"The witness descended from the stand and with quick steps went over to where the defendant sat and laid his hand on the defendant's shoulderReynolds may not have given the most vehement testimony against Brothers, but he certainly didn't go out of his way to try and get him acquitted, either.Reynolds was a 92-year-old man when the interview was recorded, but on the tape—which I accessed through the Notre Dame library—you can hear his voice still cracking with excitement when he talks about the Lingle case and the Rockne plane crash. What was the location of death? He believed that the man who was convicted of murdering Jake Lingle, Leo Brothers, wasn't the real killer but was in fact a fall guy chosen by the mob and the police department. Jerry Brondfield, in his book Until Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in April 1945, fourteen years later, there simply wasn't a funeral in American history that produced as much emotional impact as the funeral of Knute Rockne in April 1931.An exaggeration? Both had been track stars at Notre Dame. Even now bullshit and hyperbole seem to hang on every word uttered about Rockne, not least because they hung on every word uttered It was only natural that bullshit and hyperbole would take up their places in the story of Rockne's death, too.But at some point, Lingle got in too deep, and on the afternoon of June 9, 1930, a man walked up behind Lingle in Chicago's Randolph Street train station, put a gun to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger. Features He wished me luck with my research and thanked me for my call. Rock was to football what Babe Ruth was to baseball in those days, a superhero of the Golden Age of Sports.So it was not surprising when the banner headline around the world on March 31, told of Rockne's death in a fiery plane crash over the Kansas farmland, near Bazaar.A farmer, plowing his field, was an eyewitness to the crash, which also killed eight others. He believed it for the same reason Rockne's team believed in poor sick little Billy Rockne, laid up in the hospital. Which NFL Hall of Famer once famously played in a Super Bowl with a broken leg? Login But Father Reynolds never told. Why would the mob choose Rockne as the target of revenge rather than just kill Reynolds? The archives of At this point, it's essentially impossible to answer that question. He testified in the Lingle murder trial on March 27, 1931, and Rockne's plane went down on March 31.
Samuel Pettingill, representing the state's 3rd congressional district, also contacted the FBI about the bomb-plot theory. In response, Hoover writes to an agent:I said we were not conducting any investigation of this, insofar as I knew or had been advised but that I understood the investigation was being made by the Commerce Department.
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To the public, he was a newspaper reporter for one of the biggest newspapers in the country.Father Reynolds then told Kitty and me a horrendous tale of his harassment by gangsters, all of whom wanted to know what Lingle had divulged to him during that last confession.The priest gave all of them the same answer — that the seal of the confessional prevented his revealing what was said.This only increased the phone calls and the mysterious visits.
Karton puts the same question to Reynolds, who claims that the mob was too afraid to kill him because murdering an Irish-Catholic priest would have reflected poorly on them (as opposed to murdering the most famous college football coach in America).The bomb theory, to the extent that it makes sense at all, only holds water if Reynolds was supposed to be on the plane.
""Well," said the witness [Reynolds] choosing his words with care, "Mr. Brothers answers the description. Among the dead was Knute Rockne, Notre Dame's football coach, who was headed to Los Angeles to assist with the production of the upcoming film Rockne was 43. It's unclear where the interview took place, but it appears to have been recorded sometime after Reynolds left the Trappist monastery in Utah. No further details are provided about who the The New York Times called up and asked if the Bureau's Agents had done any work on the crash of the aeroplane in which Knute Rockne was killed. Did those people plant a bomb on that plane for me?