In the cold Minneapolis evening of December 9, 1935, the life of Walter William Liggett, a 49-year-old White/Caucasian male journalist, was brought to a violent and abrupt end. As he stepped out of his car, groceries in hand, in the alley behind his apartment, a burst of gunfire from a Thompson submachine gun erupted from a passing vehicle. The attack was witnessed by his wife, Edith, and their young daughter, Marda, who were still inside the car, just feet away.
Liggett was struck multiple times and died at the scene, a shocking conclusion to his relentless journalistic crusade against the city's rampant corruption.
Liggett, the editor of the newspaper *Midwest American*, had made a name for himself by publishing scathing exposés on the connections between organized crime and high-ranking political figures. His investigative work had earned him numerous enemies and threats. He had specifically targeted the alleged corruption within the Farmer-Labor Party and its association with notorious gangster Isadore "Kid Cann" Blumenfeld. Prior to his murder, Liggett had reportedly refused bribes and survived a severe beating, yet he remained undeterred in his mission to expose the criminal underworld's influence on local government.
The immediate aftermath of the shooting saw suspicion fall squarely on Kid Cann. Edith Liggett, weeping at the scene, identified Blumenfeld from a police lineup as the man who shot her husband, stating she would never forget his grinning face. Her testimony was corroborated by other witnesses. Blumenfeld, a notorious figure in Minneapolis with a history of evading the law, was arrested and indicted for the murder.
Despite the eyewitness accounts and considerable evidence against him, Kid Cann's trial ended in an acquittal. His defense presented an alibi, with witnesses claiming he was at a barbershop at the time of the killing. Many, including Liggett's widow, believed the trial was a sham, compromised by jury tampering and a lack of will from law enforcement to secure a conviction against such a powerful figure. Edith Liggett maintained that the murder could not have happened without the approval of Governor Floyd B. Olson, a frequent target of her husband's articles. Following the trial, no one else was ever charged in connection with the murder of Walter Liggett, and the case officially remains unsolved, a chilling testament to the dangers faced by those who dared to challenge the nexus of crime and power in 1930s Minneapolis.
