Ripley's wins bid for historic gallows

CHICAGO — Morbid curiosity beat out history to lay claim to the infamous Cook County gallows.

The oddity-loving Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum outbid the Chicago History Museum late Wednesday night, offering $68,300 for the rights to the contraption that put 86 inmates to death between 1887 and 1927.

The gallows was built to hang those charged in a deadly bombing during the May 4, 1886, Haymarket Square riot.

In recent years, it was part of Mike Donley's Wild West Town, a tourist theme park in Union, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago. But with Wild West Town increasingly catering to children, Donley — who bought the gallows from Cook County in 1977 for a price he declines to reveal — said it was time for the gallows to go.

The gallows was "easily the most unique and interesting piece I've seen at auction," said Edward Meyer, vice president of exhibits and archives at the Orlando, Fla.-based Ripley's.

The device was last used on June 24, 1927, to hang convicted murderer Elin Lyons.

After that, Cook County shifted to electrocution.

The gallows' 10- by 20-foot platform and 15-foot-high crossbar — with its five noose bolts still attached — would have been destroyed then had it not been for the Dec. 19, 1921, escape of convicted cop-killer "Terrible Tommy" O'Connor three days before he was scheduled to hang.

Since O'Connor's sentence specified he was to die by the rope, if he was recaptured he could not be electrocuted. He had to be hanged. So the gallows was dismantled and relegated to a jail basement, where it remained, unused, for 50 years.

Local officials who bid on the gallows lamented that a colorful bit of history had fallen through the trap.

"It was just too bad that we couldn't get it," said Libby Mahoney, the history museum's chief curator.

The museum sought the device because it had been built to hang labor activists involved in the Haymarket riot. It would have been a centerpiece for an already extensive collection of artifacts from that watershed event in the labor history of Chicago and the nation, Mahoney said.

The city's history will be a part of how the artifact eventually is displayed, Meyer promised. There likely will be references to the riot and the many who died.

Other bidders asked the auction's organizers to keep their names private, but they included "crime collectors" and other museums, according to Brian Marren, vice president of Burr Ridge, Ill.-based Mastro Auctions, which put the gallows up for bid starting at $5,000.