The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1945–1992
The mid-century decades are this page's thinnest file, and the entry says so before it says anything else. No case of those years stands in the digitized court and press record at the depth of Chapman's nineteenth century or the federal record of the century's end, and the era's name-level residue is an index, not a narrative: the St. Joseph County Coroner's records, indexed by the South Bend Area Genealogical Society for 1879–1960, which name the dead the coroner saw without trying their cases. The documented institutional act of the postwar department that survives whole is a turn outward: in December 1967 the South Bend Police Department established its Police Community Relations Bureau, organized by Captain Ralph J. Wolfe with Sergeants Sylvester McGee, Edward Friend, and Robert Miller, whose first major program was the Crime Alert project — the department's own report, preserved in the federal justice archive, describing a unit built to repair the standing of the police in the neighborhoods they patrolled, in the decade when that standing was most contested.
The decades' cases, when their record is pulled, will come from the Tribune's archive and the superior court files, neither digitized to the depth this page requires. They are not reconstructed here from memory or from the true-crime retellings that circulate without court paper behind them. The file reopens in 1993, when the county built the instrument that would count its homicides for the next twenty-eight years.
Sources:
- South Bend Police Department, The South Bend Police Department Community Relations Bureau: Its Beginning, Its Progress, Its Accomplishments (via the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, OJP) — the bureau's establishment in December 1967 and the Crime Alert project
- South Bend Area Genealogical Society, Saint Joseph County Coroner's Records — Index, 1879–1960