Word: shotgunning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Al Capone was public enemy No. 1, an estimated 4,000 Chicagoans died in gang wars in the 15 years from 1920 to 1935. Such niceties as the bulletproof car, the sawed-off shotgun, and the one-way ride* were either inaugurated or raised to their ultimate refinement in Chicago. Such blood-spattered tableaux as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the killing of Gangster Dion O'Banion in a fern bank in his florist shop, glamoured up in Chicago's Front Page newspaper tradition, shocked and thrilled a generation of Americans and Europeans...
...Made famous by Frank McElhone on Sept. 17, 1923. His victims, George Butcher and George Meeghan, hands tied behind their backs and bodies filled with shotgun slugs, were found the next morning in a ditch...
...built it up tremendously. It was like that with everything, and that obviously was what happened in the case of the prowler. Between them, they built up their fear and determination to catch the prowler into an obsession. When Mrs. Woodward was startled by the noise, grabbing the shotgun and shooting was a conditioned reflex...
...Woodward's story was that, hearing a noise, she picked up the loaded shotgun kept in her room because of the prowler and fired both 'barrels across the hallway between her and her husband's bedrooms. One of the charges took Bill Woodward square in the face. The mystery was how a woman supposedly practiced in the use of firearms could unknow ingly shoot her husband at 10 ft. But former hunting companions were not surprised. One said that Ann, who seemed to take joy in hunting, always seemed to be looking one way and shooting another...
That night, after returning from the party and retiring, said Ann Woodward, she was aroused by a noise. Taking up the shotgun at her bedside, she crept into the hallway that separated her bedroom from her husband's. In the gloom, she told the cops, she saw a "shadow" across the hall. She fired twice, heard a body fall. Then she switched on the lights, with the dawning realization that it might be her husband and not a prowler...