“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!”