by David Stout
Distelhurst came to New York City on November 7, paced in the hotel lobby, and strolled the streets as instructed. Nothing.
On November 12, he issued a statement begging the kidnapper or kidnappers to reach out to him. Distelhurst said details in the letters showed that the writer had “a complete knowledge of Nashville,” including information about the Distelhursts’ neighborhood.
The next day in Nashville, two groundskeepers for a tuberculosis hospital were digging flower beds in an isolated section of the hospital grounds when they discovered the nude body of a child under two inches of dirt. The remains had been there for weeks. Dental records soon confirmed that the body was that of Dorothy Ann Distelhurst. She had died of a skull fracture.
Either the kidnapper or kidnappers had killed the child, then tormented her father in a bid to get ransom, or some heartless chiseler who knew only that the girl was missing had tried to exploit the father’s anguish. Whoever had written the letters to Dorothy Ann’s father never got any money, suggesting that he had lost nerve in the end.
As he sat on death row in Sing Sing prison, Albert Fish said he was looking forward to the exciting experience of the electric chair. “It will be the supreme thrill…the only one I haven’t tried,” he told his jailers.143 His wish was fulfilled on the night of January 16, 1936. Just before he died at the age of sixty-five, he handed his lawyer a farewell statement.
“I shall never show it to anyone,” the lawyer said after the current had passed through his client’s body. “It was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read.”
*This is an improvisation of dialogue for dramatic purposes.
**This is an improvisation of dialogue for dramatic purposes.
***I choose not to dwell on Fish’s legal journey from arrest to trial and beyond, which has been superbly told in Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer!, Harold Schechter’s book on the life, crimes, and death of Albert Fish. The book was invaluable to me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
IN GUN-BLAZING PURSUIT
Chicago
Early 1934
In following the travels of members of the Barker-Karpis gang and other bandits of the mid-1930s, one has to wonder: considering all they went through to evade the law, did they ever ask themselves whether it was worth it? But by the time they scattered in flight after the Bremer kidnapping in January 1934, it was much too late for soul-searching. The gang members had already crossed a Rubicon of blood.
On March 10, 1934, Alvin Karpis and Fred Barker underwent surgery in Chicago. The “operating room” was a hotel room, and the surgeon was Dr. Joseph Moran of Chicago, whose healing skills were blurred by alcoholism. Moran had done prison time for performing illegal abortions, and upon his release, he had no prospects of establishing a conventional practice. He did, however, manage to land an appointment as the physician for the Chicago Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, and Helpers Union. (Was it just coincidence that Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, Chicago investigator and pursuer of Roger Touhy, was a power in the Teamsters union at the time?)
Moran became noted for emergency stitching and bullet-removal work on wounded gangsters. Besides dabbling in plastic surgery, he was believed to help gangsters launder money now and then.
Karpis and Barker were in no position to look for an ideal doctor or to seek second opinions. They wanted to alter their faces and erase their fingerprints. The “surgery” by Dr. Moran was only partly successful, and the pain drove Fred Barker half-crazy for a time.
Then there was Fred Samuel Goetz, whose name somehow morphed into “Shotgun” George Ziegler. He was a gunman believed to have participated in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.
Ziegler, then in his midthirties, had a personal profile unusual for a gangster. He was a graduate of the University of Illinois, where he earned respectable grades. He aspired to a degree of sophistication and was said to be a decent golfer. He had been an army aviator during the Great War, serving stateside and earning a commission as a second lieutenant.
But this officer was no gentleman.
He had a weakness for women—and girls, including those young enough to get him into trouble, especially if he forced himself on them, which he was not above doing. He was suspected in the attempted robbery of a Chicago doctor. The doctor was wounded, and his chauffeur was shot to death.
But the most impressive mark on his resume was his reputed role in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, the bloodbath that left seven gangsters dead in a Chicago garage. And he was believed to have been one of several men who robbed a bank in Jefferson, Wisconsin, of $352,000 in cash and bonds in 1929.
Yet for all his crimes, he was able to avoid capture. Unfortunately for him, when discretion was called for, he sometimes chose to boast, typically after a few adult beverages. He unwisely bragged to gangster friends that he had planned the kidnapping of Edward Bremer. (He was exaggerating his role, though he was reputed to have helped plan the caper and to have taken part in ransom negotiations.)
Oddly enough, Ziegler appeared to have been trying to inject some boring domesticity into his life. In March 1934, he was reportedly living with a woman in an expensively furnished apartment on Chicago’s South Shore Drive. The couple called themselves “Mr. and Mrs. George Seibert.”
Late on the night of March 20, Ziegler was shot to death while emerging from Minerva’s restaurant, a favorite hangout of his in suburban Cicero. His big mouth had apparently been his undoing. Appropriately enough, he was slain by shotgun—several blasts to his face, rendering him physically unrecognizable.
If the people who killed him were also Barker-Karpis gang members or alumni (a reasonable assumption), perhaps they should have lingered long enough to go through the dead man’s pockets. As it was, lawmen found valuable information on Ziegler’s corpse: slips of paper with names, aliases, addresses, and contact information for the Barker-Karpis bunch. One last item was added to Ziegler’s resume, albeit posthumously. Chicago FBI agent Melvin Purvis said the bureau was looking into the possibility that Ziegler was one of the shooters in the Union Station Massacre in Kansas City the previous summer. And why not speculate about Ziegler? It couldn’t be proven that he wasn’t at the train station. And if people wanted to believe that he was there, it helped the FBI in its efforts to show that people who took part in the station slaughter were getting their just deserts, indirectly or otherwise.
Meanwhile, life on the run was anything but easy for the Barker-Karpis folks. Arthur “Doc” Barker and an associate, Volney Davis, took their cues from Karpis and Doc’s brother Fred and decided to have their appearances altered. This was done in Toledo, Ohio, in the spring of 1934, likely by the aforementioned Dr. Joseph Moran. After this ordeal, Davis decided he wanted a whole new life, so he and his girlfriend traveled to Buffalo, which had an underworld presence. There, they bought a truck and drove to Montana.
But they soon sensed that even the land under the Big Sky was not big enough. After picking up rumors that the law was on their trail in Montana, they traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, still a reliable sanctuary for those who had run afoul of the law.
Around this time, Karpis and his girlfriend had settled in Cleveland. Karpis just wanted to lie low. He had no interest in any “reunion” of the Barker-Karpis gang, which at full strength numbered in the dozens, if one included the supporting cast.
In the spring of 1934, the adventures of the Barker-Karpis desperadoes intersected with those of John Dillinger, the dashing bandit and escape artist. The confluence of events happened in part because Volney Davis was acquainted with people in both criminal camps.
On March 3, Dillinger escaped from the jail in Crown Point, Indiana, where he had been taken after being captured in Arizona. He was supposed to stand trial for the killing of a police officer during a bank robbery in East Chicago, Indiana. (The Dillinger gang had also been linked to the slaying of a Chicago police officer.)
In effecting
his escape, Dillinger cowed jail guards with what was later thought to be a fake pistol whittled from a block of wood and blackened with shoe polish. The feat added to the bandit’s dashing image. But Dillinger made a big mistake. He stole the sheriff’s car and drove it across a state line, from Indiana into Illinois, on his way to Chicago. Thus, he violated the recently passed National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, which made it a federal offense to transport a stolen motor vehicle across a state border.
The act had added to the responsibilities of the FBI, which Hoover welcomed. It had also put Dillinger squarely in the director’s sights.
Then came one of the worst debacles in the history of the FBI.
The bureau got a tip that Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson, and several gangster companions had stopped at a remote vacation spot known as Little Bohemia Lodge in north Wisconsin for a rest. Hoover authorized his then-favorite agent, Melvin Purvis, to gather a posse and capture Dillinger—or maybe killing him would be better.
Purvis assembled some agents and secured some heavy weaponry, and the caravan headed to the northern reaches of Wisconsin. On the bitter cold Sunday night of April 22, 1934, the lawmen surrounded the cabins where Dillinger and friends were staying. After a while, the FBI men saw a car departing. The driver had the car radio on, so he probably did not hear orders to stop. The agents fired on the car and killed a thirty-five-year-old man who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Two other men in the car, also innocent civilians, were wounded. The commotion aroused the bandits in the cabins, and in no time, the night was lit up with gunfire. An FBI agent was killed, and Dillinger and his crew escaped through the woods.
Trigger-happy agents had killed an innocent man, an agent had been slain—and the outlaws had escaped. It soon became clear that there had been inadequate coordination between the federal men and locals on where to put up roadblocks. The raid was a fiasco.
Even in that era of less aggressive reporters, the Little Bohemia Lodge disaster generated a lot of criticism of Hoover and his bureau. A gibe from Will Rogers, a prominent humorist and commentator of the era, must have been especially stinging for the director: “Well, they had Dillinger surrounded and was all ready to shoot him when he came out, but another bunch of folks came out ahead, so they just shot them instead. Dillinger is going to accidentally get with some innocent bystanders some time, then he will get shot.”144
And yet Little Bohemia may have created opportunity as well. As the New York Times reported two days after the shootout, “Aroused by the latest escapade of the bandit John Dillinger, President Roosevelt has requested early enactment by Congress of a sheaf of bills greatly enlarging the police powers of the Federal Government.”145
The proposals, several of which found their way into law, made bank robbery a federal offense, made it a federal crime to kill an officer of the federal government, and in general lessened whatever protections criminals still enjoyed by crossing state lines. And it gave yet more responsibility to the FBI, which was becoming a national police force.
Was Hoover living a charmed life?
The not-so-subtle message that filtered down to FBI agents after Little Bohemia was simple: kill John Dillinger. There was scant sentiment among lawmen for capturing the bandit, who was known to be traipsing across the Midwest, and subjecting him to a “fair trial.”
Not long after Little Bohemia, Volney Davis got a surprise visit at his home in Aurora, Illinois, near Chicago. Dillinger and a bandit pal, Homer Van Meter, had come to call, dragging along John “Red” Hamilton, another Dillinger confederate who had been gravely wounded in a gunfight in the flight from Little Bohemia Lodge.
Dr. Joseph Moran was summoned, but he refused to treat Hamilton, perhaps because he saw that Hamilton’s wounds had turned gangrenous and were fatal. But Davis agreed to keep Hamilton in his house, caring for him as best he could until he passed away. When he did, Dillinger, Doc Barker, Van Meter, and Davis are said to have buried him in a gravel pit near Oswego, Illinois, though there are conflicting versions of this bit of gangster lore.
The last confirmed sighting of Dr. Moran alive was in a club in Toledo in July 1934. His drinking had gotten the best of him, and he was heard bragging to Doc Barker and a few associates about his value to the gang and the power he thought he had over them because of the tender care he provided.
Not long afterward, he left the club accompanied by some gang members and was never seen alive again. Later, Alvin Karpis claimed that Arthur and Fred Barker killed the doctor and buried him in a lime pit in Michigan. But Fred Barker reportedly offered a different clue in talking with other gang members: “He’ll do no more operating. The fishes have probably eat him up by now.”
His remark hinted at a more accepted version of Dr. Moran’s fate: that Karpis himself and Fred Barker took the doctor for a boat ride on Lake Erie, killed him, and dumped him overboard. Fourteen months later, a badly decomposed, fish-nibbled body washed ashore on the shores of Crystal Beach, Ontario, minus hands and feet. The FBI said it identified the body through dental records as that of Dr. Moran.
Karpis claimed that the identification was wrong, but dental records were and are more reliable than the words of gangsters. So it seems that in death, the doctor rode the wind and currents across Lake Erie from Ohio to Canada, traveling through waters that had been there for eons, passing through stretches where the British fleet had sailed to meet the Americans in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. The doctor had come a long way.
And what of poor Harry Sawyer, the owner-host of St. Paul’s Green Lantern hangout? He sensed that the new good-government spirit infecting St. Paul made it dangerous for him. So he left Minnesota and his beloved Green Lantern and moved to Las Vegas. But by April 1934, he still had not been paid for his help in setting up Edward Bremer for the kidnappers. So he wrote to Karpis in Cleveland and arranged to meet him there to get what was coming to him.
Sawyer reportedly hooked up with Karpis and friends in Cleveland that June, and plans were worked out for Sawyer and another gang member to take $100,000 or so of the Bremer ransom money to Miami in September for proper laundering. But here again, overindulgence disrupted plans. While Sawyer was away, his wife, Gladys, went to a hotel bar with some friends. They got so inebriated and vulgar that they were arrested on drunk-and-disorderly charges.
The FBI heard about the incident, but before agents could act, the Barker-Karpis folks decided it was time to leave Cleveland. One gang member flew to Havana to do some more money laundering. Fred Barker and Karpis went to Havana to relax, recuperate, and think.
Meanwhile, in their pursuit of John Dillinger, Purvis and his agents had picked up some good information—or perhaps they were finally acquiring the knack of gathering and sifting intelligence. Dillinger was in Chicago, staying with a woman who knew who he was but who was trusted by the outlaw regardless.
The woman, Anna Sage, was a woman of ill repute and sometime brothel owner who was terrified of being deported to her native Romania. She had one priceless piece of information to offer the federal government in return for being allowed to stay in the United States: she knew Dillinger’s habits, and she could inform Purvis of his movements.
The story has been told a thousand times, but it is still riveting. On the night of Sunday, July 22, 1934, Dillinger took Sage to a movie, Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster flick starring Clark Gable and William Powell that was playing at the Biograph Theater on Chicago’s North Side. Tipped off by Sage, Purvis and fifteen agents waited near the theater for the movie to end.
Purvis and his men waited breathlessly, then saw the moviegoers begin to stream out. Soon, they saw Sage, wearing a red or orange dress. She was walking with a man in gray slacks, a white shirt, and a boater hat. His once rusty-brown hair had been dyed coal black, and his face had been slightly altered, no longer bearing a scar that had adorned one cheek.
But Purvis recognized the man at once. He had spent too many hours staring at the face in wanted pictures, had thought of John Dill
inger as he was trying to fall asleep, thought of the humiliations Dillinger had inflicted on the FBI, thought of how he had made his jailers and pursuers look like fools. Thought of the trail of blood and tears he had left across the Midwest.
Dillinger sensed the trap and tried for one last getaway, running into an alley near the theater. The lawmen blazed away. One bullet struck him in the head, another in the chest.
Two other bullets from federal guns hit two bystanders, both women. The women were not seriously wounded. Had one or both of the women died, could Hoover have survived? Could his bureau have survived and grown in influence, or would it have become a bureaucratic backwater?
But yet again, Hoover and his wild-shooting, occasionally trigger-happy agents were lucky. U.S. attorney general Homer Cummings, no fan of the FBI chief, called the news of Dillinger’s slaying “gratifying as well as reassuring.”146 Hoover’s stature and that of his bureau were more secure, in part because his agents had somehow avoided killing any innocent civilians while gunning down their target.*
Not quite a month later, on Thursday, August 23, another Dillinger associate came to the end of his days in St. Paul, Minnesota. Homer Van Meter was confronted by four local cops, including Chief Frank Cullen, at a downtown street corner. Also among the lawmen was Tom Brown, once the city’s mob-friendly police chief but more recently under investigation on charges that he had aided in the kidnapping of William Hamm and Edward Bremer.
The heavily armed cops maintained later that Van Meter ignored their order to stop and ran into a nearby alley, turning around to fire twice at his pursuers with a pistol. Within seconds, Van Meter’s twenty-eight-year-old body was full of bullet holes. But it would have been hard to say that justice had been done. There was speculation that Van Meter had had a falling out with Baby Face Nelson, or Green Lantern proprietor Harry Sawyer and his friend Jack Peifer, who operated the Hollyhocks watering hole in St. Paul, or perhaps all of them. Later, there were rumors that Sawyer had set up Van Meter and that he and the four shooter cops split the money Van Meter had been carrying.