Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Harry Whittington is remembered as the “King of the Paperback Original,” and not without reason. From 1950 to about 1970, he published more than 150 novels in categories as diverse as detective fiction, horror, science fiction, westerns, backwoods romance, hospital confessions. More remarkable than his sheer output is the fact that each of them (or at least, each of the more than 50 I’ve been able to hunt down) were written with grace uncharacteristic of the genre. Fast-paced, well-plotted, unimaginably sparse, bleak, and always suspenseful. Whittington’s heroes were always disillusioned, tragic men, tarnished angels in the heat of personal battle. (See Forgive Me, Killer; Ticket to Hell, A Moment to Prey, Murder Is My Mistress). Maybe that is what attracted him to this true case about two high-flying pilots, desperate men who make one last desperate gamble. If “Invaders from the Sky” appears familiar, that’s because he later “structured the true events” of this “botched, bourbon and laced crime” into the 1960 novel, The Devil Wears Wings.

Invaders from the Sky

The small, silver Cessna cabin plane cleared the Tampa airfield at 5:45 A.M., and cut radio contact with the operations tower. Daybreak, October 24, 1957, was crisp, and in the Florida flatlands, sudden and complete.

The man at the controls glanced earthward with a faint grin. Thirty, he was stocky, handsome. His companion in the Cessna two-seater was four years younger, fair-haired, lean, long-legged. One thing they shared: a look of unbearable tensions, anxiety, inner pressures.

By nature both were gamblers, but had never hit the jackpot which they considered their right; new they were determined to play for high stakes. Their plan was new, even fantastic, full of risk, and this showed in their faces. They were risking everything in one wild gamble — they would no longer be denied: they were desperate men!

The taller, younger chap pulled a whiskey bottle from his jacket.

“Don’t start that!” the pilot shouted.

The other laughed, removed the cap, drank deeply. “You run the plane. I’ll do my part.”

“Just be sure you can.”

They followed the black lane of the city’s Campbell Causeway west across upper Tampa Bay, where they would execute the next play in their carefully plotted Operation Invasion.

At the Clearwater airfield, the pilot set the silver Cessna down on the strip occupied by other private planes. His scheme included the stealing of another airplane; two were needed for this maneuver.

The fair-haired younger man took one more drink, as if sucking courage through the mouth of the bottle.

He sauntered around the Cessna, checking it. From a distance it might appear that the silver and yellow-trimmed ship had developed some minor defect and that its owner was concerned about its condition.

The stocky pilot took a brief gander at the deserted field. It was so early in the day that the attendants hadn’t come out when the plane had landed. He strode to a larger, more horse-powered airplane which was parked nearest the Cessna. He swung into the cockpit quickly, moving with the assurance of a man who lives planes from jennies to jets. He set the controls, pressed the starter.

His companion’s head jerked around at the balky engine whine, face stark. Twice the motor almost caught, then died noisily.

Suddenly the fair-haired man ran around the Cessna, voice tense. “Come on!” he yelled. “Forget that plane. Let’s get out of here. One of those grease monkeys has spotted you—”

Faintly angered because he’d been frustrated in his theft by any plane motor, the stocky man unwillingly swung out, and in a moment the Cessna was airborne again, moving inland south by west. It was not yet 6 A.M....

By 9:30 A.M. they raised Winter Haven’s Gilbert Field, about 70 air miles inland from Florida’s Clearwater. The pilot had now been drinking, too.

His voice betrayed the anger still rankling at their first failure to steal a second plane. “We’ve got to do better than that. I hope the rest of this plan goes better. Couple more slips like that—”

“Forget it.” The fair-haired man laughed. “We’ve been over it. Every step. Plenty. It’s not about to go wrong.”

“Just the same, I don’t like this plane being spotted down here. We’ve got to get another one that can’t be traced to us. My boss thinks I borrowed it for a business trip. I’ve got to get it back safely.”

“So what? Who’ll be out this time of day? We’ve got a right to fly where we want.”

The pilot muttered something, pinpointed the silver Cessna to a spot beside a bright yellow Aeronca parked on Gilbert Field. He left the Cessna’s engine purring, swung out, raced across the runway. The fair-haired man changed seats and took over the controls of the Cessna.

This time the plane theft was accomplished quickly. The Aeronca sputtered to life, the pilot waved his arm in a motion that said more clearly than words: “This time we got a break, let’s get the hell out of here.”

Both planes took off without mishap. Flying the Cessna, the younger man kept his companion’s stolen yellow Aeronca in sight as the two fliers returned westward. Excitement was building in the fair-haired youth now. Another detail was complete, they were moving nearer to that jackpot which they both needed so urgently. His pulse raced. A vein throbbed in his temple. He could not control sudden bursts of laughter.

He watched the Cessna settle to the broken runway of an abandoned airstrip that they’d cased days ago outside Plant City, Florida. They’d returned to within 30 miles of Tampa now, but it was all planned — it was going to work.

He knew his partner was still cobbed about that plane’s not starting in Clearwater. Sure, it would have been smarter to abandon a stolen plane in Winter Haven in exchange for the Aeronca; it would have covered their trail a lot better, but that was a minor matter, no longer important.

He put the Cessna down on the strip, realizing that he didn’t fly as expertly as the older man. This fact didn’t upset him either — few men could fly that well.

There was little concealment on this abandoned airstrip, but he taxied the Cessna near the hedgeline, killed the engine. He swung out and ran across to the Aeronca, carrying his bottle. He was laughing as he clambered in.

“You happy now?” he said. “Let’s go.”

“We’ve got plenty of time. Let me have a drink.”

The two thieves had cleared Gilbert Field at about 9:45 A.M. It was now almost 11. The pilot checked the radio, but so far as he could learn, the loss of the Aeronca had not been reported.

“Slick!” the tall man said, laughing. “Not a hitch. They might not miss this plane all day. Come on, fellow, let me see you laugh. What’s the matter, you hate bein’ rich?”

The noon sun glinted on steel towers and high-tension wires strung across the stubbled field on the outskirts of Fort Meade, Florida. The two men cruised the Aeronca low over the area, circling the high-piled gray sand hills of the fertilizer company beyond a wooded area.

It was about 12:10 P.M. when the pilot set the plane down in the field, sailing in beside the high-tension power wires, bouncing across the stubbled, rutted earth. The tall man tossed an empty bottle into the weeds.

At 711 West Broadway in Fort Meade, Ex-Chief of Police, L. M. Roberts, who had retired in 1953 after 14 years of law service to run a filling station/beer tavern, noticed two strangers in coveralls strolling in from the Sand Mountain Road, headed downtown.

Fort Meade, a placid, sun-blasted town well inside the Florida cattle country, has less than 4,000 town residents; strangers attract attention. Ex-Chief Roberts had that faint sense of something being wrong, an intuition developed in years of law work; but it was nothing he could pin down. Two strangers walking into this isolated town was odd. He thought perhaps they’d had car trouble on the Sand Mountain Road, which had been the route to Wachula before the new highway was built. He expected that the newcomers would ask aid, but they strode past, sweating in the noon heat.

They crossed the railroad tracks, strode east on Broadway. Mrs. Maxine Johnson and Mrs. Neil Heath, in the drugstore, noticed them when they bought dark glasses, because aside from being strangers, both appeared to be drunk. The taller was especially taut and nervous, almost as if he were hopped up.

Across the street the Fox Theater advertised its Saturday feature, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” but neither man glanced toward its marquee. The girl behind the soda fountain warned the smaller man he’d better watch his friend or both would be arrested for being intoxicated.

“Tough town, huh?” the tall man said sarcastically. He marched to the pay phone at the front of the store, and, though he could see the police headquarters building across the street, he dialed its number.

The girl watched open-mouthed as he asked for the police chief. Told that Glenn Baggett was home at lunch, he asked, voice slurred, who was speaking? “This is Constable Harry Godwin,” came the reply.

“Well, Constable Harry Godwin, you better get down here on East Broadway. Couple men acting drunk and mighty disorderly.”

Laughing, the two men walked out to the street as Harry Godwin pulled his patrol car up alongside the curb and got out.

The constable was a stout, well-built officer. He beckoned to the two strangers, who were staggering, and said with good humor, “All right, fellows, get in my car and we won’t have any trouble.”

Meekly the two coveralled men obeyed. Godwin got behind the wheel, pulled away from the curb.

Suddenly his passengers sobered. “Drive outside town,” the taller one ordered.

Constable Godwin frowned at the sight of automatics which the men carried. They forced him to surrender his own pistol, stop the squad car in a wooded area off Highway 17. The tall man gouged his gun into Godwin’s side. “You don’t think we mean business, do you?”

He jerked his gun upward, fired it within inches of the lawman’s face. “Now do you think I mean business?”

Godwin said, “I think you do.”

The tall bandit announced, “We’re going back into town at two minutes of 1:00. You’re going to drive us.”

Godwin drove slowly. As he turned his car into Highway 17 his heart lifted. Coming toward him in his official car was County Patrolman Herbert Goodson. Godwin swerved his car into the patrolman’s lane, but Goodson, riding with another man, laughed and made way for him, waving as he passed.

At the intersection of Highway 17 and East Broadway, Constable Godwin pulled into the path of another oncoming car. Courteously, the driver gave way for him.

“You want to get hurt, bad,” the tall man threatened, “pull a trick like that one more time!”

It was now 12:58 by the constable’s watch. The tall man could no longer sit still. He and his stocky companion pulled women’s stockings over their faces and ordered Godwin to pull his car into the side street beside the First State Bank of Fort Meade. The building has a drive-in teller window in its west wall.

Just beyond the glass doors of the First State Bank entrance, the building wall was being torn down as part of a remodeling job. Thinking Halloween had come early, J. T. Smith, Winter Haven contractor in charge of the project, stared at the masked men herding the constable ahead of them.

Smith no longer thought it a prank, however, when one of the men jabbed a gun in his ribs and ordered him into the bank, along with Grover Altman, a Fort Meade garageman, who happened to be passing.

Twenty-four-year-old Morris Lunn, assistant cashier, saw the group enter the front door. The taller man held Constable Godwin by the belt, kept his pistol at the back of the lawman’s head.

Four women tellers, Mrs. Cleo Brown, Mrs. Lila Crews, Mrs. Leona Cloid and Mrs. Patricia Futral, were speechless at the sight of Constable Godwin held helpless and in danger of being slain by the grotesquely masked men.

The smaller man tossed several cloth bags at the tellers. The other gunman shoved Godwin forward so that he stumbled. “You dames start shoveling money into those bags or I’ll blow his brains out!”

Morris Lunn stared at the tall gunman. This was no fear of robbery he felt, but realization that the nervous bandit was a potential killer at the moment. The tall hold-up man began cursing at Lunn. From the moment he entered the bank, the desperado talked continuously, cursing and pistol whipping the constable to demonstrate how serious he was in his threat to kill the officer if his commands weren’t obeyed. He threw a sack at Cashier Lunn, ordered, “Fill it up!”

Worried for the lives of the women and the people in the bank, Lunn told the tellers to comply.

“Don’t put in anything less than tens,” the tall gunman pressed.

Lunn turned around. “You’ve got all the big currency,” he said.

The cashier’s words seemed to infuriate the bandit. He struck Lunn across the back of his head with the gun. The cashier slumped to the floor, his head almost at the doorway.

Head clearing, Lunn saw a man standing outside the bank door. He muttered, “We... we’re being robbed!”

The onlooker simply stared, uncomprehendingly. Lunn cried out, “Get the police!” but when the man didn’t move, he murmured, “Get on away from here!”

Rolling out of the doorway, Lunn stared at the robbers. The smaller crook had collected the money-ladened bags, was pleading with his companion to leave. “Let’s scram before our luck runs out.”

The tall desperado stood in the center of the room as if receiving a charge from this moment of evil triumph that might never come again. They’d been inside the bank no longer than seven minutes. Their loot consisted of more than $26,000.

“Come on.” The stocky man moved toward the door. “Do you have to put on a show for ’em?”

The tall gunman backed toward the door. He glanced at Cashier Lunn, jerked his gun up, fired a shot to cow the witnesses. The bullet lodged in a window sash.

Before the sound of the shot had died, before the hold-up victims had recovered from the paralyzing effects of the raid, the two bandits leaped into Constable Godwin’s car and sped west on Broadway.

Alton Bourne, employee of the hardware store beside the bank, had been alerted about the robbery by bank Vice-President J. H. White. He in turn had called police headquarters, where the alarm had been radioed to Chief Glenn Baggett.

The police chief arrived at the bank as the two bandits piled into Constable Godwin’s car and sped away. Baggett gave chase.

Drawn outside his filling station by the sound of the speeding getaway car, Ex-Chief of Police L. M. Roberts saw the man at the wheel, still wearing his stocking mask. The bandit was driving too fast to make the turn into Sand Mountain Road, and he skidded into the mud beyond it.

Gears grinding, the desperado thrust the car into reverse. When the car didn’t budge, the two thugs leaped out and fled on foot.

At this point, Perry Johnson, a Fort Meade wholesale dealer, pulled into the service lane of Roberts’ filling station. And at just this moment Chief Baggett braked his car behind Constable Godwin’s abandoned sedan.

Johnson rushed to assist Baggett, who was already crouched in the thick growth of a hedgerow, firing at the criminals running across the fields with the bags of money.

Chief Baggett tossed Johnson a gun while he continued to blaze away with his police automatic. The bandits, streaking across the field, returned his fire. By now the thugs had reached their plane.

The pilot clambered into the Aeronca. The tall man threw the money bags in ahead of him, stumbled as he turned to shoot at Chief Baggett and Perry Johnson. The pilot caught his companion by the shirt collar, dragged him into the plane.

As Johnson and Baggett ran forward, the plane was being revved, jerked about. The tall man fired once again to force them back.

The lawman and his courageous associate were stunned by the short run which the plane made before it was airborne — almost as if it were lifted bodily by that pilot’s know-how and frantic skill...

Within minutes, word of the daring daylight bank robbery and unique getaway was radioed throughout that section of the state. All law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI were converging on Fort Meade.

Meanwhile, in the yellow Aeronca, the tall bandit stuffed the loot into two suitcases he had brought along as part of the operation.

And, while this was taking place, the standard-band radio was broadcasting the following through Station WGTO, Haines City: “At noon today, John Parker of Lake Alfred reported the loss of his yellow Aeronca, pocketed at Gilbert Field, Winter Haven. Aw, come on, fellows, bring back John’s plane!”

The tall bandit could not stop laughing at the announcer’s witticism. Of course, the radioman had no idea of the use to which the plane had been put.

The bandit-pilot was not so happy. His radio was reporting that planes from Bartow Air Base, two Florida Forest Service aircraft and a Coast Guard helicopter from the St. Petersburg base were in the air search. Forest Service fire towers from Fort Myers to Gainesville were alerted to watch for the Aeronca.

Avon Park and Sebring announced that a plane answering the description of the Aeronca had been spotted. State and local police checked these reports, but the Bartow Air Base stated that one of the search planes had spotted the Aeronca on an abandoned airstrip near Plant City.

Hillsborough County police raced to the airstrip, found the Aeronca pitted with bullet holes. The robbers had vanished, leaving behind as clues nothing but shoe prints leading away from the Aeronca. Deputy Leon Thornton brought bloodhound trainer Carl Andrews and some of his best tracking dogs to the airstrip. Lieutenant J. J. Mitchell, fingerprint expert of the Hillsborough County sheriff's office, searched the plane for fingerprints, while other law officers made plaster casts of the shoe tracks.

Sheriff Ed Blackburn of Hillsborough County was in his office in conference with Pinellas County Sheriff Sid Saunders when a break in the case came. Witnesses reported that they had seen the two fugitives abandoning the Aeronca and continuing their flight in the small, silver Cessna. A description of the two-seater plane was furnished.

A check of the aeronautic records revealed that only two planes were registered in the State of Florida in that particular silver with yellow-trim color combination. One of these was quickly checked out. The other was supposed to be in its Tampa hangar.

Sheriff Blackburn’s telephone rang. A man named Eiler said he’d heard that the police were seeking his Cessna; he’d called as soon as possible. He had lent the plane to an employee of his named Don Thompson, who had told him that he had some urgent business across the bay in Venice.

Thompson was no stranger to the Hillsborough County authorities. He’d come to Tampa as an Air Force pilot at McDill Air Field, was esteemed as an excellent flier in both speed and acrobatic planes.

Thompson’s wife and seven-year-old daughter were not home. Lawmen doubted that the war hero was connected with the crime, but radioed descriptions of him and the silver Cessna throughout Florida.

Shortly before 5 P.M., Tampa police were called to the intersection at Cypress Street and Howard Avenue. Two cars had collided. A man named Irvin U. Suits was arrested for drunken driving.

Suits, youthful, handsome, 26-year-old son of a respected Hillsborough County family, was routinely questioned by the city police. Because he was known to be a friend of Don Thompson, was a plane broker, had more than $300 in fresh bills in his pockets and resembled the man described as the taller of the two Fort Meade air bandits, he was turned over to Sheriff Blackburn and the FBI.

At 5:06 P.M. Don Thompson landed at Tampa International. An airport attendant called Sheriff Blackburn, told him that “Bugs” Thompson — as he was familiarly known on the airstrips where he was a flying instructor — had just flown in with a silver Cessna.

“Keep talking to him,” Blackburn directed. “Hold him until I can get somebody out there.”

Thompson was arrested by sheriff's deputies. While he admitted that he had been drinking, he maintained that he had been giving Irvin Suits flying lessons all afternoon and knew nothing of the Fort Meade robbery. There were no guns on him or in the plane, no trace of the $26,000. Nevertheless, Thompson was detained.

Brought from Fort Meade, Constable Harry Godwin picked Irvin U. Suits from a line-up, definitely identified him as the man who had cursed and pistol whipped him in the Fort Meade bank. Godwin, however, failed to identify the stocky Dan Thompson in another police line-up.

Confronted with the fact that Godwin, as well as other Fort Meade witnesses, had definitely named him as one of the hold-up men, Irvin Suits confessed to the crime, implicating Donald J. “Bugs” Thompson as his accomplice.

He said that he and Thompson had cased a number of banks in central Florida, and had chosen the one at Fort Meade because they figured they could fly in and out of a small city with little difficulty and with no chance of pursuit.

Suits stated that after the running gunfight with Police Chief Baggett and Perry Johnson, he and Thompson flew back to Plant City. At the deserted airstrip, they’d switched planes and flown to Boca Grande Island near Sarasota. Thompson had brought the Cessna down on the fairway of an abandoned golf course. He’d taxied the small plane into a patch of tall grass and weeds where the two suitcases — one containing most of the stolen back money, the other the coveralls they’d worn, plus a quantity of ammunition — were dropped.

“I was so drunk at the time,” Suits claimed, “that I really am a little hazy about the entire matter. I don’t know whether or not I can take you to where those suitcases are.”

After hiding the loot, they’d then flown back to the Peter O. Knight Airport on Davis Islands in Tampa, where Thompson had let Suits out.

Suits had next stolen a car, and was to pick up Thompson at Tampa International when the flier returned his employer’s Cessna. But coincidence — and heavy drinking — intervened; Suits crashed into another car at the corner of Cypress and Howard, and suddenly all the luck of the daring duo ran out.

Don Thompson maintained his innocence in the face of all this evidence. However, his shoe exactly matched the cast made from the tracks left on the Plant City airstrip.

Suits accompanied the lawmen when they went to Boca Grande Island. It was a matter of five hours’ search, however, before the two suitcases were located.

Thompson and Suits were returned to Bartow in Polk County, where the robbery had occurred. Here Sheriff Hagan Parris charged them with armed robbery and assault. They would also face charges of bank robbery, a Federal offense; plane theft; and car theft.

Two days after the daring bank robbery, Don Thompson admitted his part in the crime.

“We’d been casing airports looking for planes to cover our trail,” Thompson began. “There was one we saw in Clearwater. We were going to steal it, then change to the Aeronca. If we’d done that you’d never have caught us.

“But the plane in Clearwater — it just wouldn’t start. So we had to fly the Cessna into Gilbert Field at Winter Haven and leave it there when we took the Aeronca. We flew that job to Plant City and went on with the bank robbery.

“I understand that somebody saw us when we came back to Plant City for the Cessna, and reported us. That’s where we made our first mistake.”

Thompson shook his head sadly. “The second tough break,” he muttered, “was the weather. There was supposed to be a cold front moving in, with rough winds and a lot of rain. We figured that there would be no other light craft flying that day. But the rain didn’t come.”

The two accused men were returned to Fort Meade, where they directed the lawmen to the weeds along the road they’d taken after their gun battle with Police Chief Baggett and Perry Johnson. It wasn’t long before the revolver which Thompson and Suits had taken from Constable Godwin was found. The bandits had tossed it away before climbing aboard the Aeronca.

Thus the career of the two Jesse Jameses of the air came to an end. Thompson’s great war record will likely stand him in little stead when he comes to trial with Suits, first in Polk County, then in Hillsborough County, and finally before the Federal Court.

It must be remembered, however, that Donald Thompson and Irvin Suits are entitled to fair trials, at which time it will be determined whether they are innocent or guilty of the charges against them.