Tag Archive for: Kate Kelly

Crime Doesn’t Pay: An Early Lesson from Dick Tracy

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by Kate Kelly

If you love mysteries and grew up reading the funny papers, chances are that you followed the adventures of Dick Tracy, a comic strip that first appeared in 1931. Dick Tracy introduced professional crime-fighting to the comic pages for the first time.

The inspiration for the strip came to Chester Gould, its creator, because he lived in Chicago and was tired of watching gangsters like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly get away with what they did.

“I decided that if the police couldn’t catch the gangsters, I’d create fellow who could,” said Gould.

Enter Dick Tracy and more wham-bam fights than the comic strips had ever seen. Gould saw the strip as a lesson for the “bad guys” since Dick Tracy always wins. Gould said: “The first wrong step might be the last. Bullets don’t recognize first offenders.”

Though Dick Tracy was created for a different era, the effect of Gould’s comic strip is still seen today. Consider:

1. Dick Tracy popularized the police procedural. Without the success of Dick Tracy we might have had to wait a long time before deductive crime-solving went mainstream. While readers had to wait until 1956 before Policewoman Lizz Grove (nee’ Worthington) was added to the police force, she arrived and stayed because she had what it took to be a great crime-solver.

2. Gould was prophetic about technological advances.The two-way wrist radio, introduced in the strip in 1946, was a forerunner of our cell phones that give us real-time communication no matter where we are. Ditto the portable surveillance cameras that Gould introduced in 1948. Today surveillance cameras are almost everywhere and help to solve numerous crimes. “Electronic telephone number pick up” was something Dick Tracy used in 1954; today call-tracing is an important part of all types of police work.

3. Today “crime stopper” organizations exist in most communities and owe their start to Dick Tracy. In 1947 Tracy’s adopted son, Junior, announced that he and his friends wanted to be Crime Stoppers; they would find ways to occupy street kids who had little supervision and not enough to do. By the 1950s, Gould had incorporated a “crime stopper” tip as part of the opening panel on Sundays, and the police chief in Gould’s hometown of Woodstock, Illinois decided to create a local crime stoppers club for kids in the area, holding regular Saturday meetings. Other communities began to copy it. In 1976 a police officer from Albuquerque, George MacAleese, approached Gould to ask permission to use “Crimestoppers” (one word) for a program he wanted to organize. Because of MacAleese’s plan, today there are thousands of local organizations that enlist the public’s help in solving crimes. “Tips” lines are an important feature, and many also post descriptions and video online in case the public knows something about a particular crime. (Search “Crimestoppers” and your community for an example of what exists nearby.)

Dick Tracy still runs in many newspapers and online. He has appeared in comic books as well as in advertising and in film and on TV. Clearly, Chester Gould’s creation will continue to uphold the law.

Comic strips offer a fun and interesting lens through which to view American culture. Visit my site to read about Brenda Starr, Beetle Bailey, and Olive Oyl, and if you’d like to receive future comic strip profiles by email, please send me your address: kate@americacomesalive.com with “Comics” in the subject line. I also welcome suggestions as to the characters you would like to read about.

A Missing Corpse?

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When it comes to mysteries, few things are as bone-chilling as the thought of a missing corpse. After all, shouldn’t the dead be left alone? Not necessarily. Grave robbing can—and has—happened.

Michael Jackson’s family is said to have selected Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California for his burial, feeling that it was a more secure location for his body. They needn’t go back too far in history to find reason for concern. Elvis Presley’s remains were the target of an unsuccessful “body snatching” plot, and in 1978 Charlie Chaplin’s body was removed from his grave. His widow refused to pay a ransom, so poor Charlie was later discovered left in a cornfield by his frustrated abductors.

The idea of stealing a body for ransom goes back to the late 1800s. In 1876 a plan to take Lincoln’s body was foiled, but the body of Alexander T. Stewart, one of the wealthiest merchants of the Gilded Age, was successfully removed, and this crime set off a major fear among the well-to-do. Woodlawn Cemetery, the interment site of Jay Gould, established a security force after robber baron Jay Gould was placed in the family mausoleum there because there had been threats that his body would be taken.

Of course, grave robbing used to have a “practical” purpose—digging up bodies was one of the methods necessary to obtain bodies for dissection and medical study. Often the “procurer” made his living by obtaining bodies and/or organs for doctors or medical schools, but sometimes the medical students themselves had to get their own bodies. Documents left by the students indicate that the procurement of bodies was actually quite stressful. One fellow wrote, “No occurrences in the course of my life have given me more trouble and anxiety than the procuring of subjects for dissection.” With his friends at Harvard, this fellow, John Collins Warren Jr., created a secret anatomic society in 1771 called Spunkers, whose purpose was to conduct anatomic dissections.

Body snatching presented a terrible problem for the families of the deceased. They commonly set up watch over the body until burial, and later, relatives would take turns watching over the grave for a few days to be certain it was not dug up afterward.

Today fears of body snatching are primarily limited to those where there is enough ‘fame value” that the body parts would do well on eBay. In the meantime, most people today will be allowed to “rest in peace.”

Kate Kelly

Kate Kelly is a corporate speaker and successful author of more than 25 nonfiction titles. She is a veteran of both local and nationwide talk and news programs and has been quoted in publications such as Time and The Wall Street Journal. She has appeared on World News Tonight, Good Morning America, The View, The CBS Early Show, Fox and Friends, and on CNN, MSNBC and The Fox News Channel. For more interesting bits from American history, check out http://www.americacomesalive.com/blog