HUMBOLDT PARK — As a 7-year-old in Humboldt Park in the 1950s, John Guzlowski and the countless kids on his block had free range.
They wandered the park, day and night, took bus trips to the Loop to catch movies and ventured to the beach and museums.
"This was in the mid '50s at the height of the baby boom, and there were millions of us kids outside living large and — as my dad liked to say — running around like wild goats," Guzlowski, now 67, recalled.
That was until a gruesome triple murder shocked the city.
The murder of three young boys in 1955 ended an era of innocence, of unlocked front doors.
The murder sent a scare through the neighborhood — for parents and kids alike. It also provided the inspiration for Guzlowski's new novel "Suitcase Charlie."
The novel begins with a statement from an Associated Press wire report on Oct. 18, 1955.
The bodies of three boys were found nude and dumped in a ditch near Chicago today at 12:15 p.m. They were Robert Peterson, 14, John Schuessler, 13, and brother Anton Schuessler, 11.
They had been beaten and their eyes taped shut. The boys were last seen walking home from a downtown movie theater where they had gone to see “The African Lion.”
"We would sit around at night outside and start scaring each other with these stories about Suitcase Charlie," said Guzlowski, a poet and author.
Suitcase Charlie was a ghastly legend the neighborhood kids made up, as salesmen walking the block with a suitcase were commonplace at the time.
"I'm sure what we had in the back of our minds were the Schuessler-Peterson murders of 1955," Guzlowski said. "That must have been fresh in our minds, the idea of those three boys being killed so horribly."
Paul Biasco explains how the novel mimics life in Chicago in the 1950s:
The Schuessler brothers and Robert Peterson were on a train to the Loop when they disappeared back in 1955. Their bodies were found two days later, strangled, in a ditch in the Robinson Woods forest preserve.
The actual murders which inspired the historical fiction went unsolved for nearly 40 years before Kenneth Hansen, a horseman and former stable hand was tied to the crimes, according to reports.
The novel, Guzlowski's second, was a dream of the author's since he was young, and much of it dates to his experiences growing up in Humboldt Park — where his family moved as World War II refugees who survived the Holocaust.
Guzlowski was born in a refugee camp in Germany, and, as an immigrant in Humboldt Park, he was neighbors with Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists and Polish cavalry officers who mourned their dead horses.
As kids in the neighborhood they knew about fear from hearing about it from their parents. They overheard horror stories from their parents of seeing their mothers and fathers shot in German-occupied Europe.
That fear became their own when they heard about the brutal murders of boys around their own age from nearby Jefferson Park.
"There were always rumors about the terrible things going on in Humboldt Park," said Guzlowski, who now resides in Virginia.
Most of those stories, which neighborhood kids made up, were set on an inaccessible island in the lagoon.
"As kids we talked about suicides on that island, murders on that island and terrible things happening on that island," Guzlowski said. "All of that sort of fear, the fear of what happened to those two brothers and their friend."
Guzlowski's novel, "Suitcase Charlie," focuses on two detectives who are investigating the case of a murdered schoolboy found shopped up into small pieces in a suitcase
The story takes them throughout Humboldt Park and to various parts of Chicago.
Guzlowski's research gave him an opportunity to revisit the old bars of the neighborhood, where he would go on Saturday nights as a kid with his parents and drink ginger ales.
He dug through old photographs, documents about the Shakespeare District police station and talked with nuns from his old elementary school.
Most important, he dug through memories of the characters in the neighborhood.
Mr. Fish, a character in the book, is based on a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp who lived two doors down in Humboldt Park.
"When I was growing up in that area just east of Humboldt Park, there were some really fascinating people," Guzlowski said. "Revisiting the novel and bringing this stuff back to my imagination was really such an experience for me."
"Suitcase Charlie" is available in bookstores now, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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