Chapter 6
MOM BELIEVED DAD PICKED CHRISTMAS TO LEAVE BECAUSE HE knew the holiday season was treacherous for her emotionally. It was when tragic echoes from her past were the loudest, making her the most vulnerable.
The construction workers claimed they didn’t see him.
No one seemed to have any idea what he was doing there.
My first question is his connection with that location.
Why would he pick it? How did he know construction was going on?
Was he familiar with the building because of Scientific Precision, where he worked as a sheet metal engineer?
The company manufactured tubing, coaxial cable, and other precision metal components.
Did Scientific Precision have a job in the Conway Building or a potential one?
Sheet metal is used in the ductwork of air-conditioning systems. Perhaps my grandfather was interested in the ongoing plans for air-conditioning the historic skyscraper.
Naturally, my murder mystery mind is compelled to consider the worst-case scenario.
Maybe my grandfather was forced out the window by someone who wanted to steal his inventive ideas.
Perhaps Al Capone’s “men” were involved in the air-conditioning project or there was some other reason Fred Zenner was inconvenient.
What about schematics or notes? If he had any with him, what happened to them?
The coroner’s office reported no personal effects, including a briefcase.
My fifty-four-year-old grandfather had nothing with him except a receipt from the sheet metal workers’ union, which explains where the police got his name and address.
His pockets were empty otherwise, and that seems strange to me.
What about keys, loose change, cash, a money clip, a wallet?
His oldest daughter, Alice, was seventeen, and the only sister questioned by police and the deputy coroner.
She stated that the day of his death he appeared in her bedroom at 6:50 a.m., the same time he always left for work.
She was barely aware of him walking in to leave a clock for her.
One might presume she was referring to an alarm clock that she would reset after he left.
Asked if she could think of any reason why he would take his own life, she said no without equivocation or pause.
When repeatedly pressed about anything possibly bothering him, she guessed that he was concerned about his health.
His “heart was very bad,” she offered. The year before, he’d been sick in bed with what he said was the flu, but maybe he was “lying.” Maybe he’d been suffering from heart trouble and didn’t want her to know. She added that he didn’t have much money in the bank and was mindful of “expenses.”
“He seemed to be a little bit more worried than other times,” she finally conceded about the last time she saw him.
When he left the apartment that early morning, she assumed he was on his way to Scientific Precision.
But that’s not where he went, Alice stated.
Apparently, he called his office and said he wasn’t coming in.
She didn’t explain how she might have known this.
There’s nothing mentioned in the inquest about where he was that entire morning.
Is it possible he had business on the seventeenth floor of the Conway Building?
I wonder if he planned to meet someone. None of his colleagues were called to testify at the inquest. We’ll never know what was going on with him professionally and if he might have mentioned interest in the Conway Building or a reason for going there.
When he hurtled fourteen stories to his death, crashing into a third-floor glass canopy, the building supervisor heard the noise and found the body.
He set out to locate where the victim had jumped from.
Rather magically the supervisor thought to check the construction site on the seventeenth floor and the unlocked storeroom where lumber was stored.
Inside, a window was open wide, a button on the windowsill identified as having come from “a man’s coat.” Based on very little information and virtually no investigation, the six-member jury reached a verdict:
Suicide while temporarily insane due to despondence over ill health.
All this because of a traumatized seventeen-year-old’s speculations and a button.
I suppose my grandfather may have snagged it on the window frame as he climbed out.
But there’s no description that might hint whether the button was ripped from his coat.
Were fragments of thread still in the buttonholes, for example? And was his coat missing a button?
Was it really his button? If so, could it have been torn off during a struggle as he was forced out the window?
His arms, legs, ribs, and jaw were broken.
Was he beaten or tortured first? Did the coroner’s physician check him with that possibility in mind?
The answer is I seriously doubt it, and the alleged jump was said to be unwitnessed.
But if something criminal was involved, maybe anybody present was afraid to talk.
I have no idea what transpired beyond the scant details in the inquest that the Cook County medical examiner’s office retrieved from storage.
I can’t know what was going through my grandfather’s mind the day he died.
The detail about the clock nags at me. Why did he carry it into Alice’s bedroom early that morning?
If the point was for her to reset the alarm, why didn’t she?
She testified that she didn’t get up until around 10 a.m. If she was barely awake when her father appeared in her dark bedroom, what made her think he was more worried than usual?
It’s clear from the inquest that she was coerced into offering conjectures, to grasp for explanations that would satisfy the deputy coroner.
The jury’s verdict was based almost entirely on her testimony, and I wonder about the lasting effect on her psychologically.
For all practical purposes, she’s the one who decided that he was a suicide.
His cause of death was “evisceration of the liver and intestines.” He would have bled to death in minutes.
It doesn’t appear he was autopsied. That’s too bad because we’d have more information about his health and perhaps what he was doing the morning before he died.
A postmortem would have told us if he had heart disease, scarring from old infarcts, possibly atherosclerosis.
We might have an idea what he’d eaten last and when, and if he had drugs or alcohol on board.
When someone drops from a great height and impacts a hard surface, the external examination and autopsy rarely tell you why.
The injuries are the same whether one falls, jumps, or is pushed unless there are signs of a struggle or other evidence.
Suicide is determined by investigation, and it’s a shame more witnesses weren’t called.
The only three were Alice, the building superintendent who heard the body hit the canopy, and the responding police officer.
The death certificate was signed by coroner Frank J.
Walsh, an elected official and not a pathologist. A controversial figure, he was coroner when the FBI shot gangster John Dillinger to death in Chicago on July 22, 1934.
Politicians and others unauthorized filed into the Cook County Morgue to gawk at the body of the notorious gangster.
A plaster cast death mask was made of Dillinger’s face without the FBI’s approval or knowledge.
Eerily, in 1916, my grandfather’s father, “John” Johann Zenner, also died violently from a fall.
While meeting with electrical engineers, it was reported that he stepped into the freight elevator, not realizing the car wasn’t there.
He owned a successful hardware store in Chicago and was an inventor with patents filed.
The death was an accident, according to the coroner Peter M.
Hoffman, the somewhat nonsensical cause, “Shock and injuries fall [sic] from elevator shaft.” His explanation seems to have been hastily jotted, the explanation poorly worded and meaningless.
Because he signed out the death as an accident, most likely the police had no interest.
Later when Coroner Hoffman became the Cook County sheriff, he was accused of colluding with mobsters.
Was John Zenner’s death really an accident?
And what about his son allegedly leaping from a skyscraper?
Chances are, what was believed back then is reasonably accurate, nothing nefarious or conspiratorial involved.
But there’s not enough information to say that with certainty.
My grandfather’s alleged suicide left his three daughters alone, their mother, Frances, dying four years earlier from chronic nephritis.
Mom was traumatized by the memory of visiting her in the hospital to say goodbye, and later having to kiss her cold dead cheek in the open casket.
Alice, Dolores, and my mother had no parents and no income.
When the police officer arrived to notify the daughters, Alice opened the rolltop desk, digging in a pigeonhole for a photograph of her father, giving it to the officer.
A priest arrived, as did Fred’s sister Tilly.
She hung a black wreath on the apartment door, telling her three nieces that they couldn’t go outside for a while. What had happened was shameful.
Mom couldn’t understand why her father would abandon his three daughters. He must not have loved them very much. For the rest of her life, she would say that to me. Her father’s alleged suicide would always be painful, and we rarely talked about it. Later in life, she wouldn’t talk about it at all.
Three years before she died in 2023, I began looking into what I could find out about her father’s death. I told her I had a lot of questions, not convinced he’d committed suicide. I explained my reasons for having doubts, but she didn’t want to listen. She got just as upset as she always had.