Bloody Williamson

by Paul M. Angle

  To add to Birger’s troubles the Shelton brothers were granted a new trial and released on bond.

  These adversities, however, could not approach the catastrophe that struck the gang leader early in June.

  Ever since the murder of Lory Price the chief of the Illinois state police and several of his men had been quietly working on the case. They had started on the presumption that Price had been abducted by Shelton gangsters, but from a former Birger follower, whom they tracked down in Ohio, they received information that led them to believe Price was killed by members of the Birger gang because he knew too much about their operations. Their problem, then, became that of finding the influential Birger gangsters still at large. Late in May 1927, they located Art Newman in Long Beach, California, where he was working as a private detective under an assumed name. Local police arrested him and charged him with murder. The governor of California honored a request for extradition, and Sheriff Pritchard of Franklin County set out to bring the prisoner back for trial.

  With the sheriff went John T. Rogers of the Post-Dispatch, hoping to induce Newman to tell his story as he had induced Thomasson to tell his. Somehow, on the long ride from California to Illinois, he succeeded. Arriving in Benton, Rogers handed Newman’s confession to State’s Attorney Martin as the sheriff locked the prisoner in his cell. Martin turned it over to the State’s Attorney of Washington County, in which Price’s body had been found. That official called a special grand jury to meet at Nashville, the county seat, on June 11. Newman, brought into court there, swore that the confession he had made on the train was true in every respect, and was indicted—along with Birger, Connie Ritter, Ernest Blue, Leslie Simpson, and Riley Simmons—for the murder of Lory Price.

  Newman began his story by saying that on the day Price and his wife disappeared Birger called him to Harrisburg and informed him that the gang intended to question “Slim” (Price) about “snitching” to the Williamson County authorities. The men started to Price’s home in midafternoon, but found no one there. They returned in the evening, saw that there were visitors, left and returned again. It was almost midnight before they were certain that they would find the highway officer and his wife alone.

  All the men, seven in number, went to the door. Price answered their knock. Birger, with loud profanity, asked who blew up Shady Rest. When Price said he didn’t know, Birger ordered him into Newman’s car, parked in front of the house. At the same time he seized the officer’s pistol.

  “Are you going to hurt me, Charlie?” Price asked.

  “No,” Birger promised, “I just want to talk things over with you.”

  Birger pushed his captive into the back seat and sat down beside him; Wooten took the place next to Newman at the wheel. As the car started Birger called to the men in the second automobile:

  “Take that woman out and do away with her!”

  “Charlie, please don’t hurt Ethel,” Price pleaded.

  “Never mind,” Birger snapped. “Shut up!”

  Birger ordered Newman to keep driving. Then he began to berate the policeman—for trying to find out who killed Joe Adams, for being at Shady Rest the night it was destroyed, for carrying tales to Sheriff Coleman. With every mile he became more vituperative.

  Newman stopped at Birger’s home in Harrisburg, but the gang leader stayed there only a minute or two. Re-entering the car, he named as their destination a part of the county where there were several abandoned mines.

  “I’ve got a notion, Price,” he said, “to knock you off and throw you in one of these mines.”

  Then he changed his mind and headed for the site of Shady Rest.

  “I want to show this Price what has happened to my cabin on account of him,” he announced.

  The party arrived at the barbecue stand about two a.m. Price, thoroughly frightened, whispered to Newman:

  “Art, can you help me now?”

  Birger overheard. “I’d like to see somebody try to help you now,” he blustered. “Come on in here.”

  Inside the stand he faced Price in wild rage. When the officer denied, once more, that he had double-crossed the gang, Birger fired. Three shots passed through Price’s body, and he pitched to the floor.

  At this moment the second car came up.

  “You’ve played hell now,” Wooten told Birger. “Here’s the car with that woman.”

  “Don’t worry about the woman,” one of the newcomers said. “We killed her.”

  “What did you do with her?” Newman asked.

  “We shot her and threw her in a mine shaft near Carterville.”

  “All right,” Birger broke in. “We’ll put him with her.”

  “We can’t,” came the reply. “We filled up the place with tin and timbers.”

  Birger thought for a moment. “I know another old mine near Du Quoin,” he said. “Throw this man in Newman’s car.”

  Newman protested. “I’ll be damned if you do. Put him in that Buick.”

  Birger flew into a rage, pointed his machine gun at his worried, hesitant followers, and shouted:

  “Everybody will go through this with me or I’ll wipe you all out!”

  They put Price, still alive, in the back seat of Newman’s car, and Birger, machine gun in hand, sat on his body. Near Carbondale the gangster ordered a stop. Stepping to the roadside, he vomited violently.

  “That’s too much for me,” he said when he was able to speak. “I can kill a man, but I can’t sit on him. I don’t know what in the hell’s the matter with me. It isn’t my nerves. Every time I kill a man it makes me sick afterwards. I guess it’s my stomach.”

  Birger told Connie Ritter to take his place. After a few miles Price regained consciousness.

  “Connie, I’m an innocent man,” he managed to say.

  “Shut up, you bastard, or I’ll turn this machine gun on you,” Ritter responded.

  A few more miles and Price spoke again. This time his voice was barely audible.

  “Connie, you’ll live to regret this.”

  By this time Ritter, too, had had enough, so another of the gangsters took his place astride the body of the wounded captive. Birger ordered a stop at an old coal-mine, and then saw a watchman on duty. The cars moved on to a schoolhouse. There he hoped to dump the dying policeman and burn both building and body, but rain, now falling hard, thwarted the plan. Farther on, near Dubois, he stopped by the roadside and directed the men in the first car to carry Price into the adjacent field.

  “Art,” the officer moaned, “I thought you were my friend.”

  “By God, I am, Lory, but I can’t help this,” Newman replied.

  Shots rang out, and a moment later Birger and the others who had dragged Price away returned to the cars. On the way back to Shady Rest one of the men who had abducted Mrs. Price told Newman that they had taken her to an abandoned mine, shot her, and thrown her body to the bottom of the shaft. Then they covered it, to the depth of many feet, with timbers, stone, and debris. No one would ever find her.

  Thus Newman’s confession. Was it true?

  If it was, Mrs. Price’s body would be found where it had been hidden five months earlier. As soon as the gruesome story was made public, a crowd gathered at the old mine-shaft. Many were miners with picks and shovels. They worked in relays, passing the dirt to the surface by a bucket line. After dark the lamps on their caps twinkled like fireflies. Campfire Girls and Red Cross workers set up a canteen and served coffee and sandwiches.

  The diggers worked the following day, and the day after that until noon. Then they came to the dead woman’s body. Art Newman had told the truth.

  With public opinion inflamed by a revelation of brutality even more savage than had been imagined, Rado Millich and Ural Gowen went on trial for the murder of “Casey” Jones. (Charges against Clarence Rone, also indicted, were dismissed when he turned state’s evidence.)

  On June 24 the defendants were arraigned before Judge Hartwell in the old Williamson County courthouse. They made a strange pair�
��Gowen a slender, diffident boy in shirt sleeves, looking more like a young farmhand than a gangster; Millich twice Gowen’s age, dark-skinned, with glittering black eyes in a deep-lined face, an abnormally long nose, and a head that tapered toward the top like a blunt-nosed bullet. He spoke in broken and halting English, but when asked by the judge whether he could understand the language he answered: “Yes, sir, very well.” Neither defendant had counsel, so the court appointed two lawyers to defend them.

  State’s Attorney Boswell built his case on the testimony of former Birger gangsters. All agreed that on the day of Jones’s death Birger was absent from Shady Rest. Jones and Millich, then the caretaker, quarreled over the question of who had charge. In the course of the argument Millich shot Jones.

  This much the defense admitted. They contended, however, that Millich fired in self-defense, and that Gowen was an innocent bystander who did nothing more than help drag the body to the bear pit, where it lay until the next day when Birger, having returned, gave orders that it be thrown into Saline Creek.

  Oral Gowen, thirteen-year-old brother of Ural, gave damaging testimony in behalf of the prosecution. He was plowing in the vicinity of Shady Rest, he related, on the day the murder took place. When he heard shots he ran to the cabin.

  “Who was the first person you saw when you got there?” he was asked.

  “My brother,” he replied.

  Harry Thomasson, now serving his lifetime sentence in Menard Penitentiary, testified that on the day of the killing he was at the barbecue stand when he heard shots from the direction of the cabin. Running there, he came upon Jones, face-down on the ground. Gowen, standing over the body, had Jones’s machine gun in his hands; Millich was near by. Several others came up, saw what had happened, and returned to the stand. Thomasson went with them. Once he looked around, saw Gowen and Millich dragging the body by the heels to the rear of the cabin. Shortly afterward he heard two more shots.

  When asked why he did not do something for Jones while the dying man lay bleeding on the ground, he answered with a flash of his old defiance:

  “I don’t generally get mixed up in killings that aren’t my own.”

  Millich took the stand in his own defense. In his halting English he told a straightforward story. On the day of the killing he was walking from the barbecue stand to the cabin when Jones, behind him, called out: “Rado!” As he turned, Jones opened fire with a machine gun. Millich pulled the trigger of his own rifle. Jones missed, Millich did not. That was all there was to it, except that Ural Gowen had had no part in the shooting.

  The jury, after pondering the evidence for fifteen hours, found both defendants guilty. Gowen’s punishment was set at twenty-five years in the penitentiary, Millich’s at death.

  In the first murder case arising from the gang war the prosecution had won two convictions and one death penalty. Charlie Birger, in his cell, had something to think about.

  Ten days after the verdict Judge Hartwell overruled a motion for a new trial and announced that Millich would be “hanged by the neck until dead” on October 21, 1927. The condemned man stood before the bar, impassive, until the judge finished. Then he asked permission to speak.

  “I had no fair trial,” he said. “The evidence was framed against me by Mr. Boswell. I never killed the man because I wanted to but because he forced me to. I tell the truth.”

  The sheriff led him to his cell.

  * Late in January 1927, Sam O’Neal, then a Post-Dispatch reporter and now a public-relations counselor in Washington, received a telephone call from Art Newman at Gillespie, Illinois. Newman asked O’Neal to meet him there as soon as possible. At Gillespie, O’Neal found Freddie Wooten and Connie Ritter, both Birger gangsters, as well as Newman. The three men proposed to sell their story of the gang war to the Post-Dispatch. O’Neal arranged for them to meet O. K. Bovard, the managing editor, the following day. Bovard agreed to buy the series, but wanted Birger’s name also. As O’Neal remembers it, the three gangsters were to receive $1,500 each in any event, $2,000 each if Birger would permit the use of his name, and Birger would be paid either $3,000 or $4,000. Birger, approached later, refused.

  O’Neal, John Rogers (now dead), and Roy Alexander (now managing editor of Time) spent two or three days talking with Newman, Wooten, and Ritter in a hotel at Carlinville. The series was written by Alexander, since O’Neal and Rogers were covering the Shelton trial by the time it appeared. So O’Neal wrote me on April 6, 1951.

  XIV

  THE HANGING OF CHARLIE BIRGER

  June 1927–April 1928

  It is a beautiful world.

  Charlie Birger, April 19, 1928.

  JUNE 11, 1927, was a memorable day in the history of the gang war. That afternoon Art Newman revealed the revolting story of the murder of Lory and Ethel Price. In the morning Charlie Birger, now fighting for his life, met his first setback.

  The occasion was a hearing on a motion for a change of venue. Birger entered the crowded courtroom on the heels of a deputy, jaunty and confident, took a chair at the side of his pretty young wife, who had previously found a place inside the rail, and clasped her hand. While his lawyers contended that local newspapers had prejudiced the general public against their client, and that the publication of Harry Thomasson’s confession had heightened the prevailing animosity, he listened intently. When the judge denied the motion he showed no sign of disappointment, but he twisted and squirmed with impatience during an argument over the date of his trial. As soon as that was settled he turned to the sheriff and said abruptly: “Are you ready?” After a brief good-bye to his wife he fell in behind the officers and marched, ramrod-stiff, from the room.

  On the 6th of July, as a Williamson County jury was about to decide the fate of Rado Millich, jailers led Birger, Newman, and Ray Hyland into the bare courtroom of the Franklin County courthouse to stand trial for the murder of Joe Adams. Arguments on motions took up the first two days. After that came the tiresome business of selecting a jury. All the defendants paid close attention to the questioning, the State’s Attorney trying to ascertain each talesman’s attitude toward capital punishment, the lawyers for the defense feeling for reactions to insanity and alibis.

  One morning, before court convened, an incident revealed how bitterly Birger and Newman had come to hate each other. In response to a question from a reporter, Newman said something about Birger’s connection with a bank robbery some months earlier. Birger overheard.

  “Why, that guy’s crazy!” he exploded. “I didn’t even know him then. Look at him sitting over there. Anybody can tell he’s crazy.”

  Facing his codefendant, he continued:

  “You dirty, woman-killing son-of-a-bitch, you ought to be ashamed to ask for a trial. You ought to ask the people to hang you.”

  “That’s enough of that,” Newman growled.

  One of Birger’s attorneys quieted him. As he subsided he remarked for all to hear:

  “If Newman gets out I want to hang.”

  Although the interminable questioning of prospective jurors was a dumb show to the spectators, they jammed the courtroom from morning to night. Whenever the sweltering heat and sheer boredom drove someone to the open air, newcomers waiting outside at the head of the stairs would jostle each other for his place. If they could hear little of what went on, and make little out of what they heard, there were the defendants to gape at—Birger by the side of his wife, his two daughters on his knees; Newman, dapper and nonchalant; Hyland of the swarthy complexion, thick lips, sloping forehead, and sinister joviality. Since the courtroom was small, only a few of those who sought admission managed to squeeze inside. Others, by the hundred, stood in the courthouse square, forced to be content with a brief glimpse of the prisoners as they were led to and from the jail.

  A week passed before a jury was completed—a jury of miners, farmers, and clerks, all with such “American” names as Fisher, Gunn, Knight, and Simpson. Then the lawyers made their opening statements, and the State’s Attorney began
to call the witnesses for the prosecution.

  Following time-tested tactics, he worked slowly to the testimony by which he intended to prove his case. Two days went by before he introduced the widow of the victim. Dry-eyed, she spoke in short, toneless sentences, with no striving whatever for dramatic effect.

  “The two young men knocked on our door. I got up and went to the door. They asked me if Joe Adams lived here. I said he did. They asked me if he was home.

  “I said yes, but he was asleep. I asked them if I would do. They said they wanted to see Joe personally. They said they had a letter from Carl Shelton. I went back and got Joe. I walked beside him to the door.”

  “What did they do then?” the State’s Attorney asked.

  “They shot him.”

  Clarence Rone, serving a term in the Williamson County jail, tightened the case against Birger. The boy was seriously ill, and spoke in such a low voice that the jurors strained to hear him. He had been at Shady Rest, he related, on the night before Adams was killed. He saw Harry and Elmo Thomasson come in, and he watched them enter a closed room with Birger, Newman, Ritter, and Hyland. An hour or so later Harry left; the others stayed all night.

  The next afternoon, Rone continued, he saw Connie Ritter hand a pistol to Newman, who in turn gave it to Hyland.

  “Take the bullets to the basement,” Ritter ordered, “and dose them with poison.”

  Then he scribbled a note that he read aloud, sealed, and handed to Elmo.

  Rone was at Shady Rest when the gang gathered there after the killing. Birger was elated.

  “That was fine work you boys did,” he said to the Thomassons. “I won’t have to worry about that big son-of-a-bitch any more.”

  Harry Thomasson, however, was the witness on whom Martin relied for clinching his case. Staring sometimes at the floor, sometimes at the three defendants, the young convict told the full story of the crime.