Recently, in a small town in Michigan, the writer attended a meeting at the public high school building. On the blackboard were pictures of the DeAutremonts. The superintendent explained that it was a good moral lesson, that his boys were learning that the government mails are sacred, that United States authority will not permit violation.
In another section of the Middle West two men, resembling Ray and Roy, were seen in a lumber camp. They had gone when post office inspectors, hurriedly summoned, arrived.
But within a week staid, respectable citizens all over that part of the State, farmers and villagers who never were nearer criminal affairs than watching a village marshal lock up a Saturday night drunk, received in their mail boxes official requests to be on the lookout for the DeAutremonts, together with photographs, signatures and descriptions.
With Hugh in custody, the Post Office Department has turned its search to the other two. According to the officer in charge, C. Riddiford, postal inspector at Spokane, Washington, these two men will be found. D. O’Connell, chief special agent for the Southern Pacific railway, and a large force of his men, are assisting in the hunt. They, too, have decreed that Roy and Ray will be apprehended.
So after four years Case No. 57883-D still is provoking the vigilance of the criminal investigation division of the postal service. The Postmaster General is determined to work till the two missing brothers are in his hands.
“The post office inspector has a reputation for getting his man,” Postmaster General Harry New said recently. “He never gives up. The postal inspection service is determined to a man to wipe off this blot from their otherwise clean slate.”
Since this article was written the DeAutremont brothers have been captured, convicted and sent away for life. — Editor’s Note.