Hello Jack

I was struck by the youthful appearance of the police prosecutor leading the investigation, John J, Chester, Jr., holding the dispensary strychnine bottle in this photocopy of a torn newspaper clipping (possibly from The Columbus Dispatch). I was glad to finally find some additional information about him.

Only 3 Years Out Of O.S.U.

He Now Seeks Criminals There

(Akron) Beacon Journal Bureau

506 Chamber of Commerce Bldg.

    COLUMBUS, Feb. 7. A slender, freckled-face youth, who three years ago was toting school books across the campus at Ohio State university. is the official who today is directing the efforts to unravel the university's "poison pill" mystery.

    He is John J. "Jack" Chester, 28 years old and police prosecutor of the city of Columbus.

    Chester graduated from the university law department in the spring of 1922, and was regarded as one of the best liked men in his class. His popularity among the younger set was so pronounced that friends urged him to get into politics. He did so and in the fall of 1923, only a little more than a year out of school, was elected municipal prosecutor.

Grim Campus Task

    Now he is back on the campus bent upon the grim task of feretting (sic) out its mystery which has some earmarks of developing another Loeb-Leopold affair, in which some crank, or "intellectual" with a complex has set about in a fiendish manner to commit wholesale murder.

    Most of the older students at Ohio State know Chester personally, and are known by him. It's "Hello, Jack," every few minutes as he goes about the university in his role of detective. The campus is experiencing a thrill in having one they know so well on hand as the Sherlock Holmes of the great mystery, and Chester is getting an even greater kick out of the thing. It is his first really big mystery, and he is anxious to make good.

    The whole responsibility is on his shoulders. County Prosecutor John R. King and other officials, older and more experienced, are letting Chester conduct the investigation. They say be is going about the matter in exactly the right way.

Criminal Theory

    Chester is working on the criminal theory. He has told Columbus newspapers he does not believe it was by accident that the deadly poison strychnine got into capsules at the university dispensary to cause the death of two students, and five others to become deadly (sic) ill.

    "I have found no evidence that would lead me to believe that this case came from an accident," Chester told newspaper men today.

    What the evidence does lead him to believe he would not say. Like all good detectives he is keeping mum.

    He indicated, however, that he believed the key to the mystery may depend upon discovering the means by which a small vial of strychnine, found among some harmless potions on a shelf in the dispensary, came to bethere (sic). The poison was identified as that obtained a year ago for experimental work in the university laboratory. It was supposed to have been destroyed. But the bottle, with some of the strychnine missing, has turned up in the dispensary.

    To find why it was not destroyed when the experiments were completed, and how it go (sic) to tho dispensary, is the task Chester is now chiefly addressing himself to. And, as he says significantly, "I am working on the criminal theory."

While Chester was not successful in apprehending anyone for Uncle Charley's murder, he went on to successfully prosecute O.S.U. professor Dr. Howard Snook (inventor of the Snook hook which is still used to spay animals) for the murder of his mistress in 1929. Chester died in 1957 at the age of 59.

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