Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927

FOR NEARLY FOUR YEARS THIS RELENTLESS SEARCH HAD BEEN THE GREATEST MAN-HUNT IN THE HISTORY OF CRIME AND ITS DETECTION

Southern Pacific passenger train No. 13, southbound, pulled out of the station at Siskiyou, Oregon, on the night of October 11, 1923, slightly behind schedule. The air was crisp. A small wind blew down the mountains. Sleepy passengers aboard the train glanced disinterestedly at the lights of the little town and turned restlessly in their seats.

A short distance south of Siskiyou the railroad pierces the spur of the mountain. In the tunnel the engineman saw a danger signal He jammed on his air. The brakes squealed. The cars rumbled to a stop. A man in the smoking compartment complained that a tunnel was a mighty poor place to halt a train.

Voices outside attracted the attention of the passengers. A brakeman named Johnson hurried through the cars toward the front of the train to determine the cause of the delay. He swung down from a step. Figures were moving about the mail car. Johnson started toward them.

He was shot dead.

The mail car was locked from within. Again the figures moved on the track. Engineman Sid Bates, a veteran railroader leaned from his cab window to see the cause of the signal. He was murdered with a high power rifle, at close range. Marvin Seng, his young fireman, stepped across the cab to help him. A shot stopped him. He pitched forward, dead.

In the meantime, E. E. Dougherty, mail clerk, was alone in his locked car. No one knows what preparations he made to defend himself. At least he did not open the doors. The remaining members of the train crew, moving forward, were halted by shots. Passengers fled to the rear of the train.

The three figures on the tracks worked rapidly. Through the smoky murk of the tunnel they were seen about the end of the mail car. Suddenly they drew back. There was a moment of waiting.

Unprecedented Pursuing

A terrific explosion sounded, far beyond the tunnel mouth and across the hills. Smoke rolled out. Poisonous gases drove passengers and train crew into the open. When rescue parties entered the tunnel an hour later they found the bodies of three trainmen, two in the engine cab, one by the tracks. And in the mail and express car the charred body of Mail Clerk Dougherty.

The robbers had taken four lives, had destroyed mail and express worth probably hundreds of thousands, and had been driven away empty-handed by the poisonous gases they themselves set off in their attempt to pierce the steel end of the car.

That was nearly four years ago. And the man hunt that was begun less than an hour after the crime has never for one minute been relaxed. Last winter one of the three killers was apprehended; some day, sooner or later, the other two will be found.

It has been and still is the greatest man hunt in the history of crime and its detection. A reward of fifteen thousand nine hundred dollars, offered by the Post Office Department, the American Express, the Southern Pacific railway, and the State of Oregon, have spurred thousands of detectives, professional and amateur, on the search.

Before daylight on the twelfth of October, 1923, while rescuers still searched the wreckage in Siskiyou tunnel, sheriffs’ posses had started into the hills. There is a large amount of wild timber country not far from the scene of the holdup, and it was guessed that the robbers had fled to its protection.

Post office inspectors and operatives of the express company, representatives of the State — government, railroad detectives, county, city and private agency officials joined the search. For days the posses tramped the mountainside and wilderness.

In one of these armed groups, made up from the countryside, a young, soft spoken, well dressed man named Hugh DeAutremont took a leading part. He led searchers up the faces of steep cliffs, pointed out distant thickets where the robbers might be hiding, charged dangerous passes.

And when it was decided that the killers had escaped and the posses came back to town, Hugh DeAutremont remained a day or two, and then disappeared. Last winter he was arrested on a rifle range at Fort McKinley, Manila, Philippine Islands, and confessed his part in the robbery. The other two bandits, his brothers Ray and Roy, still are at large, and still are the objects of a search that literally is world-wide.

Never before have such efforts been made to apprehend criminals. It was several days after the robbery that suspicion first was drawn to the brothers DeAutremont. Postal inspectors, searching for facts, came upon evidence pointing to these boys.

The Scope of the Search

What that evidence was, and where obtained, is one of the minor mysteries of the story. The investigators merely announced, “We have positive information that the men we want are these three brothers.”

Handbills were printed. At first by the hundreds, then ten thousand — a hundred thousand — then the presses rumbled day and night — five hundred thousand. Probably a million have been distributed.

That is the story of the crime, remarkable only for its daring, for its absolute cruelty, and for its failure. But the tale of the search is unparalleled in any nation. Scotland Yard, the Paris bureau, the Brigade Mobile, even the Cheka of Moscow have never carried on so relentless a campaign.

The offering of five thousand three hundred dollars reward for each of the men was only a start. Hundreds of officers, the best man hunters in America, have devoted years of skill to the search.

The history of the boys was investigated so thoroughly that practically nothing escaped the officials. Their habits, their physical peculiarities, their likes and dislikes, even their favorite songs and the tones in which they sing them were listed and broadcast.

The leaflets issued by the Post Office Department make the following request on the first of its ten pages:

And in the folder, following the descriptions, are listed various bits of information valuable to each special class of citizen who might come in contact with the men.

The Criminal’s Watch

Librarians, for example, are told to watch for Ray and Roy, twins, who are still at large. These two are now twenty-seven years old. They are in the habit of borrowing books on sociology and poetical works from public libraries. They are “forward with women,” and are “presuming,” according to the lookout. Librarians are further requested to examine their files of signatures, and compare them with the signatures of Ray and Roy printed on the folder.

And because these men are so much wanted, every librarian in the United States and Canada has been furnished with a copy of the handbill. Every barber shop, even to the remotest village, has been circularized, because Ray and Roy sometimes worked at the barber trade.

The employment office of every big industrial plant in America has received photographs and descriptions. Every logging camp has the request on file. Every jeweler and watch repairman has received an earnest request to be on the lookout for a seven-jewel Waltham, sixteen size, open face watch, gold filled case, with gold filled chain and knife attached. The number on the case is 4298547 and the movement number 22444312. The private mark on the back of the case is 11293HB.

The Post Office Department urges every man who has bought a Waltham watch since 1923, no matter what the source, no matter how reputable the firm that sold it, to examine it at once for these numbers. And every time a watchmaker receives a Waltham for repairs he too is expected to examine it at once. It may be the watch Roy DeAutremont had the day of the crime.

It is hardly likely that the men have kept these watches, but, having sold them, they may be traced back. Ray had an Excelsior, size sixteen, with the private mark 8662 on the back of case, and movement number 667501.

Roy and Ray have weak, squinty eyes, and both wear glasses. Every oculist and optician has been requested to watch for them. The prescriptions for their glasses have been forwarded to every optical establishment in America, with a request that a check-up be made on their files.

And then the dentists! Every dentist who could be found by the post office authorities received a description of the mouths of the three. Every tooth, every filling in every jaw wanted is known and described.

A Blot Wiped Away

Then, as if that were not enough, the finger-print classification of one of them, Ray, who served time in Monroe, Washington, during the war, for criminal syndicalism, has been forwarded to every criminal identification bureau in the world!

Every United States post office has the pictures of the three brothers on its lobby wall. Every United States consul has copies. Steamship offices, customs officials, coast guards men, railway ticket sellers, steamer pursers, newspaper men, radio announcers, theater doormen, and a host of other citizens in daily contact with large numbers of people have repeatedly been requested to keep a sharp eye open for the two remaining DeAutremonts, Roy and Ray.

In the meantime hundreds of post office inspectors are keeping everlastingly at it. The Postmaster General recently said: “These unusual steps have been taken not only because of the particularly heinous and cold-blooded crime, but because of the baffling manner in which they — the brothers — have dropped from sight.”

Recently, in a small town in Michigan, the writer attended a meeting at the public high school building. On the blackboard were pictures of the DeAutremonts. The superintendent explained that it was a good moral lesson, that his boys were learning that the government mails are sacred, that United States authority will not permit violation.

In another section of the Middle West two men, resembling Ray and Roy, were seen in a lumber camp. They had gone when post office inspectors, hurriedly summoned, arrived.

But within a week staid, respectable citizens all over that part of the State, farmers and villagers who never were nearer criminal affairs than watching a village marshal lock up a Saturday night drunk, received in their mail boxes official requests to be on the lookout for the DeAutremonts, together with photographs, signatures and descriptions.

With Hugh in custody, the Post Office Department has turned its search to the other two. According to the officer in charge, C. Riddiford, postal inspector at Spokane, Washington, these two men will be found. D. O’Connell, chief special agent for the Southern Pacific railway, and a large force of his men, are assisting in the hunt. They, too, have decreed that Roy and Ray will be apprehended.

So after four years Case No. 57883-D still is provoking the vigilance of the criminal investigation division of the postal service. The Postmaster General is determined to work till the two missing brothers are in his hands.

“The post office inspector has a reputation for getting his man,” Postmaster General Harry New said recently. “He never gives up. The postal inspection service is determined to a man to wipe off this blot from their otherwise clean slate.”

Since this article was written the DeAutremont brothers have been captured, convicted and sent away for life. — Editor’s Note.