KCI Program Director Jerome Bennett was an accomplished and complicated man. A graduate of Northwestern with a degree in both economics and mass communications, he believed in his talk show hosts being well-read and prepared for every caller. He didn’t believe in the personality preceding the knowledge-base, and for that reason he was an anomaly in a business of hucksters.
That is one reason why Bill Kradich was a very strange hire. Kradich was the exact opposite of the type of host Jerome Bennett gravitated toward. He as brash, educated in Central Europe and barely knew who ran the city of Chicago, let alone the nation. Kradich was what Bennett called a character, someone who would draw out "the lowest common denominator" of nighttime talk audiences.
He was right. Kradich was a clear departure from the intelligent talk of the rest of the day, but he doubled the audience of afternoon drive and caused the veteran broadcasters that held court from early morning and throughout the day a great deal of embarrassment. They were under strict rules that if they could not say anything nice they had better say nothing at all.
Born and raised in Hyatt, Indiana, a combination working class and affluent suburb of Chicago, Bennett was raised by a widowed mother. It was the death of his father that haunted him and sustained him. In the first installment of The Radio Murders: The Caller, Bennett finally let his obsession get the best of him.
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