Bernard Carey, the Illinois state attorney, said today he was checking whether there was a neo-Nazi conspiracy in the bizarre death, apparently by cyanide poisoning, of Sidney Cohen, 63, and the suicide of his apparent killer, a 37-year-old drill press operator with a record of arrests for participating in Nazi demonstrations.
According to police reports, the body of Cohen was found in his home in suburban Flossmore, by his son, on May 22. Lying beside the body the son found Raymond Schultz of Calumet City, the drill press operator, unconscious. Police put Schultz in the back of their squad car but found when they arrived at the precinct station that Schultz had somehow taken cyanide and killed himself.
In a routine search of Schultz’s home, after an autopsy indicated that both men died from cyanide poisoning, police found what was initially headlined as a list of Chicago Jews marked for death. Subsequently, the police said, the “list” was found to be a scrap of paper, with two names, one of Cohen and one which was either a “Lavine” or “Levine”.
Police said Schultz, described by neighbors as a “loner,” was not a member of the tiny neo-Nazi party in suburban Skokie. In 1962, according to police records, Schultz was arrested in a neo-Nazi demonstration. He was wearing a swastika armband.
The police said they found a note in Schultz’s home which read: “With the help of God and AH I can get it all done by July 1.” They theorized that the initials referred to Adolf Hitler, and that the “it” might have referred to a schedule of planned killings, presumably of area Jews, which Carey said he planned to investigate.
The police said they also found in a hidden room in Schultz’s home several gallons of cyanide, bomb components and an electric cattle prod. The police said that, apart from Schultz’s arrests over his Nazi activities, he had no criminal record.
Schultz’s apparent suicide made it impossible to learn exactly what had happened in the Cohen home but police suggested Schultz might have forced Cohen to inhale cyanide fumes and was overcome himself.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
