On 6 February 1888, Mathias Busch was arrested in Chicago for the murder of his wife, Katherine. About four that afternoon, Busch, a beer peddler, walked in to the kitchen of their home, picked up a butcher knife, and, after repeatedly slashing at his wife, cut her throat. Several people were in and about the house at the time; some grabbed and restrained Busch until the police arrived.

Busch's crime made the front pages of Chicago's evening papers the day of the murder, and coverage continued until his trial in April. City papers competed to condemn both crime and criminal; one local socialist paper, the Chicago Labor Enquirer, offered the most novel interpretation of the crime, arguing that those who scabbed( as Busch apparently had in a recent strike) could be expected to murder their wives.

In 1906, the Reverend Frank G. Smith, of Chicago’s Warren Avenue Congregational Church, warned that “we are in the throes of a moral spasm” (Chicago Tribune, 22 January 1906). The Reverend W. R. Leach shared this view, bemoaning that “not in twenty years as pastor in Chicago have I seen crime as it stalks to-day. It is an epidemical scourge” (Chicago Record-Herald, 26 September 1904). Another critic termed the city “Satan’s sanctum” (Curon 1899). Other commentators eschewed the language of the jeremiad but of fered similar assessments, often casting their observations in comparative and quantitative terms.

Even though it declined in the last decade of the twentieth century, homicide remains anAmerican problem of extraordinary importance. Yet our empirical knowledge is remarkably shortsighted. Simply put, most researchers focus on the past decade or two—usually for reasons having to do with convenience, not theory—and ignore the longer term. However, recent work has shown that past lethality is inherently recoverable, and that there is every reason to expect that comparable homicide rates across time and place should be used to set current research in context (Gurr 1981; Johnson and Monkkonen 1996; Ylkiangas forthcoming; Eisner 2000).This paper builds on some of my recent research and responds to the challenge of a recent paper by Douglas Eckberg (1998), who has shown that not only can we recover the past, but that we can even estimate missing data counts.

Anyone who hopes to trace quantitative historical changes in populations faces the problem of incomplete and biased records. This is at least as much a problem for statistics of crime as for other kinds of statistics, and it plagues historical homicide research. As with other historical trends, those of homicide are derived from actual counts from some set of sources, including coroners’ records, indictments, arrests, and newspaper accounts. But what proportion of the original incidents were recorded and—if so—still exist? Adding sources usually increases the count, but how closely does it approach the true count? This cannot be known directly. One is caught between the facts that counting is the major means open to us to understand crime “as part of the sweep of history” (Monkkonen 1980: 53) and that there are gaping “holes in the historical record” that leave a large “dark figure” of crime (Lane 1992: 30).

The contentions in this paper arose tangentially from a study of London coroners I began in the summer of 1998. I had intended to examine the verdicts from nineteenth-century coroners’ courts in order to assess the differences in verdicts that might arise depending on whether the coroner was a doctor, a lawyer, or neither. Was a physician more likely to detect murder as a cause of death than a lawyer or a “civilian?” Instead, as I read hundreds of inquest reports and explored the history of the coroners’ courts, I began to realize that no matter who the coroners were, it was rare for any of them to bring in a verdict of “wilful murder,” even in cases that seemed very suspicious to me.

Historians often despair of their ability to write histories of child murder, because the crime was easy to commit and conceal. Even today, coroners can determine only in rare instances whether a deceased infant or newborn was suffocated or died of natural causes (Knight 1996: 441–44, 345–60). No reliable test can determine, once decomposition has begun, whether a deceased newborn ever took a breath; and suffocation, unlike strangulation, leaves no physical marks, unless excessive pressure is applied to the face or lips. A murderer needed but a few moments to smother a child and could claim that the child was stillborn, had been accidentally overlain, or had died from natural causes. Unwanted pregnancies could be kept from public notice with the help of family or friends, especially pregnancies that came to term in late winter or early spring, when expectant mothers could live quietly out of the public eye or stay wrapped in heavy clothing. In New England, a large proportion of suspected neonaticides—nearly a quarter—occurred in April or early May, “mud season” in the Yankee vernacular,when people emerged from their long winter “hibernation.”