Tension persisted between the Binkley family and the Chicago police. Having announced that he would postpone a planned trip to Europe with his daughter Madeleine and niece Eleanor until the case was solved, Dr. Binkley, Jr., said, “I do not wish to reflect in any way upon the police, but it seems to me that they ought to make it their business to hunt out the person who murdered my father, and that it is foolish, with the evidence before them, to assert that it is a case of suicide.” The Chicago Tribune, reporting that private detectives had been seen at the Wellington, speculated that the Binkley family had hired them. Dr. Binkley’s only response was “I have not dropped the investigation.”

After Dr. Binkley’s death his family moved from the Wellington to the Hotel de Prado. The doctor was buried on June 6 in Shawneetown, Illinois, next to his second wife, and Mrs. Binkley went to Waukesha to stay with Dr. Binkley’s daughter Nannie Connor.

Ever wavering, Police Captain Patrick D. O’Brien suggested that someone with a grudge against Dr. Binkley might have come from Evansville to kill him. Yet two days later he commented, “It seems to me the most natural thing in the world for a man to reach around with his right hand and shoot himself in the left cheek, and as for the robbery, I can’t find out that Dr. Binkley had any money on him when he came to Chicago.” His colleague Inspector Patrick J. Lavin agreed, “It looks to me like a plain case of suicide. The fact that the man was crippled in his left hand so that he could not handle a gun with that member is not significant, and as for the money, well, it must have cost all the money he is known to have had when he left Evansville to bring the party to Chicago. I shall investigate every angle, but I don’t expect to find it a case of murder.”

When the inquest reconvened on June 10, Coroner Hoffman reported that the gun that killed Dr. Binkley had been traced to a store in New York and that police had a description of the man who had purchased it. At police request, the inquest was again continued, until June 23. Surprisingly, the surviving inquest record lists only eight witnesses: John T. Binkley, Elizabeth [sic] Upchurch, Miss Upchurch, Hafford Watson, T.C. Capen, Thomas Moran, John Murphy, and J. O’Mara. The official verdict stated only:

“The said John T. Binkley, now lying dead at 370 Wabash in said City of Chicago, County of Cook, State of Illinois, came to his death on the 2 day of June A. D. 1909 at about 4:30 p.m. in room 218 Wellington Hotel from shock and hemorrhage due to bullet wound in his head said bullet fired from a revolver held in the hand. “

On June 12, just ten days after the murder, McClintock, Capen, & Co. announced that the Wellington Hotel was for sale. Although the company had owned the Wellington for only nine months, the Binkley murder, the Gingles incident, and a gambling raid were evidently more than the owners were willing to deal with. The hotel, at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Jackson Boulevard, was demolished in May 1915.

Although the coroner’s jury returned an open verdict and recommended that the police continue investigating, the story faded from public attention. By July it had disappeared from the news. To this day it has never been officially declared a murder.

An 1889 history of Vanderburgh County, Indiana, where Dr. Binkley spent his final years, noted that “his contributions to medical literature have been considerable” and singled out one article that had received favorable comment in both the United States and Europe. Its title was “Gun-shot wounds of the brain.”