Sunday, May 18th, 1913
World's Most Famous Detective Must Disregard All Theories Advanced Thus Far and Must Evolve His Own Solution of the Mysterious Slaying.
By AN OLD POLICE REPORTER.
Can William J. Burns solve the Phagan mystery?
I certainly hope so, as does everybody else who would like to see the guilty person in this extraordinary case brought to justice.
Unless Burns and his assistants are successful, I fear we shall never know who actually committed the crime.
In my article in The Sunday American on May 4, I said: "At present, on the evidence now before the public, there is little or nothing to lead to the belief that the mystery has been solved. Will it ever be solved? My own guess is that it will not."
What can Burns do that has not been done? Everything, of course.
He will begin at the beginning. He will take up the case as a medical diagnostician takes up the case of a new patient, with out any reference whatever to reports of previous experts.
It is sometimes said in criminal circles, after a case has hung fire as the Phagan mystery has for several weeks, that "the trail is cold," meaning that so much may have happened between the commission of the crime and the period at which new men begin work, that everything is very much against the unraveling of the mystery.
This is not necessarily true, however. A cold trail is sometimes the best of all.
Mediocre detectives, like mediocre medical men, often get very fixed ideas and refuse to see new angles, new loopholes, new clews, or to examine new theories.
Very good medical men have pronounced patients incurable, or suffering from this, that, or the other disease, when a real expert brought into the case has gone at the matter from a radically different point of view, told them the true source of trouble, and remedied the evil.
WILL DISREGARD OTHER THEORIES.
If Burns does take up the Phagan case, he will not consider any of the testimony or evidence collected so far until he has first studied out the location of the crime, and from the moment the body was found, he will follow every clew, old or new, on his own line of investigation, without any reference to what may have been developed by the city detectives or at the Coroner's inquest.
After he has built up his own Frankenstein, he will take the reports of the various detectives, compare them with his own, and from these two reports he may be able to construct an entirely new and different case.
It does not follow that because nothing very positive has yet been discovered the mystery may not be solved; or, if it is not solved within the next few weeks, that it will not be solved within a year, or two years to come.
Burns is a relentless man. He knows no fear. No pull or power can influence him. He never forgives nor forgets. He never lets up. His horizon is broad;
