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The Alley Behind Second Avenue: The Unresolved Murder of Walter Liggett and the Power System That Survived Him
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 22 2026
Pages: 234
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.49 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A murdered journalist. A notorious accused man. A verdict that left Minneapolis without a final answer.
On December 9, 1935, journalist and editor Walter Liggett was shot outside his Minneapolis home while his wife, Edith, and daughter, Marda, were nearby. Liggett had spent his final months using the Midwest American to challenge organized crime, liquor interests, political protection, and the civic arrangements he believed allowed the city's underworld to survive. His killing appeared targeted. The evidence, however, would not produce a conviction.
Edith identified Isadore Kid Cann Blumenfeld as the gunman. Prosecutors brought him to trial. A jury acquitted him, and no one was convicted of Liggett's murder. That legal outcome did not erase the conflict surrounding the case, but it created a permanent divide between public suspicion and court-tested proof.
The Alley Behind Second Avenue reconstructs this historical true crime case from the life and disputes that preceded the shooting through the car in the alley, Edith's identification, the contested barbershop alibi, the prosecution record, courtroom doubt, and the political atmosphere surrounding Governor Floyd B. Olson and the Farmer-Labor movement. It asks not only who may have killed Liggett, but what can responsibly be concluded when motive, reputation, witness certainty, and institutional distrust point more strongly than the surviving record can prove.
At the center are people whose lives cannot be reduced to evidence: Liggett as editor, reformer, husband, father, and combative public writer; Edith as both grieving widow and crucial witness; and Marda as a child present at the killing who later inherited its memory and archive. The book also follows how front pages, photographs, civic shame, and later retellings transformed an unresolved murder into a lasting Minneapolis story.
Rather than treating acquittal as historical innocence or suspicion as a substitute for conviction, this evidence-aware investigation separates documented fact, allegation, inference, public memory, and legal uncertainty. It examines organized crime in 1930s Minneapolis, allegations of political protection, Prohibition's afterlife, journalism under pressure, and the limits of justice when the institutions responsible for finding the truth are themselves part of the public question.
Written in a restrained, investigative style, this book is for readers interested in historical true crime, unsolved murders, Minnesota crime history, murdered journalists, and cases in which power survives the courtroom. It offers no false certainty and no easy villain. It follows the record to the point where the record stops.
Return to the alley behind Second Avenue and consider what the verdict resolved, what history preserved, and what remains unanswered.
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