Finally, in 1906, when Crowe had been hunted in vain for more than five years, he suddenly opened negotiations with Omaha’s chief of police through an attorney, offering to come in and surrender, in case all the rewards were immediately and honestly withdrawn, so that there would be no money inducement which might cause officers or others to manufacture a case against him. After some preliminaries, these terms were met, but not until an attempt to capture the desperado had been made and failed, with the net result of three badly wounded officers. In February, 1906, Crowe was at last brought to trial and, to the utter astoundment and chagrin of the entire country, promptly acquitted, though he offered no defense and tacitly admitted that he had taken the boy. One bit of conclusive evidence that had been offered by the prosecution and admitted by the court, was a letter written by Crowe to his parish priest in the little Iowa town of his boyhood. In the course of this letter, which had been written to the priest in the hope that he might make peace with Cudahy, the desperado admitted that “I am solely responsible for the Cudahy kidnapping. No one else is to blame.” No matter. The jury would not consider the evidence and brought in the verdict already indicated. Crowe, after six years of being hunted with a price of fifty-five thousand dollars on his head, was a free man. The acquittals of Crowe and Callahan have furnished material for a good deal of amused and some angry speculation. The local situation in Omaha at the time furnishes the key to the puzzle. First of all, there was the bitter anti-beef trust agitation, founded on the fact that many small independent butchers had been put out of business by the great packing-house combination, of which Cudahy was a member; and that meat prices had everywhere been rapidly advanced to almost double their earlier prices. Next, there was the circumstance of Cudahy’s abundant and flaunting wealth. The common man considered that these millions had been gouged out of his pocket and cut from off his dinner plate. Cudahy had also begun the introduction of cheap negro labor into Omaha to break a strike of his packing-house employees, and the city was bitterly angry at him. Also, Crowe was himself popular and well known. Many considered him a hero. But there was still another strange cause of the state of the public mind.