Ebook: Wicked Decatur

In 1854, Decatur was nicknamed “Hell’s Half Acre.” By the 1910s and 1920s, the town was referred to as the “Second Most Corrupt City in Illinois,” gaining notoriety as a place where murder, bootlegging, prostitution, kidnapping, gambling and political corruption were common. Members of the Decatur police force, like Troy Taylor’s great-grandfather, were hard-pressed to bar the door against crime in a town that seemed determined to remain wide-open. Wicked Decatur presents a rogue’s gallery of those who have slipped through the cracks of legality over the past century and a half.