Moron Campaign

Chicago's schoolteachers eyed their charges with a horrid new thought in mind last week. They had to discover if any other children were criminal morons like George Rogalski. In the classroom George Rogalski had been clever, polite, attentive. His teachers had noticed nothing strange about him except that he sometimes teased smaller children. Last week George Rogalski was in jail, his name was in grisly headlines and Superintendent of Schools William Joseph Bogan, after voicing a wish that every one of Chicago's 500,000 schoolchildren could be psychoanalyzed, had ordered analysis for every pupil who seemed to his teachers abnormal or subnormal in any way. Early last week two small boys heard whimpering sounds in a deserted ice house in a poor district of Chicago. Crawling through a broken skylight they came upon a 2 1/2-year-old girl huddled on a pile of debris, her naked body black with frostbite. The boys whispered excitedly. Then an older boy, bold-eyed and sturdy in long pants, entered the ice house. "Scram, you!" he growled. The small boys ran off to the police. It did not take them long then to track down George Rogalski. The little girl, Dorette Zietlow, who had been missing for two days, was rushed to a hospital. That night she died. At her funeral, few days later, a mob of 15,000, mostly morbidly curious women, roared, pushed, fought with police. Said George Rogalski to a coroner's jury: "I walked up the alley and saw the girl and I told her I'd give her a nickel if she would come with me. She said she would. We walked about 25 blocks and came to the ice house. She didn't cry. I undressed her. She asked me to take her to her grandmother. . . . I went back to see her Monday and she was asleep. I wanted to go back and see her again, but I couldn't take any food out of the house because my mother would have known about it." Jailed last week, George Rogalski worked jigsaw puzzles (which he said he could do with his eyes closed) while state's attorneys debated as to whether he could be indicted for murder or kidnapping and manslaughter. He was examined by Dr. Harry Hoffman, Criminal Court behavior clinician. Frank of countenance and looking much like any 13-year-old, George Rogalski talked calmly. In what he called the "most fascinating" study of his experience, Dr. Hoffman pronounced the boy sane, not vicious, a "moral imbecile," a sexual psychopath hopelessly antagonistic to girls of his age and preoccupied with very young ones. Last year he was convicted, and soon paroled, by the Juvenile Court for having molested an 8-year-old. (But according to the coroner small Dorette Zietlow had not been touched.) George Rogalski announced he hated his mother, who it appeared was a sexual delinquent once confined for dementia praecox. He liked his father, an $18-a-week bakery employee who told newshawks: "Let them kill him, I'd like to see them. . . . I done all I could with him."

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