On the night of June 14, 1949, a young woman gave an enormous tip — $5 — to a bellhop at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago to deliver a note to another guest, Eddie Waitkus, the first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, who were in town to play the Cubs. The two had never met, but she needed to see him, she explained in the note, in which she called herself Ruth Anne Burns. Could he come to her room?

She ordered two whiskey sours and a daiquiri from room service and sipped them while she waited. Waitkus received the note late in the evening and phoned her room about 11 p.m. When she answered, she said she had gone to bed and needed to dress. Would he wait half an hour and then knock on her door?

The woman, a 19-year-old typist for an insurance company whose name was really Ruth Ann Steinhagen, planned to stab Waitkus with a knife when he entered the room, she later said. But after she opened the door, he rushed by her and sat in a chair. So instead, she went to a closet and fetched a .22 caliber rifle she had recently bought.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said.

Training the gun on him, she forced him to stand up and move toward the window.