Bloody Williamson

by Paul M. Angle

  “See you later, Art,” Carl said in a greeting that was a command to leave. Newman left.

  The witness swore that it was at least nine a.m. before he took Shelton’s telephone call, and that the party had not started for the funeral before nine thirty or ten. The Collinsville robbery had taken place at seven a.m. Since Collinsville is only ten miles from East St. Louis, the Sheltons had plenty of time to make their way to the latter city, even by a devious route.

  Newman was followed on the stand by a weak-chinned, ferret-faced ne’er-do-well named Harvey Dungey, who was actually one of Birger’s liquor runners, although that fact was not known at the time. Dungey testified that in January 1925 he was driving a taxi in East St. Louis, and that on the early morning of the robbery he took several passengers to Collinsville. At about six thirty, while approaching his destination, he saw a stalled Buick. Carl Shelton was looking at the engine, Bernie sat at the wheel.

  Dungey’s testimony was of critical importance, since he was the only witness to place the defendants near the scene of the crime at the approximate time it was committed. But the crowd in the courtroom paid only perfunctory attention to what he said. They had come to see and hear Charlie Birger.

  The gang leader entered with the nonchalance of a veteran actor. Instead of his outdoor costume he wore a freshly pressed gray suit, and his wavy black hair was carefully brushed and parted. Ignoring the Sheltons, he bowed slightly to the jury, took the oath, and then awaited interrogation with a faint but confident smile on his swarthy face.

  “Did you have any conversation with the defendants about the Collinsville robbery?” District Attorney Provine asked.

  “Yes, sir, I did,” Birger replied. “It was in January 1925, at Nineteenth and Market streets, in East St. Louis. Carl said he had been thinking about starting to haul whisky up from Florida. He had a payroll job in Collinsville, he told me, and when he got through with that he was going to start hauling whisky.”

  “And the next time?”

  “That was at my house five or six days after Ora Thomas’s funeral,” Birger continued. “Carl, Earl and Bernie and Charlie Briggs split $3,600 in my dining-room. When I looked in, Carl said: ‘This is some of Uncle Sam’s money, but we won’t need you for an alibi because we were at Ora Thomas’s funeral.’

  “I asked Carl how much they got,” Birger went on, “and he said about $21,000. He told me Bernie drove the car up to Collinsville, and that he and Earl and Briggs went up with him. Briggs got out and grabbed the sack, and fell down getting back into the car.

  “That,” the witness concluded, “was about all they ever said about the job.”

  After twenty minutes, his story unshaken by cross-examination, Birger walked from the courtroom, again without even glancing at the defendants.

  The Sheltons denied all the assertions made by the government witnesses. The day after the appearance of Birger and his henchmen, Carl, tall, taciturn, soft-spoken, took the stand in his own defense. When asked by his attorney whether he had any connection whatever with the mail robbery at Collinsville he replied in a level, emotionless voice:

  “No, sir.”

  “Mr. Shelton,” came the next question, “did you ever talk to Art Newman about any robbery?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Were you ever in the dining-room of Charles Birger’s home at Harrisburg, Illinois, when a robbery was discussed and the proceeds of a robbery talked about or divided?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you friendly with Charles Birger?”

  “No, sir.”

  One phase of the District Attorney’s cross-examination relieved the tension of the proceedings. When asked where he lived in East St. Louis Shelton leaned back in his chair, studied the ceiling, turned to smile at the judge, then stared at the floor. Finally his lawyer came to his rescue with an objection, which the court sustained.

  “How long have you lived in East St. Louis?” he was asked.

  “About one year. Since December 1925.”

  “What is your present business?”

  After a long pause Shelton replied:

  “Collection agency.”

  Guffaws from the spectators disrupted proceedings for several minutes.

  Earl and Bernie, following Carl on the stand, corroborated his testimony. So did a succession of other witnesses—Joe McGlynn, an East St. Louis lawyer who had accompanied the brothers on the morning of January 27; Delos Duty, who confirmed their statement that they had called at his office in Marion before noon; an East St. Louis taxicab operator who denied that Harvey Dungey was in his employ at the time of the robbery; Mrs. Mack Pulliam, who created something of a sensation when she related that Birger had told her husband, in her hearing, that he intended to pin the robbery on his former friends. And defense attorneys, in their closing arguments, hammered on the obvious animus of Birger and Newman.

  The jury, however, preferred to believe the accusers. Five hours after receiving the case the jurors brought in a verdict of guilty. The defendants took it without the twitch of a facial muscle; their wives, seated in the spectators’ section of the courtroom, were equally stoic.

  The next day the three Shelton brothers were sentenced to twenty-five years in the federal penitentiary.

  The proceedings at Quincy threw light on many aspects of the gang war; others were clarified, more or less, by Art Newman’s “inside story,” which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran simultaneously with its reports of the Shelton trial.*

  Newman dated his acquaintance with the Sheltons from the time when S. Glenn Young and his wife were shot in the Okaw Bottoms. On the representation of a friend that the brothers were “high-class boys” who were broke and in trouble, he gave them free board and room at the Arlington Hotel, the disreputable East St. Louis establishment of which he was then proprietor. Despite some friction, all remained on good terms until Newman shot and killed a friend of his three free boarders in a barroom brawl. (He was acquitted on the usual plea of self-defense.) After the killing he spent a year in Memphis. When he returned he discovered that the Sheltons were still his enemies, so he joined forces with Birger.

  (Ironically, it was Carl Shelton who had introduced him to Birger in the first place. “Boys,” Carl had said to Newman and Freddie Wooten, “I want you to meet a high-class man. If you ever need any help in Williamson County he’s the one who can give it to you.”)

  The first killings in the gang war had taken place before Newman returned to Illinois, but he told the reporters what he had heard about them. Walker and Smith, who died in August 1926, were killed by a gangster whom he refused to name, “but that wasn’t hardly a gang shooting—it was just a drunken brawl.” On the other hand the attack on Holland and Pulliam, in which one was killed and the other wounded, was the work of Birger’s men, who expected to find Carl Shelton in the company of the two victims. The Sheltons retaliated with the murder of “High Pockets” McQuay, Birger’s bartender, and “Casey” Jones.

  Newman still sorrowed over the death of Jones. “We gave him a mighty fine funeral,” he assured the reporters. “It cost $498. Charlie Birger paid for it because Casey was a good man and Charlie issued orders that he was to have plenty of flowers.”

  Newman admitted that the Birger gang had threatened Joe Adams and that they had taken $750 in a raid on his roadhouse, but he knew nothing about the murder. On the afternoon the corpulent mayor was killed, he and Connie Ritter were in Marion, Birger was at Shady Rest, Wooten at East St. Louis.

  “Of course,” Newman said, “we didn’t shed any tears about Adams getting killed. We all had a drink on it and if we had known who shot him we would have bought them a drink too.”

  With the arrest of the Sheltons for mail robbery, and the death of Joe Adams, Birger concluded that the war had ended in his favor. He no longer needed to keep an armed garrison at Shady Rest. The men left, and thus only Steve George, the caretaker, and his wife were at the resort on the night it was destroyed. (Four bodies, in fact, were
found.)

  The three gangsters told Sam O’Neal that they planned “to get the hell out of these parts” as soon as the Shelton trial was over; that was why they were willing to tell their story.

  The verdict in the Shelton trial caused a sensation; so did the revelations of Art Newman. But the biggest sensation of all made headlines on February 5. The body of Lory Price had been found.

  That morning a farmer walking across a field near Dubois, a little town in the southeastern corner of Washington County thirty-five miles north of Herrin, had come across a partly clothed dead body. Several bullet-holes were visible. Evidently it had lain there for several days, since animals had gnawed the hands away. County officials, summoned at once, identified the dead man as the missing state policeman.

  Reporters broke the news to the Sheltons, in jail in Quincy awaiting removal to Leavenworth. Bernie said: “Oh”; Earl was silent; Carl asked whether they had also found the body of Mrs. Price.

  “I hope she’s living so she can tell who did it. That’s what I hope.”

  The remark seemed to be significant, and the reporter pursued it.

  “Have you any idea who killed Lory Price?” he asked.

  “Well, this is my theory. You know he used to hang around Charlie Birger’s place, and the papers said he was there a few nights before it was burned down, and Birger, you know, is always suspicious of spies. I always figured he did away with Price on the theory that Price was spying to inform those who destroyed it of a good time to do it. I never had any trouble with Price, and I don’t know his wife.”

  Art Newman, still in touch with the Post-Dispatch men, would say only that “Slim”—the dead officer’s nickname—“was a friend of our crowd and the Shelton gang must have got him.”

  Birger could not be located.

  Southern Illinois simmered with speculation about the murder of Price and the fate of his wife, but nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except a trial—strictly speaking, two trials—to which few, in the prevailing excitement, paid much attention. The principals were only minor hoodlums charged with robbery, and neither their status nor their crime was important enough to attract notice.

  In January Sheriff Oren Coleman had raided a whorehouse in Herrin, where he found several articles that had been stolen in two separate robberies not long before. He arrested the proprietor, a young woman who went by the name of Jackie Williams; Pearl Phelps, a girl who was present; and three young hangers-on of Charlie Birger. A fourth was picked up subsequently.

  The four men were tried at Marion early in March for one of the robberies, and freed when the jury failed to reach a verdict. The next day three of them went on trial for the second offense. This time they were convicted, and sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary.

  The principal witnesses for the prosecution were the two women. At the time of their arrest they had been on intimate terms with two of the defendants, but during the weeks they spent in jail—the sheriff had held them on a liquor charge—they became convinced that their lovers had thrown them over. On the stand they testified with venom. They swore that the defendants had brought the stolen property to Jackie’s place and left it there, that they had forced them at gunpoint to indulge in abnormal sexual practices, and that they had threatened them with death if they ever revealed what had happened. The second jury believed them.

  One of the defendants thus convicted was Harry Thomasson, nineteen years old. With five brothers he had been orphaned at an early age, and had spent his boyhood in orphanages and foster homes. A year before his conviction, he and his brother Elmo, two years his senior, had become attached to Birger, who took them into his gang when he assembled it. Harry had not seen Elmo since the night Shady Rest was destroyed, and by the time of his trial he had become convinced that his brother was one of the four people whose bodies were found in the ruins.

  While Thomasson was being held in the Williamson County jail awaiting trial on the robbery charges, State’s Attorney Roy C. Martin of Franklin County, in which Joe Adams had been killed, worked on a clue. In his possession was the note that the murderers had handed their victim before they shot him. It read:

  Friend Joe: If you can use these boys please do it. They are broke and need work. I knew their father. C. S.

  To Martin the sentence, “I knew their father,” indicated that the boys were brothers. Presumably, the writer of the note would have foreseen such an interpretation and have avoided any wording that might give rise to it, yet even the wiliest criminals slip occasionally. At any rate, the clue was worth following.

  Martin soon established the fact that the only brothers in either gang who could be called boys—and the killers of Adams were indubitably young—were Harry and Elmo Thomasson. As his next step, he arranged to have Mrs. Adams see Harry in the jail without being seen. She identified him positively as one of the two young men whom she had met at the door the afternoon her husband was killed. Elmo, presumably dead, she identified from photographs.

  In sentencing Harry after the robbery trial the judge had decreed that because of his age he should serve the first two years of his term in the Pontiac Reformatory rather than in the penitentiary. Martin gave the young convict several weeks in which to brood, and then went to Pontiac. With him he took John T. Rogers of the Post-Dispatch, who had an uncanny ability to make criminals talk. Between them they convinced young Thomasson that they knew he and his brother had killed Adams, and that he would fare better if he confessed and pleaded guilty than if he stood trial. By this time Thomasson had come to believe that Birger himself had fired Shady Rest, and was thus responsible for Elmo’s death; he also blamed the gang leader for failing to help him at the time of his own trial. The boy cracked, told his story, and agreed to plead guilty and testify in open court whenever called upon.

  On April 30, 1927, loiterers in the circuit courtroom at Benton saw the bailiff lead in a slight young man clothed in a rough, ill-fitting, prison-made suit. State’s Attorney Martin presented him to Judge Charles H. Miller:

  “This is Harry Thomasson, who is one of several Birger gangsters under indictment for the murder of Joe Adams. He wishes to plead guilty.”

  The spectators—few in number, since no word of what was coming had leaked out—came to attention as the judge reminded the prisoner of the seriousness of the charge and the possible consequences of his plea. Then he asked:

  “Do you wish to plead guilty?”

  “I do,” Thomasson answered.

  The court appointed two lawyers who happened to be present to act as counsel for the defendant, the clerk read the indictment, and Thomasson started to tell his story. After a few sentences Judge Miller interrupted.

  “Why are you so insistent on pleading guilty of murder?”

  Thomasson answered quietly and without any of the arrogance that had characterized his behavior when he was on trial before:

  “Because Charlie Birger, Art Newman, Connie Ritter, and Freddie Wooten blew up Shady Rest cabin and killed my brother.”

  He proceeded:

  “On the morning of the murder, one of the Birger gang called me at my home in West Frankfort and told me to come to Shady Rest. I got in a car and went to Shady Rest where my brother Elmo had stayed the night before. Birger, Newman, Ritter and Ray Hyland were there. They gave Elmo a .38 and me a .45.”

  Hyland, Thomasson continued, drove the two boys to West City. Newman and Ritter, in another car, followed them as far as Marion, and arranged to meet them after the killing.

  “When we reached West City,” the prisoner related, “Elmo and I went to Adams’s house, leaving Hyland sitting in the car. We knocked on the door and then Adams came. Elmo handed him the note, and while he was reading it, I shot him twice with the revolver which I had hidden up my sleeve. Elmo then shot him once. We then ran back to the car where Hyland was waiting, and drove away. That night, Elmo went back to Shady Rest and stayed there all night, but I stayed in a hotel in Harrisburg.

  “The next day,” Thom
asson concluded, “I went back to Shady Rest and they paid us $150, fifty dollars for each shot fired.”

  Martin, State’s Attorney, joined with the prisoner’s counsel in asking for mercy.

  “I shall sentence you to life imprisonment,” the court responded.

  Thomasson walked from the courtroom without faltering. Outside he asked to see Gus Adams, the dead man’s brother, and when Adams came up, offered his hand. Gus took it.

  “I’m sorry I killed Joe,” Thomasson said. “I never knew him and he never did me any wrong. I had to do it. I’m sorry for you. My own brother was killed too.”

  Tears blurred his eyes as he was led away.

  In the Franklin County jail Birger, who had been arrested the day before and charged with murder in anticipation of Thomasson’s confession, denied that he had had anything whatever to do with the killing of Joe Adams.

  Thomasson’s testimony was not the only blow Birger had to parry. The day before the gang leader was arrested Edmund Burke, one of the lawyers for the Sheltons in their trial at Quincy, filed a motion in the United States court at Springfield asking that they be granted a new trial. To support the motion he produced an affidavit that Harvey Dungey, witness for the prosecution, had made in his office on the previous day. Dungey swore that he had perjured himself when he testified that he saw Carl and Bernie Shelton near Collinsville on the day of the mail robbery. Birger and Newman, he said, had threatened to kill him unless he testified as he did. Now, conscience-stricken, he had decided to admit his guilt.

  Another blow came a few days later, when a Williamson County grand jury indicted four former members of Birger’s gang for the murder of “Casey” Jones. Word spread that the grand jury acted on evidence showing that Jones was killed at Shady Rest in Birger’s absence, that his body was allowed to lie outside the cabin all night, and that early in the following morning it was taken twenty miles away and dumped into the creek in which it was found. Named in the indictment were Rado Millich, a Montenegrin whom Birger had formerly employed as a caretaker, and two local boys not yet twenty, Clarence Rone and Ural Gowen. (The fourth person was not named.) Millich, Rone, and Gowen were already serving sentences for other offenses.