A Life Cut Too Short

Paul Moses’ life came to an abrupt and tragic end in 1966. On the evening of March 24, he attended a dinner party with his wife Alice and later gave the babysitter watching their three-year-old son Michael a ride home. He then drove to the north side of the city, where Patrick Kennedy (20) and Richard Tolowski (16) shot and killed Moses and took his car. They later confessed that they had gone out that evening looking for a car to steal and planned to drive to California.

Reports of Moses’ death and its aftermath filled the pages of newspapers in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Alice collected and saved many of these, including the examples shown here. “One terrible day,” she would later write in a eulogy to her husband, “has ruthlessly taken away from you all the rewards of life…no day will take from our hearts our eternal sorrow.”