Another partner of his has been the eminent expert in the chemistry of crime, Dr. Lemoyne Snyder, formerly medico-legal director of the Michigan State Police.
In fact, Ray Schindler and Dr. Snyder have joined with the famous handwriting expert, Clark Sellers, and William Harper, the physicist, to form a sort of court of appeal called “Scientific Evidence Inc.,” to which individuals or officers of the law in need of the highest criminological skill can refer difficult problems.
Though the private detective of fiction, like the black sheep among private detectives in fact, works against the legal police forces, Ray Schindler always cooperates with them.
Homer Cummings, while he was Attorney General of the United States, wrote: “In my judgment, Raymond C. Schindler is a great detective. He has at his fingertips the techniques of his craft. He never evolves theories of his cases until the last scrap of evidence has been developed and analyzed. I never knew a man to move more swiftly or with surer touch. He is loyal to the most exacting and ethical standards.”
How the Federal Bureau of Investigation values him is shown by this excerpt from a letter written by its chief, J. Edgar Hoover:
“I am looking forward to shaking hands with my friend, Ray Schindler, so that I may be able personally to tell him how much I appreciate his ardent support of the F.B.I. One always likes to know who his friends are, and it is good to know that I have such a friend in Ray.”
As I have gone about with him I have been astonished by the number of people who know him and greet him with affection. It seems that half the people in the country must call him “Ray.”
In the usual detective fiction, the sleuth is an eccentric character of strange habits and quaint dialect. When he is called in to repair the stupidity of the dull-witted and blundering constables of Scotland or other Yards, he puts on his fore-and-aft cap or other quaint costume, takes a shot of his favorite narcotic, lights his pipe, arms himself with his trusty magnifying glass, and sallies forth to perform a miracle by way of analyzing cigarette ashes or penetrating the mind of the occult murderer. When he has astounded the public and humiliated the bumbling officers of the law, he goes back to his Dr. Watson, or his private hobbies and awaits the next appeal to his uncanny intuitions.
But Ray Schindler is more of a syndicate than an individual. Instead of waiting for an emergency call, he goes to his main office in the morning and inspects a daily work-sheet that may contain fifty current cases on which he is working with his staff. These are of every imaginable and picturesque variety. He has associated offices in twenty important cities and cooperative arrangements with other bureaus everywhere.
His brother and associate, Walter Schindler, spent the whole summer of 1949 travelling Europe and reestablishing connections with foreign agencies in the principal capitals abroad.
His clients are not merely victims of blackmail threats, thefts, forgery, mayhem, murder, arson, sabotage, but also great banks, hotels, department stores, insurance companies, railroads and other corporations.
At any moment a telephone call or a telegram may lead him to throw out, like an alarmed fire department, a swarm of twenty or thirty operatives, whom he sends scurrying forth in all directions. He may dash to a plane, a train, a steamer or an airplane for Europe.
Ray Schindler himself, though he is constantly wandering into danger, has never worn a disguise or carried a firearm. He has never been engaged in a fight, though on one occasion he did vault over a rail and drop fifteen feet onto the shoulders of a man who had been eluding the police of half a dozen cities for half a dozen years.
Ray’s principal weapons are his extraordinary intuitions as to human nature, his genius for inventing ways to uncover its workings and outwit it; his acquaintance with every known scientific implement, and the patience and perseverance that may keep him at work on a case day and night for years on end.
Yet there is something so human about him that even the criminals he overtakes and delivers to trial are ordinarily more angry at themselves than at him. He often promises his friendship and a job to some man whom he has been instrumental in sending to prison. More than one murderer whose conviction has been due to Ray Schindler has gone to his death with expressions of affection for him.
He has an enormous acquaintance everywhere in all walks of life from the highest to the lowest and can count on friendly collaborators wherever he needs them. He finds time, too, for much social activity and has been president of the Adventurers Club three times, as well as one of the leading figures in the hilarious festivals of the Circus Saints and Sinners. He is also an ardent worker for the Boys’ Clubs and the Future Presidents’ League. He lectures widely. In 1939 he founded, and became President of, International Investigators, a worldwide organization.
Ray Schindler is a made detective, not a born one. In his early life he showed none of the love of sleuthing that gives so many boyhoods an aura of imaginary melodrama.
It took the San Francisco earthquake to shake Ray Schindler down into the detective business.
He was born in the town of Mexico, New York, on November 11, 1882. His father was John Franklin Schindler, a graduate of St. Lawrence University, and a minister in the Universalist Church. A month after Ray’s birth, a new church was offered in the near-by city of Oswego. A few years later the family moved to a parsonage in Marshalltown, Iowa. Later, the roving pastor took over the Universalist Church in Stillwater, Minnesota.
The state prison there was in charge of a warden who was a pioneer in many prison reforms nowadays more or less generally practiced. There, perhaps, Ray acquired his first realization that criminals are human beings; the prey of their own natures and environments. He has pursued them but he has never persecuted them.
His mother founded the prison library and served without pay as the librarian at the penitentiary. She also conducted Sunday School classes for the prisoners. She was assisted by Henrietta Younger, sister of three inmates famous as the Younger Brothers, later closely allied with the James Brothers in the annals of American crime.
The Schindlers moved next to Whitewater, Wisconsin, where Ray began a schooling, which was continued in later stopovers at Racine and Milwaukee. At this point, his father, having accumulated four sons and three daughters, left the profession of saving souls in the hereafter for that of insuring lives in this world. Long afterward he followed his sons into the detective business.
Outside his school hours, Ray was industrious in delivering papers for 25 cents a day, then special delivery letters. At night he was a theater-usher and played small parts in a stock company. On one occasion he spoke three lines in Richard Mansfield’s production of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
In 1900, he spent a summer vacation as night clerk in a hotel in Escanaba, Michigan.
He finally saved enough money to buy into a Californian gold mine and later, with a new capital of a thousand dollars, decided to go West and look into his gold mine, which rejoiced in the name of “Sky High.” This journey took Ray into an odyssey of adventures. Cut-rate railroad ticket sharks sent him and a buddy of his on a roundabout journey via Denver and Cheyenne, at which point their money all but gave out.
The kindly brakeman on a freight train smuggled them for five dollars each into a refrigerator car where they perched on crossbeams in a crouching position. They had no food and a December blizzard combined with the freezing temperature inside nearly delivered the young men as frozen meat.
At Laramie their faint cries were heard and they were removed from the ice box. After thawing out for a day and a half, their gluttony for adventure led them to bribe another brakeman to let them “ride blind baggage.” This put them outside on the front platform of the first baggage car immediately behind the engine and the snowplow, which had to buck heavy drifts and a continued blizzard.
Choked and blackened by soot and smoke and congealed with blown snow, they managed to live a few hours till the fireman noticed them, hauled them over the top of the coal car and warmed them with te
n hours of shoveling coal into the firebox of the engine.
Ray’s further mishaps were too harrowing to relate, but he reached his gold mine on an icy Christmas Day. The horses actually wore snowshoes! The supplies were brought in on skis, and the inhabitants left their houses by second-story windows to get out on top of the sixteen-foot-deep snow. Ray worked under frightful hardships twelve hours a day, seven days a week until spring came. Then the mine was abandoned.
He arrived in San Francisco just in time to find the town in ruins from the famous earthquake. He slipped through the lines while the fire was still raging and secured a job with a refreshment stand in the burned-over area. After a month of this his eye was caught by a want advertisement beginning with the word “Historians” of all words! It read:
“Historians. Wanted men with college education to record the greatest catastrophe that ever occurred on this continent. Good salary. Apply G. Franklin Mc-Mackin Historical Society.”
Ray had never had a college education, but the words “good salary” inspired him to talk around the subject and he became an “historian.”
Unconsciously and unintentionally he had also become a detective. At last the wanderer had found his path of destiny.
The word “historians” was the subterfuge of a New York private detective. He had been sent to the stricken city by some of the big fire insurance companies, whose very existence was threatened and in some cases snuffed out by the enormous losses. The mission of the sleuth was to prove that most of the houses had been wrecked by the earthquake before the fires broke out. Since the earthquake was interpreted as “an act of God,” the insurance companies preferred to leave the compensation to Him.
So the sleuth hired forty-two investigators to call upon persons who had visited the region before the fire followed the quake, and wheedle out of them statements as to the condition of the buildings before they were attacked by the flames. It took some skill to elicit this information without rousing suspicion. That was why the investigators were called “historians.” They were merely compiling a history of the cataclysm.
As one of the forty-two, Ray was so zealous and so ingenious that, at the end of a month, the private detective was sent back to New York and Ray was promoted to his post.
The investigation kept him busy for a year and a half, during which time he had his headquarters in an apartment house where a rising young lawyer, Hiram Johnson, had taken up temporary offices while his bumed-out building was being rebuilt.
All this while San Francisco had been suffering from political termites, who were wrecking the city like a slow earthquake. The boss was Abe Ruef, one of the most picturesque, clever, and tenacious criminals in all the ghastly history of American municipal corruption. His tool and confederate was the violinist and orchestra leader, Eugene Schmitz. He was one of the countless contradictions of Shakespeare’s beautiful lines:
“The man that hath no music in his soul
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.”
Mayor Schmitz had plenty of music in his soul and in his fingers, but his soul had also room for treasons and stratagems and all the spoils his clever fingers could pick up.
The gang that owned San Francisco took money from licensed pickpockets, licensed prostitutes, licensed criminals of every sort. They collected wholesale graft from street car companies, telephone and gas companies and every other activity. A small army of collectors went about gathering in all the traffic would bear and hunting down every imaginable source of revenue.
One day Hiram Johnson, who had taken a liking for young Schindler, told him that President Theodore Roosevelt had sent out an Assistant U. S. District Attorney and a U. S. Secret Service detective to San Francisco to work secretly. This was at the request of Fremont Older, the newspaper publisher, who loved his city well enough to uncover its shame and so to rescue it from its degradation and slavery. He had the financial backing of the wealthy Rudolph Spreckels.
The U. S. Attorney was Francis J. Heney, and the Secret Service man was William J. Burns. Hiram Johnson was assisting Heney and, at his recommendation, Burns took Ray Schindler as his right hand man. With Ray he took over sixteen of the “historians.” And now Ray was aide and pupil to one of the greatest of all American detectives.
The investigation and the trials lasted for three years. The U. S. Attorney Heney was shot through the head in open court; but Hiram Johnson took his place on the firing line, refused all remuneration and fought the case through. Jurors were shamelessly bribed. When the dishonest Police Chief was removed, his successor was promptly taken out in the police boat and drowned. The chairman of the Board of Supervisors turned State’s evidence, and his house was blown up with dynamite, he and his family narrowly escaping death.
It would take volumes, and volumes have been written, to tell of that incredible battle against embattled crime. Some of the worst crooks were acquitted; but, after exhausting all the wiles and loopholes available, Mayor Schmitz went to jail and Abe Ruef finally landed in San Quentin Penitentiary. After a few years of decent and honest administration San Francisco grew weary of virtue, and when Eugene Schmitz was released from prison, he shamelessly ran for mayor and came within a few thousand votes of being shamelessly reelected.
On other occasions, to be described later on, Ray Schindler aided in ridding other American cities of monstrous grafters and sending them to prison. In these cases, on their return from prison, they ran again for the offices they had befouled, and were triumphantly re-elected.
While Ray has never hesitated to do a good deed because there was no money in it, he soon learned not to belittle his art by putting a low price on it. He owes this to Hiram Johnson, who, on learning that Ray had charged a man ten dollars for a service, scathingly rebuked him for not asking a hundred dollars.
During their association, William J. Burns gained complete respect for Ray’s abilities. When at length Burns resigned from government service and prepared to open a huge agency, he offered Ray the post of chief assistant. They came to New York together in 1909.
While Burns has been violently abused by many critics for his achievements in a field where it is extraordinarily easy to make both mistakes and enemies, Ray Schindler has paid him tribute in the following words:
“Burns had imagination. He was a stickler for details. He taught his men to work from 15 to 18 hours a day. It was perhaps this training, particularly in the art of setting up a pretext that was foolproof, that caused me to make this my life’s work. The challenge to outsmart, analyze the workings of a guilty mind and cause that person to assist you in obtaining evidence against him, is fascinating.”
While he was with Burns, the office was called on to clean up Atlantic City, which was another lesser San Francisco as a stinkhole of political graft, bribery, licensed and heavily taxed gambling, thievery, and prostitution. By a fascinating wonderwork of detection and what is technically known as “roping,” and the use of a hundred thousand dollars in actual cash for a pretended bribery, eleven city officials were caught and indicted. Seven were convicted. But later the prodigal leader came out of the penitentiary and was so welcomed home that he was elected to his old post and served for years.
About the same time, a Governor of one of the Carolinas was the victim of the office’s skill. He was impeached and thrown out of office for the odious business of selling pardons. But, after a brief period of rustication, he also was lovingly forgiven and elected to the United States Senate for many terms.
Three years after joining William J. Burns, Ray decided to strike out for himself. In 1912, he opened his own business. It has grown steadily in importance and good works ever since. His father (recently deceased) and his brother Walter joined forces with him, and added an efficiency and conscientiousness to his own that have kept the name of Schindler amazingly free from either the suspicions or the accusations that usually cloud the very name of detective.
A catalogue of Ray’s achievements would include nearly every imaginabl
e kind of crime and criminal, along with every imaginable kind of victim. This book is therefore a sort of cyclopaedia of human life as it is really lived. And it gives a hint as to the enormous number of people who have had reason to look upon Ray Schindler with profound gratitude for saving them from evil men and women who were outwitted and thwarted only because Ray Schindler and his aides were cleverer than they were, and far more patient, far, far more unfaltering.
2.
THE SERIAL MURDERER
The managers of big New York hotels have strange complaints and stranger requests heaped upon them by strangers from out of town. One day the manager of one of the tallest hotels in town was called by a newly arrived guest who gave his name and room number and asked:
“Could you come up here at once?”
“Of course! I’m on my way now.”
He found a parson and a physician from Grand Rapids. They looked as tame as it is possible to look, but frightened.
The parson said, “We want a good detective in a hurry.”
“Do you think you’ve been robbed here? I’ll call our house-dick.”
“No, we believe that two murders have been committed and a third is about to be, unless something’s done in a hurry.”
“Have you tried the police? The District Attorney?”
“No. They couldn’t and wouldn’t move. Who’s the best detective in town?”
“If you believe their advertisements, there are a hundred bests. But for my money, I’d choose Raymond C. Schindler.”
“Get him, please. It’s a matter of life and death. The man we think is twice a murderer is due here on a train tomorrow with the third victim.”
The Complete Detective Page 2