The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

The fugitives drove into Pennsylvania. Near Allentown, they forced a motorist off the road, tied him up, put him in the back seat, and sped west. Some 350 miles and many hours later, they put him out of his car near Akron, Ohio, and drove off, leaving the motorist with an adventure story to tell for the rest of his days.

As for Karpis, the target on his back was bigger than ever. Charles “Baby Face” Nelson, notorious killer and robber who had been with John Dillinger in the battle at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin, had been cornered and shot dead by federal agents at Barrington, Illinois, near Chicago, on November 27, 1934. But before he was slain, he managed to kill two agents. Since he had already been “credited” with killing one of Purvis’s men at Little Bohemia, Nelson is believed to have killed more federal agents (three) than any other outlaw in United States history.

It may be recalled that Volney Davis had friends in both the Dillinger and Barker-Karpis gangs. Davis was thirty-two years old in 1934. Born in Oklahoma, he was a rather handsome man with wavy hair.

Davis and his then-girlfriend, Edna Murray, were eventually suspected of taking part in the kidnapping of Edward Bremer, once the FBI figured out that the Barker-Karpis bunch (and not Verne Sankey or God only knew who else) had abducted the banker-brewer.

FBI agents caught up with Davis in St. Louis on Wednesday, February 6, 1935, and made arrangements to fly him to St. Paul to stand trial in the Bremer case. But on February 7, soon after the plane carrying him and two federal agents took off from Kansas City, it ran into bad weather and made an emergency landing on a farm near Yorkville, Illinois. Davis had been manacled while on the plane, but after the landing, his chains were removed as a farmer drove the prisoner and two agents to a hotel in Yorkville.

Incredibly, while one agent was telephoning Chicago for instructions, his partner took Davis to the hotel bar. “What’ll you have?” the agent asked his prisoner and new drinking buddy.151

“I’ll take beer,” Davis replied. He held his stein just long enough to throw the contents into the face of the agent, whom he stunned with a punch. Then Davis plunged through the nearest window as the agent fired three shots at him. All missed. Davis quickly stole a car and motored off—to Chicago, fifty-eight miles to the northeast, it would be learned later.*

Months afterward, Purvis would concede in the Chicago Tribune that the agents had bungled the handling of Davis, and indeed it cost them their jobs. Yet their flabbergasting incompetence seems to have set off little, if any, criticism of the bureau’s leadership. Yet again, Hoover seemed almost immune.

Davis would remain at large until June 1, when he was caught in Chicago, this time for good. In his initial capture and before he fled after the plane made a forced landing, agents had found on him a piece of paper with a Chicago phone number. Agents staked out the address that matched the phone number and waited for Davis to show up—which he eventually did, no doubt much to the bureau’s relief.

Davis sought to lessen his punishment by giving information on what was left of the Barker-Karpis gang and giving testimony against them. Still, he was convicted of taking part in the kidnapping of Edward Bremer and was sent off to Alcatraz to meditate for several decades.

By the spring of 1935, it was clear that the heyday of the Barker-Karpis gang was over and that the white heat generated by the kidnapping of Edward Bremer, which had once seemed such a tidy, professional job, had contributed to the gangsters’ undoing.

On Saturday, May 3, Harry Sawyer was arrested in New Orleans, becoming the thirteenth person arrested in the Bremer case. He had been doing what he knew best: running a dance hall and gambling den on the Mississippi coast.** Altogether, some dozen people had been indicted for the Bremer kidnapping by this time. It was believed to be the first case in which the federal government went after not only the principals but virtually everyone involved in a kidnapping.

On Friday, May 17, 1935, five defendants were convicted in St. Paul of taking part in the Bremer crime. Two of them, Doc Barker and Oliver Berg, were immediately sentenced to life in prison for being among the ringleaders of the enterprise (though it probably didn’t matter much to Berg, who was already serving a life term in Illinois state prison for murder).

But the biggest fish of all, Alvin Karpis, was still at large. Another suspect still missing was Dr. Joseph Moran, whose remains at that moment were floating across Lake Erie toward Canada. Another gang member, it was learned later, shared a weakness with Dr. Moran. He talked too much. His name was William Harrison, and it was discovered later that he had been lured to an abandoned barn in rural Illinois in early 1935 and shot to death. His body was incinerated.

And one mystery about the Bremer kidnapping remained. It will be recalled that during Bremer’s captivity, he heard church chimes playing the “Angelus.” Investigators set about trying to find the church, thinking it might lead them to the kidnappers’ lair. But did it?

Not long after Edward Bremer was freed, the New York Times reported that FBI agents had zeroed in on the small village of Menominee, in northeastern Nebraska, where a Catholic church with chimes was found. But Bremer eventually identified his place of imprisonment as a house owned by one Harold Alderton in Bensenville, Illinois, not far from Chicago and well over five hundred miles east of Menominee, Nebraska.

On Hoover’s orders, agents spent hundreds of man-hours “revisiting every town between Joliet and central Wisconsin in search of the right combination of trains, church bells, and factory whistles Bremer had heard while in custody. The agents churned out hundreds of reports but…found nothing.”152 One