* * *
—
The ground of their campsite, just two miles from the tunnel, was littered with empty bullet casings, more than sixty spent .45-caliber shells. Roy squinted at targets and practiced firing his Colt pistol. They pulled their triggers quickly. They trained at aiming from the hip, but they spent most of their time becoming more comfortable with “snap shooting,” a technique used when a hunter quickly points and fires at a target in close range without careful aim. They never bothered practicing much with the sights, the devices on guns used to make long-distance aim more accurate for snipers. This train heist, the brothers suspected, would likely end with a bloody, close-range gunfight.
They spent weeks traversing the countryside near the Siskiyou tunnel using a map of the state of Oregon they had bought from a bookstore. A compass guided them to different camping spots. They stored more guns, clothes, ammunition, and food inside a small abandoned wooden cabin at Mount Crest. They hid a cache of supplies at a different location, including a metal probe for digging bullets from their flesh and blood-stopping powder for healing their wounds. Roy, Ray, and Hugh burned most of their belongings—gun casings, toothbrushes, fuse wires, even cooking utensils—hoping to erase all incriminating evidence.
During a reconnaissance mission, Roy eyed a group of men repairing the track on the south side of the tunnel, and it almost deterred them. But they were determined to never return to one of those dangerous lumber camps. And Roy had a girlfriend back in Oregon, a young woman he hoped to marry someday, if they escaped from this robbery alive. He had even bought several double indemnity life insurance policies on himself, so she would receive at least $30,000 if he was killed.
The DeAutremonts were bright men, but their plan seemed to be bedeviled from the start. Several days before the day the train was due to pull through Tunnel 13, the youngest brother announced that he would drive their Nash touring car almost two hundred miles north to Eugene to visit with their father one last time. Hugh planned to tell Paul DeAutremont that he and the twins would report soon to a logging company for work after going on a camping adventure.
But within the first few hours, Hugh plowed into a cow in the Siskiyou Mountains and wrecked the car. He had to spend several days in Ashland while it was being repaired. Hugh left the car with their father in Eugene and returned by train, but then he was stopped on the station’s platform in Ashland and questioned by a special agent assigned to keep an eye out for illegal activity. Hugh avoided trouble with the investigator, but he was forced to walk almost twenty miles back from Ashland. All this should have been a signal—a good reason to just quit. But the brothers pushed through.
Roy rubbed his knee as he sat on the hill. The twins had their own troubles after Hugh left for Oregon. The pair decided to sneak down to the tunnel one night for a closer look. It was dark, and after they poked around they heard a freight train chugging toward the tunnel. The brothers hid, intending to hop aboard and ride back toward their cabin. Roy scrambled onto the platform as he heard the clanking of the train wheels growing louder.
“I hit the platform with my knee,” said Roy, “and it just about paralyzed me.”
He screamed and landed on the wooden planks, unable to catch up to the train. Ray glanced back and hopped off. It was useless—the twins would have to hobble to their cabin two miles away, “discouraged and depressed, ready for anything.”
While Ray and Roy waited for Hugh to return, they reflected on their plan, now only two days away. Roy wondered if they were foolish—perhaps they should just move ahead with his suggestion to buy some property and live a simple life. But Roy lamented the certain loss of his young girlfriend, and the men had hoped to help their parents and brothers. The train robbery had to be done, they decided.
Hugh finally returned from Ashland by foot, hours late and almost broke. He was exhausted from the luckless trip, while Roy was still healing an injured knee. The twins glanced at each other and asked Hugh earnestly one final time to reconsider.
“Hugh, you don’t know what you are going into,” Roy insisted. “If we fail in this, it means you are a dead man.”
Hugh was steadfast. “Boys, I don’t give a damn. I will take my chances.”
* * *
—
They popped open their pocket watches—it was twelve p.m. on October 11, and No. 13 was supposed to arrive around one p.m.
“It was pretty near always on time,” said Roy. “We went around, Hugh and me, and left Ray standing at the south end of the tunnel.”
Ray carried a sawed-off shotgun stuffed with buckshot; he was agitated as he chain-smoked cigarettes, leaning against the concrete wall. Hidden close to the mouth of the tunnel was the bag stuffed with dynamite along with the blasting machine, that fire engine red DuPont detonator. Roy and Hugh eyed the Southern Pacific train as it pulled through the north portal of the tunnel and began to slow. Engineer Sid Bates gently applied the brake.
“Hugh, go out,” Roy yelled.
The brothers began to run as Hugh scrambled onto the blind baggage carriage, an open car behind the tinder. The engineer spotted Hugh and quickly pulled the throttle wide-open, increasing the locomotive’s speed. Roy struggled as he ran alongside—his knee still wasn’t quite right. He was frantic as he dropped the .45-caliber Colt pistol with all eight cartridges still loaded.
“The worst I was scared on the whole job was right then when I thought I was going to miss that train,” said Roy. “I was running to beat hell and losing ground.”
Hugh climbed down the car’s steps while Roy pumped his arms, hoping to catch up to the train as it picked up speed. Hugh turned around, stretched his leg back, and offered his brother a foot. Roy lunged forward and grabbed Hugh’s boot, crawling toward his leg, hurling his body toward the steps and onto the carriage. Roy was convinced that no one had seen them as they snuck toward the engine cab in front of the train. Roy whispered to Hugh to give the engineer his orders, while Roy would handle twenty-three-year-old fireman Marvin Seng, the youngest member of the train’s crew.
“Stop your train with the engine cab just clear of the tunnel,” Ray yelled as Bates adjusted the throttle. “If you fail to do so the fireman will take your place because you will be dead.”
Roy turned to the fireman, who was now alarmed by the pair of young men with dark, greased faces, one armed with a revolver.
“If the engineer fails to stop the train with the cab just clear of the tunnel,” Roy declared, “you are to take his place because he will be dead.”
As Bates peered through his round, wire-rimmed glasses at the brothers, Roy became suddenly agitated.
“I told him to keep his eyes off of me,” he said. “The engineer acted like he thought it was a joke. He could see we were young.”
The engineer quickly applied the brake, and No. 13 slowly screeched to a stop. The engine cab poked out from the mouth at the south end, with the remainder of the train (including the precious mail carriage, containing the loot the boys wanted to grab) and its passengers trapped inside the three-thousand-foot-long tunnel. Hugh pointed his revolver at the fireman and the engineer and ordered them to step off the train.
Ray watched steam fill the tunnel and realized that their plan had actually worked—the brothers had hijacked No. 13. Roy was eyeing the mail carriage, their main target, when he noticed a man’s head pop out of the open side door. U.S. Postal Services mail clerk Elvyn Dougherty spotted Ray holding a shotgun and, in a panic, retreated. Ray lifted his gun, quickly aimed, and fired, missing the clerk. Dougherty stuck out his head again as Ray gathered the suitcase with dynamite sticks inside. The clerk slammed the door shut and barred it, locking himself inside the mail carriage to protect its cargo. Roy scurried over to Ray—now they were both standing in front of the mail car. Ray handed Roy the suitcase with orders to place it, along with some extra sticks, at the mouth of the tunnel near the train car.
The front of the train ruptured, and its wheels lurched off the tracks, ruining their plan to disconnect the mail car from the remainder of the train. Worse, the dynamite turned the mail car into an incinerator by overturning a coal-burning stove inside, setting the room on fire. The mail clerk, Elvyn Dougherty, burned to death at his post, leaving behind a wife and young son. The thirty-five-year-old’s charred spine lay exposed in the rubble hours later.
“I killed the mail clerk,” Roy admitted.
The entire train trembled—glass shattered around the passengers. One man in the smoking car cradled his bloody head. Glass shards sliced the artery in another man’s leg. The passengers assumed that the engine had exploded and were alarmed by the smoke and putrid smell.
The tunnel filled with black smoke, steam, and fumes. Flashlights were useless—the brothers couldn’t see a thing. Roy crawled on the ground, desperately hoping to find Ray and Hugh. He could hear screaming. They wanted to uncouple the mail car, but now the carriage was smoldering, and the steel was scalding. Roy had grabbed the two metal pieces clasped together and was trying to pull them apart when something scared him. The train’s brakeman, dressed in dark overalls, jogged toward the train’s left side and waved a lantern aglow with a red light. Roy pulled out a gun, yelling to Charles “Coyle” Johnson to put up his hands.
“I told him that his life was in greater danger than it had ever been before,” said Roy.
Sensing the robber’s agitation, the thirty-six-year-old agreed to help. Johnson disconnected the steam hose, but when he grabbed the lever that controlled the coupling, the brakeman struggled to release it. It was no use.
“He said to uncouple it you had to pull ahead with the engine while you pulled that up,” Roy said.
Roy didn’t trust Johnson, but he allowed him to hop on the train—arms up in surrender—to tell his brothers that the engineer should move the train forward. Johnson jumped on the carriage, but Roy didn’t notice whether he had actually put his hands in the air.
Roy flinched when he heard the blasts—the crack of a shotgun and a pistol shot. He listened. The brakeman was dead, he was certain. He would later learn that, as Johnson lay dying from a bullet to the stomach, he muttered, “That other fellow said to pull the thing ahead.”
“I think he forgot to put his hands up in the air,” said Roy. “They thought he had killed me.”
The engine still hadn’t moved, so Roy ran toward the mail carriage and stood at the car’s opening. It was bewildering—smoke and steam everywhere encircling twisted, sharp metal that was once something useful but was now indiscernible. The incredible heat contorted the walls of the carriage while the paint on the exterior was peeling. The stench of sulfur was overwhelming. The tunnel was also severely damaged—the explosion broke and charred the interior timber posts.
Roy dropped to his hands and knees and began scrounging for money, anything they could steal that would redeem this dismal mistake. Ray, Hugh, and the engineer tried to turn the train by pushing the throttle to make it move. It was futile—the huge charge of dynamite had knocked at least one section from the tracks. Now all three DeAutremont brothers were glaring at Sid Bates as he vainly worked the throttle.
“The engineer wasn’t trying to pull that mail car,” said Roy. “We all thought so.”
The brothers yelled at Bates and Seng, the fireman, to pull the mail car out of the tunnel now. The steam was thickening, and the black smoke burned their eyes. The hiss of engine was deafening. It was a chaotic scene for a peaceful place like the Siskiyou Mountains. Roy was furious at their luck, and as the fireman stood near the engine, the brothers whispered to one another. Roy nodded, snatched Ray’s pistol, and aimed at Martin Seng.
“I shot him with his hands in the air,” said Roy.
Seng fell to the ground after two shots, his striped cap still on his head. His eyes stayed open as blood dripped down his nose. Roy had killed two men: the mail clerk and the fireman. His brothers had killed the brakeman. Of the witnesses who could identify them, only Sid Bates, the engineer, was left alive. The fifty-year-old was the veteran of the train’s crew, with a nearly thirty-year career with Southern Pacific. It was rumored that he would soon retire.
Roy faced the mail car, readying himself to go inside the blackness. It was too daunting—he refused to explore the carriage without someone there to protect him.
“We will have to see if we can get anything out of the car where it is,” Roy yelled to Ray. “We can’t get it out of the tunnel.”
The twins stepped inside the car and choked on the smoke and fumes. They stumbled over bags and walked carefully around a hole in the floor. They both fretted over finding the burned corpse of mail clerk Elvyn Dougherty. Roy gagged.
“The mail was all just blown to hell,” he said, “and all on fire.”
He told Ray it would be at least an hour before the smoke would clear, and if they waited, a posse sent from nearby Ashland would certainly hunt them down and lynch them. The men watched Bates as the engineer sat peering out the window of the left-hand side of the cab. Ray called out to Hugh, standing in the engine room and holding his Colt .45.
“Bump him off and come on.”
Within seconds Sid Bates was dead from a shotgun blast to the back of his head. Powder burns singed his skin. The brothers had just killed each of the four eyewitnesses—there was no one left to reliably identify them and no real evidence to link them.
The brothers were now murderers without money. If there had been any loot left to salvage in the mail carriage, it was hidden by the smoke and debris. They dropped the burlap sacks, along with a pair of leather gloves, a cap, and a small suitcase. They never bothered to collect the red detonator or the pair of greasy overalls still hidden in the thick weeds.
A .45-caliber Colt pistol was lying inside the tunnel, though it would be impossible to trace without a legible serial number. Without hope of gaining any earnings from their ill-fated train robbery, the DeAutremont brothers did the only thing they could—they ran. As the train creaked from the jolt of a sensational blast, the three hapless robbers disappeared into the beautiful thick of pines lining the mountains. By late that afternoon, the largest manhunt in United States history began, a panicked search that unleashed thousands of volunteers, deputies, federal agents, and bloodhounds across the Pacific Northwest.
* * *
—
Edward Oscar Heinrich lingered over the collection of evidence spread carefully across his heavy wooden laboratory table. He gave each clue just a cursory glance because he knew that a simple pair of spectacles would never solve the mystery of the vanishing train robbers. Two special agents, including one with the federal government, milled around his Berkeley lab mid-morning on October 16, 1923. Local sheriff’s deputies in Oregon were poorly equipped to process a murder scene, so Southern Pacific Railroad and the U.S. Postal Service, the employers of the four murdered men, dispatched their own investigators.
By the fifth day, the seasoned agents were simply stumped, left inert by a mystery with few clues. Confused passengers couldn’t even agree on the number of suspects. A baggage clerk saw just two men running toward the front of the train. The agents spent days examining the evidence left behind, only to label each piece useless. There was almost no trace evidence, no viable hidden clues to be mined.
“Nothing doing,” the local sheriff told reporters, “except the finding of a couple of leads that may work out into something.”
Despite scant evidence, the sheriff’s deputies quickly made an arrest in a nearby town, hauling a shocked suspect to
jail who seemed to be tied to the few circumstantial clues at the scene. And now the agents were crowding Oscar’s lab, insisting they needed the forensic scientist to prove the man’s guilt.
Oscar Heinrich’s business had matured well since his investigations into the cases of Father Heslin and Fatty Arbuckle. He had accepted an unprecedented number of clients, and he continued to garner international attention, but he still seemed dissatisfied. The shadow cast by Fatty Arbuckle’s multiple trials haunted him, chasing him from case to case, because most juries still seemed dazed by his scientific evidence.
In 1922 and early 1923, Oscar Heinrich had worked on more than one hundred cases including forgeries, kidnappings, disputed wills, and, of course, violent crime. He investigated the murder of Anna Wilkens in San Francisco, whose husband killed her and then blamed carjackers. The still-unsolved murder of Hollywood director and actor William Desmond Taylor had stymied the nation’s top detectives, including Oscar.
While most criminal trials were settled in Oscar’s favor, juries still mistrusted science and doubted the experts who espoused its credibility. A brilliant forensic expert, Oscar now believed, was crippled in most American courtrooms.
“The more learned the chemist, the more unskillfully would he drape words and clauses about an idea,” Oscar complained to John Boynton Kaiser, “until it resembled pictorially and structurally the benzene nucleus and side chains of his chemical notebook.”
When a scientist defended the merits of his own methodology on the stand, many jurors responded with dreamy, distracted gazes. That scene, repeated over and over again in courthouses during Oscar’s career, was simply maddening to the byzantine mind of a persnickety forensic scientist.
* * *
—
Investigators stood over the bodies of the three railway workers, now lying on the ground outside the tunnel. The postal worker’s body was still smoldering inside the charred mail carriage. Within hours the sleepy countryside of Northern California and southern Oregon came alive with posses from both states hunting for clues. Bloodhounds dragged deputies along rocky trails, but it was windy, so the dogs had a tough time.
American Sherlock Page 15