page_title: Adelbert Cronkhite
section_title: Investigation into son's death
hierarchical_section_title: Adelbert Cronkhite / Investigation into son's death
caption_attribution_description: English: Alexander P. Cronkhite (US Army officer)
context_page_description: Adelbert Cronkhite was a career officer in the United States Army. He was notable for his command of the 80th Division during World War I. He also served as interim commander of IX Corps and commander of VI Corps after the war. In addition, his later command assignments included the Newport News Port of Debarkation, the Coast Artillery Training Center, and Third Corps Area.
  Cronkhite was the subject of national attention in the early 1920s when he advocated publicly for the investigation into the death of his son to be reopened; Alexander P. Cronkhite was an Army major stationed at Camp Lewis, Washington in 1918 when he died as the result of a gunshot. An investigation determined that the wound was accidental and self-inflicted; Cronkhite's public campaign led to the indictment of two soldiers who had been with Alexander Cronkhite at the time of his death. The 1924 trial of one ended in an acquittal, and charges against the second were dropped. Cronkhite's public campaign to renew the investigation brought him into disfavor with senior Army leadership, and he was retired against his wishes in 1923.
context_section_description: Adelbert Cronkhite's son Alexander Pennington Cronkhite, nicknamed "Buddy", was a 1915 graduate of West Point. In October 1918, he was serving as a major commanding a battalion in a Camp Lewis, Washington engineer regiment. Major Cronkhite died of a gunshot wound while at a Camp Lewis training area; subsequent investigation determined that the wound was self-inflicted, and that it was accidental.
  Some members of Alexander Cronkhite's regiment talked among themselves and raised the possibility of suicide. Others suggested that a sergeant who was with Cronkhite at the time of his death might have been the shooter.
  Adelbert Cronkhite and his wife refused to accept the finding that the shooting was accidental. After hiring private detectives to re-interview witnesses and having a second autopsy performed, they were convinced that their son had been murdered. In Adelbert Cronkhite's view, the sergeant who was with his son on the day of the shooting and the captain in temporary command of Alexander Cronkhite's troops at the time of the shooting were responsible. (Alexander Cronkhite was not in command on the day of his death because he was recovering after having been hospitalized with influenza.)
  For two years, Adelbert Cronkhite attempted to have the War Department re-open the investigation. When this did not happen, he tried to convince the Justice Department to pursue the investigation and prosecute the two soldiers he believed to be guilty. The Justice Department eventually took up the investigation, and law enforcement agents were able to obtain multiple confessions from the sergeant who had been with Alexander Cronkhite at the time of the shooting; the sergeant implicated the captain who had been in temporary command. With no motive immediately obvious, Adelbert Cronkhite suggested that the killing of his son was part of a plot to ruin his, Adelbert's, reputation. Because the captain who was implicated was Jewish, members of the right wing press, led by Henry Ford's newspaper The Dearborn Independent, claimed that the shooting was murder, and that the captain had forced the sergeant to carry it out in the captain's supposed role as a "'German Jew Spy' and also a Bolshevik agent".
  The sergeant eventually repudiated his confessions, claiming they had been coerced. The agents who obtained them admitted to harsh interrogation techniques, so the confessions were excluded at the sergeant's trial in October 1924. With the prosecution case largely consisting of the argument that it was impossible for Alexander Cronkhite to have shot himself by accident, given the angle of the shot and the distance of the gun from his body when it was fired, their central claim collapsed when a friend of Alexander Cronkhite's, Eugene M. Caffey, and a second officer each demonstrated in court that an accidental shooting that fit the circumstances was not only possible, but that it was simple to recreate a plausible series of events which could have resulted in Alexander Cronkhite pulling the trigger by mistake. The sergeant was quickly acquitted; charges against the captain were soon dropped.
  Adelbert Cronkhite had refused to accept assignment as commander of the Panama Canal Zone so that he could continue to pursue the investigation into his son's death. This refusal, coupled with his public denunciation of the Attorney General for not pursuing the case rapidly enough, brought him into disfavor with the Secretary of War John W. Weeks and John J. Pershing, the Army Chief of Staff. As a result, Cronkhite was retired against his will "for the convenience of the government" in 1923.
caption: Alexander P. Cronkhite as a West Point senior in 1915.
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