Harold Israel

Who is Harold Israel?

Harold Israel was a defendant wrongly accused of murdering a priest in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1924. The charges against Israel were dismissed by the prosecutor, Homer Stille Cummings, who later became Attorney General of the United States. The case, which gained national attention, became the basis for a 1947 film by Elia Kazan, Boomerang!. The Israel prosecution was praised in the Wickersham Commission report on law enforcement in the United States, which criticized police interrogation methods.

Israel, a vagrant and former serviceman, was charged with the murder of Father Hubert Dahme, a popular Catholic priest, at the intersection of High and Main Street in downtown Bridgeport in the evening of Feb. 4, 1924. Twelve thousand people attended the funeral. Newspapers pressed authorities to find the killer, and police conducted an intense search for the perpetrator. Eight days later, Israel, who had been arrested in Norwalk, Connecticut on a gun-possession charge, was accused of the murder. He was described as a “transient indigent, and a person of low mentality of the moron type.”