It was decided that Hunsaker was to watch the stranger’s movements and notify the police the next time the man appeared at the Porter farm. As a double check, officers were dispatched to Kansas City to watch the movements of Burke’s wife, who was employed as a nurse in a doctor’s office.
It was about three o’clock on the morning of Thursday, March 26, that the call came from Hunsaker. Burke was at the Porter home and his big car was parked outside, he reported. His wife was in Kansas City. Hunsaker understood that her husband was to leave to join her in the morning.
The raiding party, under the command of Captain John Lard, was ready in an instant. Two high-powered cars, ready for just that moment, roared away to the north in the night. With Captain Lard were three detectives, A. W. Thedings, Melvin Swepston and E. R. Kelly, and at their feet were three machine guns, shotguns, and a half dozen tear gas bombs.
At Milan the two cars halted their furious race long enough to pick up Sheriff L. C. Hoover, of Sullivan County. Deputy Ralph Clubine and Constable A. F. Pickett, of Green City.
Arriving at the Porter home about dawn, the officers found a highly polished, powerful automobile parked alongside the house in a driveway. Captain Lard ordered one of the police automobiles driven in front of it, and the other police car halted behind it to prevent any attempted escape.
Silently the seven men slipped noiselessly up on the porch. They had intended to rush into the house, but Porter, awakened by the sound of the cars, met them at the door. A revolver was pushed into the ribs of the astonished man and he fell back without a word.
The officers rushed down a narrow hall to the bedroom door, on the other side of which Captain Lard had been informed he would come upon the man known as the most ruthless slayer of modern times. The door was flung open, and there on the bed lay a sleeping man with black hair and a mustache. The high-powered car was parked just outside the open window and on a chair close beside the bed was a man’s coat with bulging pockets.
Two of the officers stepped between the chair and the bed, and two others stood with machine guns leveled at the man’s head. Detective Swepston shouted: “Stick ’em up!”
The man in the bed awoke with a start and sat bolt upright. He gasped in astonishment, and looked into the muzzles of the two machine guns. Then he made a grab for the coat on the chair. But the officer kicked it away. The coat fell to the floor, and a thirty-two caliber automatic revolver fell from the pocket.
The man now was trembling with fear.
“Take it easy,” warned Swepston. “We’ve got you cold and it won’t pay to fight.”
“What are you going to do, take me for a ride?” the man stammered. And then he heaved a sigh of relief when the raiders convinced him they were officers of the law and not hired killers who had come to put him on the spot.
While he was dressing the captured man told the officers his name was Richard Franklin White, and that he was a salesman. In the pockets of his clothes was seven hundred and ninety-five dollars in hills of large denomination.
It was not until he was lodged in a special cell in the St. Joseph jail and under the guard of two officers that he revealed his identity. He refused to talk until he was confronted with Bertillon measurements and finger-prints, which checked in detail.
“Well, as long as you know, then I guess there isn’t much use in denying it,” the prisoner said sullenly. “I’m Burke. Who did you think you were capturing, Jesse James?”
Then he added with a smile:
“And I’m not a damned bit afraid to go back to Chicago.”
When Omaha, Nebraska, police telephoned a few minutes later in an attempt to learn from Burke whether he had had any part in a recent bank robbery at Lincoln, he replied curtly:
“Tell them to get a spiritualist and hold hands. Maybe they’ll find out.”
Burke made it clear that he wasn’t going to talk about any of his exploits or lend any help in clearing up the long series of crimes charged to his trigger finger.
“As far as I’m concerned, you might as well go take a walk, because I’m not going to talk,” he told Chief Matthews.
But despite his boast that he wasn’t a “damned bit afraid” to go back to Chicago and face the charge that he was the man who had helped mow down the seven Moran gangsters with a hail of machine gun fire, St. Valentine’s Day, Burke was pleased at the decision of Governor Henry Caulfield, of Missouri, to turn him over to Michigan authorities instead.
In Michigan, he realized, the maximum penalty for his crime would be life imprisonment, whereas Cook County, Illinois, had been loud in its promises to “burn” Burke in the electric chair if he were ever brought to trial.
“Of course I’d rather go back to Michigan,” Burke said. “I don’t think much of the hot seat.”
VIII
Governor Caulfield signed the extradition papers turning Burke over to Michigan, and the Michigan officers went into conference to agree upon a plan for the five hundred and sixty-eight mile trip back to the scene of Charles Skelly’s cold-blooded murder. It was agreed that the utmost secrecy must be used in arranging for the trip, especially since there had been vague rumors that the underworld might attempt to take Burke from the law and put him on the spot before he had an opportunity to turn squealer on the higher-ups who had hired him to do their killings.
At five o’clock on a morning last March, just as the first streaks of cold dawn appeared, Burke was bundled out of his cell and put into an armored car that waited at the curb outside with motor running. The large car seemed to bristle with machine guns. Four officers of the Michigan State Police were seated inside, alert. Their revolvers were cocked for any foray that gangland might attempt.
Then began a dash across the Middle West at breakneck speed. At eight twenty-five that night Burke was back in the little Michigan resort town, where for three months, he had hidden out as a peaceful country gentleman... until he had got drunk and lost his head over a trivial traffic mishap.
Back in the St. Joseph, Michigan, jail, seven guards grouped about his cell with shotguns slung across their knees and State Troopers patrolling the streets outside night and day, Burke was a sullen, growling prisoner. He chewed savagely on big, black cigars and cursed the newspaper men who came to the bars of his cell to ask him about his crimes.
“You guys never gave me a break and you won’t get anything out of me now, you—” he grumbled.
He had been in the jail only two days when I went to his cell accompanied by a deputy sheriff and succeeded in persuading him to talk — but not about his ignoble career. A score of police officers from nearly as many States where he was reputed to have left a trail of terror had questioned him during those two days and to them he had maintained that same stubbornness.
I found him seated on the edge of his iron bunk reading a Western story magazine, and as I talked to him the group of heavily armed officers sat grouped outside the bars, alert to any attempt which might be made to take their captive from them. But Burke seemed unmindful of their glowering watchfulness and the cold steel muzzles of their guns.
He sat in his shirt sleeves. A barber had been to see him a few minutes before, and he was clean-shaved excepting for the bristling black mustache he had grown in an attempt to escape the eyes of the law.
But it was his eyes, deep gray eyes with pouchy lids and a menacing cold look, that labeled him as the Fred Burke whose photographs have been emblazoned on thousands of police posters. It was those eyes that had attracted the attention of the young truck driver, Hunsaker, six months before and had finally resulted in the sensational capture.