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1830–1900 · THE PAPER TRAIL OF THE EARLY CASES
South Bend's nineteenth-century murder record survives as paperwork, not as legend. The county's coroner's inquest files run from 1879 forward — an index of inquests from 1879 to 1960 is preserved by the South Bend Area Genealogical Society — and the county histories of the era, Chapman's of 1880 and Howard's of 1907, record the courts, the jails and the ordinary run of crime on this ground. What the sources reached for this history do not preserve is a nineteenth-century South Bend murder trial of the stature Fort Wayne's record carries: no scaffold narrative, no reported appeal, no trial that the press of the day sold as the case of the age. The absence is printed as a finding, not filled. The first South Bend murder case whose whole court course the record does preserve is a policeman's killing in the rail yards in 1897 — and it ends, after three trials, in an acquittal.
Sources:
- Saint Joseph County Coroner's Records, Index 1879–1960, South Bend Area Genealogical Society
- Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907), histories of St. Joseph County — the early courts and crime record