Minneapolis Acquittal

As he got out of his car in the alley back of his Minneapolis apartment house at 5:41 o'clock one afternoon last December, Editor Walter Liggett was riddled by five machine-gun slugs. Liggett's weekly tabloid, Mid-West American, had made a business of regularly denouncing the "alliance" between the underworld and Minneapolis and Minnesota officialdom. More recently, he had violently broken with his old political crony, Minnesota's Farmer-Laborite Governor Floyd Bjornstjerne Olson. Editor Liggett's murder, therefore, put Governor Olson in something of a spot, whence he attempted to extricate himself by joining Liggett's widow in asking Attorney General Cummings to send Department of Justice agents into the State to investigate the crime. Attorney General Cummings, who once called Minneapolis a "poison spot of crime," prudently demurred.

Meantime, Mrs. Liggett positively identified a liquor dealer named Isadore Blumenfield ("Kid Cann") as the man who killed her husband. As she sat in the family car, said Mrs. Liggett, she had seen Kid Cann lean out of a passing automobile and fire the fatal shots. At Kid Cann's trial, which began late in January, a second witness also identified him as the killer. This witness, who was in the alley behind the Liggett apartment, said he recognized Kid Cann because they had served time together in the local workhouse.

Kid Cann had witnesses, too. These definitely placed him in a chair at the Artistic Barber Shop, far from the scene of the crime, well before 5:41 p.m. and long after. When his case went to a jury of eight men and four women last week, they promptly returned a verdict of not guilty.

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