Carol Marin, Lura Lynn Ryan, The FBI and a Lot of Blood

Carol Marin marinaded Lura Lynn Ryan in her Sunday Sun Times column and tossed her to the media jackals - Don & Roma shilling for the ditto-heads in their breakfast political chow-down. Politics ain't bean-bag and hard-hitting newspersons know how to throw a punch.

Carol's story launched my memory code: I taught in Kankakee ( home of George and Lura Lynn); got married there ( George and Lura Lynn attended and gave Mary and me a marble lazy -susan - still got it); they came to Mary's funeral; they came to Mary's Dad's funeral; Jennifer Bishop taught at Bishop Mac after Mary and I left; Her sister Jeanne worked for Protestants for Justice in Northern Ireland; Her sister Nancy was murdered in Winnetka; Carol Marin reported that they were an IRA hit; Chris and Mary Fogarty were arrested for the crime; they were also hounded by the FBI for years on end. These things bothered me. Carol Marin is bothered by Lura Lynn's silence. I am bothered by Carol Marin's. Did she help put the Fogartys in the jackpot?

Here is an excerpt from John Conroy's 1992 account of the Langert Murders - The Irish Connection.


On April 23, one week after Bishop and Boyle's encounter with the FBI, Channel Five's Carol Marin broke a dramatic story on the ten o'clock news. After cutting from scenes in Winnetka to footage depicting a British soldier on patrol in Northern Ireland, Marin told her viewers that the leads on the Langert murder investigation went far beyond suburban Winnetka. After explaining that Jeanne Bishop was the sister of the dead Nancy Langert, Marin said, "Sources say the FBI told Bishop that someone in the Irish Republican Army believed Bishop to have been disloyal to the cause, even though Jeanne Bishop has long worked as a human rights activist in behalf of the struggle in Northern Ireland." Marin said that the FBI had told Bishop that if she went back to Northern Ireland, she would be hurt or killed. The story concluded with Marin reporting that there were two theories under investigation--that Nancy Langert was mistaken for her sister when she was killed, or that she had been killed as some kind of warning to her sister. Marin said that Jeanne Bishop had declined to be interviewed but that "a family spokesman told us this evening that Bishop and her entire family reject any theory linking this tragedy to the IRA, believing that to do so is an attempt by federal authorities to intimidate or undermine both Bishop and a legitimate human rights movement." Marin went on to say that the FBI and the Winnetka police had refused to comment on the case. The next day, Marin reported that the IRA lead was one of four angles being pursued by the Winnetka police, the others being "business connections," "personal relationships," and "family connections"; most of the police department's effort, Marin said, was going into the IRA investigation. She included a statement issued by the Bishop family, which said that "some unnamed person has chosen to seize upon our family tragedy in order to sully Jeanne and her legitimate work for human rights." Marin then reported that "authorities who are heading up an investigative task force say Bishop has declined to cooperate with this investigation." Marin seemed to have scored a great coup. Who would have thought that the IRA could have established a presence in Winnetka? Or that the murder could have been, as Channel Five's teaser had it, "an act of international terrorism"? She then left the story, never to return.

That is some story. How about some answers? How about some journalist not wearing a tight collar ( or a wire) taking up the cause of Mary and Chris Fogarty?