If you didn't know we have criminal merchandise available on our website, you can get T-shirts, tote bags and stickers and every now and then we've limited edition merchandise available to head did. This is criminal dotcom slash shop to get criminal merch now that this is criminal dotcom slash shop. Thanks very much for your support. I always talked about how it's the best kept secret ever. The people of hÉireann took those secrets and what they saw to their grave. This is author Scott Doody.

In the summer of 1922, in a town called Heren in southern Illinois, 23 people were murdered over two days. Men, women and children came out of their houses to watch and in some cases to take part in the violence. I don't understand how this just happens. How was there any voice of reason in this whole thing?

Zinat and I hear this in your voice, and it's what I learned through the four or five years of research. You keep thinking, you know, we all grew up watching movies. The guy in a black hat, the guy in the white hat, the good guy, all movies and well, so forth, so on.

Now no one stepped forward, no one stepped forward and no one would discuss it. More than 50 years after the murders to college, students from Southern Illinois University went to hÉireann and started asking people to talk about what had happened.

They literally drove over to herin with an old school tape recorder and taped men at the local pool hall in downtown herin in the 1970s, guys that were alive and had participated in the massacre. Now, had they thought about it, of course, you know, young people do crazy things, they would have never done that, but they actually got people to talk to them about what had happened. It is human nature when somebody tries to take your weapon away from you, you're going to fight even a wild animal, do that.

What happened in here in Illinois in 1922 is a story about what happens when the job you thought you had is taken away. It's a story about money and work, pride and loyalty and a story about coal.

Any place coal is in the ground, there's trouble. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

Here in Illinois was a coal town. Local residents used to say that you could be a coal miner or a farmer in. But the mining work was the better path. And one of the reasons that working in the mines was better was because of the union, the United Mine Workers of America. Tell me what the unions did for the mine workers in Hebron.

Well, they changed their lives. They knocked back that 100 hour work week to a 60 hour work week to a 40 hour work week. But the most important thing is the men started to have a say in how deep they'd mine, how the mines were put together, what kind of construction would go into it, the safety aspects and more importantly, the wages, because they went from making nothing to making a pretty decent living.

When the United States Coal Commission visited here and they wrote in their report that the town really believed in the union, that it had, quote, brought them into the promised land when their government had been careless or indifferent to their needs.

And then in the spring of 1922, the United Mine Workers announced a national strike. It would be the largest ever and would include 600000 miners from every coal producing state in the country. They were striking for better pay. On April 1st, miners all over the country stopped work. Just outside of herin, a man named William Lester had recently bought land and opened a mine. He was new at it. He wasn't from Herron and he was in debt.

Here's longtime hÉireann resident Joe Walker speaking in 1978.

I was right here and I was right in the middle of it, knew all about it. He was anxious to get in the coal business and didn't know anything about the coal business.

William J. Lester didn't want to stop working just because the miners were on strike. He had 60000 tons of coal that he was being told he wasn't allowed to sell.

And because mines were shut down all over the country, the price of coal had skyrocketed.

He was sitting on coal worth about three point seven million dollars today.

So last year decided to bring in non-union labor to help and ship and sell it.

Well, anybody that was acquainted in southern Illinois knew that you couldn't do that.

Other mine operators warned Lester not to cross the union. Lester still moved forward. He reportedly said, I need the money. Why shouldn't I?

On June 15th, about 50 men arrived from Chicago. Some would work in Lesters mine and some would protect those workers from the people of hÉireann. The people of Heron had been on strike for two and a half months.

The folks didn't have welfare to fall back on. There was no federal government programs. You didn't work, you didn't eat.

So when when Lester decided to bring in non-union workers, that meant that.

All of the striking workers who did work at one point at the mine were just kind of sitting there in town watching these train cars roll into town with these workers who were there to replace them, these strikebreakers.

Oh, exactly. Exactly. What you had was literally thousands of people. And this is for their livelihood, their wives, their children, their families. So what do you think's going to happen?

And it did.

On June 16th, Lester notified the railroad that he had 16 cars of coal ready for shipment. The first railroad crew refused to touch it, but a second crew eventually agreed to transport it. Many people continued to warn Lester to stop. He wouldn't. He'd already hired heavily armed private detectives from a Chicago agency called the Hargrave Secret Service. On June 20th, a telegram from the president of the United Mine Workers of America was published in local newspapers. It said that union members would be, quote, justified in treating this crowd as an outlaw organization.

On the morning of June 21st, in broad daylight on a state highway, the United Mine Workers ambushed a truck and a car. The truck had non-union workers on it. The car had detectives in it. And I mean, just shot both vehicles all out and then went to the local neighbors right there along the state highway, handed over their rifles and shotguns and said, hold these, I'll be back for them. All over town, people gathered weapons, even breaking into hardware stores to take guns and ammunition.

But there was a hardware store and down the street was a hardware store and they went in and got all our shotguns arrival, Tucker. And the man, the union man, told the store owners when they were taking whatever action Winchester rifles and pump shotguns and handguns and ammunition billett to the union, the unions. Good for it. When one store owner called the local union leader to make sure the union would pay for the guns, the union leader said yes, his members were just going bird hunting, he said.

At three thirty that afternoon, Lesters mine superintendent, a man named Claude McDowell, called the sheriff's office to say that Lester's mine was completely surrounded and that 500 shots had been exchanged. Williamson County Sheriff Melvin Thaxton was a former union miner himself. Most accounts of what happened on June 21st and 22nd make a note, the Sheriff Thaxton was hard to find through all of this.

He's quoted as saying, I have the situation well in hand and there's no danger. No one lifts a finger, not one person. Nobody calls the National Guard. No one. These guys are on their own, on both sides, so there's bullets flying and bullets flying. It's a war zone for the better part of 18 hours. And this gunfight went on until daylight. Scott Doody says that in the middle of the night that night, most of the security guards Lester had brought from Chicago to protect the non-union workers snuck out of the mine and left.

Lester was also nowhere to be seen. He checked himself into a hotel in Chicago, 300 miles away from his hotel.

He'd agreed to start mining if the union would allow his men to return home unharmed.

Well, a group of about 100 union miners approached the front of the mine with a white flag. They discussed terms of surrender just like a war zone. They agreed to march them to the train station at hÉireann and that they will allow them safe passage to leave. That didn't happen. That's when things went bad. The local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America agreed to stop firing at William Lesters mine if the strike breaking miners left town immediately and Lester shut down the operation.

Here's former hÉireann union miner Joe Shumake, you let one guard move and it's just like cancer, you just keep spreading. And at what age? Right now they're grip that people have tried to nip it in the bud, you might say.

A huge crowd of the union miners gathered to escort the strike breakers away from the mine. One man reportedly yelled, the only way to free the country of strikebreakers is to kill them all off and stop the breed.

Someone called the local leader of the United Mine Workers of America, a man named Hugh Willis, and he says, I'll be right there. That's when things went bad, Hugh Willis shows up in his automobile box, the highway, and tells the man, take these men out into the woods, shoot all you can. Don't shoot them in front of these women and children, because now the whole highway is lined with people on both sides of the road.

They literally lined them up against a barbed wire fence about 100 yards off the road. And it literally depended on if you were in first in line or last in line. Once they got to the fence and they started hearing the shooting, the people that were in the front of the line jumped the fence and started running through the woods into the town of Hebron, a man in the crowd reportedly yelled, Here's where you run the gauntlet.

Let's see how fast you can run between here and Chicago. So they're lost.

They're running for their lives. Can you imagine? I can't even imagine what was going through their minds. I keep thinking, where's the police? Where are the soldiers? What in the hell is going on? How did this happen? One of the locals thought and heard a rumor and shouted it out. The National Guard is on the way. Their words were the Guard is on its way, which was not true. Well, that caused the locals to disperse a little bit.

Afraid of the National Guard.

So the wounded right there, some men escaped through the fences, hidden barns. They were caught.

They wound up with six men in front of the Heron Grade School right downtown hÉireann. They marched the men through town, near restaurants and candy stores and people's homes, they told the men to crawl, they tied them together. They shot one man in the foot and he brought the rest of the men down. When they got to the cemetery, they shot them all. Some men didn't die right away and they slit their throats. A huge crowd of men, women and children came to the cemetery to watch.

Here's one of them from the 1978 recording.

I didn't like it out loud at that cemetery. Some people get jealous like your dogs was right there. Closure's ship four, five, six feet from. They wouldn't leave, they killed him. I remember it well, they were one of the members determined to kill him, which they finally did. Of course, he loved Bobby. There was an AP wire service reporter down from St. Louis who witnessed it all, and he said, I'll never forget a beautiful young, blonde haired woman holding a baby in her arms with a flowered dress.

Stepping on the man's wounds to see if they would grong to see if they were dead or not. He said, that has stuck with me, you know, this is almost 30 years later. He said, I think about it every day. He tried to give water to to a couple of the men that were still alive. And he was told they'll get no water and you'll get the same if you don't back off. I guess the way to put it, it'd be like shooting somebody in the head today in front of CNN or Fox or whoever.

They're sitting there with their camera. They just did it. Had the whole thing end. I think many people were appalled by what they saw. And as the day turned into that afternoon, I think folks started realizing what had happened. Now, having said that, they gathered all their bodies up and displayed them in a downtown building for a day, some people reportedly spit on the corpses.

One woman was later quoted as saying to her children, look at the dirty bums who tried to take the bread out of your mouth.

Finally, a police officer couldn't stand it anymore. They were sticking cigarettes and cigar butts and these dead man's mouths. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore and he put a rope up.

To keep people back off the dead man. The massacre was national news, Harun was described as an unconquered province of lawlessness and a stench in the nostrils of humanity.

President Warren Harding referred to what happened in Hebron as a shocking crime, butchery and madness that shamed and horrified the country in the days following the massacre. Not one person was arrested. Weeks passed. Still no arrests. It was unbelievable to everyone. There had been plenty of witnesses.

Hundreds and hundreds of people had seen what had happened. When questioned, witnesses would describe what they had seen, often in horrific detail. But when it came to saying who had done what, people said, they just didn't know. A piece in the St. Louis Times asked show unionism be set above the laws of God and of man.

Eventually, the state of Illinois collected a list of names of men they would attempt to hold responsible in court.

The state's attorney was a man named Delos Duty. The first murder trial began on November 8th, 1922. Jury selection lasted for weeks because Dallas jury could not find 12 men he felt were impartial. Over the years, reports have come out that the union tried to bribe all kinds of people, jurors said they were offered bribes.

Delos Doody said he was offered a bribe and a man from the next town over named Anderson man Thompson claimed in a recorded interview with his granddaughter. The union told him to locate potential witnesses they couldn't trust and to temporarily relocate them.

We had a witness we couldn't depend on, wouldn't take them away. We came in St. Louis.

He describes putting them up in a St. Louis hotel and paying them the small salaries for their cooperation.

When he got word that it was safe to do so, he brought the witnesses back home to Aaron.

The jury came back with a not guilty verdict, Delos duty tried again. The second trial began in February 1923, six miners were accused of murdering one of Lesters men. Again, the jury came back with a not guilty verdict. Delos Judy told reporters that he was giving up, he felt that Heren jurors were going to come back with a not guilty verdict no matter what evidence he presented. It is a hopeless proposition, he said. I don't know who had around here, but would condemn the coal miners.

I certainly don't. That's what makes your union is believing in it and willing to fight for it. You like your country.

It was terrible at the time. Everybody was really tore up. And anybody in here could do that was between a union and non-union miners to blame the union miners for it taking their jobs. You couldn't blame you couldn't blame them?

No, they were scabs came in here to take jobs away from a union man. That was the main thing in people's mind, and they weren't going to get away with it. I felt the same way about it. And I think it was a decision they had to make. And I think they made the right decision. Money is the root of all evil that's at the root of all evil, and I think people can buy and sell off.

Well, I would say that community was shocked to think people were killed, but they were they were upset to think that a man would come in here to take another man's job. And Robbie's family, that's just the way they looked at it. Did you look at it that way? Yeah, I look at it that way. Twenty three men were killed during those two days in Hebron in June of 1922, three of the men were local and 20 have been brought to town by William Lester.

Records later showed that in some cases, the men Lester hired have been referred by Chicago employment agencies and may have come to hÉireann with no idea that they were breaking a strike. Many people felt there was only one person to blame for their deaths and the deaths of the local miners, William J. Lester. The men from out of town whose bodies were not claimed were buried anonymously. In 2009, Scott Doody went looking for those graves and you can't make this up, what had happened?

Was the town in their haste and their urgency to bury the past? Lost track of where the massacre victims were buried, along with about 100 other poor people, they started selling the lot in the 1980s and burying local people on top of poor people that had been buried in that section of the cemetery. So here's what happened.

The hair massacre victims had local hair nights buried in amongst them and on top of them because they had forgotten their history.

That is the. Ability of the locals to keep what had happened buried. Criminalist created by Lauren S'pore and me media will soon as our senior producer, Susanna Roberson is our assistant producer, audio mix by Rob Byers, special thanks to the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

And Matt Griselle ask for help locating the audio recorded by the college students in 1978, thanks to John Griswold and Richard Ketter. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal dotcom. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Kriminal show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WNYC, where a proud member of Radio Topia from PUREX, a collection of the best podcasts around shows like The Heart.

The Heart went on hiatus, and now it's back with a new team.

The heart sets out to tell stories about love in the most universal sense, what it means to love ourselves while loving each other.

I'm aware of this whole other universe around me. It's a very complex people, especially important, but it's like I'm trapped inside myself.

She talks to me and I begin to perform, professionalising whiteness, lightness of like a sort of placation of whiteness. I've been trained to perform my whole life talking to just it's like a reflex. It's just like it happens in spite of me. Like, it just hurts like a bitch is. A switch is flipped and it just happens in spite of myself, as if my body responds before my mind even does go listen.

I'm Phoebe Judge, this is criminal. Radio topia PUREX.