Years before the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer conferred literary celebrity on him, before taking on (with Jerome Buting) Steven Avery’s murder trial defense in 2007, and even well before Avery was found to have been wrongfully convicted in 2003 of an earlier crime, Dean Strang was searching an online law database on a whim. It was the mid 1990s, and Strang had recently become a partner at Milwaukee law firm Shellow, Shellow & Glynn. He ought to have been working that evening but instead, curiosity got the better of him, and Westlaw beckoned.

Strang had been fascinated with Clarence Darrow, arguably the best-known American lawyer of the twentieth century, since law school, and well knew Darrow’s deep ties to the Midwest: born and raised in small-town Iowa with his law practice first based in Chicago, until growing fame brought more national renown, more notorious criminal defense cases, and more travel time. Might Darrow have tried a case in Wisconsin in the years before Leopold & Loeb, Ossian Smith, and the Scopes Monkey Trial? He had not, Strang learned, but the database did spit out a reference to a case in the state’s Supreme Court.

“I was drawn in immediately,” Strang told OnMilwaukee’s Bobby Tanzilo, “both because the story was so interesting and because the underlying melee happened on the corner of the very block on which I then lived.” The melee in question, a violent riot outside a church in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood, took place in September 1917, resulting in the arrest of eleven Italian immigrants, branded as anarchists, charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In November of that year, five days before the defendants’ trial, a bomb ripped through a downtown Milwaukee police station, killing nine officers and a civilian. (The culprits were never caught.) The defendants, also branded the Bay View Eleven, couldn’t have bombed the station since they were all in jail awaiting trial, but the prevailing mood made people believe they had some connection to the tragedy.

That they were convicted was, in 1917, a foregone conclusion. The Bay View Eleven were viewed with scorn for their anarchist views, an ideology vilified since the Haymarket riots three decades before to Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions a decade later. More surprising, as Strang read on, was what happened to the eleven defendants post-conviction—and Darrow’s role, which bent an already corrupt criminal justice system into further suspicious contortions.

It would take almost two decades for that Westlaw search to become a book, Strang’s only book to date. Reading it closely offers a glimpse into a hidden corner of legal history and Strang’s literary—and lawyerly—aspirations.