MOONSHINE MURDER

8/5/1932 - On the run from warrants for their arrest in the Texas murder of Hillsboro grocery store owner John Bucher, with Bonnie Parker off visiting her mother in Dallas, bandits Clyde Barrow (23 years old) and Raymond Hamilton (19 years old), along with their outlaw pals, Everett Milligan and Ross Dyer, decide to spend a portion of their Saturday evening at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma.  It is a decision that will have fatal repercussions.

                                     
                                                      Clyde at 16
                                           
                                                      Hamilton

Northbound on Route 69 in a stolen Ford, shortly after crossing over the Red River into Oklahoma, and already semi-sloshed on whiskey drunk from Mason jars, the group spots the inviting lights of an open air dance just off the road near the small country town of Stringtown.  A pleasant summer evening, pretty girls to dance with, booze, flickering multicolored Chinese lanterns, safe in a state in which they aren't wanted (yet!), hootenanny fiddles and guitars making music ... it is a combination of delights that is too much for Hamilton.  "I need to shake a leg," the teenage thug tells Clyde ... and not much wiser himself, Barrow agrees to stop and let the gang relax at the dance for a few hours.  Strangers dressed in city slicker suits but driving a mud covered new car, sipping something intoxicating out of glass jars, asking local ladies for dances and more ... it is only a few minutes before the group becomes a subject of interest to the local authorities.

                                   
                                         Deputy Sheriff Eugene Moore

Receiving information at their office in Atoka that some drunks might be disturbing the peace at the local dance, shortly after 10:00 Sheriff Charley Maxwell and 30-year-old Deputy Sheriff Eugene Moore (a husband and father of three young children) drive the eight miles out to Stringtown to investigate and maybe make a couple of easy arrests.  Arriving at the dance, they see men sitting in a car behind the bandstand sipping what appears to be moonshine and approach the group.  "We want to talk to you," Moore calls out, not expecting trouble as he and Maxwell approach the strangers with their weapons holstered.  They are the last words he ever speaks.  Surprised rattlesnakes, Barrow and Hamilton both instantly respond by drawing their weapons and blasting away at the lawmen from almost point-blank range.  In the lead, Maxwell is felled by seven bullet hits to his chest and stomach, but survives, though crippled for life, after hours of emergency surgery.  Moore is not as lucky ... hit in the head by a single bullet from a .30 caliber Stevens automatic rifle, the unlucky officer dies instantly.

                      
                                           Site of the shooting  

Dance over, Clyde floors the Ford out of Stringtown, abandoning fellow hoodlum Milligan in the process.  Not happy at being left behind by his comrades to a mob of citizens that almost lynches him, Milligan responds to the slight by telling the authorities who the shooters were at the dance, and Oklahoma joins Texas in wanting the murderers put six feet under or beyond bars for life.  Sadly though, before that happens there will be many more killings!

                     
                                     Hamilton & Barrow

Deadly dangerous as solos, Hamilton and Barrow are pure poison as a duo.  Separated by arrests, in 1934 Barrow will orchestrate the prison break that frees his former partner from the prison farm at Eastham, Texas, killing a guard in the process, Major M. H. Crowson.  It is the murder that causes Texas to finally call Texas Ranger Frank Hamer out of retirement to deal with Clyde once and for all ... a mission completed with the massacre ambush of Bonnie and Clyde on a rural road in Louisiana on 5/23/1934.  On death row for several murders at the time (he is serving a sentence of 362 years plus death!), Hamilton avoids that exit though ... but fashions one of his own that is just as fitting.

                    
                                              Clyde

While dinner is being served, using a .45 pistol smuggled into the Huntsville prison (along with commandeered bolt cutters, a paint shop ladder, and several reluctant hostage guards), on 7/24/1934, Hamilton, bank robber Irwin Newton "Blackie" Thompson, and Barrow associate Joe Palmer, manage to get out of their death row cells, over the walls of the institution, and vanish into the night in one of two waiting, black V-8 Fords (three other cons that participate in the escape are not as fortunate ... one, Whitey Walker, is shot off the ladder by guards and killed by way of a holed head, while the other two men, Charlie Frazier and Roy Johnson, are seriously wounded and end up handcuffed to beds in the prison hospital).  But not for long!  

                          
                                                 Thompson
                       
                                                    Palmer
                         
                                               Hamilton

Hiding near Amarillo, Thompson is the first to go when he fatally loses a gunfight in December of 1934 with three car loads of unhappy law enforcement agents.  Three weeks after his escape, Palmer is caught sleeping on a railroad embankment in Paducah, Kentucky, while Hamilton is on the loose a little longer, robbing banks in Texas and Mississippi, before being captured in Fort Worth.  

                        
                                               Infamy

There will be no further escapes for either of the men, and on May 10, 1935, both killers are fried to death at Huntsville in the state's electric chair, "Old Sparky" (Palmer first, a sobbing Hamilton perishes five minutes later after the chair has been cleaned up).  Hamilton's last words from behind his leather death mask are, "Well, goodbye, all."  Goodbye indeed ... adios to the Barrow Gang! 

                            
                               Old Sparky

FOUR FOR LINCOLN

7/7/1865 - With most of the nation wanting payback beyond the death of John Wilkes Booth for the April 14th assassination of President Lincoln (scores of individuals are thrown in jail while the Federal authorities try to establish who was in on the plot, among them are Booth's actor brother Junius, theater owner John T. Ford, and James Pumphrey, the owner of the livery stable where Booth hired his escape horse), four co-conspirators deemed most guilty by a military tribunal (among its nine-member commission is the future author of Ben Hur, Major General Lew Wallace) appointed by President Andrew Johnson are executed at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.

                              
                                              Assassination
                                    
                                                   Wanted
After a trial lasting seven weeks in which 366 witnesses testify, the condemned consist of Lewis Thornton Powell (also known by the name Lewis Paine, a 21-year-old former Confederate soldier that wounds five with a Bowie knife and the butt of his misfiring pistol trying to kill William Seward at the Secretary of State's home ... escaping the attack, he rushes into the night crying out, "I'm mad!  I'm mad!"), Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt (a 45-year-old widow that owned the boarding house where Booth stayed for months while planning Lincoln's murder), George Andreas Atzerodt (a 30-year-old drunk from Germany who is assigned the death of Vice-President Johnson, but instead, goes on a bender in the bar of the Kirkwood House, the hotel where Johnson is a resident), and David Edgar Herold (the 23-year-old guide that shows Paine the home in which to attack Seward, and then helps Booth out of the city after Lincoln's shooting, accompanying the killer until the pair are caught  in Virginia).
               
             
                                                         The Trial
            
                               Powell                                                Surratt
            
                            Atzerodt                                               Herold
                                        
                                            The Surratt Boardinghouse

Supervised by one of the heroes of the Battle of Gettysburg, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, at 1:15 in the afternoon of a hot Washington, D.C. day (at noon the temperature is almost 94 degrees), before a crowd of over 1,000 (including Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner who scores a grand slam with Lincoln and his death, capturing the President's likeness seven times while he is alive, documenting the man's funeral, and taking the only shots of the execution of Booth's co-conspirators), the condemned prisoners, ankles and wrists bound by shackles, are led from their cells in the Old Arsenal Penitentiary on the grounds of Fort McNair and escorted by four members of Company F of the 14th Veteran Reserves up to the scaffold built for their execution.

           
                                            The Order of Execution is read

Built under the supervision of "Captain" Christian Rath (actually a colonel who preferred the lesser designation), who also fashions the nooses used (tested the night before by dropping bags of buckshot from a stout tree limb), the gallows of the guilty stands 12 feet high and is a hinged wooden structure of 20 square feet.

                              
                                                         Rath

Shielded from the sun by black umbrellas, it takes roughly 15 minutes for the prisoners to be readied for their deaths ... as each of the condemned is ministered to by a member of the clergy (collapsing from the heat and the ghastliness of her situation, Surratt requires the support of two soldiers and her priests), the order of execution is read by General John F. Hartranft, and then the arms and legs of each individual are bound with strips of white cloth, Surratt's bonnet is removed, nooses are adjusted to necks, and white canvas bags are placed over the heads of the guilty (Surratt, proclaiming that she is in pain from too tight of bindings is sarcastically told by an officer on the scaffold, "Well, it won't hurt long!").

                    
                                       Readying the principles

Ready for last words ... stepping forward on to the drop Surratt says, "Please don't let me fall" ... Herold is silent ... Atzerodt exclaims, "May we all meet in the other world.  God take me now" ... and Powell, told by Rath that he hopes he dies quick, makes a  final utterance of, "You know best, captain."  

                         
                                         The drop moment

But the Captain really doesn't ... ten seconds after the drop is cleared of all but the four, Rath claps his hands twice and soldiers knock out the supports and the four fall into eternity ... though some go quicker than others.  Surratt and Herold have their necks snapped and go to their deaths instantly, but faulty placement of the nooses on Powell and Atzerodt cause the two men to linger several minutes before finally strangling to death ... jerking wildly trying to find an impossible purchase for their legs to the horror of the audience (twice Powell will contort his body into a sitting position at the end of his rope), Powell is the last to go.

                           
                                                 Dead
                     L to R - Surratt, Powell, Herold, and Atzerodt
                      

Last act, after all the hung are officially pronounced dead by a physician (they remain dangling for about 30 minutes and are finally cut down at 1:53 P.M. ... rope cut, Atzerodt drops to the ground with a loud thud ... the corporal responsible instantly and loudly reprimanded for the act, the other bodies are treated more delicately), the bodies are taken down, placed in pine boxes and buried in temporary graves next to the scaffold.

       
                                          Coffins and Graves

Mary Surratt is the first woman to be executed by the United States government.

GOODBYE GARFIELD

7/2/1881 - For the second time in America's history, the recipe of a madman, politics, and a handy weapon results in a president not completing his term of office ... the victim, the 20th President of the United States, former Union Civil War general James Abram Garfield, the assassin, mentally challenged Charles Julius Guiteau.

                  
                     Garfield                                    Guiteau 

A failure as a college student, as a member of the utopian religious sect known as the Oneida Community (he will be nicknamed Charles Gitout for how much the inhabitants desire his company), at running a newspaper called the Oneida Theocrat, as a lawyer (he somehow manages to pass a Chicago bar exam), as an author (he plagiarizes almost an entire book by John Humphrey Noyes), as a town hall speaker on religious topics, as a political operative (he writes a speech called Garfield vs. Hancock, cropped from a speech called Grant vs. Hancock, that he believes is instrumental in Garfield's narrow victory in the presidential election of 1880), Guiteau finally snaps (no surprise to his family, who try to get him committed to an insane asylum in 1875 ... a place he belongs, but escapes from using an open window) when his efforts to receive a diplomatic post in either Vienna or Paris come to naught despite meetings with Garfield, Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, and various members of Congress and the Republican Party (no help at all to himself, jobless, he roams Washington D.C. for months looking for political support in the same slovenly outfit every day, the only clothes he owns).

                                      
                                                      Madman

Believing God has told him to kill Garfield, Guiteau borrows $15 and buys an ivory-handled .44 Webley British Bulldog revolver to accomplish his mission ... a selection made for the gun's power, and because Guiteau believes it will look nice in a museum exhibit about the assassination someday (and sure enough, in the early part of the 20th Century the weapon is put on display at the Smithsonian).  Armed and ready for mayhem, Guiteau then begins stalking his prey (not totally crazy, the assassin prepares for his adventure in murder by checking out the District of Columbia jail where he knows he will be held and writing a letter in advance of the deed to Commanding General of the United States Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, asking for mob protection during his incarceration) through the month of June (a real sweetheart, he decides to postpone the assassination once because Garfield is with his wife ... and he doesn't want to upset her seeing her husband's death ... though that is what ends up happening anyway with her at the dying president's bedside).

                                   
                                               British Bulldog

As the president is about to leave town for his summer vacation (and to give a speech at his alma mater, Williams College in Massachusetts), at 9:30 in the morning of 7/2/1881, Guiteau finds Garfield totally unprotected (despite the Lincoln assassination of 1865, presidents at the time did not use security details or bodyguards) in the waiting room at the Washington D.C. Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad and strikes.

                        
                             Scene of the crime

Firing two shots at almost point-blank range into Garfield's back, the president throws his arms in the air and asks, "My God, what is that?" ... then he staggers forward and collapses, wounded with a bullet to the shoulder and one that lodges behind his pancreas.  Fleeing his accomplishment, Guiteau is arrested by a policeman as he attempts to make it outside to the cab he has waiting (the cop, Patrick Kearney, is so excited about the collar, that he forgets to relieve Guiteau of his weapon until they arrive at the police station ... and in his defense, he gets a little busy protecting the assassin from a mob looking to lynch Guiteau).

                          
                                                         Ouch!

In shock and unconscious, Garfield is taken to the White House, where doctors do not expect him to make it through the night ... but he does, and then hope becomes that the president will survive his wounds ... and he might have, had all the doctors who examined him not used their unsanitarized hands and dirty instruments probing for the bullet that caused the pancreas wound (one doctor will puncture Garfield's liver searching for the bit of lead).  Fade to dark, in extreme agony, Garfield will go from weighing over 200 pounds to being a stickman of 135 at his death 11 weeks later ... official causes being committed to history as a ruptured splenic artery aneurysm brought on by blood poisoning and bronchial pneumonia ... he is 49 years old at his death (trying to make the president comfortable in the summer heat, a Navy engineer creates one of the world's first air conditioner's ... an air blower and filters installed over six tons of ice).

                        
                        Lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda

At his trial, Guiteau puts on a show that displays his insanity ... frequently cursing and insulting the judge, witnesses, the prosecution, and even members of his own defense team, giving testimony in the form of epic poems, inquiring for a woman with a personal ad in the New York Herald, planning a lecture tour for after the trial, soliciting legal advice from random spectators, and throwing his hat in the ring for the 1884 presidential race.  Bed-bug nuts, he is deemed sane anyway, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death ... a sentence which is carried out on 6/30/1882 with an unsurvivable neck stretching.  Looney tunes to the end, Guiteau's last words are to recite a poem he has written entitled I am Going to the Lordy (a small sample so as to not ruin any nearing meals: I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad, I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad, I am going to the Lordy, Glory Hallelujah, Glory Hallelujah ... Bob Dylan he ain't!).  

                                   
                                    Political Cartoon of Guiteau - 1881

The maniac is 40 years old when he goes Lordy looking for eternity!  

CROSSROAD DAY FOR DILLINGER

6/10/1933 - After a month of attending church, listening to lectures from his father, looking into local job openings, and generally acting as if he wants to turn his life around, recent prison parolee (released after serving over eight years for an attempted robbery of a grocery store owner), John Dillinger, shows his true colors by engaging in a full day and night of thievery.

                                       
                                               John Herbert Dillinger

The twenty-nine-year-old criminal begins his day in New Carlisle, Ohio, a small town north of Dayton where the New Carlisle National Bank resides.  Bearing a list of easy scores that his convict friends at the Michigan City Penitentiary have put together (along with the names of crooks he can use), the financial institution is the first stop in a summer of Midwest robberies meant to provide enough funds to orchestrate a breakout from the Indiana State prison.  The first stop, and also the first bank the budding public enemy will rob in his career ... there will be eleven others before he is stopped in 1934.

                              
                                    New Carlisle

Accompanied by two teenage hoodlums, William Shaw and Paul "Lefty" Parker, Dillinger and his two confederates don white handkerchiefs and enter the bank at 8:00 in the morning, just after the head bookkeeper, Horace Grisso, unlocks the front door of the establishment for business.  The first three customers of the day are also the last customers of the day.  With pistols as persuaders, Grisso is convinced to open the bank's vault, and while Dillinger polices the front door (two employees and a customer will be corralled entering the building and tied up in baling wire), Shaw and Parker fill a sack with bags of cash that will give the trio a payday of $10,600.  In and quickly out, in less than ten minutes the bandits are back in their car and on a return route of deserted dirt farm roads to their base of operations in Indianapolis.

                              
                                                   Haag's Drugstore

A nice haul, but Dillinger's cut is not nearly enough to pay all the expenses a prison break will require ... bribes, weapons, clothes, cars, hideouts, food, and loose women ... so he talks his buddies into spending the evening taking down some local scores.  First up is Haag's Drugstore and it's two cash registers.  Pistols at the ready, Dillinger takes the responsibility of emptying the register at the soda fountain, while Shaw boosts the main register.  

And the comedy begins!  

Fearing that the employees staring at him will be able to identify him to the authorities, Dillinger orders his hostages to look away from him, but when they turn their heads in the opposite direction, Shaw comes into view and tells them the same thing, then it is Dillinger's turn again, back to Shaw, back to Dillinger and the heads in the store pivot back and forth as if a tennis game is taking place.  Pockets stuffed with cash, when the men arrive back on the street, they are horrified to discover that Parker, who has never driven a getaway car before, has parallel-park their escape vehicle tightly between two parked cars.  Anger steam almost coming out of his ears, Dillinger seethes as Parker is required to play bumper cars to bang his way away from the curb, but isn't angry enough to call off the second robbery the men have planned for the evening.

                               
                                                       A Year Later!

Recommended by Shaw, hitting the City Foods supermarket of Indianapolis is a mistake.  

Failing to tell his companions that he has robbed the same location only days before, Shaw and Dillinger find the business without its usual cash funds ... upset about the recent robbery, the store has hired a collection agency to carry off the market's excess cash, an operation that has taken place only minutes before.  Unhappy at being thwarted, Dillinger returns to the getaway car where Parker has learned the criminally correct way to park ... out in the street, pointed in the right direction for an exit, and with its motor left running.  Meanwhile, Shaw stays inside the market and spends a few moments stealing boxes of cigarettes from a display case.  

And then Parker displays that along with having parking issues, he is in dire need of a few driving lessons too!

When Dillinger slips into the front seat, Parker guns the vehicle and with tires screaming, drives off ... without Shaw.  As Dillinger yells for him to stop, a panicked Parker slams on the brakes, throws the car into reverse, and backs down the street to where a running Shaw meets them.  Safely reunited before any citizens can react, the men drive off, with the still rattled Parker bringing more unwanted attention their way by running through several stop signs.

Lessons learned, the next morning Dillinger will begin looking for new partners of a more professional disposition, and with different associates in tow, in July, will next lighten the cash reserves of the Commercial Bank of Daleville, Indiana, by $6,500.

                                           
                                                     Public Enemy #1

DON'T MARRY PUBLIC ENEMIES!

6/5/1949 - Proving that he never should have been paroled out of Leavenworth Penitentiary, former bank robber Thomas James Holden adds murder to his already full criminal resume ... and for his victims, he chooses members of his own family.

                                         
                                                         Holden

A wanted felon since the late 1920s for a series of Midwest robberies committed with his partner-in-crime, Francis Keating (their 1926 hijacking of a U.S. Mail truck at Evergreen Park, Illinois, nets the bandits $135,000 ... and 25-year sentences when the duo are finally caught), after escaping prison using a trusty pass forged by George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Holden works with a who's-who of public enemies that includes Kelly, Frank "Jelly" Nash (the robber that gunmen are trying to free when they perpetrate the infamous Kansas City Massacre in 1933), Harvey Bailey (mastermind of robberies that net him over $1,000,000 in cash and securities), Verne Miller (a former soldier and sheriff who switches careers, becoming a thief and a murderer by 1930), Fred and Doc Barker (two of Ma's four muderous sons), Alvin Karpis (the brains behind the most successful bandit gang of the 1930s), and Lawrence DeVol (a killer of at least 11 people during the 22-years of his bloody career).
   
                                    
                                                         Karpis

Caught in 1932 by Federal officers while playing golf in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Old Mission Golf Course, Holden is returned to Leavenworth to finish out his sentence ... but is foolishly let out due to a rheumatic heart condition and "for good behavior" in 1947.  Returning to his home town of Chicago to be close to his wife Lillian and his two sons, with no job (no one will hire him ... not exactly a surprise given his history), Holden spends most of his time sampling the fare of the neighborhood taverns and leading a somewhat quiet life for roughly 18 months.  Then, violently, he reverts to form.

       
                                             FBI Documents On Holden

After a full day of carousing about the local bars, Holden continues getting blasted at home ... which his wife is not happy about at all.  More booze, loud screaming, fisticuffs, and Lillian involving her two brothers in her argument with her 'deadbeat" husband eventually results in a 3:15 in the morning call to the police ... who arrive at the fourth floor West Side apartment where Holden is living and discover the three corpses of Lillian and her brothers, shot by the irate robber with a .38 pistol (found on a dresser with four spent rounds and two waiting for the next argument).  On the lam again, Holden becomes the first criminal to be placed atop the FBI's newly created, Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List, and rightly so, is described by a spokesman for the law agency as, "... a menace to every man, woman, and child in America."

                                
                                   Under Arrest

His freedom is short-lived though!  After The Oregonian runs an article about the FBI's list and its ten miscreants on June 20, 1951, a tip is received that Holden is living in Beaverton, Oregon, working as a plaster for the Cascade Concrete Products company while using the alias of John McCullough.  It is good information and Holden is arrested three days later while working in an unoccupied home just outside of town.  Surprised and weaponless (except for an assortment of spatulas and a tub of plaster), he is returned to Illinois where he is soon easily convicted of the three murders by a Chicago jury and sentenced to life in prison ... a life behind bars that lasts only until 1953, when his faulty ticker vapor locks and he finally ceases to be a menace to the public.

                       
                                               The Headline Story