Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 62, No. 2, October 3, 1931

Without Mercy, Without Reason — the Red Career of Fred Burke, Gangdom’s Monster!

I

It was shortly after seven o’clock one Saturday evening in December that Forrest Kool, a young farmer, was driving along the rolling highway fringing the shores of Lake Michigan near the little resort town of St. Joseph, Michigan. A full moon cast a shimmery sheen across the lake, and shed a soft, still splendor over the snow-covered countryside. In the front seat of Kool’s light Ford sedan was Mrs. Kool, and in the rear seat were their ten-year-old son and Mrs. Kool’s mother, Mrs. Walter Carlson, of Baroda. Christmas was only ten days away and there was the holiday shopping to be done that evening.

As Kool drove his car along the broad highway, another car, a large blue Hudson coupe, drew abreast, careening wildly from one side of the road to the other.

“That man must be drunk!” exclaimed Mrs. Kool nervously.

As she uttered the words the driver of the big coupe steered madly — deliberately it seemed — into Kooks light sedan, crashing into the side of the lighter car and hurtling it into a shallow ditch at the side of the road. The coupe continued down the road for about one hundred yards and stopped. The driver got out clumsily, and walked back to where young Kool was examining his shattered fender.

“How much for the damage?” demanded the man. There was an odor of liquor on his breath and his eyes were bloodshot. He was a powerful appearing person, two hundred pounds or more in weight, with a ruddy complexion and a long underlip. One of his upper front teeth was missing. Kool, who spent his days in the fields and came into town only on Saturday nights, was ignorant of the fact that several thousands of detectives and police officers throughout the United States were looking for a man with a missing front tooth... a man with a ruddy complexion, a long underlip and weighing two hundred and ten pounds.

“Well, I don’t know just how much damage has been done.” Kool said. “But we can go into a garage and find out what is needed to put it back into shape.”

“No: we settle up now,” protested the large man.

The young farmer finally proposed that the stranger pay him twenty-five dollars. The price seemed agreeable to the man and he took a bulky roll of bills from his pocket, peeling off several one-hundred-dollar and fifty-dollar notes. Then he suddenly stuffed the money back into his pocket.

“Say, you can’t get away with this,” he said sullenly. “You know your whole damned car isn’t worth twenty-five dollars.”

And then he staggered off down the road.

“Just as you say,” Kool called after him. “We’ll let some one else settle for us.”

Kool went back to his car. He finally succeeded in prying the damaged fender from off the tire, and drove on. As he passed the blue coupe, which was still standing in the middle of the highway, he saw the stranger slumped over the wheel staring vaguely ahead. A few hundred feet farther on, Kool glanced into the rear view mirror and saw the coupe following, a short distance behind.

As Kool passed a tourist camp about a mile from the city limits, the blue coupe roared alongside, and again the driver steered his car at Kool, who swerved suddenly to the side of the road and narrowly avoided a second collision. Both cars came to a halt and the drivers alighted to renew their argument.

“You’re drunk and I won’t argue with you,” Kool said at last and started back to his car.

“Do you know who I am?” shouted the man.

“No, and I don’t care.”

If he had known... a man with forty-one thousand five hundred dollars on his head... the most heartless, most widely hunted, and called by police the most dangerous man in the world!

Kool drove into St. Joseph with the blue coupe still close behind. At State and Broad Streets, in the center of the town, he saw Policeman Charles Skelly standing at the curb, and he pulled over to the side of the street. He called to Skelly. As the officer approached his car, the blue coupe, traveling at a fast clip, shot by on Broad Street.

“There he goes now!” cried Mrs. Kool. “That man struck our car, forced us into the ditch, and then tried to hit us a second time.”

The officer jumped onto the running board of Kool’s sedan with a terse order, “Follow him!”

At State and Ship Streets, a block farther on, a red traffic light halted both cars, and as Kool drew alongside the blue coupe Officer Skelly called out:

“Say, mister, hadn’t you better settle with this man and save yourself a lot of trouble?”

The ruddy-faced man appeared not to hear the officer. Just then the traffic light changed and he sped off, turning south on Main Street. Skelly, on the running board of Kool’s car, ordered more speed, and after two blocks the two cars were abreast again. A car drew out of a garage, forcing the blue coupe to slacken its speed, and Skelly took advantage of the opportunity to step from the Kool car to the running board of the coupe. The window on the driver’s side was lowered.

With a contemptuous glance at the blue police uniform, the ruddy-faced man reached into the pocket of the door and closed his fist around a forty-five caliber revolver. He fired, the bullet struck Skelly in the chest. The officer swung around dizzily, but gripped the car door. He clutched at his chest.

There was a second shot that imbedded itself in the officer’s right side, and as Skelly cried out in pain and swung from the car to the pavement the man with the missing front tooth laughed and fired again.

Skelly, reeling with faintness and crying with pain, was clawing at the revolver holster at his side when the third bullet struck him in the stomach.

As the young officer crumpled to the pavement in a heap, the man in the blue coupe put his car into motion and roared south on Main Street, which led to the Indiana-Michigan line twenty-five miles away.

A score of men and women saw the ruthless shooting of the young officer, but those who didn’t run for cover at the sound of the first shot were too dazed by the suddenness of the crime to intercede. J. J. Theisen, president of the Commercial Bank, was less than twenty-five feet from the blue coupe and within easy range of the mad motorist’s bullets.

As the big coupe raced southward from the scene, William Struever, of Benton Harbor, Michigan, a witness to the whole affair, and a cousin of Skelly, ran from the curb to the wounded officer lying in a pool of blood.

“Help me, Bill. I’m shot,” gasped Skelly. He was lifted into Struever’s automobile and rushed to the St. Joseph Sanitarium.

When the blue coupe with its crazed driver raced away, Kool put his car into gear and started in pursuit, but his wife, shouting hysterically, grabbed the wheel and turned the car off into a side street.

The sound of the shots had hardly died away before Harry R. Ohls, a witness to the shooting, was at a telephone in a grocery store near the scene telling Sheriff Fred G. Bryant that Skelly had been shot and that the man they wanted was speeding southward on Main Street. A minute or two later a car bearing Deputy John Lay and another officer roared over the spot where Skelly had fallen and sped on with siren shrieking.

At a sharp turn leading to the Lake Shore Boulevard, only eight blocks from the scene of the shooting, Deputy Lay came upon a crowd of excited neighbors grouped around an automobile, the front two wheels of which had been sheared off when it had leaped over a curb and into a telephone pole.

“Where’s the driver of this car?” demanded the officer who accompanied Deputy Lay.

“I don’t know, but I saw a man — a big man — crawl out and run south a second or two after the car crashed into the curb,” a woman explained, “That wasn’t two minutes ago.”

“Which way did he go?” questioned the officer.

“Through those back yards toward Winchester Avenue,” the woman said, pointing.

But a thorough search of the neighborhood by men armed with revolvers, limiting rifles and clubs discovered no trace of the large, ruddy-faced man with the missing front tooth. The trail appeared to have been lost.

II

A little sorrowful group waited silently in the operating room at the sanitarium that night as Dr. T. G. Yeomans, who had been elected mayor of St. Joseph a few months before, busied himself with his instruments and prepared to probe for the three bullets that had lodged themselves in Policeman Skelly’s rugged body.

Beside the operating table stood Mrs. Olga Moulds, of Benton Harbor, Skelly’s sister. She gripped the hand of her brother and tried to smile down on him through her tears. A nurse moved forward with the anaesthetic mask, and the young officer, biting his lip to stifle the pain, spoke.

“You’d better kiss me good-by now, sis.” Then, to Dr. Yeomans:

“Get that guy, doc!”

They were his last words. At eleven ten o’clock he died.

He was a twenty-five-year-old youth who had lived in and around St. Joseph all of his life, driven taxicabs, served as a member of the fire department and then as traffic officer. He was the victim of one of the most cold-blooded, heartless murders ever known. The fact that the killing was so pointless made it all the more ghastly.

Chief of Police Fred Alden, veteran head of the St. Joseph police force, instituted immediately the greatest manhunt ever known to the little resort region along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. City Manager James Crowe stood at the telephone almost constantly from the time of the shooting until six o’clock Sunday morning, broad-casting the alarm to cities, towns and hamlets through a half dozen States. The headquarters of the State police in East Lansing and Paw Paw were notified, and special patrols were sent out on the highways.

Police departments were notified in Chicago, East Chicago, South Chicago, Gary. Hammond. South Bend, Michigan City, Niles. Valparaiso, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids. Muskegon, Battle Creek, Jackson, Ann Arbor. Detroit, Toledo. Cleveland. Milwaukee. St. Louis. Louisville, and scores of smaller towns and villages.

In the excitement of the manhunt a half dozen tips on the whereabouts of the hunted man were received and a posse of armed men tracked each one down with breathless frenzy.

First the officers went to a lunch stand at Bridgman, twelve miles away, where a bulky, rosy-faced man was reported. A few minutes later fifteen heavily armed deputies, acting on a telephone tip, rushed into the home of a farmer near Bridgman and routed the farmer and his wife, both of whom were unaware of the murder, out of their bed.

Every police officer for miles around was mustered into service and citizens were mobilized and hurriedly sworn in as deputies by Sheriff Bryant. All trains entering or leaving the county were stopped and searched. A dozen St. Joseph firemen strapped forty-fives onto their hips and demanded a part in tracking down the slayer of their former comrade.

“If you see the man, shoot to kill!” ordered the sheriff as he swore in the groups of special deputies and provided them with weapons. When the supply of guns gave out, bludgeons and blackjacks were distributed.

During these wild scenes in the county jail, where the men gathered, a farmer living south of town walked into the sheriff’s office and stepping meekly up to a deputy said:

“I think I can tell you the name of the man you’re looking for. It’s Fred Dane, a fellow who lives out on Lake Shore Drive about three miles south of here. He and his wife live out there in a swell little bungalow.”

“I know that fellow,” spoke one man.

“But he can’t be a killer, not that quiet man,” said another.

“Well, it was his car that crashed into the curb,” insisted the farmer. “I saw it, and Dane’s a big fellow with a missing front tooth.”

It was less than an hour after the cold-blooded slaying of Officer Skelly that Sheriff Bryant picked up the trail of the killer. A group of picked officers under Deputy Erwin Kubath were strapping guns onto themselves in preparation for an attack on the little bungalow on the shore of Lake Michigan when a wild-eyed man stumbled into the jail.

He was an Israelite, one of the bearded members of the strange House of David religious cult on the outskirts of Benton Harbor, and his long whiskers fairly bristled with excitement.

“I’ve been held up!” he stammered. “Got here as soon as I could. Man stuck a gun into my ribs — forced me to drive him to Stevensville — tried to—”

“Just a minute,” interrupted Sheriff Bryant. “What did this man look like?”

“He was a big man, forty or forty-five, and he must weigh close to two hundred pounds. He wore a cap and a light buff-colored sweater. He had a mustache and I guess he had been drinking.”

“That’s him!”

“Who?” asked Monroe Wolff, the Israelite.

“The murderer!”

“I didn’t know there’d been a murder. And here I’ve been helping a murderer get away!”

The Israelite then explained that he had been seated in his automobile waiting for his wife, about three blocks from the intersection where Deputy John Lay had found the killer’s blue coupe with the two smashed wheels a few minutes before. A man dressed in a cap and buff sweater ran limping across the street and jumped in beside him, Wolff said, sticking a gun into his ribs and ordering:

“Beat it south and be quick about it!”

Wolff started the car, but, feigning that he knew little about driving, managed to have considerable difficulty in shifting the gears. His kidnaper stuffed the gun in his ribs again and threatened to kill him if he didn’t drive faster. They sped out Lake Shore drive — past the little bungalow three miles south of town where Fred Dane lived — and through the small villages — just ahead of the telephone alarm.

Beyond Stevensville, at a point about seven miles from town, Dane became violently sick and ordered Wolff to stop the car.

He alighted and backed away from the car, keeping his gun leveled on Wolff. The Israelite put the car into gear, reckless of his danger, and sped away, leaving the man standing in the middle of the road shaking his fist above his head at the disappearing automobile.

Another man came to the jail to provide additional information. The man was Albert Wisehart, a farmer, who said that Dane, who was a neighbor, had stopped him south of Stevensville and ordered him to drive back to the town, a distance of about two miles. When Wisehart refused to go over an almost impassable dirt road east of town instead of using the concrete highway. Dane leaped from the car with a curse and disappeared in the darkness.

When Wisehart last saw him, Dane was only about three and a half or four miles from the bungalow where he lived.

“He’s not far from here, men!” exclaimed Sheriff Bryant. “Get out to that house — and don’t take any chances with him!”

III

A group of eight deputies, led by Deputy Kubath and Chief of Police Fred Alden jumped into two large automobiles and sped out the Lake Shore drive. The cars were parked in a lane a short distance from the house and the officers, divided into two groups, crept up to the place. There was no sign of a light.

Kubath knocked at the back door. After a wait that seemed like several minutes a woman’s voice called out, “Who’s there?”

“Sheriff’s men. Open the door!” answered Kubath.

The door was opened and a short, plump woman with bobbed hair peered out. She wore a bathrobe over a nightgown.

“We’re looking for Fred Dane — is he here?” demanded Officer Kubath.

“Why, no; I don’t know where he is,” answered the woman, stammering nervously at the sight of the officer’s drawn guns. “I came in from Chicago on the eight o’clock train and he was supposed to meet me at the station in St. Joseph, but he wasn’t there, so I took a taxicab and came home. What’s the matter, what—”

“Never mind,” interrupted Kubath, adding, “we’ll have a look around here, I guess.”

The officers stalked cautiously through the well-furnished little home, peering into darkened rooms and closets.

“Who are you?” asked Kubath of the startled woman.

“I’m Mrs. Fred Dane, and I don’t like this at all. Busting in on a woman at this time of night.”

The house appeared to be empty save for the woman, and the officers were about to give up their search and return to the county jail when Deputy Frank Priebe, rummaging around upstairs, called the others. A half dozen men with gun ready leaped up the stairs.

Priebe stood with arms akimbo before the open door of a clothes closet and there was a puzzled, frightened look on his face.

The officers looked into the small dark closet, which was lighted only by the ray from a flash light, and saw, neatly stacked on the floor and on shelves, all the weapons of a small arsenal — machine guns, rifles, steel vests, ammunition drums, pistols, tear gas bombs!

With murmured exclamations of awe the officers went down on their knees and pawed over the deadly instruments — instruments no peaceful gentleman-farmer would have cached away in his country home.

There were two machine guns, one completely assembled and ready for its deadly business and the other knocked down and packed in a black suitcase. There was a case containing six rifles, all high-powered. Ammunition was everywhere, in glass jars, in machine gun drums and scattered about on the floor.

There were four bullet-proof vests of thin, flexible steel, a sawed-off shotgun with pistol grip, two bags of forty-five caliber ammunition to refill the machine gun drums, and a half dozen tear gas bombs. The machine guns were of Thompson make with nine ammunition drums of one hundred shots each and three twenty-shot clips.

On the shelf was a neatly wrapped and tied bundle, and as Deputy Kubath tore the heavy brown paper from it several green embossed papers fell to the floor. Bonds! Three hundred and nineteen thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars in bonds!

Kubath ordered the woman brought upstairs and as she was led before the gaping closet door and confronted with the exhibit she shrank back with a cry of horror, clasping her hands over her eyes.

“Oh, where did those things come from?” she cried.

“Do you mean to say you didn’t know they were in the house?” asked Kubath.

“I never saw them before. I tell you I never saw them before.”

“I guess you had better come along with us,” the officer told her.

She went to dress, returning a few minutes later garbed in an expensive mink coat — a Christmas present from her husband a year before, she explained.

Back at the jail there was wild excitement. The four-party telephone line serving the Dane home had been tapped by City Manager James Crowe while the officers were at the little bungalow, and an intercepted message had landed Steve Kooney, one of the killer’s neighbors, in jail.

Kooney, who talked in broken English to the officers, had been heard telephoning to a farmer living about two miles away about Dane’s escape. Kooney lived in a modest little home less than two hundred rods from the Dane bungalow.

“What do you know about Dane, and where did you see him to-night?” demanded the sheriff.

“Well. Dane is my neighbor and I used to do a lot of odd jobs for him, especially when he was remodeling the bungalow last fall,” the man said in his broken English. “He always carried a big roll of bills and boasted to me that he made three thousand dollars a month from some gasoline stations he owned in Gary, Indiana. My wife never liked Dane, but I thought that was just because he was such a windy fellow. No, I don’t know much about his house because I was in it only a few times.”

Kooney said that about nine thirty or ten o’clock that evening he and his wife were sitting in the parlor of their home when his wife looked out and saw a man standing in the driveway. Kooney, thinking it might be the chicken thief who had been prowling around the neighborhood, went outside and the man hurried toward him. The man was panting and his hair and clothes were disheveled. Then he recognized the man as Dane, his neighbor.

“I’ve got to see a man in Coloma right away and you’re going to drive me there: my car’s broken down,” Dane told Kooney, in a voice that carried a command. Kooney, who was ignorant of the slaying of Skelly, saw a revolver in Dane’s hand and asked him what the trouble was.

“I’m in a hell of a jam, but it’s none of your business,” the big man said. “Hurry up and get your car out and drive me out over the Napier Bridge to Coloma.”

They got into Kooney’s car and drove to Coloma, about fourteen miles north of St. Joseph on the shore of Paw Paw Lake, without being stopped by any of the half dozen officers who must have been patrolling the road. Dane got out of the car on the outskirts of the little town, flung a five-dollar bill at Kooney, and ran into the darkness.

Kooney returned to his home, unaware of the fact that he had aided the escape of a murderer.

When Sheriff Bryant had completed the questioning of Kooney and had ordered him released, Deputy Kubath turned to Police Chief Alden, a stocky man weighing considerably more than two hundred pounds, and jokingly remarked:

“Fred, I nearly took a shot at you by mistake when we were at that house a short while ago.”

“What do you mean?” asked Alden.

“Well,” explained Kubath. “I came out of the front door of the house to see that our cars were well hidden and I saw a man crouching near a hedge on the other side of the road. At first I thought it might be Dane and I called out, ‘Fred.’ The man didn’t move, so I decided it was you hiding out there to watch the roadway.”

“But I wasn’t outdoors. I was down in the basement of the house looking around,” said the chief.

“It was Fred, all right, Fred Dane,” said the sheriff. “He was doubling back to Kooney’s house and you fellows let him slip through your fingers.”

With the trail of the slayer lost fourteen miles to the north of St. Joseph, the officers set about checking up on the true identity of this fiendish, daring killer who kept a complete arsenal in his modest little hideout. The three hundred and nineteen thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars in bonds of various denominations, undoubtedly stolen, were the best means of fixing the identity of the slayer, Prosecuting Attorney Wilbur M. Cunningham said, and Sheriff Bryant agreed. George Selfridge, assistant cashier of the Farmers & Merchants National Bank in Benton Harbor, was called in and told to check the origin of the securities as quickly as possible.

IV

First a call was put in for Pontiac, Michigan, where there had been a recent bank holdup, then to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a robbery had been staged several weeks before. But these leads were unavailing. The serial numbers on the bonds didn’t check with the loot taken in the two cities.

“But you might call the bank of Jeffersonville, Wisconsin,” suggested a Milwaukee banker over the telephone. “They had a robbery up there some time ago and some bonds were stolen.”

Selfridge communicated with L. H. Smith, president of the Farmers & Merchants National Bank of Jeffersonville.

And there the serial numbers checked. The bonds found in the little bungalow were part of the three hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars carried away by four men who held up the Wisconsin bank six months before. About thirty-five thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds were missing, it was revealed.

“Who were the four men?” asked Sheriff Bryant, taking the telephone from Selfridge.

“Well, one of them was Fred R. Burke, the fellow they want so badly in Chicago,” came the reply over the wire.

Fred Burke, called by police the most dangerous man alive!

Could he be the man who had lived quietly as a gentleman-farmer in the little resort town for months?

The officers had known they were searching for a cruel, heartless killer. But now their quarry was revealed as the most vicious slayer of gangland, a man who could line seven men up against a wall and mow them down with a machine gun...

Sheriff Bryant went to a file and took from it a long poster with the big black type — $41,500 Reward — Fred Burke — Wanted For Murder! The poster, containing two photographs of the widely sought killer, was dated April 1, 1929, and bore the signature of William F. Russell. Chicago commissioner of police.

There were a half dozen aliases — John Burke, Robert Burke, John Thomas. Brooks, Camp, Kempt and Kemper.

And the description: “Forty-three years old, five feet eleven and three-quarter inches tall, weight two hundred pounds, black hair, brown eyes, ruddy complexion and missing upper front tooth.”

There was a note in bold face type at the bottom of the poster:

“Our ticket to this man’s hiding place — if he really is Burke — is coming from that woman in the cell upstairs.” Prosecutor Cunningham said.

But before they questioned the woman who said she was Mrs. Fred Dane — Viola, she said her first name was — the prosecutor and sheriff dispatched an officer to the homes of several St. Joseph merchants with the police photographs of Burke.

“Sure, I remember that man well,” said Edgar Smith, an employee of the American dry cleaners. “He’s Fred Dane, a steady customer of ours. I remember he bawled me out just a few days ago for printing identification marks on his clothing in indelible ink.”

A half dozen other merchants readily identified the photographs as those of Dane.

Queries were telegraphed to police departments throughout the country asking for information on Viola Dane or a woman meeting her description.

Then the prosecutor and sheriff went to the cell upstairs where the woman sat calmly looking out through the barred window into the still night. They told her about the murder of Skelly, about her husband’s flight, and about the stolen bonds. What did she know about it all?

Throughout the night they questioned her — first Cunningham and then the sheriff.

The woman, who said she was thirty-four years old and formerly operated a beauty parlor in Chicago, explained that she first met Dane in 1927 at a party in Chicago. She was an unwilling talker, and it took constant prodding to draw the story from her. Her eyes shifted constantly away from the glowering gaze of her questioners.

They were married in November, 1927, in Chicago, and went to live in Burnham, a suburb of Hammond, Indiana, she told the officers. Burnham, the officers reflected, was known as the Indiana hideout of Chicago’s south side gangsters and for years had enjoyed the reputation of a wide-open town. Its killings had been frequent. It was in October, 1929, that her husband had purchased the Lake Shore Drive home in St. Joseph.

Then she broke down.

“Oh, I can hardly believe it,” she sobbed. “But if he’s all that you tell me then I hope you capture him. Why couldn’t I have known about this. They call women dumb, and I guess they are.

“Shield him? Never; now that I know what he is I hope he gets all that’s coming to him. Murder! Anything but that.”

They asked her about her husband’s relatives, but she knew of none. And he never told her about his friends. Once in a while he would have some visitors from Chicago, but she never became acquainted with them. There was a woman called “Hon” and a man nicknamed “Prince” who came to St. Joseph several times.

“Do you have any photographs of your husband?” asked the prosecutor.

“No,” she replied simply. “He didn’t like them and would never have any taken.”

“He wouldn’t,” said the prosecutor.

She knew little about the man to whom she had been married for two years. He never cursed or swore, she said, and even objected to slang. But sometimes he drank more wine than was good for his disposition.

“But when he was sober no woman ever had a better husband,” she added, “He always spoke kindly of every one and was always willing to help any one.”

“Did he ever talk with you about bank robberies?” asked the sheriff.

“I remember him saying what fools men were to take chances like that. He happened to mention it when we were reading about some bank robberies in the newspapers.”

“What are you going to do now, divorce him?” asked Cunningham.

“Do you think I’d live with him now?” she replied with scorn. “Not after he shot a man down in cold blood and run away like a yellow cur.”

V

During the next twenty-four hours, events moved swiftly in the feverish hunt for the slayer of Officer Charles Skelly.

Sunday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the slaying, the St. Joseph city commission convened in special session at the call of Mayor T. G. Yeomans and a ten thousand dollar reward was posted for the killer.

John Stege, deputy commissioner of detectives in Chicago, notified Sheriff Bryant that it appeared certain that the slayer of Skelly was none other than Burke, whom he described as the most dangerous man ever known with a machine gun.

Reports were received, amazing, formidable reports that linked Burke with a score of major crimes — ransom kidnapings in Detroit over a period of eight years, the murder of a patrolman in a Toledo mail truck holdup; a bank robbery at Cadillac, Michigan, where sixty thousand dollars were taken; the robbery of ninety-three thousand dollars from the First National Bank of Peru. Indiana; the slaying of two men in an apartment in Detroit; a St. Louis bank holdup; and another bank robbery in Louisville, Kentucky.

But greater than all of these crimes was the linking of the most horrible crime of modern times to this ruddy-faced man — the St. Valentine’s day massacre in Chicago!

On February 14, 1929, ten months to the day before the slaying of Skelly on the streets of St. Joseph, seven men, members of George “Bugs” Moran’s liquor dealing mob, were surprised in their garage hangout at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago by four men. Two of the four carried machine guns and wore police uniforms.

The seven Moran gangsters were lined up against a wall and mowed down by the men who were masquerading in police uniforms. One of the seven men was still alive when police arrived, but he refused to talk.

Theories were advanced by the scores and men arrested by the dozens, only to be released after questioning. Then police officials announced that one of the men in a police uniform had been identified as Burke, known as a henchman of Scarface Al Capone.

Burke. Chicago police said, was one of four men hired by the Capone organization to wipe out the Moran gang in retribution for the murders of Pasqualino Lolordo and Tony Lombardo, of the Capone-Lombardo faction. Two of the other kills were Joseph Lolordo, brother of Pasqualino, and James Ray, of St. Louis, companion of Burke.

As in the killing of Skelly, it was Burke’s missing front tooth that led to the linking of his already infamous name to the massacre.

That Sunday afternoon, in St. Joseph, Chief of Police Alden received a telephone message from Officer Richard Anderson of the Des Moines, Iowa, police department, identifying Mrs. Fred Dane as one of the most desperate criminal characters of the west — a murderess and a highway robber! She had served time in the Missouri State Penitentiary for murder and highway robbery, and was known under the aliases of Viola Daniels and Viola Kane, the latter an alias frequently adopted by Burke.

Burke, the Des Moines officer also volunteered, was wanted there for leadership in two bank robberies and was known as James “Cornbread” Burchell. A confederate in one of the holdups had squealed on Burke and was serving time in prison, it was said.

“We’ll get the truth out of this woman now,” Prosecutor Cunningham announced.

But Viola Dane was sullen. She admitted nothing.

“That’s all a lie!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never been in trouble in my life.”

And she hadn’t. The next day when photographs and finger-print records of Viola Daniels and Viola Kane were received from Missouri they failed to correspond with those of the woman held in St. Joseph as Burke’s wife.

“Nevertheless, she hasn’t told us all she knows about this,” Cunningham insisted.

Deputy Police Commissioner Stege of Chicago came to the St. Joseph jail, and was closeted with the woman for more than an hour. When he came out of the cell, wiping the beads of perspiration from his forehead he admitted that he had been unable to extract any helpful information from her. Patrick Roche, chief investigator for the State Attorney’s office in Cook County, tried it. And he failed.

Couldn’t anything break this woman down? Every attempt had failed, but there remained one strong weapon — jealousy.

On Tuesday afternoon they buried Officer Skelly with all the honors that could be bestowed by a citizenry roused to the white heat of hatred over so ruthless a killing. More than four thousand persons, from the youngsters he used to call to on the streets to high police officials from cities of the Middle West, passed by his bier.

And during the funeral services word came to the county jail that Burke and a woman companion had spent the previous night at a tourist camp near Flint, Michigan. Mrs. S. H. Jarvis, operator of the camp, had identified Burke’s picture and said the man had told her he was on his honeymoon.

“He seemed all wrapped up in the girl,” Mrs. Jarvis told police. “She was very beautiful, bobbed golden hair and long, curling eyelashes.”

So Prosecutor Cunningham and Sheriff Bryant, determined to play what they regarded as a hole card, went upstairs to the women’s cell block and faced Viola Dane.

“Well, I guess we’re closing in on your husband,” the prosecutor said, with a casual smile. “He stayed at a tourist camp near Flint last night with a beautiful young blonde he introduced as his wife.”

The woman jumped to her feet.

“It’s a lie — a dirty lie!” she cried.

The prosecutor repeated Mrs. Jarvis’s report.

“I don’t believe it — you’re just trying to give me the works,” the woman sobbed.

The officers waited for her to recover her composure. And after several minutes of gentle persuasion she broke down and admitted that her story to them had been fictitious. She was really Mrs. Viola Brenneman, and she and Dane, as she continued to call him, were not married.

Her maiden name was Viola Ostroski and she had married John Brenneman in Kankakee, Illinois, in 1912 and divorced him two years later. Her mother lived in Kankakee, she said.

“I was living in Chicago when Gladys Davidson, a friend of mine, invited me to go to Hammond for a party,” she said. “That was in June, 1928. Fred, who lived at Burnham, was at the party and I became acquainted with him. In the summer of 1928 we went to Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and took a log cabin for several weeks and in the fall we went to Hammond to live in an apartment.

“He always told me he would marry me as soon as he could get a divorce from his wife, and so she wouldn’t find out about us we lived under the name of Reed in Hammond and later, when we went to Gary to live, he used the name of Herbert Church.”

“Did you ever see these business cards before?” the prosecutor interrupted, handing her a card which had been found in the bungalow on Lake Shore Drive. They showed the name of Herbert Church, salesman for the Columbia Commercial Feed Company, 1222 Wrigley Building, Chicago. Cunningham had found out that such a concern never occupied offices in the Wrigley Building, and that Herbert Church was unknown there.

“Yes, I’ve seen them,” she replied. “He told me that was his business, but I never knew much about his affairs.”

They moved to St. Joseph in September, 1929, from Gary, she explained, and Dane was never away from home more than two or three hours at a time.

“Do you know where you and Fred were on St. Valentine’s Day, last February?” Prosecutor Cunningham asked.

“We were living in Hammond. I remember the day distinctly because he brought me a big bouquet of chrysanthemums,” she answered quickly. “He left our home about seven o’clock that morning and did not return until about eleven o’clock. I remember it so well because he came home and I asked him about dinner and he told me to run down to the delicatessen store and buy something. But I persuaded him to go out and get some food for me to cook. I think he ordered the flowers when he went out for the groceries. That afternoon he went out to get some magazines and was gone about a couple of hours.”

The St. Valentine’s Day massacre in the North Clark Street garage occurred about eleven o’clock on the morning of February 14. 1929.

Viola Brenneman, as she had revealed herself, had thrown up an alibi for Burke, but feminine jealousy, aroused by the story of the beautiful blonde, had given the officers some new information.

VI

That same afternoon the entire town was thrown into an uproar of frenzied excitement when Roche announced to newspaper men that Burke’s hideout was surrounded and that he would be in jail before nightfall.

Captain Fred Armstrong of the Michigan State Police said that Burke was hiding in a cottage on the shore of Paw Paw Lake at Coloma, nursing an injury received when his automobile had crashed into the curb as he fled from the scene of the Skelly shooting. That night a squad of heavily armed deputies swooped down on the spotted cottage with machine guns, tear gas bombs and rifles, and were rewarded with the capture of a drunken caretaker.

Four days after the slaying of Skelly, two of Sheriff Bryant’s deputies, Charles H. Andrews and Erwin Kubath, went to Chicago carrying with them two cumbersome suitcases containing the machine guns found in the bungalow. They were taken to Chicago at the request of Major Calvin C. Goddard, New York ballistic expert, who had been called to aid in clearing up the St. Valentine’s Day slaughter.

And on December 23 Major Goddard went before the Cook County coroner’s jury and testified that the bullets which hailed death upon the seven Moran gangsters on that St. Valentine’s Day were fired from the two machine guns found cached in the bungalow in St. Joseph.

Fred Burke, the most vicious journeyman killer, was definitely linked with the slaughter — all because he lost his head in a minor traffic mishap in the little town where he had lived peacefully as a wealthy gentleman farmer!

Major Goddard explained his ballistic findings so convincingly that the jury unhesitatingly ordered Burke arrested for the grim assassination.

Examining the two guns, Major Goddard found that the serial numbering on the barrels had been carefully filed. But the application of a strong acid brought out the markings in their full intensity because of the effect of the stamping on the texture of the steel.

One bore the number 2347 and the other 2580, and it was a simple matter to trace their origins. They had been sold by a New York manufacturer to a Chicago dealer, who had in turn sold one of them to authorities of Marion County, Illinois, and the other to a man who had said he was purchasing it for Elgin, Illinois, police officers.

“Number 2347, and perhaps the other one, was used in the slaving of the seven Moran gangsters.” Major Goddard said.

Meanwhile, Viola Brenneman had engaged an attorney and was fighting for her release from jail in St. Joseph. A technical charge of receiving stolen goods had been placed against her by Prosecutor Cunningham, and he demanded ten thousand dollars bond for her release.

If she were released she might lead them to Burke.

After resting in jail for two weeks, she was released and went directly to the home of her mother in Kankakee. Officers trailed her, but their stalking yielded no clew to the killer. Finally they ceased their surveillance.

Reports of Burke, some vague and others apparently well founded, continued to pour in. He was reported seen, usually with blond women — one of his weaknesses since his first “job” with Egan’s Rats in St. Louis — in a half hundred American cities. Chicago’s gang hideouts, or at least some of them, were searched. Detroit police reported that he had crossed into Canada. He was reported seen in Springfield, Illinois, again in Gary, Indiana, and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Then Police Commissioner Grover Whalen of New York announced that Burke’s deadly weapons were also responsible for the murder of Frankie Yale, Brooklyn gang chief. Yale’s gorillas charged that Burke and James Ray were responsible. Yale had been suspected of having had a hand in the murders of “Big Jim” Colisimo and Dion O’Banion in Chicago in his capacity as the boss of gun handlers for Capone. Shortly before Yale’s sudden and inglorious demise, however, Yale and Capone had broken off friendly relations.

When Alfred “Jake” Lingle, the Chicago Tribune reporter, was shot last summer, John H. Alcock, now acting commissioner of police, said Burke might have had some part in that slaying.

It was not until mid-summer that the trail of Burke grew really hot. On the evening of July 24 Thomas Bonner, minor racketeer and stool pigeon on Chicago’s south side was slain in front of his home by two men who drove by in a Ford sedan and leveled a machine gun upon him. An investigation revealed to the police that only two days before Bonner and a Chicago druggist had driven to Hess Lake, near Newaygo, Michigan, where Burke was rumored to have been hiding out at a small resort.

Police were informed that Bonner had gone to the resort to learn of Burke’s hiding place in order that he might direct the authorities there and cut in on a portion of the ten thousand dollars reward money. Fifteen detectives led by Lieutenant John McGinnis of the homicide squad sped to the resort, to learn that the man they were hunting had left twenty minutes before.

It can be disclosed now that Burke’s escape on this occasion was caused by the carelessness of an officer who mentioned the impending raid in the presence of one of Burke’s friends.

The widow of Thomas Bonner is certain that Burke killed her husband.

“How do I know?” she says. “Why, didn’t they work together as brakemen years ago, and didn’t Burke hang around Tom’s saloon before prohibition? Don’t worry, I know Fred Burke. He was scared because he thought Tom was getting ready to squeal and cut in on the reward for the St. Valentine’s Day killings.”

Less than a month later a squad of St. Louis police raided a downtown hotel on a tip that Burke was hiding there, but instead they found a gambling house owner and a well-stocked arsenal. A month after the Merchants’ Trust Company in Paterson, New Jersey, was held up and robbed of twenty thousand dollars, and half a dozen terrorized girl employees identified Burke’s pictures from police files. More leads... leads to nowhere.

But there was one agency that continued its relentless scouring of the country for the mad killer. The United States Department of Justice, remembering the two hundred thousand dollar mail truck holdup in Toledo, Ohio, in which a policeman had been slain and Burke’s acquittal of a thirty-five thousand dollar railway express robbery in St. Louis in 1925, was determined that this man should be brought to justice. Operatives had been working continuously and secretly on the manhunt for months, and finally their opportunity came.

VII

It was late in December of 1930 — a year after the Skelly killing in St. Joseph, Michigan — that Joseph. Hunsaker, a lean-faced young truck driver, living in Green City, Missouri, about one hundred and seventy-five miles northeast of St. Joseph, Missouri, became suspicious of a stockily-built, black-haired stranger who visited a farm home three and one-half miles west of Green City frequently.

The stranger flashed a big roll of bills, went around in flashy clothes, and drove an expensive automobile. When he drove into town he never got out of his car, and he avoided the people in Green City.

Hunsaker had seen a picture of Fred Burke, his cold, steely eyes glowering, and over it the caption: “Thousands on His Head!”

There had been something familiar about that face — and those eyes. In the picture Burke was clean-shaven, but there was an unmistakable resemblance between him and the stranger with the big, expensive automobile and roll of bills.

The young driver browsed around the town, learning what he could of the stranger.

Bit by bit he learned that the man was known as White, and that he was supposed to be a big business man in Kansas City. Last summer he had married Bonnie Porter, the tall, slender, blond daughter of Barney Porter, at whose home near Green City he visited.

Hunsaker was satisfied that he had located the widely hunted killer. He sat clown and wrote a letter to the Department of Justice agents in Chicago. Three days later he received an important locking letter warning him to proceed cautiously, keeping an eye on the man until he received further orders. Chief of Police E. M. Matthews of St. Joseph, Missouri, also received a letter. He was asked to investigate the information supplied by the truck driver.

Three times a squad of St. Joseph police went to the little four-room farm house midway between Green City and Milan, making the trip in the middle of the night. But each time they learned from their informant that the man they sought had left shortly before.

It was decided that Hunsaker was to watch the stranger’s movements and notify the police the next time the man appeared at the Porter farm. As a double check, officers were dispatched to Kansas City to watch the movements of Burke’s wife, who was employed as a nurse in a doctor’s office.

It was about three o’clock on the morning of Thursday, March 26, that the call came from Hunsaker. Burke was at the Porter home and his big car was parked outside, he reported. His wife was in Kansas City. Hunsaker understood that her husband was to leave to join her in the morning.

The raiding party, under the command of Captain John Lard, was ready in an instant. Two high-powered cars, ready for just that moment, roared away to the north in the night. With Captain Lard were three detectives, A. W. Thedings, Melvin Swepston and E. R. Kelly, and at their feet were three machine guns, shotguns, and a half dozen tear gas bombs.

At Milan the two cars halted their furious race long enough to pick up Sheriff L. C. Hoover, of Sullivan County. Deputy Ralph Clubine and Constable A. F. Pickett, of Green City.

Arriving at the Porter home about dawn, the officers found a highly polished, powerful automobile parked alongside the house in a driveway. Captain Lard ordered one of the police automobiles driven in front of it, and the other police car halted behind it to prevent any attempted escape.

Silently the seven men slipped noiselessly up on the porch. They had intended to rush into the house, but Porter, awakened by the sound of the cars, met them at the door. A revolver was pushed into the ribs of the astonished man and he fell back without a word.

The officers rushed down a narrow hall to the bedroom door, on the other side of which Captain Lard had been informed he would come upon the man known as the most ruthless slayer of modern times. The door was flung open, and there on the bed lay a sleeping man with black hair and a mustache. The high-powered car was parked just outside the open window and on a chair close beside the bed was a man’s coat with bulging pockets.

Two of the officers stepped between the chair and the bed, and two others stood with machine guns leveled at the man’s head. Detective Swepston shouted: “Stick ’em up!”

The man in the bed awoke with a start and sat bolt upright. He gasped in astonishment, and looked into the muzzles of the two machine guns. Then he made a grab for the coat on the chair. But the officer kicked it away. The coat fell to the floor, and a thirty-two caliber automatic revolver fell from the pocket.

The man now was trembling with fear.

“Take it easy,” warned Swepston. “We’ve got you cold and it won’t pay to fight.”

“What are you going to do, take me for a ride?” the man stammered. And then he heaved a sigh of relief when the raiders convinced him they were officers of the law and not hired killers who had come to put him on the spot.

While he was dressing the captured man told the officers his name was Richard Franklin White, and that he was a salesman. In the pockets of his clothes was seven hundred and ninety-five dollars in hills of large denomination.

It was not until he was lodged in a special cell in the St. Joseph jail and under the guard of two officers that he revealed his identity. He refused to talk until he was confronted with Bertillon measurements and finger-prints, which checked in detail.

“Well, as long as you know, then I guess there isn’t much use in denying it,” the prisoner said sullenly. “I’m Burke. Who did you think you were capturing, Jesse James?”

Then he added with a smile:

“And I’m not a damned bit afraid to go back to Chicago.”

When Omaha, Nebraska, police telephoned a few minutes later in an attempt to learn from Burke whether he had had any part in a recent bank robbery at Lincoln, he replied curtly:

“Tell them to get a spiritualist and hold hands. Maybe they’ll find out.”

Burke made it clear that he wasn’t going to talk about any of his exploits or lend any help in clearing up the long series of crimes charged to his trigger finger.

“As far as I’m concerned, you might as well go take a walk, because I’m not going to talk,” he told Chief Matthews.

But despite his boast that he wasn’t a “damned bit afraid” to go back to Chicago and face the charge that he was the man who had helped mow down the seven Moran gangsters with a hail of machine gun fire, St. Valentine’s Day, Burke was pleased at the decision of Governor Henry Caulfield, of Missouri, to turn him over to Michigan authorities instead.

In Michigan, he realized, the maximum penalty for his crime would be life imprisonment, whereas Cook County, Illinois, had been loud in its promises to “burn” Burke in the electric chair if he were ever brought to trial.

“Of course I’d rather go back to Michigan,” Burke said. “I don’t think much of the hot seat.”

VIII

Governor Caulfield signed the extradition papers turning Burke over to Michigan, and the Michigan officers went into conference to agree upon a plan for the five hundred and sixty-eight mile trip back to the scene of Charles Skelly’s cold-blooded murder. It was agreed that the utmost secrecy must be used in arranging for the trip, especially since there had been vague rumors that the underworld might attempt to take Burke from the law and put him on the spot before he had an opportunity to turn squealer on the higher-ups who had hired him to do their killings.

At five o’clock on a morning last March, just as the first streaks of cold dawn appeared, Burke was bundled out of his cell and put into an armored car that waited at the curb outside with motor running. The large car seemed to bristle with machine guns. Four officers of the Michigan State Police were seated inside, alert. Their revolvers were cocked for any foray that gangland might attempt.

Then began a dash across the Middle West at breakneck speed. At eight twenty-five that night Burke was back in the little Michigan resort town, where for three months, he had hidden out as a peaceful country gentleman... until he had got drunk and lost his head over a trivial traffic mishap.

Back in the St. Joseph, Michigan, jail, seven guards grouped about his cell with shotguns slung across their knees and State Troopers patrolling the streets outside night and day, Burke was a sullen, growling prisoner. He chewed savagely on big, black cigars and cursed the newspaper men who came to the bars of his cell to ask him about his crimes.

“You guys never gave me a break and you won’t get anything out of me now, you—” he grumbled.

He had been in the jail only two days when I went to his cell accompanied by a deputy sheriff and succeeded in persuading him to talk — but not about his ignoble career. A score of police officers from nearly as many States where he was reputed to have left a trail of terror had questioned him during those two days and to them he had maintained that same stubbornness.

I found him seated on the edge of his iron bunk reading a Western story magazine, and as I talked to him the group of heavily armed officers sat grouped outside the bars, alert to any attempt which might be made to take their captive from them. But Burke seemed unmindful of their glowering watchfulness and the cold steel muzzles of their guns.

He sat in his shirt sleeves. A barber had been to see him a few minutes before, and he was clean-shaved excepting for the bristling black mustache he had grown in an attempt to escape the eyes of the law.

But it was his eyes, deep gray eyes with pouchy lids and a menacing cold look, that labeled him as the Fred Burke whose photographs have been emblazoned on thousands of police posters. It was those eyes that had attracted the attention of the young truck driver, Hunsaker, six months before and had finally resulted in the sensational capture.

“How did you happen to kill Skelly?” I asked.

He glanced away and remained silent.

“You must have been pretty drunk, weren’t you?”

“Now, listen here,” Burke said earnestly, “if you think I’m going to open up and tell you my life history, you’re badly mistaken. They’ve got a tight case against me here and I’m not going to say a word. You can’t blame me for that, can you?”

He admitted that he had lived in St. Joseph as Fred Dane, and that Viola Brenneman had posed as his wife. But that was all.

“How about the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago?” I persisted.

“Why don’t you guys lay off that stuff?” he demanded in a tone of disgust. “I wasn’t in Chicago when that happened, and I don’t know anything about it. All this talk about me bumping off seven guys for Capone — that’s a lot of bunk. I don’t even know Capone.”

I asked him about a number of other crimes with which he had been directly charged — the slaying of Frankie Yale, the Brooklyn gang leader, and the Milaflores slayings in Detroit — but his answers were a few terse curse words.

The only gangsters he knew were dead ones, and he was a victim of newspaper sensationalism. That was his story.

I asked him how he had succeeded in slipping through the well organized manhunt on the night of the Skelly killing. But there was no answer.

“Where did you get all of your experience with machine guns, Burke?” I pressed.

“What do you mean ‘experience’?”

“You served with the United States forces as a machine gunner in France, didn’t you?”

“Another newspaper yarn. I was in the tank corps and that’s no training school for killers. That’s for suicides.”

“How about this plastic surgery operation you had performed on yourself to disguise your features?”

“That plastic surgery, as you call it, happened to be a little automobile accident near Kansas City last summer.”

I prepared to leave.

“Well, Burke, you’re one gangster that’s just as tough as the cops say, aren’t you?”

“I used to be, I guess,” Burke said, and smiled. It was the first time a smile had been seen on his face since the five police officers with drawn guns had awakened him at daybreak in the little Missouri farm house and placed him under arrest.

Burke remained in the cramped little cell under the constant watchfulness of the armed guard until the end of April, when he was led out by a cordon of fifteen heavily-armed deputies and taken across the street to the court room of Circuit Judge Charles E. White.

A troop of State police officers and special deputies surrounded the courthouse and the same two machine guns once owned by Burke were mounted in front of the jail as a reminder to the crowd of eight thousand curious townsfolk that order must be preserved. When the killer, immaculately dressed in a blue suit, entered the court room, his handcuffs were removed and he was led to a chair between Sheriff Cutler and a State policeman.

Every one who entered the court room was searched and nine guards with sawed-off shotguns stood at the entrances.

Charles W. Gore, of Benton Harbor, who had been hired as attorney for Burke two weeks before, came over and whispered to his client, and when judge White mounted the bench, the lawyer stepped up and conferred with him and Prosecutor Cunningham for several minutes. Then the bailiff called for quiet.

“The defendant pleads guilty to the State’s charge of murder without degree,” Gore said.

There was an audible gasp from the craning spectators. Rurke appeared unmoved.

After a brief hearing, during which Forrest Kool. the young Buchanan farmer, pointed his finger at Burke from the witness stand and said calmly, “He’s the man who killed Skelly,” Judge White announced that Burke, as notorious as he was in the field of crime, could not be sentenced for first degree murder inasmuch as no premeditation could be shown in the killing of the officer.

“I, therefore, sentence you to life imprisonment in Marquette prison under the Michigan statute providing the penalty for second degree murder,” he said after Burke had been called before him.

“Thank you,” Burke said in a low voice, and turned to hold his hands out to the officers who stood near by with the handcuffs.

On the way back to the jail Burke, apparently relieved, joked with Sheriff Cutler.

“Bring along some fishing tackle when we go up, sheriff,” he laughed. “They tell me the trout fishing is good up around Marquette and the season opens May 1. Maybe we can take time out to get a few.”

At four thirty-seven o’clock the next morning, Burke was again loaded into that same armored car bristling with machine guns and started on his last trip, a ride into exile.

“This life sentence doesn’t bother me much,” he said as he stepped into the car.

Before he left the jail, Burke autographed a book, “On the Up and Up,” written by Bruce Barton, and handed it to Sheriff Cutler. It was signed: “Optimistically, Fred R. Burke.”

“Barton’s my favorite author, you know,” he told the sheriff.

Twelve hours later the great iron gates of Marquette prison, known as “Siberia” to criminals in Michigan because of its location in the desolate wastes of the upper peninsula, swung open to admit “the most dangerous criminal in the United States.” He was the one thousand and first prisoner to enter the penitentiary, and the number 5293 was stenciled in large figures across the left breast of his blue denim shirt.

His remark that the life sentence didn’t bother him much took on a real significance the next day when Prosecutor Cunningham admitted that Burke, accused of the most ruthless slaughter of modern times, a dozen or more wanton killings and innumerable other crimes, will be eligible for a parole in twenty-five years, and that good behavior may reduce his term to eighteen or twenty years!

The armored car was almost in sight of the gray stone prison walls when Burke turned to Sheriff Cutler and said suddenly:

“You know, you fellows wouldn’t be bringing me up here if I hadn’t got drunker than a lord on grape wine that day I shot that copper.”