still on display at the FBI's Chicago field office. His name is first on the Wall of Honor.

As for Irma Sullivan Durkin? I haven’t looked yet to see what happened to her… that’ll be for another day.

See you tomorrow.

— Chris

Sources