My Grandfather's Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City

Chapter 7

Chapter 7 109 On Wednesday, May 26, 1948, there appeared in the morning paper a small four-paragraph item that ran deep in the inside pages. Headlined “Dies at Municipal Farm,” the Kansas City Times reported that James Patrick Lyons, thirty-nine, of Fifth and Main streets, had been arrested the previous Thursday near his home on skid row and that he had been sentenced on Friday to the Farm after being fined fifteen dollars for intoxication. On Monday he was placed in solitary confinement because “he caused a disturbance,” the item said. He had been checked by guards six times before he was found dead an hour before sunrise on Tuesday. The article added that William Delahunty, superintendent of the homicide bureau for the Jackson County sheriff’s office, a heavyset man like many of the rest of the deputies, was in charge of the investigation . Like his boss, Sheriff Purdome, Delahunty was deeply active in Jackson County Democratic politics. He had run the Fifth Ward for the party. He served as secretary-treasurer of the First Ward Business Men’s Democratic Club. With that kind of political background, and this an election year and his boss up before the voters again, Delahunty wasted no time announcing what he said had happened to my grandfather. Delahunty was born and raised in the Kansas City area. He knew its ins and outs, its street corners and its neighborhoods, and he knew its skeletons, too. He knew how to hide things. Also like Purdome, Delahunty had worked his way up in law enforcement. When he first started out in public service he was assigned to the Kansas City Health Department, an agency with a good deal of oversight of the Municipal Farm. Delahunty knew how things worked out there as well. In 1933 he was named chief inspector for the city Health Department . Six years later he moved over to the sheriff’s office just as 110 Richard A. Serrano Purdome’s star was rising. There Delahunty stayed for twenty years and served as a deputy and then as chief deputy of the criminal division and now as superintendent of the homicide bureau. His career closely tracked Purdome’s. In many ways the men were inseparable. They were so tight that Purdome gave Delahunty the honor of serving as one of his groomsmen at the hotel tearoom when the sheriff married Wolf Rimann’s widow. So it was to Purdome’s advantage and it fell to Delahunty’s doing that the homicide investigation into my grandfather’s death be quietly swept aside. They clearly wanted to dispose of the whole unexplainable , messy affair. Here it already was late May, just a little more than two months out from the crucial August Democratic primary . Voters would be going to the polls soon. In that very first small newspaper item about the jailhouse death, Delahunty tried to quickly close the lid on the case. “Natural causes,” he announced. The death certificate offered the barest of facts. But death by natural causes was not among them. It described James Lyons as divorced , yet a spouse, identified only as Josephine, was listed on the form. For the box asking whether she was still alive, the coroner’s office typed in a question mark. His “usual occupation” was listed as “railroad work,” and they said his parents were from Ireland. His birthday was June 18, 1908 (mine is June 17), he was not a veteran, and his Social Security number, if he had one, was “unknown.” More important, the coroner determined the “immediate cause of death as shock . . . fractured neck . . . presumably of unknown traumatic conditions.” Means of injury: “Trauma.” Time of death: 5:30 in the morning, May 25, 1948. He had lived thirty-nine years, eleven months, and six days. His body would be turned over to his mother. There was no mention of solitary confinement in the death certificate , no description of a struggle. No evidence of a rope, a noose, or a chair tipped over. Under the category of accident, suicide, or homicide, Jackson County coroner James C. Walker wrote simply: “Do not know.” Armed with the death certificate, I drove out to the cemetery office in Kansas City, Kansas, and found an old printed graveyard register that said my grandfather had died of a “broken neck.” 111 My Grandfather’s Prison I visited the funeral home and their records called it a “fractured neck.” Their file added this notation: “On insurance papers...