It was the evening of February 4th, 1924 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Father Hubert Dahme, a well-liked priest at the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, was taking his daily walk through downtown.
Just as he was in the vicinity of the Lyric Theater, an unknown assailant ran up behind him and shot him once behind the left ear with a .32 caliber revolver before quickly fleeing the scene. Several passersby rushed to the priest’s aid, but in the chaos, no one called for emergency services until ten minutes after the shot had been fired. Father Dahme was still alive when authorities arrived but died shortly after being taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
The city mourned the tragic death of the beloved priest; over twelve thousand people attended his funeral. And it seemed the police were also keen to bring Father Dahme’s killer to justice, for a little more than a week later, they arrested and charged a twenty-year-old Army veteran by the name of Harold Israel with the crime.
At the time of his arrest on February 12th, Israel was already in jail in Norwalk on a weapons possession charge; he had been picked up only days after Father Dahme’s murder. And on its face, the case against him seemed superficially compelling: Israel did own a black .32 caliber revolver of the type that had killed the priest, and he was known to have been in the Bridgeport area at the time of the shooting. Additionally, several witnesses identified him as the man they’d seen running away from the scene. Israel, who was described by authorities as a “transient indigent, and a person of low mentality of the moron type,” also confessed to the slaying, though he later recanted his statements.
At Israel’s arraignment in late May of 1924, prosecutor Homer Cummings, who had initially touted this as an open-and-shut case, surprised everyone when he entered a declaration of nolle prosequi, or “unwilling to pursue,” an action which effectively dropped the charges. Cummings gave a ninety-minute presentation to the court in which he dismantled the police’s case against Israel and essentially accused them of coercing a confession out of someone with diminished mental capacity. He also called witnesses who challenged the police’s ballistics evidence.
Though Cummings weathered widespread outrage after the case was dismissed, his reputation would bounce back admirably, as he later became Attorney General under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Israel went on to have a relatively uneventful life, marrying and having a child. In 1947, Elia Kazan directed a film called Boomerang! which was based on the case, with actor Arthur Kennedy portraying Israel.
In 1954, three decades after the murder, a Bridgeport man who had witnessed the slaying told authorities that he had been threatened with death if he spoke about the crime, but said unequivocally that Israel had not been the killer.
The murder of Father Hubert Dahme is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 