IV
First a call was put in for Pontiac, Michigan, where there had been a recent bank holdup, then to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a robbery had been staged several weeks before. But these leads were unavailing. The serial numbers on the bonds didn’t check with the loot taken in the two cities.
“But you might call the bank of Jeffersonville, Wisconsin,” suggested a Milwaukee banker over the telephone. “They had a robbery up there some time ago and some bonds were stolen.”
Selfridge communicated with L. H. Smith, president of the Farmers & Merchants National Bank of Jeffersonville.
And there the serial numbers checked. The bonds found in the little bungalow were part of the three hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars carried away by four men who held up the Wisconsin bank six months before. About thirty-five thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds were missing, it was revealed.
“Who were the four men?” asked Sheriff Bryant, taking the telephone from Selfridge.
“Well, one of them was Fred R. Burke, the fellow they want so badly in Chicago,” came the reply over the wire.
Fred Burke, called by police the most dangerous man alive!
Could he be the man who had lived quietly as a gentleman-farmer in the little resort town for months?
The officers had known they were searching for a cruel, heartless killer. But now their quarry was revealed as the most vicious slayer of gangland, a man who could line seven men up against a wall and mow them down with a machine gun...
Sheriff Bryant went to a file and took from it a long poster with the big black type — $41,500 Reward — Fred Burke — Wanted For Murder! The poster, containing two photographs of the widely sought killer, was dated April 1, 1929, and bore the signature of William F. Russell. Chicago commissioner of police.
There were a half dozen aliases — John Burke, Robert Burke, John Thomas. Brooks, Camp, Kempt and Kemper.
And the description: “Forty-three years old, five feet eleven and three-quarter inches tall, weight two hundred pounds, black hair, brown eyes, ruddy complexion and missing upper front tooth.”
There was a note in bold face type at the bottom of the poster:
This man is a very dangerous murderer and bank robber. Police officers should use the greatest caution in approaching him.
“Our ticket to this man’s hiding place — if he really is Burke — is coming from that woman in the cell upstairs.” Prosecutor Cunningham said.
But before they questioned the woman who said she was Mrs. Fred Dane — Viola, she said her first name was — the prosecutor and sheriff dispatched an officer to the homes of several St. Joseph merchants with the police photographs of Burke.
“Sure, I remember that man well,” said Edgar Smith, an employee of the American dry cleaners. “He’s Fred Dane, a steady customer of ours. I remember he bawled me out just a few days ago for printing identification marks on his clothing in indelible ink.”
A half dozen other merchants readily identified the photographs as those of Dane.
Queries were telegraphed to police departments throughout the country asking for information on Viola Dane or a woman meeting her description.
Then the prosecutor and sheriff went to the cell upstairs where the woman sat calmly looking out through the barred window into the still night. They told her about the murder of Skelly, about her husband’s flight, and about the stolen bonds. What did she know about it all?
Throughout the night they questioned her — first Cunningham and then the sheriff.
The woman, who said she was thirty-four years old and formerly operated a beauty parlor in Chicago, explained that she first met Dane in 1927 at a party in Chicago. She was an unwilling talker, and it took constant prodding to draw the story from her. Her eyes shifted constantly away from the glowering gaze of her questioners.
They were married in November, 1927, in Chicago, and went to live in Burnham, a suburb of Hammond, Indiana, she told the officers. Burnham, the officers reflected, was known as the Indiana hideout of Chicago’s south side gangsters and for years had enjoyed the reputation of a wide-open town. Its killings had been frequent. It was in October, 1929, that her husband had purchased the Lake Shore Drive home in St. Joseph.
Then she broke down.
“Oh, I can hardly believe it,” she sobbed. “But if he’s all that you tell me then I hope you capture him. Why couldn’t I have known about this. They call women dumb, and I guess they are.
“Shield him? Never; now that I know what he is I hope he gets all that’s coming to him. Murder! Anything but that.”
They asked her about her husband’s relatives, but she knew of none. And he never told her about his friends. Once in a while he would have some visitors from Chicago, but she never became acquainted with them. There was a woman called “Hon” and a man nicknamed “Prince” who came to St. Joseph several times.
“Do you have any photographs of your husband?” asked the prosecutor.
“No,” she replied simply. “He didn’t like them and would never have any taken.”
“He wouldn’t,” said the prosecutor.
She knew little about the man to whom she had been married for two years. He never cursed or swore, she said, and even objected to slang. But sometimes he drank more wine than was good for his disposition.
“But when he was sober no woman ever had a better husband,” she added, “He always spoke kindly of every one and was always willing to help any one.”
“Did he ever talk with you about bank robberies?” asked the sheriff.
“I remember him saying what fools men were to take chances like that. He happened to mention it when we were reading about some bank robberies in the newspapers.”
“What are you going to do now, divorce him?” asked Cunningham.
“Do you think I’d live with him now?” she replied with scorn. “Not after he shot a man down in cold blood and run away like a yellow cur.”
V
During the next twenty-four hours, events moved swiftly in the feverish hunt for the slayer of Officer Charles Skelly.
Sunday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the slaying, the St. Joseph city commission convened in special session at the call of Mayor T. G. Yeomans and a ten thousand dollar reward was posted for the killer.
John Stege, deputy commissioner of detectives in Chicago, notified Sheriff Bryant that it appeared certain that the slayer of Skelly was none other than Burke, whom he described as the most dangerous man ever known with a machine gun.
Reports were received, amazing, formidable reports that linked Burke with a score of major crimes — ransom kidnapings in Detroit over a period of eight years, the murder of a patrolman in a Toledo mail truck holdup; a bank robbery at Cadillac, Michigan, where sixty thousand dollars were taken; the robbery of ninety-three thousand dollars from the First National Bank of Peru. Indiana; the slaying of two men in an apartment in Detroit; a St. Louis bank holdup; and another bank robbery in Louisville, Kentucky.
But greater than all of these crimes was the linking of the most horrible crime of modern times to this ruddy-faced man — the St. Valentine’s day massacre in Chicago!