Belva Gaertner
What I learned from The Chicago Homicide Project: On the night of Mach 12, 1924, Walter Law was found shot and dead in a car with an automatic pistol beside him. The car was parked on Belva Gaertner’s property. Belva Gaertner was arrested shortly thereafter for the crime, drunken and covered in blood. She was tried and acquitted in June of that year.
What I learned from Wikipedia: Law and Gaertner were having an afair (Law was married to another woman, Gaertner was married but separated). Gaertner admitted to having been driving drunk with Law that night but couldn’t remember anything else. During the trial, a co-worker of Law testified that Gaertner was overly possessive in her relationship with Law. Gaertner’s defense was that Law could have killed himself, and she was acquitted in June. In 1925 she remarried the husband from whom she had been separated/presumably divorced, and they divorced AGAIN the next year, with her husband claiming she was abusive.
The basic facts of the two sources are the same, with Wikipedia containing more details surrounding the murder and events thereafter, giving a more well-rounded, but still unbiased idea of what might have happened. Wikipedia’s references are all from the Chicago Tribune. I think that based on the fact that the main information is all the same, and that Wikipedia has a fairly reliable (primary) source, it probably is reliable itself on this issue. Because the Wikipedia page contain the same basic information as the Chicago Homicide project, which is a reliable source, the Wikipedia page is reliable as well. This may not be true for any and all Wikipedia pages, but this specific page seems to be accurate.
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