Lindsey Graham

He died at 1.30 p.m., approximately three hours after the shooting.

By the time Loftus returned to the crime scene, the police commissioner William Russell and coroner Herman Boondenson had arrived.

The first reporters on the scene had already rushed off to file their stories, and detectives collected bullet casings while the coroner prepared to transfer the bodies to the morgue.

Loftus was struck by the silence.

In his experience, police officers usually cracked wise at murder scenes, attempting to bring levity to what was otherwise a dark undertaking.

But this scene was too gruesome for jokes.

Loftus watched as each victim was loaded into a police wagon and taken away where coroner Herman Budenson began the process of identifying the bodies.

He soon ascertained that five of the six men were known members of the Northside gang, while the sixth was a local optician who hung around the bootleggers almost like a groupie.

With the identities of the men known, it seemed clear that this shooting was an attempt to wipe out the Northside gang.

But there was a problem with the theory.

The leader of the Northsiders, George Buggs Moran, was not among the men killed.

Police officers canvassing the neighborhood learned that, curiously, on the morning of the murders, witnesses observed men dressed like police getting into cars with men dressed like mobsters.

This led police to believe that Moran may have been kidnapped, and many suspected that his body would soon turn up in a ditch.

And while authorities continued to try to determine the motive for the crime, the public was learning the gruesome details.

Thanks to the haste of the photographers and reporters who rushed to the scene, photos of the massacre were plastered across the Chicago papers within just hours of the shooting.

The images were shocking.

The articles that accompanied the photos described the event as heinous and one of the most cold-blooded gangland massacres in Chicago's history.

After years of gunshots echoing through the streets and gangsters seemingly never held accountable for their actions, the brutality of this crime, laid out in black and white in graphic photos on the front page, made the violence impossible to ignore.

Chicago law enforcement knew that they needed to respond.

But while it seemed clear that this was yet another battle in the gang wars, there was almost no evidence as to which gang had perpetrated it.