A Hollywood censorship board was established that soon ruled that Arbuckle should never work in the entertainment industry again. Eventually the decision was reversed, though he would remain unofficially blacklisted.
* * *
—
About a week after the final trial, Oscar Heinrich turned forty-one years old. At age twenty-two, he had promised to intentionally reflect on his life on every birthday. Unfortunately for Oscar, many of those memories left him melancholy. His youth was filled with burdens, responsibility, and few rewards, even on his birthday.
“I never had a cake or even a reminder that someone was pleased about it until after I was married,” he told Kaiser. “Nobody but myself ever seemed to pay any attention to it.”
Oscar was comforted by the adoration of his wife and two sons; he was satisfied with his business and his professional success, but he was aging, and it felt unsettling. “I move more deliberately, I require more sleep,” he told Kaiser. “Within the past few days my estimable wife chortled over the discovery of two gray hairs over my left ear.”
Oscar valued his sons and coveted their education. He vowed to protect their futures, though he noted they were quickly developing into two very different types of boys. “Did I tell you that Theodore could sing the song ‘The Old Swanee River’ and a few other English songs in Latin?” Oscar wrote his mother. “Mortimer does not bring home such good reports. He’s raising the devil in school all the time although he seems to have time enough left over to get most of his lessons.”
The Arbuckle case had thrust Oscar Heinrich into the national spotlight, but it also damaged his credibility as an expert witness. And fingerprinting in America, still in its nascent stage, also came under the scrutiny of critics. Skeptical jurors couldn’t understand if it was a credible science, and Oscar was certain that the jury had been seduced by a charismatic movie star, even if Arbuckle had been maligned in the press.
“If the entire episode results in a general elevation of the tone of moving pictures,” he told Kaiser, “I shall feel satisfied that the prosecution’s work was well done. This I think really will come to pass.”
* * *
—
The aftermath of Fatty Arbuckle’s ordeal in San Francisco, much of it caused by Oscar Heinrich, triggered wave after wave of disappointments and failures for the actor. His wife of seventeen years, Minta Durfee, divorced him in early 1925 because he was in love with another woman. Four months later, Arbuckle married his mistress, movie actress Doris Deane. But in 1928, after less than four years of marriage, she divorced him amid cheating allegations.
Arbuckle was buried in legal bills. He sold his famous cars, along with his Los Angeles mansion, which was worth $100,000. He wallowed in alcoholism. Studios declined to hire him because movie executives refused to risk a box office failure—all of this despite being categorically acquitted.
But Fatty Arbuckle appeared resilient. He was determined to stay relevant in Hollywood, only he found it prudent to adopt an alias—William B. Goodrich (the facetious moniker Will B. Good would stick with Arbuckle for the remainder of his career). One of his closest friends, actor Buster Keaton, hoped to help Arbuckle—but the comedian, once cheery and charming, was now a sad sack.
“It was a dismal experience to watch him,” remembered Keaton. “Roscoe just was not funny anymore, was like some washed-up old performer who knew he was through and was just going through the motions because he had no alternative.”
In early 1924, Arbuckle turned from big-screen actor to feature film director by directing Sherlock Jr. Now considered a silent film classic, the comedy starred Keaton as a shy movie theater projectionist and janitor who wanted desperately to be a detective.
During the film’s opening scene, Keaton’s character peered at a book titled How to be a Detective through a magnifying glass. He fantasized about becoming a professional sleuth who unraveled complicated plots.
Keaton’s character, under Arbuckle’s direction, was a twisted tribute to Oscar Heinrich, according to people on the set. The forensic scientist who helped ruin Arbuckle’s career had actually inspired him creatively. The actor had watched Oscar closely in court as he pointed to large photographs of fingerprints. Fatty Arbuckle noted how Oscar Heinrich had absolutely mesmerized jurors.
7.
Double 13:
The Case of the Great Train Heist
By a man’s fingernails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.
—Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet, 1887
We will play it on one card,” the three brothers agreed. “If we win, we win. If we lose, we lose all.”
The breeze felt cool on his neck. There was no place quite as peaceful in autumn as southern Oregon’s forests of dark green pines. The swaths of color, yellow and orange on the maples and dogwoods, were divine for travelers wandering toward a campsite. It was certainly a bucolic, remote mountain wilderness.
As he stroked his forehead, his fingers slid on the unctuous, greasy tallow that was smeared on his skin. The stuff darkened his face. Hopefully he would be mistaken for a Mexican worker toiling on the railway. A putrid, smoky odor drifted around him. His shoes were covered with salt and sugar gunnysacks secured with rope and soaked in the dark, flammable chemical creosote—an attempt to mask his scent. He sprinkled black pepper from a one-pound Carnation tin can in the hopes that the pungent mixture of alkaloids and resin would repel tenacious bloodhounds on the hunt.
It was Thursday, October 11, 1923, when Roy DeAutremont (also spelled D’Autremont) and his two brothers squatted in prickly brush in the Siskiyou Mountains on the border of California and Oregon. They stared at the tunnel located on the steepest railway in the country, the line that traversed the summit of the mountain range just one mile south of its next stop in Siskiyou County. The Road of a Thousand Wonders line had carried thousands of travelers between Portland and Los Angeles via San Francisco over 1,300 miles through the Cascades, past snow-capped Mount Shasta and across thousands of acres of wheat, apples, walnuts, and roses near the Columbia River.
The handsome twenty-three-year-old tugged at his hat as the three brothers gazed toward the train tunnel, number 13. They were awaiting their first view of Southern Pacific Railroad Train No. 13, an express train—double 13. The brothers had heard unfounded rumors that the train, which the media later dubbed the Gold Special, was carrying up to half a million dollars in gold, all the motivation they needed to hatch a clever scheme to escape their troubling lives.
The steep grade of the Siskiyou Mountains required running the train in two sections, with a mail-express car leading the first half, followed by four baggage cars and three passenger cars. As it crested the steep grade of the summit, the engineer would be forced to slow down to test the brakes at the top of the pass by bringing the train to a near stop. The brothers planned to wait for the first three cars to pass through the south end of the tunnel before sneaking aboard and overpowering the crew.
Roy gripped his .45-caliber Colt automatic revolver and glanced at the gunnysacks. His younger brother Hugh, just nineteen years old, clutched a sawed-off shotgun filled with Ajax shells that contained buckshot for “long-range loads.” A heavy weapon with powerful recoil, it was unlikely that anyone could survive an accurate shot. Roy’s identical twin brother, Ray, sat at his side, his eyes fixed on the tracks as he listened for the rumbling and chugging sounds to grow louder from No. 13’s engine.
A “blasting machine,” a small wooden red box and plunger made by DuPont with a geared motor inside, was wrapped inside a pair of overalls. It was a device the brothers had stolen from a construction site near Oregon City. Pushing the plunger would turn the pinion gear on a magneto, a type of electrical generator, sending a current to the
fifty pounds of wires attached to blasting caps on the sticks of dynamite inside a gunnysack lying nearby. Roy carried a .45-caliber Colt automatic pistol with its traceable serial numbers scratched off. They hauled along loads of ammunition.
The DeAutremont brothers were reared with guns in their hands during their childhood in the wilderness; their father had allowed them to load rifles as soon as they were strong enough to hold them. Roy had killed numerous rabbits before his tenth birthday, but small animals were his only victims. The brothers listened for the train’s whistle, shrieking in the distance—they were jittery.
“What do you think about it, little lad?” Roy had asked his younger brother just the day before.
“The breaks are against us,” replied Hugh gravely. “There is not much chance, but there is a chance.”
They believed there was about $500,000 worth of gold and money on the train, cash and checks stuffed inside thousands of pieces of mail guarded by a U.S. Postal Service clerk. It seemed like a fortune to three brothers, who had spent much of their lives struggling. This would be their first train robbery—and their last.
* * *
—
The two men, dressed in black and donning Stetson hats and spurs, pointed their pistols at the engineer, forcing him off the train after it rolled to a stop. They dragged the frightened travelers from their seats and lined them up outside. A passenger dashed toward the tracks before being felled by a gunshot to his back.
In the annals of great American Western films, The Great Train Robbery claimed its place as one of the earliest movies in cinema, the first Western, and a genuine Hollywood blockbuster in 1903. In less than twelve minutes, the silent film told the tale of a gang of outlaws pursued by a sheriff’s posse after a deadly train robbery. The bandits were menacing gunslingers who seized control over dozens of passengers before eventually dying in a blaze of gunfire in the woods. The story concluded with the leader of the gang firing his pistol point blank at the movie’s audience, a startling cinematic technique repeated almost sixty years later during the opening sequence of the first James Bond film, and it’s been used in each subsequent movie in the series.
Pulp magazines and dime novels in the 1920s glamourized the Old West by depicting real-life robbers like Jesse James and Bill Miner as protagonists, heroes who stole from the rich on trains or stagecoaches. Young men, including the DeAutremont brothers, marveled at Hollywood Westerns that starred daring bandits riding atop horses as they raced alongside trains and fan-fired at their enemies. The Robin Hood tale of struggling Americans robbing the wealthy in grand fashion was appealing to a generation that had survived World War I just five years earlier.
Train robberies were common during the 1800s in the American Old West. As the country expanded, bandits targeted slow-moving locomotives carrying cash and precious metals to large cities, but soon railway companies added massive safes with armed guards; they hired the infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency to track thieves. Mail robbery was especially lucrative because banks routinely shipped large amounts of cash and valuables by registered mail.
The brothers had read that gangs in the East earned millions of dollars by robbing mail carriages—and they were right. Between 1919 to 1921, mail robbers had stolen about $6 million, and the federal government was finally forced to act. In 1921, the Postmaster General pleaded with President Warren Harding to assign American marines as guards, and soon more than two thousand military personnel patrolled trains and government buildings, including post offices. The marines were trained to use deadly force to stop a heist, a disclosure that should have frightened any hopeful robber. But the lure of millions of dollars in cash and gold was too strong for the DeAutremont brothers and other gangs, who demanded their share of the country’s growing wealth thanks to new leadership in the White House.
In August 1923, President Harding unexpectedly died of a heart attack, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge took office. After Harding’s death, his legacy began to blacken amid revelations of political corruption within his cabinet and the president’s multiple mistresses. His successor served as a sort of conservative father figure, a Republican leader known as “Silent Cal,” who said little but made key policy decisions that shifted the economy. Calvin Coolidge favored tax cuts and limited government spending, and the economy quickly grew by 7 percent between 1922 and 1927. With new prosperity, more people earned better-paying jobs and overall crime slightly decreased.
Prohibition still hobbled the country, encouraging organized crime and holding the homicide rate at its highest level in American history. Despite the enormous economic boom, many Americans were still underemployed—still in need of a big, quick payout.
* * *
—
Roy DeAutremont looked over his nineteen-year-old brother, a slight and short teenager with a baby face and blond hair. The twins wondered if recruiting Hugh was wise—they would be responsible for their younger brother’s life during a risky mission.
“Hugh, you see what is in front of you,” warned Roy. “We won’t think hard of you if you turn back.”
“What the hell do you think I am?” Hugh yelled. “I am not turning back.”
The DeAutremont brothers were improbable criminals, in a way, because of their strong family values. Roy and Ray were born in 1900 in Williamsburg, Ohio, while Hugh came along four years later. There were two other brothers, Lee and Verne, along with their parents, Paul and Bella—a boisterous, busy family of seven.
Their mother believed strongly in spirituality, so the five boys had faithfully squirmed in pews since they had been baptized into the Catholic Church as newborns. Roy regularly attended Mass and Sunday school and gave confession; he had enjoyed learning the tenets of the Bible. Roy and Ray had each made it midway through high school before dropping out; they were well-educated students who could read and write—two men devoted to their family and each other. Roy and Ray were inseparable, and though their bond with Hugh was strong, it was difficult to usurp a twin’s lead position in his brother’s life.
Their father, Paul DeAutremont, had spent much of their childhood hunting for work, so the family moved around frequently, all across the US, never quite settling down in one area. Instability bred domestic discord—Bella and Paul fought frequently, and eventually their marriage deteriorated.
“Their marriage life got to be worse and worse,” said Roy. “It seemed like they absolutely couldn’t get along. It made it so disagreeable for us boys that Ray and I decided to leave.”
Paul relocated to Oregon without his wife or children to eventually open a barbershop, and soon the twins settled down with their father. Roy went to barber college, hoping to be like Paul, but instead he took a job at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem—a foretelling of his bleak future. Ray labored at a shipyard about sixty miles away and became an avid reader in his off time.
The three brothers were the antithesis of the desperadoes who starred in their favorite films. But they subscribed to a belief that eventually poisoned all three of them, transforming them into volatile and dangerous criminals. The DeAutremonts firmly believed that the government had betrayed one of them.
At age eighteen, Ray became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies, a labor union that was stocked with indigent working-class men fueled by beliefs of injustice. Police arrested Ray and thousands of other Wobblies under a new legal statute called criminal syndicalism, which made it illegal to commit crimes, sabotage, or violence to support industrial or political reform in the United States. Even freedom of speech was repressed. Between 1917 and 1920, during America’s post–World War I era, twenty-two states and territories enacted these anti-labor statutes, laws that were created to punish left-wing idealists and union organizers.
Police arrested Ray in 1919, and he was sentenced to one year in Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. He had been a compassionate and hard-working boy, b
ut in prison he devolved into an angry, embittered man filled with vitriol toward anyone with authority. When Ray was released in 1920, Roy tried to assuage him by begging his twin brother to return to his Catholic faith.
“I did not know him, he was so changed,” said Roy. “I think that he is crazy. He tells me the religion that I had been raised to believe is all bosh. But because Ray was my brother, my twin brother, I took what he said with silence and a heavy heart.”
Ray spent twelve months behind bars, seething over his wayward life, his misfortunes at the hands of the wealthy. Soon after his release he presented Roy with a proposal: they would commit a robbery, just one heist to earn enough money to last them a lifetime. They enlisted younger brother Hugh, and the men spent the next three years plotting the perfect train robbery.
But there were hitches—they had a difficult time settling on a plan, and they oftentimes considered backing out. Roy even suggested buying a comfortable little homestead for their entire family and making due with sporadic employment, embracing an honest living.
“We knew it would mean we couldn’t help mother and dad and the brothers,” said Roy. “We were sick of life, tired of it all, and we didn’t care.”
Ray and Roy ventured into logging camps searching for steady work; the two brothers were handsome and charming, natty dressers with manicured nails. But they were also slim and short—all less than five feet seven and each weighing about 130 pounds. They didn’t have ideal builds for fledgling lumberjacks.
“I have come within an ace of getting killed time and time again in the logging camp,” said Roy. “The work was too hard for me.”
But he was determined. He would never go back to that type of dangerous job. So how could a crafty young man make a living in the rural northwest? Roy had an idea.
American Sherlock Page 14