The Case of the Crime King

Chapter 25

Latent Prints is right next door to R & I. We walked out one door, in another, and had Harvey Daniels’ record pulled.

There wasn’t much doubt from the suspect’s description that we finally had a make on the squat, heavy-set member of the gang. He was described as five feet eight inches tall and weighing two hundred and two pounds. He was thirty-four years old, and his record went back twenty years. His first arrest had been for stealing a bicycle at the age of fourteen.

Since then he had managed to get himself arrested seventeen times, for everything from vagrancy to suspicion of homicide. He had five misdemeanor convictions and had drawn hard time twice, both times for armed robbery. On the first conviction he had done three out of five, on the second five out of five-to-life. Currently he was wanted for parole violation.

His mugg shot showed a wide, sullen face with a squashed-in nose that looked as though it had been broken repeatedly and never set.

“Little more progress every day,” Frank said with satisfaction. “Now if we can get a make on that guy with the birthmark, we’ll have every member of the gang pegged.”

We went upstairs to Robbery and got out the necessary bulletins on the suspect.

No leads developed on any of the gang members over the weekend.

On Monday, April 28th, the district attorney issued a complaint against Maurice Wey. The following day the suspect was held to answer at a preliminary hearing in Division 34 of the Municipal Court. He was bound over for the charges filed against him and transferred to the County Jail in the custody of the sheriff. His arraignment in the Superior Court was set for Monday, May 12th.

On Wednesday, April 30th, the first of a new series of robberies by the gang occurred in San Francisco. All four of the gang members still at large participated in the payroll robbery of an armored truck. The usual false-nose disguises were not used, and Big Julie, Harry Strite, and Harvey Daniels were positively identified from their mugg shots by the victims. The fourth suspect was the man with the birthmark, but no identification could be obtained.

The loot from the payroll robbery amounted to $150,000.

During the following week the gang hit five more times in widely separated parts of the state. For these jobs they again split into teams of two. They had now abandoned all attempts at disguise, and had also abandoned their previous MO of hitting only supermarkets.

The two robberies in the northern part of the state, one a supermarket and the other a loan office, were staged by Big Julie and Harry Strite. The three in the southern part of the state were the work of Harvey Daniels and the tall man with the birthmark. Targets included a drive-in theater, a restaurant, and a supermarket. Only the last was in the Los Angeles area.

The total score for the gang since the beginning of Operation Statewide now amounted to this: eleven successful robberies, with an aggregate take of nearly a quarter of a million dollars; two unsuccessful robberies, with no take; two homicides and two victims wounded.

An all-out effort was begun to locate the suspects. Their pictures and descriptions were circulated in newspapers throughout the state. All known sources of underworld information were tapped. Known associates and former associates of the three identified suspects were placed under surveillance, and many were brought in for questioning.

Until Tuesday, May 6th, none of these maneuvers had had the slightest result. The suspects struck, then disappeared as though swallowed up by the earth. It was theorized that they had several alternate hideouts throughout the state, but we were unable to get leads on any of them through underworld informers.

The suspects were behaving with unusual discipline for a robbery gang. Apparently they were spending none of the money. Between jobs they remained discreetly in hiding.

At 11:14 a.m. on May 6th, Mrs. Marie Winters, the blonde who had been with Big Julie and Strite the evening we had first picked them up, was brought to Robbery Division for questioning. We had not brought her in earlier because she was now listed in the record as only a “former associate” of Harry Strite. We knew that she had broken with Strite while he was in prison and had refused to resume their old association after he was released. However, we were now scraping the bottom of the barrel in our attempts to get some kind of lead, and we weren’t passing up anyone who had ever had the slightest association with any of the suspects.

We offered the woman a chair, and she nervously seated herself.

I said, “I guess you know why we want to talk to you, ma’am.”

“About Harry?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s what I figured,” she said. “But you know he’s not my boyfriend any more, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I had enough of that stuff,” she said. “My old man was the same way.”

“Your father?” Frank asked.

“Naw. My former. Jack Winters. In and out of the can all the time. I told Harry when we got engaged that his first fall would wash us up. I’m not about to mark time for some jerk who’s sitting behind bars. Not after doing it once. I like my men around.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Then you don’t have any contact with Harry any more?”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “He used to phone me once in a while. He’s still carrying the torch, I guess. But I wasn’t having any. I got a guy now who keeps his nose clean. And that’s the way it’s going to stay. I don’t owe Harry nothing. I saved his money for him and gave it to him when he got out—” She stopped abruptly and touched fingers to her mouth in a gesture of fright.

Frank said quietly, “That was Harry’s money we found at your place, huh? Not yours.”

“Not that money,” the blonde said in a weak voice. “Just a few bucks I was holding for him.”

I said, “If that was holdup loot, and you covered for Strite and Big Julie, you could still get in a lot of trouble, Mrs. Winters.”

“Honest, it wasn’t that,” she said quickly. “That was mine. A final settlement from my former. You ask him.”

“Where do we find him?” Frank asked.

“He moved up north. Seattle, I think. Last I heard, he was thinking of going to Alaska.” The thought seemed to relieve her, for she visibly relaxed.

There didn’t seem much future in this line of questioning, even if we eventually got the woman to admit she had lied about the money being hers. If she had turned it over to Harry Strite, it wasn’t recoverable. Anyway, it seemed obvious that she was going to stick to the story that the money was hers, and without a confession it would be impossible for us to prove differently.

I said, “You have any idea where Harry is now?”

She shook her head. “The letter he wrote me was postmarked Sacramento, but he was probably just passing through.”

“What letter?” I asked sharply.

“The one I got the other day. I thought you might want to see it, so I brought it along. I want to cooperate, see. I got nothing to hide.”

She fumbled in her purse and produced an opened envelope.

The letter was postmarked May 1st — the same day, incidentally, that Strite and Big Julie had knocked over a Sacramento loan office. It was written in ink on a double sheet of lined foolscap. I held it so that Frank could read it at the same time I did.

It read: