The Hotel Lee, a café at the corner of Wood Street and Monument Avenue, was one of the hottest spots in the part of Hamilton known as “the Jungles.” 

The nickname was largely a racial epithet, but people of all races frequented the speakeasies, “soft drink parlors” and “sporting houses” that lined Wood Street, now Pershing Avenue, the heart of the Ohio city’s thriving Prohibition era nightlife. It was run by Lee Richardson, an African-American attorney from Nashville who moved to Hamilton in 1903.

Edward Schief, proprietor of a “cafe” at 328 Court Street, and his right-hand man Andrew “Skimmer” Kuhlman were making the rounds of the clubs on April 30, 1925. They, along with Philip Einsfeld and his wife, went to a restaurant to get some food but found it closed, and decided to go to Peter Farley’s café on Wood Street, between the Hotel Lee and Madame Hawley’s house, to get some sandwiches. Einsfeld and his wife waited in the car. Ten minutes later, when Schief and Kuhlman did not return, they walked to their house. 

They did not hear about the murder until the next morning.

Reports of what happened were incoherent and contradictory, but by all accounts a party of about eight men and one woman swooped down upon the Hotel Lee about 1 a.m. The café was supposed to have closed by midnight by city ordinance. Owner Lee Richardson said he had closed it, but that “the boys” broke in. 

The brawl started in the cabaret room.

According to one of the patrons, a black man who “took the air” as soon as the fuss started, said that Kuhlman and Schief were squared off against John “Todd” Messner and four other men. Metal knuckles and broken bottles made for a bloody fifteen minutes. A door window was knocked out and the tables and chairs were overturned.

Patrolmen Henry Keiser and Frank Mayer were a few blocks away when the red signal lights began to flash. When they got to the Hotel Lee, they saw Eddie Schief trying to kick in the door to the hotel, blood running down his face.

They saw several other men beaten and bleeding but no one would give them any information and no one wanted to get treated for their wounds. The patrolmen had heard shots fired, but they could not find a gun.

Schief and Kuhlman retreated to the Farley Café, a few doors east on Wood Street, to clean up. They stayed inside there for about thirty-five minutes. Kuhlman was the first to come out. Several men from the brawl jumped him, knocking him to the sidewalk.

“I felt a blow on the head, but it did not quite knock me out,” Kuhlman said later. “I fell to the sidewalk and tried to get up.”

One of the men was kicking Kuhlman in the face when Schief came out of Farley’s place.

“What are you doing to Skimmer?” he shouted.

Two shots fired. 

Kuhlman said, “I heard a shot and saw Schief fall. The gang then jumped on me and that is the last I knew until I woke up in the hospital.”

Schief collapsed on top of him. He was shot twice, once in the neck and once about six inches above his left knee. He was killed instantly by the throat wound.

The gang jumped in a Hudson and fled.

The police arrived shortly, detectives Joe Koons and Charles McCormick, found Schief and Kuhlman in a pile on the sidewalk, one on top of the other, and took both to the hospital.

Word on the street was that Messner and Schief had a falling out over a shipment of beer from Canada, that Messner somehow “double-crossed” his partner.

When the coroner examined Schief at the hospital, he had no personal effects except for a single key and a fountain pen.

Jack Schief, the victim’s brother: “When I examined Eddie, I found that he had cuts and gashes in his head which had been sustained in the brawl which preceded the killing.”

The police officers had passed the Hotel Lee Café a short time prior to the fracas.

Philip Einsfeld, 129 Chestnut Street, a former policeman: “I know nothing about the affair. I rode down to the place with Schief and Kuhlman and they went into the café and I walked to my home a short distance away. I don’t know what’s the matter with Messner. He’s crazy if he says I slugged him. I don’t think that he knows me.”

Eisfeld said that he was not on Wood Street when the brawl or the murder took place.

Police got an answer to the mystery when they spoke to taxi cab driver Edward “Red” Weber, who said that he met Ray Nugent, a local thug named he knew as Crane drive off in the Hudson.

“I had two customers in the cab when the fight in the hotel took place. I don’t know much about the scrap. After the row in the café some of the boys left in a Hudson coach. As I was parked in front of butcher shop to await a milkman whom I see regularly, I saw this same coach drive north on Front Street and turn into Wood Street. This was some time after the fight. I followed the coach and parked my car on Monument Avenue, north of the Hotel Lee. Pretty soon, I heard two shots fired. I drove to Wood Street.

“I was sitting in my machine on Front Street when I noticed a large automobile being driven toward Wood Street. I recognized Nugent and Messner as occupants. I did not see anyone else. Knowing of the fight in Richardson’s place, I followed the car for a while. It was driven back to Richardson’s place and parked in front. I kept on going over Wood Street. Suddenly two shots rang out. I turned my machine and hastened back. Just as I came upon Nugent running toward his machine, Messner had already boarded the automobile. Nugent saw me and aimed his revolver at me. It was a nickel plated gun.”

“Don’t shoot,” he cried. “I’m just a taxi driver.”

“What are you doing here?” Nugent asked, still pointing the gun.

“Then a little fellow who is in the Hudson calls, ‘Come on, Crane, come on!’

“Then Messner began to call for him to hurry. He appeared to become excited at this point. I think I owe my life to the fact that Messner called him. Otherwise I believe that he would have shot me.”

Taxi driver William O’Hara also had a story to tell about the case. He said picked up Todd Messner the morning of the murder at the corner of East Avenue and Hanover Street.

“I told Messner about the murder, and he asked me to drive him around to Farley’s place to see about it,” O’Hara said. After riding him past the scene, he drove to Ninth Street and dropped Messner off in an alley near Heaton Street, not far from where Ray Nugent lived.

Farley said that immediately after the shooting her heard the sound of an automobile being driven away rapidly but was unable to see the machine.

On Thursday afternoon around three o’clock, less than 24 hours after the killing, police arrested Raymond Nugent in his home at 331 North Ninth Street, where he lived with his wife and two children, two and four years old.

He had been going by the name Roy Browning since getting to Hamilton as he was wanted in Cincinnati in connection with the murder of insurance agent Ashur L. Pickens during a brawl in the Little Sunshine fishing camp in Turkey Bottoms in Cincinnati’s East End the previous October. Police had also charged a man Edward Naegle with the crime. At that time, Nugent had been going by the name Richard Crane. 

He was arrested by Detective Charles Nugent, no relation. While detective Charles Morton guarded the front door, Nugent told the man’s wife that he was a friend of “Crane Neck,” Nugent’s gangster name.

She pointed him to the room where he found Nugent lying in his bed. His face was cut and bruised, but the detective recognized him as the partner of George “Fat” Wrassman, a convicted bootlegger and burglar that he had recently arrested by Middletown police. During the arrest, this man Nugent -- alias Browning alias Crane -- jumped on the running board of Wrassman’s car and escaped.

Now, the gangster didn’t recognize him or seem alarmed, so Detective Nugent continued to act as if they were pals. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Oh, all right,” the gangster replied.

“Had pretty much of a scrap last night,” the detective said. “Get hurt much?”

“Yes, had a row at Lee’s but didn’t get hurt much,” Nugent said. “Got socked several times.”

“Well,” the detective said. “You’re wanted at police headquarters, so come with me.”

“What’s the charge?”

“Assault and battery.”

As Detective Nugent walked the thug Nugent into the station, Weber took one look at him and said, “That’s the man who pointed the gun at men.”

Nugent said nothing.

Messner’s mother and sister identified him as the man who had come to their home earlier in the day asking for Tod. They told him Tod had been arrested for Schief’s murder and the man left abruptly.

Questioned by Police Chief Frank Clements, Nugent denied any knowledge of the Cincinnati murder nor Schief’s murder, but he did talk about the brawl that took place in the Hotel Lee’s cabaret room.

“I was standing in Lee Richardson’s place on Wood Street when Schief entered. He was accompanied by Kuhlman and two other men whom I took to be bootleggers. Schief came over to me and without a word, struck me. I became angry and picking up a chair, swung it above my head and brought it down on his head. In the meantime other men in the place began to struggle. Messner was among the lot. I seized the first opportunity and made my escape. They were all still fighting when I left. I went to my home and did not leave it until the police arrived and arrested me.  I was positively not on the scene when the shooting occurred.”

They asked him about his association with Fat Wrassman. Nugent “shut up like a clam,” detectives said. That evening, Cincinnati detective Joe Schaefer and William Duning, superintendent of the Bertillon Bureau of the Cincinnati police department, identified Nugent on sight.

“We want him badly,” Schaefer said, “for murder.” He told the Hamilton police that Nugent was “a gangster, a hi-jacker, a thug and a safe-cracker.” He was well-known at a joint called the Hole in the Wall, a notorious West End resort and the hangout of Cincinnati yeggs. But since Hamilton had possession of the man, the Cincinnati police conceded, they could have first crack at bringing him to trial.

Coroner Hugh Gadd: “My version of it is that the brawl and the killing was a result of a bootleggers’ brawl. They had been drinking. I understand that Messner and Schief had been partners and that they had split up. My evidence in the case is very meager as neither side seems to want to give information. The fact that no one talks makes me cling to the theory of a bootleggers’ war.”

From the jail, Messner said, “Why should I kill Eddie? He was my pal and my friend. God knows that I am innocent of this charge. Why I was not there when any of the shooting they talk about took place. The police arrested me at my home. They said I had killed Eddie--God, I didn’t even have a gun. You want to know all that I know about it. I don’t know much about any of it. When Eddie was shot, I wasn’t there. I was walking along the street when Philip Einsfeld, who was with Eddie and Skimmer, jumped out of an automobile and slugged me. Eddie told Phil, ‘That’s Toddie’ didn’t hit him [sic]. We were in Lee’s place when the fight started. I don’t know what it started over. Then someone took me home and it was there that I was arrested.”

He said he did not know who took him home. He said he danced with the girl who was with one of them but he did not know her name.

Messner: “I had just stepped out of Richardson’s place when Schief, Phil Einfeld (Insfeldt), Kuhlman and several women drove up in a machine and stopped. Schief got out of the machine first. I had no more than said, ‘Hello, Eddie,’ when Einfeld, who was drunk, lunged at me and struck me in the mouth, busting my lip. Then Eddie shouted, ‘Stop it Einfeld. Todd’s all right. Todd’s our friend.’ Even that did not stop Einfeld. He knocked me down and into the street. I got up, dazed, and ran into Richardson’s place again. Einsfeld followed me into the place and again started to beat me. In the meantime Schief and Kuhlman also entered and were fighting with two other men whom I did not know. The next thing I knew I was being walked up and down the street by two men. I didn’t know them. They finally put me into an automobile and took me home. Arriving there, they took my key from my pocket, opened the door for me and I went upstairs. My mother and sister had just finished bathing my wounds when the police arrived and put me under arrest. I want to stay that I was not there when Schief and Kuhlman were shot. I was home and in bed.”

Lee Richardson updated his story, now saying that Nugent, Messner and several others pursued Schief and Kuhlman into his place and into a dance hall where a free for all struggle ensued during which chairs were hurled, tables knocked over and fixtures broken. Several shots were fired, but no one was struck by any of the bullets. After the struggle, Messner, Nugent and the others drove away in an automobile.

Peter Farley: “I was sitting in my place when I heard the sounds of a terrific struggle which I learned later had taken place in Richardson’s café. I went to the street and came upon Schief and Skimmer Kuhlman. Bother were cut and bruised and their clothes was splattered with blood. Knowing them, I invited them into the rear of my place where I have a gymnasium and I dressed their wounds. I helped them clean up and we talked for a while. I urged Schief not to go out. He had not been gone more than two minutes when suddenly two shots rang out. Thinking that the fight had recommenced, I went out the side door of my place and walked into the street. There is a high fence about my side yard and when I stepped through the gateway I nearly stepped upon Schief and Kuhlman. Skimmer was lying on top of Schief, who was dead. When the police arrived, I helped put them into an ambulance and went with them to the hospital.”

Farley said that immediately after the shooting her heard the sound of an automobile being driven away rapidly but was unable to see the machine.

Messner said he believed the two men who took him home were the two men who started the fight with Schief and Kuhlman. He said he did not know them and was unable to explain their solicitude for his welfare.

Indignation over the affair prompted Mayor Howard E. Kelly to announce that he would shut down the cabaret at the Hotel Lee as a result of his own investigation into the place. He said he found the cabaret “obnoxious” and “a public nuisance.”

“My investigations have shown that that the cabaret at Lee Richardson’s place was the source of a great deal of the trouble in the Jungles.” Richardson would still be allowed to run his soft drink parlor, but the mayor said he would continue to investigate other cafes in the city.

After two days of searching for the third man in the Hudson, Detective Schaefer and Cincinnati police did Hamilton police a favor by arresting Edward Scott, twenty-three years old, a black man who lived on Cutter Street. Scott was a known associate of Nugent.

“We have them all now, and the stage is set for a preliminary hearing on the Schief murder,” Chief Clements said, noting that this was one of the hardest cases he ever had to unravel. “Everyone we questioned gave us facts very reluctantly, as if they were afraid something would happen to them if they told when they knew.”

Detective Morton concurred, saying, “It was ten hours after the murder before we were able to get anything but the bare fact that there was a murder.”

Clements added, “Everything has been well-handled in spite of the fact ad we expect to have the murderers’ confessions or conviction very soon.”

Nugent, Messner and Scott were all held on charges of first degree murder. Only Nugent was held without bond.

Coroner Hugh Gadd held an inquest on the death of Schief on May 15, and there were still surprises coming forth when the long-rumored “woman in the case” made her first public appearance, but it proved anticlimatic. Twenty-two year old Ella Mae French, 969 Main Street, said that she was at the Hotel Lee with Elmer Woodruff about one o’clock in the morning. They had come from the Woodlawn Inn. She knew Messner and saw him there. “Toddy was rather rough,” she said, meaning he was pretty drunk, but she danced with him. He got a little fresh and she slapped him, then he slugged her, so she left the joint. She said she was there for 20 minutes but did not see a fight or hear any shots fired.

The coroner had a warrant issued for Lee Richardson, who failed to answer a subpoena to appear at the inquest, and postponed a verdict until he could interview the man. The next day, Richardson was arrested at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, for violating liquor laws. At the Kentucky Derby, he was at the same table as Hamilton police chief Frank W. Clements and chief of detectives C.W. Herrmann when a fourth fellow, a sheriff’s deputy from Illinois, produced a bottle of liquor and sat it on the table. Clements said that just at that moment, a federal agent seized the bottle and arrested everyone at the table.  

On May 27, when Richardson finally appeared before the coroner, the scene had the atmosphere of a showdown. Richardson tried to explain why he missed the earlier subpoena and got his dates mangled so badly that he had himself both in Windsor, Canada, and Louisville, Kentucky, on the same day. “The testimony was passed over for his signature,” the Evening Journal reported, but realizing the contradiction in dates, he refused to sign the paper until he was given the opportunity to study a calendar and see where he made his mistake. Looking at a calendar, he said he was in Windsor on May 9, Detroit on May 12 and Louisville May 16. “Say, everybody knows I was at the Derby on the sixteenth. It was in the papers.”

That straightened out, Richardson said he knew practically nothing about the Schief murder, that he had passed operations of the establishment to his son, Max. He was upstairs on the night of April 30 and heard fighting in the dining room. Several men were in a brawl, but he didn’t know any of them, and he was the one who called the police. When police got there, he said, Skimmer was lying beneath a table unconscious and Schief was on the sidewalk looking into the hotel. When the hotel was cleared, he and Max were at the bar talking when they heard two or three shots and someone told them that two men were lying on the sidewalk.

On June 28, Todd Messner was badly beaten and bruised about the head and body, his skull fractured with the butt of a revolver, in a brawl at a fishing camp somewhere on the Little Miami River, the result of a liquor deal gone bad.

On August 22, Warren Gard, Nugent’s attorney, managed to get Judge Clarence Murphy and Prosecuting Attorney P.P. Boli to agree to a $5,000 bond for his client, with the property of William J. Barry, former proprietor of the Stockton Club as surety. Because Nugent was wanted by Cincinnati authorities, Sheriff Luther Epperson refused to release the prisoner until probate court Judge Gideon Palmer intervened and ordered Nugent’s freedom on a writ of habeus corpus. Nugent managed to slip out of the jail and into the wind just moments before Detective Schaefer arrived to collect him. Sheriff Epperson joined Cincinnati detectives that afternoon in visiting Nugent’s known haunts, but he could not be located. The bond required his presence before the grand jury.

When the grand jury convened in October, it charged Nugent with second degree murder, Edward Scott and Todd Messner as accessories. 

***

The trio would be tried together, and a date set for December 9, 1925. Two days before the trial began, Judge Walter Harlan gave Sheriff Epperson subpoenas to deliver to potential jurors and witnesses. On the list was Red Webber, the taxi driver and the only person who puts a smoking gun in the hands of a killer. Epperson turned to the Hamilton police for help, but the man was nowhere to be found.

On the day of the trial, Judge Harlan waited until 10 a.m. for Webber to show up, then called the trial to order. Prosecutor Boli asked for a continuance: “The witness has not been found and without him, the state cannot proceed.”

After Harlan granted an indefinite continuance, the sheriff took Todd Messner into custody again. Lottie Hawley, operator of a known brothel on Wood Street and the woman who put up surety for his $5,000 bond, had two weeks earlier asked to be released from the commitment. Epperson was unable to locate him in advance, so when he showed up for trial, the sheriff assigned Deputy Ernest Legg to shadow the suspect. In order to avoid any legal tangles, Legg waited until Messner had stepped out of the court room before taking him in custody and straight back into the courtroom to appear before the judge, who ordered the sheriff to take the man to jail. He did not stay long as that afternoon, C.M. Parker stepped forward to sign the bond.

Word got back to Sheriff Epperson that Red Webber was in Dillsboro, Indiana. Because he had not been served with the subpoena, the sheriff could not go after him, but he was confident that Webber would come back to Hamilton, and Judge Harlan promised that when he did, he would place the witness under a bond. Webber showed up at Boli’s office on December 29 with a certificate showing he had gone to Dillsboro for his health and arranged for a $300 bond to assure his presence when the trial could be rescheduled. It would make him the second witness under bond as Ella Mae Thompson nee French had to post $1,000.

***

Finally, on January 11, 1926, while the city dug its way out from under a weekend snowstorm, the trial of Nugent, Messner and Scott got underway. The morning was devoted to seating a jury, and the afternoon was spent in as the long-awaited “star witness” Red Weber, began the state’s case by repudiating his previous statements, even though he told his story under oath to three different courts during preliminaries.

“That’s typewritten stuff,” he said when confronted with transcripts, “and some of it is not true. My memory isn’t very good. I’ve been sick for five or six years and I drank a good deal until recently.”

Over the objections of defense attorney Warren Gard, a clearly exasperated Boli read passages from the grand jury, mayor’s court and coroner’s inquest transcripts, but Weber held fast that he didn’t know what he was talking about then, and that he’s not feeling much better now.

“I was in no condition to appear at those hearings,” he said.

“Were you drunk?” Boli asked.

“I was pretty well mixed up,” he said. “I don’t know much about this case.”

“You remember more now than you ever did?” Boli asked.

“Yes, sir. My memory’s been bad.”

“How long has your memory been bad?”

“One day it’s all right, and the next day it is all wrong.”

“Did you get well today?”

“No, sir. I am not right yet.”

“If you told the grand jury it was Crane that came toward you, that wasn’t right?”

“If I did say it then, it wasn’t right,” he said.

The defense did not need to call a single witness. For all the delays, the trial which was expected to last a week was done in only two days. After the state rested its case Tuesday afternoon, still agitated over Red Webber’s change of story, Gard moved for a directed verdict. 

Boli said, “The state believes that there has been some pressure brought to bear on the testimony of one witness in an attempt to bring about a miscarriage of justice. We believe this case should be given to the jury.”

“Undoubtedly, there has been a cover-up process, suppression of the truth and intimidation,” Harlan said. “I guess there’s nothing to do but direct a verdict. I don’t like to do it.”

When the jury came back, Harlan explained the action he was about to take, tracing the testimony and explaining that there was no evidence to directly connect the two defendants to the killing.

“Therefore,” he said, “the court is bound to direct you to render a verdict in favor of these defendants. I sustained these motions with great reluctance. Somebody killed that man. It seems to me, and no doubt to you also, that somebody should come forward and tell the truth. It is a sad condition of affairs in this city that this isn’t done.”

Later that month, Red Weber was indicted for perjury, but the trial was postponed indefinitely. 

The papers never said why police didn’t hold Nugent on the Cincinnati charges, but he man went on to enjoy a notable career in the gangster world as one of the top machine gunners around. He would never be put on trial again, but would be credited with at least a dozen other murders, moving on to bigger and more notorious gangs. He went to Kansas City and renewed his acquaintance with a war buddy, his sergeant on a motorcycle machine gun crew who was now leading a gang there. His name was Fred “Killer” Burke, and the notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone called the Burke gang his “American boys,” and it was this gang that he called upon for the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Ray “Crane Neck” Nugent was one of the machine gunners with Burke that day.

After that fiasco of a trial, Boli got back to the business of padlocking the cafés from Skinner’s list and targeted 12 cafés, but by that time so many had changed ownership or closed down completely that only four cases made it to hearings.

Ohio prohibition commissioner McDonald continued to offer his support, but the tone of his comments revealed his impatience. He was, the Evening Journal said, “straining at the leash.”

“If the authorities at Hamilton want me to give them legal assistance in their liquor padlocking cases, I will make arrangements to have someone from the attorney general’s office go down to help in the prosecution,” McDonald said. “We have a number of men who are familiar with that kind of litigation and could render valuable aid… If it is impossible for the attorney general to furnish a lawyer from his department I will secure one of the attorneys in the employ of the Anti-Saloon League and one of the best. I want the cases pushed to the limit and I want the state to give all possible assistance as it is duty bound to do.”

When the first four cases were brought to court on January 25, only Casey’s Place at 41 Chestnut Street was ordered padlocked because the other locations had been vacated and the café equipment removed, although Boli said he would keep the suits alive should anyone attempt to re-open the locations as cafés. John Casey lost a $1,000 bond on the deal, which he had posted a year earlier after being threatened with a padlock and promising that he would use the building as a barbershop. Casey tried to get another bond, but the effort proved unsuccessful and he relocated to Florida to take a job as a chef. “The café business in Hamilton is too tough,” he said.

It would be the end of March before another joint would be padlocked, Wrassman’s Dunlap Café on Court Street, and then only after another raid. The raiding party of 11 men from the city police, sheriff department and Seven Mile court failed to turn up any liquor

On May 2, 1925, The Saturday following the murder, people of the Congregational Church at Seventh and High Streets passed out handbills advertising the next evening’s sermon by its pastor, the Reverend William S. McBirnie. The headlines read “What I Charge Mayor Kelly With” and “Schief Should Not Have Been Murdered.”

Because of the publicity, nearly 2,000 people crammed into the sanctuary, filling every available seat and standing room in the back. 

The service began innocuously enough with the regular prayers and hymns, up until McBirnie read a passage from Lamentations, according to the Evening Journal, “the story of how Jerusalem, once the pride of the world, became decadent, the walls crumbled and fell, and how the passersby sneered and hurled stones at the city, and how then Jeremiah, the weeping prophet called to them ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?’”

“Is it nothing to you,” McBirnie addressed the audience, driving his point home, undoubtedly in the dramatic fashion for which he was known and loved, “that Hamilton is corrupt?”

McBirnie had barely been in Hamilton a year. Born in Ireland in 1890, he said he early on developed a taste for travel. It’s not clear when he first came to North America, but he joined the Canadian Army in 1914, fought in France during World War I, and relocated to the United States in 1917. He became affiliated with the Salvation Army and went on a lecture circuit as a fundraiser, talking about his experiences in the trenches at Ypres. As he traveled the country, mostly in the Midwest and South, he said he became more interested in evangelism than lecturing, and began studies at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.

When he first came to Hamilton in December, 1923, for an interim position with the First Congregational church, he said he was planning to embark on a three year world tour. The Evening Journal described “a young man of intense convictions” who “preached in the power and demonstration of the Holy Spirit.” He was such a compelling preacher and so won the hearts of the First Congregational that by April 1924 he had accepted the pastorate there, to begin that August after a trip to Ireland to see his mother. 

The sanctuary at the Congregational church was packed “pit to dome” on the evening of May 3, 1925, with Mayor Howard E. Kelly and his stenographer in attendance, along with municipal court Judge E.J. Kautz and other city officials.

McBirnie revealed that three months previous, he was part of a self-appointed committee that launched an investigation into the “moral affairs” of the city. He did not name the other seven members of the committee, but said he was authorized to impart the results of his investigation, which he conducted in disguise--“a cap and an unlighted cigar”--with two hired detectives as his bodyguards.

The first place he visited was Bob Schief’s Place at 338 Court Street.

“The man who was with me gave the ‘high-sign,’” McBirnie said. “The door was unlocked and we were admitted. We asked for two ginger ales and got two glasses of ‘white mule’ with ginger ale on the side. I couldn’t drink mine. The detective who was with me drank his. In a moment, the sweat began to stand out on his head. He complained of intense head and stomach aches. Such was the effect of the stuff we found there.”

McBirnie also went to the Hotel Lee that night, where all the trouble would start the night of Schief’s murder.

“We entered the cabaret,” he said. “We asked the colored waitresses and later the house man if we could get any good whiskey. He said he would find out. A little later we received the high-sign and were led through a door into a small room. Lee Richardson was there and poured out three drinks in one glass. Three of the colored waitresses crowded in. They asked us for cigarettes.”

The reverend had the audience enraptured and outraged. They laughed at his comic stories about his experiences in the bars and brothels of Hamilton. He charged Mayor Kelly with incompetence, relating several occasions when Kelly had knowledge of gambling and illegal liquor operations and refused to act, saying he didn’t have enough police force to do much about it. 

“There are more houses of ill-fame in Hamilton than churches,” he preached. “It is easier to buy moonshine than milk... I went to Mayor Kelly with three others and told him of the conditions I found. I offered my evidence. He promised to find out what action could be taken... Nothing has been done.”

After the sermon, a reporter heard the mayor quip, “Well, I feel better about it now that I know what it was all about.”

The next day’s Evening Journal published a six-paragraph statement from the mayor saying that if McBirnie would swear affidavits as to the findings of his investigation, the mayor would personally sign them to bring charges against the sporting houses.

The last two paragraphs took a different tone, threatening court action against the crusading reverend: “I personally believe that [certain statements] were sufficient to slander my character, and I will institute a suit against him as soon as my attorneys have gone over the contents of his sermon.”

That Tuesday, Mayor Kelly reported that McBirnie was to come to his office at 1 p.m. and deliver the evidence he had gathered, but he did not show, instead leaving a note for him at the YMCA saying that he was going to “confer first with members of the citizens’ committee.” 

As it turned out, the Rev. McBirnie and the delegation of citizens had actually gone to Columbus that day to deliver his evidence to Governor Vic Donahey: 58 affidavits and a typewritten sheet outlining his charges against Mayor Kelly and demanding that he be removed from office. The governor then handed the affidavits over to state prohibition Commissioner A.F. McDonald, who said he would send a pair of investigators to Hamilton straightaway to investigate the allegations contained in the affidavits.

McBirnie continued his own investigation, hiring “secret service men,” including some former, disgraced Hamilton police officers, at a cost of $1,700 (he wouldn’t say whose money it was, only that it wasn’t his) to begin issuing affidavits locally to shut down the cafes and resorts of Hamilton. By the end of the week, police had arrested Florence Freese for keeping a house at 319 Market street and five other women for keeping or working in houses on Wood Street on charges sworn to by McBirnie and his committee. 

In a municipal courtroom packed with men and boys that Friday, four of the Wood Street women were fined $50 and costs, with charges dropped against one. Madame Freese’s case was continued until Monday. “Rev. McBirnie was constantly in whispering conversations with Millikin Shotts, city solicitor,” the Evening Journal reported. “The whispers were taken to mean that the minister was leading the cross-examination.”

The defense attorneys called McBirnie to the stand for three minutes of testimony that didn’t seem to amount to much.

“Are you an American citizen?” was the first question. His attorney’s objection was sustained and McBirnie didn’t answer.

“Have you been deputized?”

“No.”

“Did you finance this investigation yourself?”

He did not answer the question, and the judge did not compel him to.

The following Sunday, May 10, McBirnie took to the pulpit again with the sermon “Behold a City Left Desolate By Sin,” furthering his clean-up effort and challenged the congregation to end dancing and card-playing in their own homes. He charged that “moneyed interests behind vice” were working to thwart his effort, but he declared his relentlessness.

“They say I am running away,” he said. “I assure you that I have never fled from anything and that I will not run away.”

He related his experience on the witness stand in municipal court and the implication that since he is not an American citizen he has no standing as a crusader.

“I knew they would say this,” he said, “so I made my application for my first papers. This shows that my heart is right, does it not? I’d sooner be Irish with God in my heart than like some people in Hamilton without God in my heart.”

McBirnie claimed that three-fourths of the spectators in the courtroom were in sympathy with the women: “I got dirty looks and was called dirty names but it didn’t stop me one bit.”

He closed his sermon with a denunciation of conditions in Hamilton so fervent and a call to action so passionate--“In the name of Hamilton go over to the right side! Do something for God’s sake! For Hamilton’s sake, do something!”--that he momentarily collapsed into a chair next to the rostrum, his head buried in his hands.

A hush fell over the congregation and Mrs. McBirnie jumped to her feet and led a rousing rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was enough of a pause for the preacher to compose himself enough to offer the benediction. The packed sanctuary rang with cheers and the minister was surrounded by parishioners with their pledges of support for his clean-up drive.

The next morning, McBirnie spent a half-hour in front of the Butler County grand jury, but he would not speak about it afterward, and the jury’s next report did not mention and did not include any indictments coming from McBirnie’s crusade. 

That evening, McBirnie was back in court, standing the entire time as he directed the prosecution of Florence Freese. She was represented by Warren Gard, former Congressman and county prosecutor, who spent a full 15 minutes at the start of the trial objecting the introduction of water works billing records that would prove that Mrs. Freese was the tenant of 319 Market Street. Nevertheless, the document was accepted. After a three hour session Monday and another session of at least an hour Wednesday evening occupied by Gard’s motion to dismiss, the court fined Mrs. Freese $50 and costs.

“Thugs and denizens of the underworld,” as the Evening Journal called them, or “some slinking reprobate” as McBirney would say from the pulpit, struck back at 10:45 p.m. Saturday, May 16, with an attempt to burn down the preacher’s house at 815 Campbell Avenue.

The minister, his wife, his two sons Bobby and Billy, and his mother-in-law were all asleep when Mrs. McBirnie heard the sound of footsteps and voices outside the house. Peeking out a window, she saw flames leaping from the rear porch. She awakened her husband and he called the police and fire departments, who responded quickly and extinguished the fire before much damage could be done. Investigation showed that the rear porch and weather boarding had been soaked with benzine and ignited with a match. A quart bottle smelling of benzine was left on the back porch.

Word of the arson further inflamed both public indignation and the pastor’s fury as more than 1,500 packed into the High Street church Sunday evening.

“They can’t come out in the open and take off their coats and fight like men,” he began his sermon. “They had to wait until my babies were asleep before carrying out their infamous plot.”

Meanwhile, rumors were flying in from Columbus that Commissioner McDonald had finished his investigation and would release the results at any moment. Those rumors halted when Governor Donahey called Mayor Kelly in for a private conference, which he did on Tuesday, May 26. The following day, McDonald and Donahey released a recommendation that seemed to take much of the city by surprise, although McBirney publicly expressed satisfaction at their findings.

McDonald concluded that it wasn’t the mayor, but Chief of Police Frank Clements who was to blame for the lax law enforcement, and he and the governor recommended Clements’s immediate removal. Clements refused to resign and Kelly seemed to balk at the idea of firing him, but did the following day. The chief immediately appealed to the Civil Service Commission. Twenty-five of the 58 affidavits that McBirney gave to the governor concerned Clements, who argued that the real problem was that the police department was severely understaffed, to the point that he was personally acting as desk sergeant in addition to his duties as chief so that he could have an additional man in the streets.

Before the Civil Service Commission began its hearings on the case, Kelly officially filed a $10,000 slander suit against McBirney, and the Council of Congregational Churches met at the High Street church the very next day and voted to dissolve their relationship with the crusading pastor, saying that he did not consult the council about his investigation and did not have its approval. McBirnie delivered a “farewell sermon” the following Sunday, June 8, and vowed to remain in Hamilton until all the matters that required his attention were taken care of.

Even though he was without a job, McBirney and a cadre of his supporters--now known as “the Committee of 12”--attended the Civil Service Commission hearings. McBirney himself testified, occupying most of the first day. He had his say, but the proceedings did not go well for the crusader after that. During the second day, while the city safety director was testifying that while Clements was suspended he continued to work as desk sergeant while drawing the salary of a chief, McBirnie interrupted the hearing and accused Mayor Kelly of hand signalling answers to the witness. “Instantly there was a hubbub in the courtroom,” the Evening Journal reported. “Attorneys were on their feet, all talking at once... The mayor merely laughed and shook his head.” Even before things began to settle down, McBirnie apologized to the members of the commission, grabbed his hat and began to push his way through the crowd and into the corridor.

“It’s all a frame-up!” he cried to a reporter on the way to the elevator, and waving his arms dramatically shouted, “I’m through! I’m through.”

“Will you come back?” the reporter asked.

“Never!” he shouted as he got on the elevator.

Twenty minutes later, the hearing adjourned and the three-man Civil Service Commission unanimously sided with Clements and ordered that he be returned to duty, which he did on July 6. He sent out a memo to the department explaining the situation and asking for their cooperation--and took a shot at McBirney as he denounced “non-citizens, cheap investigators and their backers.”

That weekend, the Rev. William S. McBirnie, citing health concerns, packed up the family car and said they would be staying for a month in St. Louis, eventually making their way to Dallas, to rekindle his work with the evangelist Gypsy Smith and the Salvation Army. He said they would camp along the way, in the hope of further benefiting his health.

At around 10:30 p.m., Saturday night, June 20, 1925, Squire Morris Y. Shuler and five members of his liquor squad parked their cars on the Seven Mile Pike in Coke Otto, the village that would later be incorporated as New Miami.

Shuler remained in his car while Wayne township constable Wilbur Jacobs, 43, led a team that included State Prohibition officer and Middletown resident Arnold Skinner, Coke Otto magistrate Louis Bolser and Seven Mile deputy marshal Robert Tewart. They walked the 200 yards to the house on Augspurger Road. Sanford Lakes rented the house and lived in part of it with his wife and daughter, but the Prohibition squad was interested in the two rooms in front, one up and one down, that Lakes sublet to Ethel Grathwohl and her boarder Milton Henson. Jacobs carried a warrant to search those rooms for liquor.

Jacobs had been a deputy in Shuler’s court for about three and one-half years, and had been on nearly 800 raids of the cafes, barns, sheds, garages, and homes of Butler County.

Milton Henson was a 32-year-old veteran of the Great War and claimed to have been gassed three times. Two years earlier, he came to live with Ethel Grathwohl, 30, and her husband William, who operated a boarding house at 335 Market Street in Hamilton. A year later, when Mr. Grathwohl moved out of the house and separated from his wife, Henson stayed on, and he and Ethel lived together since. They also bought a Ford coupe together, but both Henson and Grathwohl insisted they were not living “as man and wife.” 

Jacobs knocked on the screen door. A man answered, asked them what they wanted. When Jacobs said that he “represented the law,” the man hastily closed and latched the screen door in their faces and walked rapidly away.

The officers then broke through the door. Tewart, Bolser, and Skinner went immediately up the stairs, where at least nine men were shooting dice and playing poker.  One of them shouted, “If you’ve got a gun, get rid of it!”

In the corner was a tub full of ice and bottles of home brew, a small group of men drinking beer next to it, and two women fast approaching him. Jacobs stepped into the front room at the left of the hallway. Jacobs suddenly stood face to face with Ethel Grathwohl. Standing defiantly behind her was Mattie Foster, a friend who still lived in the boarding house on Market Street, although Mattie would later swear she went out into the yard as soon as the liquor agents arrived.

Ethel confronted the officer and shoved him toward the door, telling him that if he represented the law to “get out and enter the house in a manner becoming ‘the law’," she said later.

“I have a warrant,” Jacobs said.

“Where’s the warrant?” she inquired and Jacobs held it out to her.

“Read it,” he said.

“You read it. Is it for me or for him?” evidently referring to Henson, but he wasn’t in the room at the time.

The room was dimly lit by a lone lamp on a table in the center of the room. Jacobs brushed Grathwohl aside and took steps toward lamp to get better light, and started to read the warrant.

The men who were drinking home brew from the tub would later say that Jacobs “was reading the warrant when I chanced to look past him and saw the slayer, alone, creeping stealthily into the room from the hallway. His eyes glittered and half crouched, he kept his right hand and arm hidden behind him.”

“It was while she and Jacobs and the Foster woman were standing near the table in the middle of the room that a man entered from the hallway. Henson entered the room bare-headed and in his shirt sleeves.” 

One witness said he felt a “little funny when Henson entered the room in a crouched position. Walking in a stooped position to a place near the center of the room, the man suddenly straightened, extended his right arm... with a revolver not far from the officer’s head.”

“That man was Milton Henson. I believe that just before he fired the shot he shouted, ‘Read it, damn you.’”

“Suddenly, the crouched figure straightened, the hidden arm was brought forth, clutching a revolver and the bullet fired into Jacobs’s head.” 

The bullet entered Jacobs’s left temple and took an upward course through his skull, and exited from the right side of his head. The bullet was never located. 

Jacobs “just groaned, then slid to the floor, dead. The slayer ran from the room and out the front door, still holding the revolver in his hand. That was the last that I saw of him.”

“What became of him after I do not know. I ran from the house, together with other occupants.” 

While he was trying to find the light, Milton Henson entered the room from the hallway. He was in a crouching position, his right hand behind his back. He slipped in beside Ethel, then suddenly stood up straight and shouted, “Read it, damn you!”

He then extended his right arm, clutching a .38 calibre revolver with a pearl handle, the barrel within two feet of Wilbur Jacobs’s head.

The bullet entered the officer’s left temple at an upward angle and exited on the right side of his head. Jacobs, a witness said, “just groaned, then slid to the floor, dead.”

Ethel Grathwohl said that she was “too bewildered” to know who fired the shot. “I only heard one shot fired. As soon as the shot was fired, someone went to the window while another person opened a locked read door in the room or jumped out a window.” Other witnesses said that she grabbed Henson and started crying, “O Milt! You’ve killed him!”

At the sound of the shot, the entire house erupted in chaos as the officers barreled down the stairs followed by those gamblers who didn’t climb out of a second floor window. Arnold Skinner, who was the last officer to go up the stairs, was the first officer to reach Jacobs. He said that about two minutes had passed since they had broken down the screen door. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, a man rushed from the room with a smoking revolver in his hand, the pungent odor of burnt powder still permeating the room. the other men in the house escaped by various means of windows and doors and ran down the street toward Seven Mile Pike with Tewart and Bolser in pursuit.

“I was waiting in a car parked on the Seven Mile Pike when I heard something that sounded like a shot,” Squire Shuler said. “The next minute I heard a large group of men running down the street. I recognized Bolser’s voice calling them to stop. Then I jumped from the car and pulling out my revolver, headed the men off. We searched them and found no weapons. The sheriff and police were called at once and the men taken to Hamilton.”

He said they found a half-pint bottle of liquor in the house. Beneath a trunk on the second floor, the flooring had been sawed out, evidently as a cache for liquor. None was found.

Shuler broke down when they told him that Jacobs had been slain. “Jacobs was one of the best officers I ever saw. He was not in the raiding business for the money that was in it but because he wanted to clean up this moonshine and illegal liquor traffic. He was a fine officer and a square one.” 

Still, he held the prisoners under guard until the Sheriff and his deputies arrived, along with a contingent of Hamilton officers and detectives. Sheriff Epperson was the first called and he in turn called deputies Wesley Wulzen and Ernest Legg, and they all hurried to the scene along with a contingent of Hamilton police officers and detectives.

***

The search for Milton Henson lasted ten days. On more than six different occasions, police had responded to calls to places where Henson was believed to be hiding, but always arrived too late. 

Finally, on June 30, deputy sheriff Wesley Wulzen took a tip from an informant and assembled a team to go to Brookville, Indiana, where Milton Henson was said to be hiding out on the farm of Joseph Roark, a distant cousin. Wulzen and 17 other officers left Hamilton about 8 p.m. When they arrived, the men spread out and completely surrounded the house and barn, which were about 75 yards apart. They were prepared to wait until dawn, believing that if they waited until daylight, the fugitive would have less chance to escape. For hours the officers lay in hiding behind outhouses, trees, and bushes.

At first light, Sheriff Joliff of Brookville knocked on the door to the house. Joe Roark answered.

“I don’t harbor that kind of breed,” Roark said. “He was here but he has left. You can search the house if you want to.”

Patrolman Joe Evans of the Hamilton Police and Patrick Hanna, officer of the Oxford magistrate’s court, had already gone inside the barn, Police Inspector Holden of Hamilton covering the loft while they searched. In the meantime, Patrolman Joe Evans of the Hamilton Police and Patrick Hanna, officer of the Oxford magistrate’s court, went inside the barn to search. Police Inspector Holden of Hamilton stationed himself to view the loft to preclude an ambush. Finding no sign of him he had seen no sign of the fugitive in the loft, Inspector Holden joined the other two officers and aided in the search. The trio split up.

Outside the barn, Detective Charles Nugent and a dozen other officers were lying flat on the ground so they could not be seen should the fugitive try to bolt for the woods. The morning pastoral stillness was interrupted by the clatter of hoofs. Someone climbing onto a straw pile had chased a bull out of the barn and into the field. Nugent saw the bull. It was coming his direction. Nugent knew there was a fence between him and the bull but didn’t know the gate was open. The bull came through. Then Nugent ran. He later said, “But I was not the only one who ran.”

Detective Evans was the first to see Henson lying in the haymow, tucked into a hole dug in the hay, covered with a blanket. He was muttering incoherently in his sleep. Evans, drawing his revolver, reached over, shook Henson and warned him to keep his hands from beneath the blanket where he believed a pistol might have been hidden.

“Don’t shoot, Joe,” he said. “I’ll give myself up.”

“Have you a gun?” Evans asked.

“No. I threw it in a creek between here and Brookville.”

With three revolvers aimed at him, the fugitive became a prisoner as he climbed down from the mow without the least show of resistance. Deputy Wulzen and other Hamilton officers joined them in the barn and began questioning him.

Deputy Wulzen asked him, “Did you shoot Jacobs with a .38 or a .45 calibre revolver.”

Henson answered, “I didn’t shoot him.”

No one would own up to it--Henson wasn’t sure but thought it was Hamilton detective Charles Nugent--but somehow or other, someone struck Henson in the back of the head with a revolver before he came out of the barn, leaving a bleeding wound.

Henson was perceptibly nervous on the return as he rode handcuffed to Detective Evans. He volunteered no information but readily answered questions.

Holden asked him, “How are you feeling?”

“Not very good. I am nervous. I cannot sleep and cannot eat.”

“Why did you shoot Jacobs?”

“I don’t know,” Henson said, and added he was sorry he did it. He said no more until his arrival at the police station.

In the chief of police’s office in Hamilton, Henson made a full confession to safety director Joseph B. Meyers before his attorney arrived.

After preliminary questions concerning his name and so forth, Henson was asked if he knew Jacobs. He answered that he knew his face but did not know him personally.

Henson seemed nervous when asked to tell the story of the shooting. His hands were twitching and he tugged at his clothing. Before beginning his story, he asked for a cigarette. After a few puffs, he laid it aside on a table near where he was sitting, and burned itself out as Henson told of the murder and his flight from justice.

He recalled in detail the police coming to the door and Jacobs reading the warrant, but the moment that he pulled the trigger was hazy in his memory. “But after I had pulled the trigger, I ran out of the room and out the front door.”

"I came to the house at Coke Otto where I had been staying with Ethel Grathwohl about 10 o'clock on the night of the shooting,” he said. “At 10:15 I took a boy to work at Hamilton, leaving him at Fifth and Vine streets. On the way back, I stopped my car on B street and got some cigarettes, then I returned to Coke Otto.” 

He drove right into the yard when he got back to the house, the first time he had ever done that. The lights flashed on Mattie Foster, who was sitting in the yard. 

“I know it’s you!” Henson said the woman yelled.

“When I got there, some of the boys wanted a little game of cards, so I went to look for a blanket. Someone said, just about this time, that there was somebody at the door. I looked, but didn't see anybody. Then I went into the front room downstairs.”

There was a rap at the door and he answered it. There were some men there. One of them said, “Open the door.” Henson asked them who they were but they did not answer. Then he turned to walk in and reached up on the cupboard for his pistol.

"Just then the door was broken down. A lot of men rushed upstairs. Another one started into the room. Mrs. Grathwohl tried to stop him. I believe the man was [Jacobs]. He pushed her aside, threw back his coat and showed his badge, then said, 'I'm an officer and I have a warrant.'”

At the start, Jacobs pushed Mrs. Grathwohl aside when she tried to get him to go out and read the warrant.

“I was standing in the door. Someone threw a flashlight on me and I put my head down. Jacobs was standing at the table. Two men who were sitting in the corner of the room got up and went out.

“I ain’t going to read it!” Henson said Jacobs remarked.

“I said go ahead and read it, if you have a warrant for her and one for me.”

Henson remarked that he could neither read nor write.

“I said 'Read it.' Jacobs answered 'Read it yourself, damn it,' and threw it on the table.

"I guess that was when I shot him. I threw the gun on him and pulled the trigger. I don’t know how I came to do it. There was scuffling in the house. Some of the men who had gone upstairs came down and some of those who were in the house went out through the windows. I said for someone to call the doctor or the police and get them quick.

“I don't remember just how it was, but after I had pulled the trigger, I ran out of the room and out the front door.”

Ethel Grathwohl was out there trying to get someone to call the police. Several other men tried to get out, but the officer knocked them back with the remark, “Get back there or I’ll kill you.”

He went to the barn behind the house, he said, and sat there until everything at the house quieted down. Henson said he went back to the barn and sat there 20 minutes, then he got up and went back to the house. There was no one there. He tried to open both the front and back doors, and finally tried to get in through the cellar but that door was also locked. He called to the Lakes family, “Are you asleep?” but no one answered.

He saw several automobiles parked in front of the place but he did not know the persons in them, so he went back to the house, rapped on the door again and said, “Open the door.”

“Lord have mercy don’t come in here,” Mrs. Mary Lakes replied without opening the door. “There’s been a man killed.”

“What did they do? Where did they go?”

She said the police took everyone to town.

“I want to come in,” Henson insisted. The he turned and walked back to the barn again with the gun still in his hand. Some automobiles came and threw their lights onto the field. He finally recognized one of the boys with whom he formerly worked and asked him to take him to down.

“I’m afraid to do that,” the boy replied.

Henson said he’d get the boy some whiskey if he did, but he still refused. Henson went to the barn again and remained there for a short time, then walked to the coke plant and found a telephone. He called Mattie Foster and asked her to take him to town.

“I can’t do that,” Foster said. “They’re watching me. There’s someone here now.”

After that, Henson went down the road to the traction line. 

“I ran along the road and down into the creek, where I hid under the bridge which crosses Four Mile creek,” a few hundred yards from the house. "I stayed under the bridge for a long time."

Then a traction car came along and he could see where it was going, he climbed the bank and followed the tracks.

Henson followed the railroad track to Hamilton, arriving there at 3:30 a.m., cutting over to about Third Street at Vine. Policemen were within a city block of Henson at that time.

“I went back on Third Street to Little Italy where I stayed with a family named Barger all the rest of Sunday night and until dark on Monday.”

Two of the boys there had sat up with him all night. They told Henson they did not know what to advise him to do. 

“I believe I’ll go and give myself up,” Henson said he remarked at the Barger house.

After that, he went over to the family home of William Rogers on North Fourth Street but did not go in. He talked to someone there and asked them to tell his brother. Henson was told his brother had been seen but they did not get to talk to him. He got a drink of water there, he said, but was then turned away, so he went down East Avenue to the home of Roy Roark, a cousin. He remained there Monday night and left there Tuesday after dark. One of the boys who had married into the Roark family, whom he did not know except by the name of Casey Jones, drove him over to the Joe Roark farm near Brookville. 

At the Roark house on East Avenue, the officers arrived only about twenty minutes after Henson had gone to Brookville that first time. Myers asked, “Where did you get your grub?”

“I didn’t eat. I drank a glass of milk. They asked me to eat but I was not hungry.”

Henson came back to Hamilton Tuesday afternoon, saying he planned to turn himself in. He paid a farmer boy $4 to bring him in from Brookville. The boy took him to the National garage on Main Street where he used to keep his automobile and used a telephone to call Mattie Foster.

“You aren’t in town?” she asked.

He replied, “Yes, I came back. Get word to Ethel. Tell her I’m coming over.”

He then called on his brother, Bev Henson.

“Come over and take me to the police station,” he said he told his brother.

“All right. I’ll come and take you or you can call them where you are so they can come and get you,” he said his brother replied.

After talking it over, he changed his mind about giving himself up at that time, so he called the Ohio Taxi Company. It was then after 1 p.m.

Eddie Fiehrer, the cab driver, would later tell the Evening Journal the story of the ride to Brookville: “I was called to the National garage to get a passenger and when I got there a man asked me what the charge would be to take him to Reily. I told him twelve dollars. While we were on the way to Reily, my passenger said to me, ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ and I replied, ‘No. Your face seems familiar, but I don’t know your name.’ ‘It’s all right,’ the fellow answered and nothing more was said about identity. 

“When we got near Reily the fellow asked me what the charge would be to take him on to Brookville and I told him fifteen dollars and he asked if I could not take  him there for less. I told that when I got to Reily I would call up the head office and ask about it. I did so and was told to take him on to Brookville for twelve dollars, which I did, taking him up among the hills about two miles beyond Brookville. 

“I had absolutely no idea who my passenger was and I had no reason to ask his name so long as he paid and knew where he wanted to go. If I had known who he was, I would without doubt called the sheriff as I had every opportunity to do so at Reily where he sat in the cab while I went into a place to call the office. He would not have known what I was talking about and if I had known it was Henson I could easily have called the sheriff and they could have gotten him right away as I could have held him there on some pretext until the officers arrived. I did not know until after his arrest and confession that I had hauled Henson that day. I did not in any way tip him off to the officers because I did not know who he was and consequently I have not received, nor do I in any way feel entitled to any reward in connection with the case.”

“I had the gun with me all the time,” Henson said in his confession. It was a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson Special, he said, which he had bought about a month ago at a store at Main and B streets. “After the taxi had left, I walked back along the road to a bridge near Brookville and threw the gun in the river.”

Meyers asked, “Why did you buy the gun?”

He replied, “A fellow had been threatening me. You know you never can tell what they’ll do.”

Henson had been considering giving himself up ever since the shooting.

“I couldn’t sleep. This thing was on my mind. I couldn’t get it off. I have eaten practically nothing. I drank a little milk. When I would sleep I would dream. I was dreaming about this woman (Ethel) when officers arrested me. She seemed to be saying, ‘I’ll see you.’ I thought she was crying.”

“Then I went back to the farm and into the barn. I guess I went to sleep about dark and I didn’t hear anything until this morning when Joe Evans woke me up in the barn. I was dreaming then about a girl. It seemed that she was crying, trying to tell me to beware of something that was going to happen. That was when the officers awakened me. That’s about all, I guess.”

Meyers asked him to get it into the record: “We didn’t use any force to get this confession, did we?”

Henson replied, “No, no, no. I wanted to tell the straight story and get it off my mind.”

He paid a farm boy $4 to bring him back to Hamilton on Thursday, again planning to turn himself in. On a phone at a Main Street garage, he spoke to Mattie Foster and told her to tell Ethel he was coming to see her, then called his brother and decided to not give himself in and took an Ohio Taxi back to Brookville.

“Then I went back to the farm and into the barn. I went to sleep about dark and I didn’t hear anything until this morning when Joe Evans woke me up in the barn. I was dreaming then about a girl. It seemed that she was crying, trying to tell me to beware of something that was going to happen. That was when the officers awakened me.”

***

The day after Henson’s capture, Mayor Shuler levied a fine against Ethel Grathwohl to the tune of $1,000 for the home brew and moonshine found in her apartment the night of Jacobs’s murder.

He raised his right hand above his head and said, “Mrs. Grathwohl, I hope the spirit of Wilbur Jacobs will harass you during all the time you are if it so happens that  you cannot pay this fine. I hope, too, that the widow of this man and his children, as they go sorrowfully about their daily tasks will cause you to regret more and more that this evil deed was done at your house.”

When he had finished, he dropped his hand to his side and bowed his head, tears coursing down his cheeks. Jacobs had been a lifelong friend of Mayor Shuler.

Henson mounted a defense that he was too drunk to be totally responsible for the murder. Prosecutor Peter P. Boli asked the jury for the death penalty, while Henson’s lawyer asked for second degree murder, which would give him a chance for parole. It took the jury five hours to reach a guilty verdict for first degree murder, but recommended mercy, and Judge Walter Harlan sentenced him to life in prison. He made no appeal.

Ethel Grathwohl did not appear as a witness at Henson’s trial and did not pay the fine, so she spent some time in the Marysville reformatory until a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in March 1927 ended Shuler’s liquor court and rendered all its decisions null.

Milton Henson died in the Ohio Penitentiary hospital, June 1, 1966, at the age of 72.

At about 6 p.m. on the evening of Saturday, November 21, 1925, Butler County Coronor Hugh Gadd, moonlighting as an officer of Seven Mile Mayor Morris Y. Shuler’s liquor court, met up with brothers Bob and Fred Gary at the YMCA to discuss their plans for the evening. Shuler had told Gadd earlier that the Donkey Club, 328 Court St., had installed a steel door and was selling liquor in the back room. So the three men first went to that café and stood near the rear door listening. They heard voices quoting prices for drinks and half-pints.

They went around front and saw three young men coming out the door and stopped them at the corner of Court and Third. One man had a bottle of liquor in his pocket, so the agents took the trio to Sheriff Luther Epperson’s office. The young men would not say where they bought the liquor, but because the prohibition officers had seen them exit the Donkey Club, they were able to get a warrant to search the place.

Upon reaching the Donkey Club at 7:45 p.m. Fred Gary circled down a passageway to the east of the cafe building to a rear door. He looked in the peep hole and saw three men in putting white liquid into bottles. When he rapped on the door and demanded admittance, a voice on the inside shouted: “You come in here and I will pour some hot lead into you.” He stood back and kept an eye on the door.

In the meantime, Gadd and Bob Gary went in through the front door. Alabama Wells, co-owner of the cafe, was behind the bar. There were ten or twelve men in the room. Gadd saw two men he did not know go through a steel plated door behind the bar into a back room. 

Gadd said, “I asked Wells if he was in charge and he said he was.”

The Donkey Club had formerly been owned by Bob Schief, who was murdered outside the Hotel Lee on Woods Street, but had been purchased by Olney Wells, known around Hamilton as “Alabama,” his home state. Orphaned as a toddler, he was reared by relatives, and when he turned 15, took up the trade of a molder at in Ensley, Jefferson County, Alabama. He came to Hamilton to work in the foundries here before he joined the army, and returned at the start of Prohibition, but began working in the cafes instead of the foundries. The Donkey Club was not his first venture, and he had paid fines in the Mayor’s courts of Seven Mile and Morning Sun in Preble County.

On March 5, 1925, Wells and his employer, John Welsh, who owned a café at Fifth and Sycamore streets, as the result of a visit by federal prohibition officers on February 23. “On their first visit to the place, officers were under the impression that a signal was sent to the second floor and that some liquid was poured into other containers. Samples were taken and these tested 5.55 percent alcohol. It also contained acetic acid, supposedly to kill the odor. Nothing was found during a second search when the warrants were delivered, but Wells and Welsh were charged for Volstead violations, including “maintaining a common nuisance,” a charge that would get their café padlocked. The episode cost them $175 in fines from the federal court in Cincinnati. 

A few days later, Hamilton Police seized an abandoned automobile on the corner of Sixth and Sycamore that contained 46 gallons of moonshine. The car belonged to Olney Wells and Officer Ed Tuley signed out a warrant against him for transporting liquor. In January, 1925, Wells and another Hamilton man were fined $150 in Preble County by Squire Pastor of Morning Sun. They were sent to jail in Eaton and released “after a satisfactory arrangement had been made.”

The Coroner noticed as he read his search warrant to Wells, the men in the café, getting the drift of what was about to go down, began exiting the front door, but no one came out of the back room. Soon, Gadd reported, it was just the two officers and Wells.

“I gave him the search warrant to read,” Gadd said. “Wells said to me, ‘There is a word in this warrant I can’t make out,’ and I told Wells that the word was ‘structure’.”

About that time the telephone rang, and Wells set the warrant on the bar while he answered it. “Graham’s not here,” he said, then hung up and the cab driver Tincher came in for a pack of smokes. Wells gave him change for his quarter while Gadd explained the meaning of “structure.” Then the phone rang again and Alabama took the call while Bob Gary and Gadd waited.

Wells stayed behind the bar, Gadd walking up and down in front of it, chewing gum rapidly and seeming to be nervous, according to one of the men who peered in through the front window, his hands ducking in and out of his pants pockets.

Finally, Wells said, “If you are looking for whiskey, then go ahead and search.” 

“I was waiting for you to finish your phone call so you could open up the steel door,” Gadd said.

“Why don’t you just search behind the bar?” Alabama asked.

“Because the whiskey’s in the back room.”

Then chaos erupted. 

Gadd said that Gary walked toward the steel door behind the bar and in line with the peep hole when he saw Wells reach for his gun.

"Gary's back was to Wells," the coroner said. “When Wells pulled out, his revolver and started to shoot. Gary walked behind the bar and within about eight feet of Wells and the way it looked to me that Robert Gary turned his head and about that time a shot was fired by Wells... and Gary fell back on the bar.

“I tried to get my gun out about the same time Wells was getting his out,” Gadd said, “but I didn’t get it out until after Gary had been shot. Wells reeled and shot twice at me and the second shot hit me in the left hand, entered at the second joint of the index finger and about two inches back of the knuckle joint.

“Every time Wells shot he would duck under the bar and would bob up and down to fire again. He shot about five times.”

Gadd said that he was only able to get off one shot, then his Colt .45 revolver jammed.

“Then there were two or three more fellows ran in the front door with guns. I hit Wells on the head with my gun and as I did he fell on the bar. I took Wells’s gun off the bar and put it in my pocket and I then stepped around to where Gary was lying on the floor.

“I noticed that Gary did not have a gun in his hand. I reached under his coat and removed the gun from his holster.”

While Gadd and the cafeman were clinching, police officers, deputies, and detectives swarmed into the cafe. 

Around back, Fred Gary tried to force the door, but found it heavily barred and impossible to move, but was working on it when he heard the shots, seven in all: Three quick ones, then a pause, then two more, then two more. The last shot, he would say, was louder than the others. He went running down the alley, around the corner and to the Donkey Club’s front door. He knocked and detectives let him in. 

“Where’s Bob?” he asked the coroner.

“Bob’s been killed,” Gadd said and pointed to the spot behind the bar where he lay.

He went around the corner and saw his brother. “That is my brother, men,” he said bitterly. “Who shot him?” 

“That man there,” Gadd said, pointing at Wells who was sitting in a chair, bleeding.

“Why did you shoot my brother?” Fred Gary asked.

Gary would later that Wells answered, “I don’t know,” but the detectives on the scene said that the only thing Wells would say after the shooting was that he wanted an attorney, former prosecutor and ex-Congressman Homer Gard, who earlier in the year helped get a directed not guilty verdict for Todd Messner and Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, alleged killers of Bob Scheif, former owner of the Donkey Club.

Gary put handcuffs on Wells as Butler County Sheriff Luther Epperson came to the scene. By this time, the café was crowded with dry agents, police officers and detectives, then the police ambulance arrived.

Gadd handed a .38 Colt revolver to the sheriff, saying it was the one used by Wells. The barrel was still warm. There were six empty shells in its chambers. Epperson picked up a loaded .32 automatic that was laying on the counter. 

Sheriff Epperson led a search of the premises. No alcohol was found, neither in the front nor the rear room behind the steel door, but there was a loose floorboard, and under the floorboard was a funnel attached to a hose leading to a drain into the sewer system.

1926 0408

At Alabama Wells’s trial, Warren Gard laid out the defense: Gadd fired the fatal shot, not Wells. 

After Gadd served the warrant and they talked about it for a few minutes, Gard said in his opening statement, “Robert Gary came behind the bar and advanced toward Wells, who was about in the middle of the bar.

“Wells, seeing Gary coming toward him, his hand outstretched, retreated. Robert Gary continued to pursue him, comeing nearly to him with his hands outstretched, armed with a revolver. As Gary advanced to the telephone at the south end of the bar, Wells turned to the sideboard, securing a revolver from a drawer. 

“A shot was fired across the room by Hugh Gadd from a .45 caliber automatic Colt revolver, undoubtedly at Wells, but the shot struck Gary. Gary fell and Gad remained with his revolver drawn.”

Gadd then advanced toward Wells, who had a gun but did not shoot. When Gadd got to where Wells stood, the coroner hit him on the head and Wells fell over a gas stove, unconscious. While he was on the floor, Gadd shot the revolver at Wells’s head, but struck only a glancing blow, but Gadd continued to wave the revolver around threatening to shoot Wells.

At that time, someone came into the door, saying, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!” to which Gadd replied, “If you come in here, I’ll kill you.”

The defendant took the stand himself and told his side of the story publicly for the first time. 

At the trial, Wells told his side of the story publicly for the first time. He said that prior to November 21, he was being treated at the Veterans Hospital in Dayton for broken blood vessel in his nose, and when he got to the café around four o’clock on November 21, it was his first time there in three weeks. He was tending bar when Gadd and Robert Gary came into the café.

“Gadd was standing across the bar from me and Gary at the north end of the bar. Gadd explained the warrant and I read part of it. The telephone rang and a party asked for a man named Graham. Graham was not there. Again, I picked up the warrant and read it and then someone asked for cigarettes. There was another call on the phone.”

He said he was friendly with the officers and there was no hard feelings on his part. “I told the officers to help themselves and search. And Gary came around the end of the bar and came toward me. Gadd was a little north and east of the bar where I was standing. Gary Came toward me. He was rather tall, with a menacing looking face and he came with his arms outstretched. He got close to me and I retreated. I did not have a gun in my hip pocket. My gun was in a drawer. After Gary came close he said, ‘Come on! I’ll get you!’ Gadd fired point blank and struck Gary. Gadd has his gun in his left hand and he seemed to point it at me. Gary was very close to me.”

“Did you see Gadd shoot?” Gard asked.

“I did,” he said. “Then Gary seemed to leap into the air and fall backward. I reached in a drawer and got my gun and started firing at Gadd. I was fearful of Gadd. We exchanged shots. I don’t know how many I fired or how many Gadd fired, but we both kept going north and we met at the end of the bar. Gadd grabbed me and started beating me over the head. I was knocked out and fell into a corner, but before I lost consciousness Gadd fired at me, the bullet striking me in the back of the head.”

During cross examination, Boli asked him if he was selling whiskey the night of the shooting.

“No.”

“You never sold any?”

“Oh, yes, I have sold whiskey.”

“Did you sell it in the back room?”

“No. I was selling whiskey out in front and had it under the bar.”

He told the court that he had stopped selling whiskey after his arrest on August 22 by Seven Mile officers, including Fred Gary. He was fined $500 for the incident and still owed $100 to Squire Shuler. He denied that he told Fred Gary that he would get even with him.

The star witness for the defense was a 33-year-old horse trader named Joe Jacobs. Around Hamilton, Jacobs was known as “Turkey Joe,” a nickname he picked up after an incident in which he led the hijacking of what he thought was a load of moonshine, but ended up just being a load of turkeys on the way to market.

Despite Gadd’s claim that everyone had fled the bar when he produced the warrant, Jacobs testified that he was standing at the bar talking to Wells when the officers came in, and that Gadd was standing behind him and to the north of him. He didn’t see Gadd fire the shot, but the shot came from his direction and he saw Gary fall to the floor. When he turned around, he saw the gun in Gadd’s hand.

“I was about the middle of the bar. One fellow, supposed to be Gary, was walking behind the bar and Gadd backed away from the bar. Gary walked up toward Wells with his hands out. I heard a pistol fired behind me. I could feel it. It almost shot me. Gary threw up his hands and fell back. I became frightened and thought I had better get out or I might get shot. Gadd walked up towards the bar, toward the end of the bar. As I was going out I heard four or five more shots. I walked to the front door and stood in the door. There was a tussle between Gadd and someone else whom I could not see and Gadd was hitting someone on the head with a gun. Gadd said, ‘Ill kill you.’ I don’t know who he was talking to. Gadd backed away and shot, saying ‘I’ll kill you.’”

Jacobs said there was a voice from outside saying, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!’ and Gadd said, “I’ll kill anyone who comes in.” 

“The witness said he became frightened and left the café, looking back to see Gadd striking someone behind the bar. Gadd also… made the remark “I’ll kill you,” and stepped back from the man he was beating and fired another shot.

“Did you see him fire the shot?” Boli asked.

“Not exactly,” Jacobs said, “but his gun was smoking. After the shot was fired, Gadd stood there trembling.” 

He did not see Wells with a gun and saw no gun in Gary’s hand.

Jacobs admitted to having pleaded guilty to larceny in Greenville in 1918 to get a suspended sentence, and that he had been arrest by Monroe officer for having whiskey in his home. He said he trained horses in the summer and did not work in the winter, and has been doing that for 10 years.

“Do you operated a place on Wood Street?” Boli asked.

“No.”

“You’re running Lottie Hawley’s place, aren’t you?” Boli asked.

“No, sir.”

“Have you been living there? Why do you spend most of your time down there?”

“I’ve been trying to rent the place. I tried to rent Farley’s place several times.”

John Evans, thirty-one years old, testified that he was standing outside the Donkey Club and looking in the window when Robert Gary walked behind the café bar toward Wells. He said he was not drinking whiskey but had come there looking for his brother, Charles.

“Looking through the window, I saw Gadd step back a little and go down with both hands into his clothing. He came up with an automatic pistol. There was a report. I saw a flash from the gun. It looked like he pointed it in Wells’ direction. Then I left the place and walked east on Court Street, North on Fourth and West on High Street to a restaurant.

“They seemed to be having an argument,” he said. “Gadd reached down and there was a report. It looked like the gun was pointed in the direction of Wells.”

Evans said it looked as if Gadd was going to get two guns and had trouble getting his gun out.

During cross examination, Boli asked him if he was known as “Happy Evans”.

“You were in trouble in 1918 and served time in the penitentiary for burglary and larceny, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, also admitting that he had been arrested for disorderly conduct and was a regular patron of the Donkey Club when Schief owned it, but not since.

Evans said he left at that and did not see Gary fall.

The defense’s only witnesses who say they saw the actual shot were Joe Jacobs and John Evans, whose testimony was suspect because of their dubious characters.

Assistant prosecutor H.H. Haines said, “It seemed strange that of all the men around here, the defense could only get the two criminals to come in and say they saw the shot. Why would Gadd want to shoot? There was no indication of danger. They said he was nervous. Who said it? Those sweet-scented cherubs Joe Jacobs and John Evans. They didn’t get them from the sidewalk. They came from the gutter.

“Wells is a criminal in a criminal business and was pursued by officers of the law, like all men of his type. Ten minutes before the murder he had sold this vile liquor to three boys.

Boli also attacked Joe Jacobs: “If you believe a man like Joe Jacobs, there is no need for further argument. I venture to stay that for $50 I can get the like of Joe Jacobs to swear that I was in St. Louis yesterday. A man who did a day’s work ten years ago and who does not have to work during the winter--I’m surprised there weren’t more Joe Jacobs in this trial.”

The prosecutor then closed his argument with a statement that would resound in Hamilton for the next century and beyond: “Let your verdict show that law and order must prevail in this community. Don’t tell the world that Hamilton is a Little Chicago, a breeding place for murder, robbery, pillage and the stick-up man.”

Warren Gard--former prosecutor, judge and Congressman--reminded the jury that the burden of proof was on the state, not the defense. He said, “We are not compelled to show that Gadd fired the shot that killed Gary. It is the duty of the state to show Wells guilty.”

Gard claimed that the .45 caliber bullet found under the floor was part of the defense evidence in that it proved the testimony that Gadd had shot at Wells while he was on the floor in the northwest corner of the room.

“There is only one man who said that Wells fired the shot that killed Gary,” Gard said. “And that was Hugh Gadd.”

Gard demonstrated what he termed the impossibility for Wells to fire the shot from the position he was in and inflict the wounds which caused Gary’s death. “You cannot shoot a bullet around a corner.”

“It is not the contention of the defense that Gadd shot Gary for the purpose of killing him, but it is our contention that he fired at Wells and the bullet struck Gary.”

xxx

On April 1, 1926, a jury of eight women and four men took seven hours to acquit Wells of the charge of murder.

At 9:50 o’clock, nearly three hours after the jury had returned from supper, George Oberfell, the court bailiff, was notified that a verdict had been reached. Wells was brought from the county jail and attorneys for the state and the defense were called to the courtroom.

When the doors of the room were opened, more than 30 people who had kept watch in the corridors of the courthouse filed into the spectator’s section of the room. Jurors were asked by deputy clerk William Hunter if a verdict had been reached and the roll of jurors called.

Before the verdict was read by Hunter, Judge Walter Harlan warned Spectators that there would be no demonstration of any kind when the verdict was read. The signed verdict was received from Walter Houck, foreman of the jury, and read by Deputy Hunter. Not a sound was heard in the courtroom other than the voice of the Deputy Clerk and for a moment after the reading of the jury's finding and after the jurors had answered “it is” to the question of whether or not it was their verdict, not a person moved. 

Jurors were told by Judge Harlan that they had been called to sit in this case only and that their services would no longer be required. 

It was then that the jurors stepped from the jury box to where Wells was seated nearby, and in turn practically every member of the jury shook hands with the man who had been acquitted. 

A few of the jurors lingered about Wells, speaking of their confidence in him and advising him to give up his former Associates and live a life beyond reproach. Wells in turn thanked the jurors and went from the courtroom to the office of Sheriff Epperson where arrangements were made for him to leave the courthouse a free man. 

When asked if he had anything to say, Wells answered only that he desired to speak appreciation for the interest people have taken in his case and for the things that have been done for him.

When the verdict was received in the courtroom Wells’s attorneys, Warren Gard and JB Connaughton, were with them and H.H. Haynes, assistant prosecuting attorney, represented the state. 

It was rumored at the close of the trial that the first ballot taken by the jurors after they retired to deliberate stood seven to five acquittal. Other ballots followed and the vote is said to have changed to eight to four, nine to three, ten to two and and finally twelve for acquittal. 

The slaying of Prohibition agent Robert Gary quickly caught the attention of state officials who swept into the city 24 hours later to begin a series of raids that left many of the Hamilton’s cafes in wreckage.

“There are more barred and steel doors in cafes in Hamilton than in any city of its size in the state,” said Samuel A. Probst, deputy state prohibition commissioner when he arrived in Hamilton to launch a drive to have such doors taken from cafes, either by persuasion or force.

As Probst and his men gathered with Morris Shuler’s Seven Mile agents to begin the raids, he said if anyone initiated gun play, they had orders to shoot to kill.

State officers found their first steel door at the Crystal Café at Central Avenue and Walnut Street. State agent Arnold Skinner said that when officers arrived at the Crystal they saw several men leaving, locking the front door behind them. Police broke down the front and used a heavy iron bar to force open a steel-lined door at the back. There was no liquor, but Skinner said he believed there had been liquor there.

At the Dunlap Café, 338 Court Street, a few doors from where Gary was shot to death, state men are said to have been resisted by George “Fat” Wrassman, proprietor. Wrassman, standing over six feet, four inches and over three hundred pounds, was a known tough. He’d been acquitted on a robbery charge in Middletown and held there on an Indiana indictment of unlawful possession of dynamite, but released when no Hoosier officers came to pick him up.

There were eleven men in the raid, and Skinner was the first to go in the front door, only to find himself looking down the foot-long muzzle of the revolver in the equally large hands of George “Fat” Wrassman.

Skinner kept his head and did not pull his revolver, but ordered Wrassman to put his down. Surprisingly, the big man did.

Skinner picked up the heavy gun.

“I’ll have to handcuff you,” Skinner said.

“There aren’t enough men here to do that,” Wrassman said. 

That started a free-for-all fight, Wrassman tossing dry agents like flies, his giant fists protected by brass knuckles when they tried to handcuff him. With Wrassman shouting curses in every direction, the prohibition men finally wrestled him to the ground after several sharp blows to the head softened his resolve, but Fat continued to curse the officials even as he lay flat on his huge stomach with the handcuffs behind his back.

The back door in the Dunlap Café, lined with one-half-inch steel, proved to be was tougher to break down than the Crytal’s. Police eventually gave up on battering it down to get into the back room and went through the partition wall instead. The room was empty, but there was evidence that liquor had been dumped and an unknown number of men made a get-away. Wrassman continued to curse the whole time they trashed the place.

Police arrested Wrassman on four charges--carrying a gun, currying metal knucks, pointing a firearm and assault--and placed him in the county jail.

He was fined $40 for that melee.

No liquor was found in any of the cafes they raided. 

Probst assured Butler County Sheriff Epperson and Hamilton Chief of Police Frank Clements that he realized what they were up against and promised all possible aid by state officers. “You have some tough characters to deal with here,” he said. 

For all of his glad-handing while he was in town, Deputy Prohibition Commission Probst had a quite harsher tone when he got back to Columbus on Monday, laying the blame for Gary’s murder on the door of Hamilton police, saying the inefficiency of the department “has resulted in a reign of terror in Hamilton with bootleggers holding sway.” 

“Bootleggers in Hamilton are in open rebellion against the law and will resort to murder to carry out their trade,” he scolded, then promised “There will be no let-up until Hamilton has been cleaned-up.”

Mayor Howard Kelly said he was all in favor of shutting down the liquor trade in Hamilton, but he couldn’t do it on the resources he had available.

“When the prohibition law became effective, it added 75 percent more duties on the police department,” he said. “With the present force we have been unable to meet the situation. At times I have had to be satisfied with a house crew of nine men and until the time that revenue from taxes will permit an increase in the force, we shall continue to have a force inadequate to cope with the situation. I have revoked licenses without effect. I have closed places without effect. I have asked for state aid without effect and now I am asking for padlock proceedings.”

He pointed out Fat Wrassman’s Dunlap Café as a prime example. The man had never been issued a license, but opened up his shop with its iron doors anyway.

Wrassman was linked to Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus and was suspected in a litany of crimes all over Southwest Ohio. Before his story would end, he would have two murder acquittals on his record and never convicted of anything other than liquor violations. 

“Out of all his escapades ‘Fat’ emerged unhurt physically and with a whole skin as far as conviction was concerned,” wrote the Evening Journal.

Other than Skinner, Wrassman’s chief nemesis was Joe “Dutch” Schaefer, a detective working for the Hamilton County prosecutor’s office, who was constantly on his trail. Wrassman was frequently heard to boat, “I’ll wipe out that dirty Dutch bastard.” When Schaefer heard of this, he said he accepted the challenge.

Wrassman had been a railroad man like his father, who used to take him on runs from Hamilton to Indianapolis. He had “a smile as expansive as his mountainous bulk,” the Evening Journal said, “with a smile, a joke and a back-slap for all he met.” He moved to Hamilton in 1918, when there were still local option laws. Indianapolis was dry; Hamilton wet. When he’d go from Hamilton to Indianapolis, he started carrying quarts of whiskey with him to sell to his friends.

When prohibition hit, Fat quit the greasy, back-bending railroad job and went all in with the liquor racket. It didn’t take long for the law to catch on. Wrassman and his wife lived in a modest bungalow on Hudson Avenue, where she kept a neat house and he kept a 100-gallon still in the basement. When police raided the house in March 1923, it took trucks to haul it and 75 gallons of high-quality moonshine away. “Biggest and best seized to date,” police bragged as they hauled Fat off to jail. Wrassman moved his family to Ross Avenue, and when police raided that house later in the same year, they commented that his new still was even bigger than the first.

His craft included the transporting of good “red liquor” as well as making his own moonshine and at some point he added the art of the yegg (safecracker) to his repertoire. He was found not guilty of robbing the H.A. Glenn store in Middletown in March, 1925, and was suspected in a Connorsville, Indiana, heist that June, but had an alibi. Wrassman was also the primary suspect in the robbery of the Butler County Courthouse in January, 1926. 

After the showdown with Skinner, Wrassman moved further south to Cincinnati. Though he steered clear of Hamilton for much of 1926 and 1927, he was occasionally seen at the Hotel Lee and at a café on South Fifth Street, and always had three men with him as bodyguards. His merrymaking trips to Hamilton often ended up in brawls and sluggings. 

Wrassman was credited with the June, 1927 shooting of Glenn Hiatt, alias Harrington, and Jack Parker at the Superior Fishing Camp, and was linked up with the slaying of Thomas Concannon, July 6, 1927, at the Five Mile House, Rapid Run Pike, a “good beer” joint on Race Street. 

Toward the end of May, 1929, Wrassman and one of his men came to Hamilton to party at the Hotel Lee, but the soiree broke up when a Dayton man took a bullet in the shoulder and his pal ended up in Hamilton police headquarters. Wrassman and his entourage slipped away, but the heat was great, so he turned himself in a few days later. The Dayton men would not talk, forfeiting $100 bonds by failing to appear at a hearing and Wrassman walked out of municipal court a free man.

***

Schaefer wanted Wrassman for several shootings at fishing camps and had been trailing him closely. The detective was returning to Cincinnati at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 11, 1929, after a late-night trip to a Newport fishing camp along the Licking River when he spotted Wrassman’s automobile, a brown sedan, parked on Opera Place between Race and Elm, now the site of Cincinnati’s convention center.

Dutch called police headquarters for back-up, Captain of Detectives Walter Fricke, and they searched the car but did not find anything except a few steel saw blades and other tools of the yegg--but no guns, so they knew the big man would be armed.

Then Schaefer saw two men on the south side of the street, leaving the Canton Chop Suey House, about 100 feet away. Wrassman was carrying food in his left hand. Schaefer stood in the shadows with his hat pulled down on his forehead, but Wrassman recognized him anyway and shouted, “I’m going to kill you, you dirty bastard!”

Wrassman walked toward Schaefer and Schaefer walked toward Wrassman in a classic showdown stance, Fricke standing nearby, watching closely should Wrassman pull his gun. But he did not draw his weapon. He was already holding it in his right hand. When they were about 35 feet apart, Wrassman began shooting. He fired twice before Schafer sprang into action, and his revolver barked five times as Fat continued to hurl lead. The men walked boldly toward each other as they shot. Fricke called it “the most remarkable show of courage I ever hope to witness.” When they were but 10 feet apart, Wrassman crumbled to the sidewalk, falling on his gigantic stomach. All five bullets hit the prodigious mark, but all six of Wrassman’s shots missed.

“You got me at last, Dutch,” he murmured as he turned his head toward Schaefer.

“I’m sorry, Fat,” Schaefer said as he holstered his revolver and took Wrassman’s, noting that they both carried the same type of pistol. “It was you or me.”

There was a tense moment as a half-dozen or more men, thought to be members of Wrassman’s gang, gathered anxiously around the scene of the shooting, trigger fingers itching. Fricke worried that there might be more trouble if these fellows decided to take out their revenge right away, but they began to disperse as more police arrived.

His death marked the end of a bitter rivalry between the gangster and the detective. 

Schaefer accompanied Wrassman’s body to General Hospital, and an hour later got a phone call there. “You,” said a mysterious voice. “You’re marked.”

Undertakers created a specially-made, extra-large casket to accommodate Wrassman’s enormous frame. It took eleven pall bearers to get the huge casket in and out of his modest home on Evanston Avenue, where more than 250 people mingled in the yard while the family of George Wrassman held private funeral services inside. 

Even though they weren’t officially posted as guards, there were several Cincinnati police detectives in the crowd. Hamilton Chief of Police John C. Calhoun forbade any Hamilton police to go there. The police presence caused a fair amount of tension, and reporters on the scene said there was an expectation that “anything could happen,” though nothing did.

Late in the evening of May 3, 1927, two men, one from Canada and one from Michigan, came to the Hamilton Police Chief Otto Kolodzik with an unusual request: They wanted help in tracking down some bandits they believed were in Hamilton. Earlier that day, the two men had left Toledo with $400 in cash, a Ford truck filled with 166 cases of Canadian beer, and a Ford roadster loaded down with 60 cases of Canadian whiskey. They were headed south to Cincinnati.

When they were just past Greenville, four men in a Hudson brougham forced the truck off the road. Shots were fired, but the driver escaped unharmed. One of the men from the Hudson got in the driver’s seat and took off with the truck, the beer, and the $400. The driver of the roadster, seeing this activity in his rearview mirror, at first pulled over, but once he figured out what was going on, he tried to speed away. The Hudson soon caught up with him and amid a hail of gunfire, the driver pulled over into the yard of a farm and hit the ground running, the bullets spattering the lawn around him as he sought safety in the farmhouse.

The Hudson, the load of beer, and the whiskey continued the journey south. The two drivers met up on the road and hoofed it back to Greenville. They had managed to get the license plate number of the car, and the Greenville police told them that it was registered to Robert Kolker of Hamilton. The drivers fully admitted that they were rum runners, but they wanted the Hamilton police to help them recover their vehicles and cash.

Chief Kolodzik had a tip, so with a posse of a half-dozen detectives, deputies, and liquor agents, he set up an ambush in Coke Otto and waited until 5 a.m. Wednesday morning. It turned out to be a wasted effort. The posse spread out to search for the three vehicles, and a few hours later, they found the roadster and truck, shed of the cargo, parked on Maple Avenue. At 4 p.m. that afternoon, Sheriff Bert Wagner of Darke County showed up with an arrest warrant for three Hamilton men: Kolker, 29, Jack Parker, 28, and Glenn Harrington, 25, whose real name was Hiatt, but he was trying to avoid being located by an ex-wife in Michigan. Police knew Kolker and Parker to be close, both with prior records not only of bootlegging but also armed robbery, safe cracking, and gambling. Parker owned the cafe operated by Olney Wells on Court Street where Bob Gary had been killed in a raid. Again acting on a tip, Kolodzik and two detectives drove around town and spotted the Hudson brougham with five men inside, including the three named in the warrant. Kolker, Parker, and Harrington (Hiatt) were arrested and turned over to the Greene County authorities.

Although the trio didn’t speak, police in Hamilton and Cincinnati believed that the hijacking was in retaliation for an earlier hijacking, and that some kind of rift had opened among the Hamilton bootleggers, that a war between rival factions was beginning to heat up.

And heat up it did.

Kolker, Parker, and Hiatt made bond in Greenville and returned to Hamilton. A couple of weeks later, Parker and Hiatt took their wives to the Superior Fishing Club along the Little Miami River for a day of relaxation, but it may have been something of a gangster’s picnic. These “fishing clubs” were quite popular along area rivers during Prohibition. Tucked away deep in the woods far from the prying eyes of city police, many of them had bars where they could legally serve “near beer” as a front for whatever other activities might go on. Kolker had a previous engagement that Sunday, June 5, or else he and his wife would have been there, too.

There were about 25 other people there that afternoon, and copious amounts of near beer and who knows what else consumed. Jack Parker was reportedly very drunk, and after the two couples had dinner on their own, his wife came down with a headache and went to the car to lie down. Parker and Kolker were at the bar, and witnesses later said that Parker went around asking for a $10 loan. Exiled Hamilton bootlegger and moonshiner George “Fat” Wrassman, then making Evanston his home, reportedly said to him, “I don’t have $10, but if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

Parker turned on him. “If you think you’re a better man, let’s step outside,” he slurred.

Wrassman did not step outside. He calmly pulled a revolver from his jacket and shot Parker in the knee, breaking his kneecap in two and shattering the bone behind. Enraged, Hiatt either pulled his own weapon or took one from Parker (accounts vary) and shouted, “Who did that?” and waved his gun around the crowd in a circle. “I’m going to get the guy who shot my pal!” At the coroner’s inquest, twenty-three people who had been in the bar testified, but no one could say for certain who fired the shot that killed Glenn Hiatt. Parker didn’t remember, but somehow, a struggle ensued and more shots were fired. Hiatt took a bullet in his right side and the crowd dispersed immediately.

The Hiatts and the Parkers hopped into the Parkers’ car with plans to go back to Hamilton to Mercy Hospital to have their wounds tended to. It’s not clear who was driving the car, but it ended up in a ditch. Some men stopped to help extricate it, but having no luck, a nephew of the man who ran the camp took Kolker in his car, and dumped him at a doctor’s office in Montgomery, where he died shortly after.

Jack Parker and the two women went to Mercy Hospital, thinking that was where the nephew had taken Hiatt, but he wasn’t there, so the two women left Jack at the hospital to be treated for a shattered kneecap and went to a Cincinnati General Hospital. They asked around, and found that Hiatt was at rest in the Hamilton County morgue.

Police expected Fat Wrassman to turn himself in, believing that he would believe he would be safer in police custody than on the streets, but he did not. Hamilton County Prosecutor Robert Taft said he believed fear of Wrassman was responsible for the rampant lapse of memory among the witnesses and was convinced of connections between this case and the murder of bootlegger Harry Sollick in Cincinnati two months previous, which resulted in a warrant for Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, who was known to be one of Wrassman’s trigger men.

Without an indictment, it seemed the case would blow over until someone would come forward. But three weeks later, Wrassman was wanted again, implicated in a shooting at a speakeasy on Race Street in Cincinnati when a bootlegger named Ed Concannon was killed. Wrassman played a bit of cat and mouse with the prosecutor, but when his $3,500 bond was forfeited, he gave himself up and stood trial. It only took the jury ninety minutes to vote for acquittal, even though Taft’s star eyewitness was a bank director and former state senator. Wrassman’s attorney, Charles H. Elston, would soon help Cincinnati’s bootleg kingpin George Remus cop a temporary insanity plea in the murder of his wife.

***

On Sunday evening, June 5th 1927, an unidentified man brought a body to the office of Dr. J. O. Blackerby, Montgomery. The man said he picked the body up in Miamiville. No other details were given by the man, who left doctor Blackerby's office immediately after placing the injured man in the Physicians Care .

Two man laid the body on the floor of the office. It was shot through the long. He died a few minutes after being left there. 

One of the men was later identified as Charles Mitts of Connorsville, Indiana.

Mitts is a brother-in-law of Taylor, the man who ran the camp, and was working that day. He was about 300 feet away from the bar when the shots were fired, he said, and ran back to learn what it happened. Taylor at once decided he better go home,  only to come upon Parker's auto, stalled in a ditch. 

He was in his machine trying to pull it out with both Parker and Hyatt were in it. Someone suggested that he take Hyatt to a doctor, and the man was placed in his machine and he drove to Montgomery and to the office of Dr. Blackerby. The doctor had his patient in his office at the time,  he was alone Mets declared, a man came out of the office and help them take Hyatt in And lay him on the floor. He said he left at once, as he thought the other machine was following him, and he did not know who hired or anything about the shooting. Betts said that no one at the camp was drunk.

Mitts's story a was contradicted by that of Doctor Blackerby and by Henry Weisel, 1638 Western Avenue, who was in the doctor's office at the time. They declare that Mitts told them that the injured man had been hurt in an automobile accident, and when he started to leave the office and was asked where he was going he said he wanted to get his hat. 

But he jumped into his machine and speed away, Weisel declared. 

The only identification marks on the slain man we're tattoo inscriptions on the right arm what's the initials G. C. H.- Helen Nolan - true love.

An automobile key, a truck key, and the door key were the only things found in his clothing. The victim was about 5 ft 11 in tall, weighed about 185 lb, had dark hair, had dark brown hair and mustache. It was wearing a light gray suit and was of neat appearance Curry

Glenn Hiatt had been going by the name of Harrington to avoid being found by his ex-wife.

On Sunday, June 5, 1927, many of the key figures in the local bootlegging and hijacking game were together at a cook-out at the Superior Fishing Camp along the Little Miami River.

Bernice Hiatt: “Sunday my husband and I and Jack Parker and his wife Mary went to the camp in Parker’s machine. The men played ball with the others there in the afternoon and then we had dinner. There were about 25 others there, but I did not know any of them. Just before the shooting, Mrs. Parker was asleep in the automobile, she having felt ill, and I was standing at the end of the bar with the others when Glenns aid he was going to the other end of the bar to get some cigarettes.

“There was no argument; I didn’t hear a word before the shot was fired. WHen the shot was fired I ran to the machine and woke up Mary Parker and they brought my husband and Parker to the machine. Parker said he was stooping down over my husband when someone shot him, the bullet passing through his right leg at the knee.

“We started to leave in Parker’s machine, but it went into a ditch, and then some men in another machine came along and they said they would take my husband with them. They put him in that machine and started off.

“We supposed they were going to take him to the hospital at Hamilton. Another couple offered to take me there in their car and I went with them. We went to the hospital but they did not show up there, and then we came to Cincinnati and went to the General Hospital. We saw a policeman there and told him what we were looking for and asked if any wounded man  had been brought in. He advised me to go back home and wait until I heard something of where they had taken my husband. I then called up the police department and was told there was no report of anyone being brought into the city wounded. They did not ask my name.

“I did not see who shot my husband, and I do not know who did. There was a big man and a small man standing beside the end of the bar when he went there. The big man weighed more than 250 pounds, I would think, and the other man probably weighed 170 pounds. The big man was dressed in a dark suit and a straw hat. He also wore shellrimmed glasses. I would know him again if I saw him, as he was playing ball with the others during the afternoon. The other man wore a light suit. I did not see much of what happened for I was not looking at my husband at the time, and I ran to the machine as soon as the shot was fired. I did not see anyone with a gun.”

When taken to the morgue to identify her husband's body she broke down completely, and had to be assisted back to the coroner's office. She expressed great concern for the blow her husband's death will be to his parents, who, she stated, Zanesville, Ohio. 

Mrs. Hyatt was permitted to return to Hamilton what's mrs. kolker, after she had promised that she would come here to testify at the inquest. Mrs. Coulter said that she and her husband had not gone to the camp with the other couples on Sunday for the reason that they had arranged to visit relatives at Middletown instead.

Long before Mrs. Hyatt had sent the word which identified the dead man as her husband, deputy sheriff's August Beckman and Herman Klein have discovered the place where the murder was committed. This resulted through a telephone number found in the effects on hiatt's body, which proved to be the number of the Superior fishing club, and with County detective Shafer, they had started an investigation which is expected to lead to the arrest of the man who killed Hyatt and shot Parker.

They also learn that the story told by mrs. Hyatt, that she and her husband and Parker and his wife went to the camp alone, was true. The two couples kept to themselves at the camp except that the man played ball with the others for a while. Babe dinner by the house and drink home brew beer at the bar, but made no attempt to mix in with any of the other crowd. These facts, coupled with the further information that the party which had picnicked at the place during the afternoon at all left for home before the shooting occurred, please officers to the theory that the killing was a Bootleggers Feud entirely.

What's a murder of Hyatt the murders of Harold h Fitch and Harry solic, both known Bootleggers. We're recalled. Such, it is charged, was riddled with bullets at a garage in Reading Ohio, and his body then taken to a lonely spot on Cooper Avenue where it was left by the roadside early on the morning of March 19th. For this murder Harold Nason, Alias Nate Blum, Detroit Michigan, were indicted on a first-degree charge, but both were released on five $5,000 Bond each, and nothing has been done with their case yet.

Sollick was shot and killed bedroom on West 2nd Street and his body taken in an automobile to front and Harriet streets, where was dumped in the gutter on February 2nd. A sealed indictment was returned in this case, but no one has been arrested. This also was declared to have been a fight between Bootleggers who had fallen out. Which was alleged to have been a hijacker.

Detective Schaefer and deputy sheriff Klein return from Hamilton empty-handed, as Parker, whom they sought to have a beer before Corner swing, was too badly wounded to be moved. This is the second time that he received a bullet in his name the former bullet tearing away part of the kneecap. 

In spite of the fact that mrs. Hyatt said that she was standing at one end of the bar drinking near beer with Parker when her husband went to the other end to get some cigarettes and was shot, and despite the fact that she had declared Parker inform her he was leaning over Hyatt when he receive the bullet in his bag, Parker denied to the officers that he was close enough to see anything he declared that he did not know anything was wrong until he heard the two shots and received a bullet in his leg.

However the officers have information proving that there was an altercation before the shooting and that's more than the two shots were fired.

The bullet entered on the left side, pass through the left lung, then through the spinal column after which just went through the right long and passed out the right side of the body. 

Search for a fat man weighing close to 300 lb, and a companion, was estimated to weigh approximately 175 pounds, was because yesterday my deputy sheriff's Herman Decline and August Jo Beckman and County detective Shafer the question them regarding the murder of Glenn Hyatt 216 South 3rd Street oh, at the Superior fishing club camp. It was learned that the fat man left Hamilton Monday and has not been seen since, while the whereabouts of his smaller companion also has not been learned.

The suspect is said by police to have been ordered out of Hamilton two years ago. He is said to have made a hasty Retreat from the camp after the shooting and has not been seen by detectives are friends of the police department sense.

Joe Schaefer, Hamilton County detective, predicted the man will be arrested as soon as any disguise he may assume will not be difficult to penetrate. Real paragraph Schaefer also believes Fat may surrender as he has been told he’s first on the list to be bumped off in the liquor fight said to be waging.

Parents of Hyatt were to arrive and Cincinnati Wednesday afternoon to take charge of the body no funeral arrangements have been made but it is believed the body will be taken to Saginaw Michigan the home of mrs. Hyatt. The body has been in the Hamilton County Morgue since its removal there Sunday night from The Office of Dr. Blackerby. 

***

The next casualty in the Little Chicago gang war came March 5, 1928 at the Garden of Allah, a roadhouse on Springfield Pike just outside of Butler County. Jack Parker, whose entrepreneurship included gambling, was having dinner there with John “Buddy” Ryan, a well-known and promising young boxer from Covington who was also known to consort with the gambling fraternity. Parker, again very drunk, and Ryan got into a persistent argument, apparently over a woman, and three times they took it to the parking lot. The third time, Ryan came back alone, bleeding from a wound in the stomach from a heavy calibre automatic. Parker was seen to hop into a big car with the woman in question and drive off.

Parker was indicted on the lam March 13, and three weeks later was involved in another notable caper. Though not directly related to the gangster wars, the incident at the Pelican Club proved to be a pivotal event in the Little Chicago narrative.

The Pelican Club Cafe was a pool hall, restaurant, and ice cream parlor on Hamilton Avenue in College Hill. Although there is no record of it being a speakeasy, no reported liquor violations, owner William “Peanuts” Warnken did have prior arrests for allowing gambling on premises, and he was present during the early morning hours of Sunday, April 8, 1928, when a gang of six gunman burst in on a hot dice game that was taking place on one of the pool tables. They all wore masks of some sort, a bandana covering their mouth and nose or a small black mask covering their eyes. One wore large, dark sunglasses, who seemed to be the leader of the crew. One man carried two sawed-off shotguns, another man one. The rest brandished pistols.

It was apparently the dice game that had attracted the bandits, but they first went for the safe. One of them put a gun to the cook’s head and demanded he open it. He pleaded that he did not know the combination. Fearing they would open fire, Warnken stepped forward and said he could open it. The safe yielded but five dollars in pennies, so the bandits turned to the twenty men in the cafe, many of whom were crouched and hiding under the tables. The bandits cursed and yelled, poking the men with their shotguns and pistols, getting them to line up along the walls. One man didn’t move fast enough and was paid with a shotgun muzzle to the face, knocking out several teeth.

In the meantime, the village marshal, 53-year-old Hungarian immigrant Peter Dumele, had been on a robbery call in the neighborhood, and seeing the lights on in the Pelican Club, decided to stop in and shoot the breeze, as he sometimes did. Dumele saw all the commotion in the place as the bandits were about half-way through their shake-down, but found the glass front door locked. He tapped on it.

One of the bandits noticed Warnken trying to give Dumele a sign to move on and opened the door, ushering the marshal inside. Dumele laughed, as if he thought it were a put-on when they ordered him to put up his hands. Warnken begged him to obey, but his pleas were cut short. Suddenly realizing the seriousness of the situation, Dumele made a move toward the pistol in his back holster. 

The bandit in the dark glasses shouted, “Give him what’s coming to him, boys!” 

The bandits opened fire. One load of shot tore away Dumele’s right hand and shattered his arm, another hit him square in the chest. A revolver bullet went through his belly sideways. Dumele fell to the ground. The men panicked and the room erupted into chaos. One of them crashed through a large window and dragged the sash behind him down Hamilton Avenue.

The bandits hastily collected their loot. As they filed out the door, one of the victims shouted, “Hey! I know you fellows! You’re from Hamilton!”

“Let him have it!” dark glasses shouted. The last bandit out the door turned around and fired a shotgun into the room. The blast passed within inches of Warnken’s head and then peppered the back of a man huddled in a corner, causing superficial flesh wounds.

Dumele survived a few hours. On his deathbed, he told his wife, “I would not be a coward. If it had to be, I would rather die for the village.”

Detective Joseph “Dutch” Schaefer was put on the case, and soon began making arrests. Although they wore masks, they were easily identified. Witnesses pegged the leader of the gang, the man in the dark glasses who gave the order to fire on Dumele, as Todd Messner, who a few years earlier had been acquitted along with Crane Neck Nugent of the murder of Hamilton Cafe owner Robert Schief. The gang included Breck Lutes of Middletown, Rodney Ford of Cincinnati, and Bob “The Fox” Zwick, of Newport but closely associated with Nugent and Wrassman. The “sixth man” was not indicted for lack of identification, but was only referred to as “a Hamilton man,” suggesting that it may have been Turkey Joe Jacobs.

Jack Parker was part of that gang, too, but he was not indicted, because he was killed before Schaefer could catch up with him. A posse almost had him in Preble County on April 13, but missed him by a few hours, though they did capture a 150-gallon still on the raid and arrested Parker’s pal Kolker for it.

Parker’s bullet-riddled body was found by a man out picking greens on the afternoon of May 16, 1928, in a pool of water at the foot of an embankment 20 feet off a Warren County road near Lebanon. He had been hiding out in a camp near there. Bloodstains in the road suggesting he was shot there and thrown into the ditch. He was shot three times, once in the face and twice in the back. At first it was thought that some of his old pals had taken him “for a ride in the country.” No one was ever arrested or indicted for his murder, but Schaefer would later express the belief that it was the work of Crane Neck Nugent, who was reported to be a special pal to Buddy Ryan, the boxer for whose murder Parker was under indictment.

The body count continued to rise in the Little Chicago gang war, and it was far from over. Soon the violence would return to Hamilton’s neighborhoods with a series of bold assassinations.

Two weeks after Jack Parker’s body was found beside a Lebanon highway and just less than a month after the murder of Marshal Dumele at the Pelican Cafe, Hamilton County detective Joe Schaefer receive a break in the latter case when he took into custody Breck Lutes, a 28-year-old Middletown electrician, from “a disorderly house” in Newport, Kentucky. Three women were arrested at the same time, including one who gave her name as “Mary Hamilton” and turned out to be Jack Parker’s widow.

Schaefer had tracked him to Newport following an incident on May 30, 1928, in which two Cincinnati motorcycle police chased a speeding car containing two men and a woman across the bridge into Covington. One of the men in the car began firing with a revolver over his shoulder at the motorcycle cops, hitting one of them three times in the shoulder and the other once in the foot. They gave up the chase, but one of the officers said he recognized the driver of the car as “Crane Neck” Nugent, who had been acquitted of the murder of Bob Schief in Hamilton. He was reasonably confused, as it was actually Todd Messner, Nugent’s co-defendant in the Schief murder, also acquitted. Investigators traced the car to a rental agency in Covington. Lutes admitted being in the car when it was rented, but said he was not in the car when the motorcycle cops were shot. He wasn’t, but three people identified him as one of the Pelican Cafe bandits. Schaefer let Lutes go, however, hoping that he would lead detectives to the other bandits in the case.

Nearly five months would pass before the first solid arrests in the case, all three tinged with serendipity.

On the afternoon of Sunday, September 30, Hamilton police responded to a disturbance at a fishing camp along the Great Miami River north of town near Woodsdale. Several people had been drinking at the camp, and when some of the party decided to leave, a very drunk and belligerent Toddy Messner shot the tires of their car full of holes. “I’m staying and now so are you,” he told them.

Somehow, the departing partiers managed to call a cab and took the tire into town for repairs. The garage owner tipped off Hamilton police, and a posse of seventeen officers from Hamilton and Middletown set up a stake-out at the entrance to the narrow lane that led to the fishing camp. When Messner, another man, and two women left the camp, police surrounded the car and took them all into custody. The man, a bus driver from Bond Hill, broke down under questioning and gave police the address of the Newport apartment where Messner had been living. There, they found a stash of yegg’s tools and the clothes that would place Messner at the Pelican Cafe the night of Dumele’s murder. Hamilton police turned him over to Hamilton County authorities, and the owner of the Pelican Club identified Messner as the man who directed the other bandits during the raid.

The very next weekend, Detective Schaefer and his partner found Rodney Ford, a 30-year-old Cincinnati man, parked in a car a couple of blocks from his home in the West End. They saw him drop a revolver over the back seat. They took him into custody and witnesses identified him as one of the bandits from the Pelican Club. During his trial, he revealed that he had just dropped off the fugitve Robert Zwick, also known as “The Fox” and “Foxy Bob,” who was also wanted for Dumele’s murder and other crimes, and was on his way to buy some whiskey. It was the first of many narrow escapes for Foxy Bob.

The same day Ford was arrested, Breck Lutes showed up at Mercy Hospital in Hamilton after having been shot in the hip at a fishing camp near Venice. Charles Fiehrer, a Hamilton man who owned the camp, said he was cleaning his gun when it went off and shot his friend. Schaefer and Hamilton police arrested Lutes when he left the hospital three weeks later, and a Hamilton County grand jury indicted Messner, Ford, Lutes, and the absent Zwick on first degree murder charges.

The three prisoners appeared at a preliminary hearing together on November 15 and were granted separate trials. Ford was to be the first to face the jury, but with Zwick on the loose the gangster war raged on even while these three were in custody.

On the night of December 12, the day the Hamilton County court began questioning potential jurors in Ford’s trial, Martin Lewis, who lived on West Miami River Road, just north of Venice but across the river in Hamilton County, saw his barbecue stand about 250 feet from his hillside home consumed in flames. He rushed to the scene and with some of his neighbors watched the small frame building quickly burn to the ground. The stand had been closed for the season and there was nothing flammable inside, but it burned so quickly that Lewis presumed it was arson. Still, he  was shocked when the falling flaming timbers revealed a body lying on the floor.

The coroner discovered a bullet wound in the chest, three knife wounds, and a broken left arm on the charred remains. The body was lying face down. The coroner asserted he had been killed elsewhere and the barbecue stand, just a few yards where the body of another gangster had been discovered a year earlier. A belt buckle and the remaining teeth helped identify the body as that of Robert Andres, a 28-year-old railroad worker who was present at the Pelican Club the night of Dumele’s murder. He was one of the few men present willing to go on the stand to identify the bandits and had testified at Ford’s arraignment. There was no doubt in Schaefer’s mind that this was the reason for his murder, and he laid the crime on Foxy Bob Zwick and Crane Neck Nugent, by now a gangster all-star having been in on the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. 

Three days later, Nugent and Zwick struck again, by Schaefer’s reckoning. Bob Kolker, who was close to the late Jack Parker, had been drinking at his Parrish Avenue home with a fellow named Kenneth Richardson. At about 4:30 in the morning they both got into Kolker’s car, Richardson driving, to take the latter home on Dixie Highway. In front of Richardson’s house, Kolker got out of the car and was about to take the driver’s seat when the glare of bright headlights blinded him from the rear. A sedan slowly passed near and a man leaned out of a window, firing five shots. Four shots missed, but one caught Kolker in the chest, just below his heart, and lodged in his left lung. He had been picked up several times by the police in connection with Parker’s death, and Schaefer insisted Kolker never talked and said he believed that the gangsters believed that Kolker had been giving “tips.” 

Kolker managed to survive the attack and appeared as a defense witness at Lutes’s trial, offering an alibi, then went into the wind. All three of the captured bandits were convicted in the Dumele murder, Messner and Lutes both receiving life sentences in the Ohio Penitentiary, and Rodney Ford executed July 1929. Foxy Bob Zwick was still on the move, but still spent a good deal of time in Hamilton, and was there on May 19, 1929, when the gangster war began its boldest string of skirmishes.

A Lindenwald street car passed Seventh and Heaton streets about 10:45 p.m. that evening, and in spite of the rattle, several in the neighborhood heard what sounded like gunfire or a car backfiring. But they minded their own business. Several alleys in the neighborhood contained garages filled with all sorts of contraband, and most residents fearfully parked their cars on the street to avoid stumbling onto something.

But shortly after 11 p. m. Walter Finfrock drove into the alley off the 300 block of North Sixth Street and in the beam of his headlights saw a man lying on the ground, sort of wedged up against a garage door. “Just a drunk,” Finfrock’s passenger, his father, said. Then they noticed the pool of blood. Finfrock abandoned his car there and notified police. 

The dead man was George Murphy, known around town as a night clerk at the Grand Hotel when it was run by former Butler County Sheriff Rudy Laubach. He was originally from St. Louis and was known to have run liquor to Hamilton from Detroit, Kansas City, Louisville, and St. Louis. Other than talking about his war experience in the Canadian army, he revealed very little of himself to people in Hamilton, who noted that he was often out of town for months at a time. Even his family was in the dark about his occupation and didn’t know any of his friends, but they knew he always had money, dressed in the finest clothes, and always drove a new car. 

The law enforcement system knew Murphy better than the underworld or his family. In addition to being well-known as a liquor runner, Murphy was the chief suspect in a recent attempt to blow up a safe at the Rollman department store in downtown Cincinnati on May 5 along with Hamilton’s own Fat Wrassman and Harry Truesdale, one of George Remus’s lieutenants. He had a long criminal record and had made a daring escape from the Atlanta federal prison. He was such a brazen and reckless operator that no gang would work with him full-time, so he was known as a lone wolf. Nevertheless, he had a reputation as a straight-shooter for the most part, although he had been known to participate in several hijackings of fellow bootleggers. 

Murphy, 40, elegantly dressed in a fine gray suit with monogrammed handkerchiefs, bad been dead twenty minutes when the first police arrived. The location of machine gun shells indicated a gunman had lain in wait behind a board fence across the alley. Twenty-eight shots had been fired: ten into the garage door, eighteen into George Murphy. Six bullets went into his back, six more shots nearly tore off his left wrist and arm, and six of the bullets, apparently shot after an initial attack, traced a perfect circle eight inches in diameter around his heart. Murphy had a .38 revolver tucked in his belt. His inside coat pocket was a gold watch that contained a picture of a pretty girl. Detectives presumed it was his sweetheart, the titian-haired beauty Pauline Wilson, 25, but she was nowhere to be found. Murphy and Wilson had moved from last known address, an apartment on Atlantic Ave. in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Cincinnati, in February. They told neighbors they were moving to Florida. Neighbors knew her as “Pearl Murphy” and suspected he was a professional gambler. They paid their rent in advance, in cash, and were mostly quiet but received frequent visitors, including “a big fat man.”

The next morning, in what police believed as evidence of a related incident, travelers discovered a pool of blood on the bridge at Venice, not far from the burned-out barbecue shack that contained Robert Andres’s remains. The river was running high, making it impossible to search for a body. 

Although there were many men in and around Hamilton who served in World War I and could wield a machine gun with the precision and panache as Murphy’s hit, but no two were as expert as Crane Neck Nugent and Foxy Bob Zwick. It would later turn out that the bullets in the Andres murder and the Murphy assassination were from the same gun, the kind that Zwick was known to use.

Police were also concerned because the tactic used in the attempt on Kolker’s life and the Murphy assassination--hiding in ambush and taking the victim by surprise--was almost unheard of in Southwest Ohio. A more common method among local thugs was taking the man for a ride outside the city limits. “Victims were often lined up before a battery of weapons and told of the cause for death before his life was snuffed out with led,” the Daily News reported. “Not so with Murphy. No killing quite so well-planned and covered up has come before authorities here in many years.”

As it would turn out, the hit on George Murphy was just a warm-up.

After the assassination of George Murphy and other escalations in the Little Chicago gangster wars, police were on the lookout for Bob Zwick, one of the top machine gunners in the underworld and indicted in the murder of College Hill Marshal Peter Dumele.

Zwick hailed from Cincinnati and was early on associated with the bootleggers in Newport, Kentucky, but he also had a friend in “Turkey Joe” Jacobs, one of Hamilton’s most well-known gangsters. Jacobs, a horse trainer and race by trade or cover, was a defense witness at the trial of Alabama Wells, testifying that Coroner Hugh Gadd fired the shot that killed Bob Gary. It was reported that he hated his nickname, earned early in his bootlegging and hijacking career when he stole a turkey truck that he believed was hiding a load of liquor, but it turned out to only be turkeys. Another story says he got the name because he grew up on a turkey farm in a neighborhood right outside of Hamilton known as Gobbler’s Nob. He was closely connected to an interstate auto theft ring and implicated in a variety of gangland activities, from running moonshine to blowing safes. 

“To all but those who knew Jacobs well,” the Evening Journal reported, “he might have been considered a yokel. His manner of dress, his easy-going way and his disarming appearance characterized him as such, but he was anything but a yokel in the racket.”

The Daily News said that Jacobs was not fond of guns but was well-armed with his fists. He and Zwick were the best of friends, and many believed a not-so-innocent bystander when the assassins came after Zwick, that Turkey Joe just got caught in the crossfire. He was planning to take one of his horses to a race in Columbus the day after his death.

At 6:15 p.m., May 27, exactly one week after the Murphy killing, Turkey Joe Jacobs and Bob Zwick were in the Milders Inn at Symmes Corner south of Hamilton, a favorite regional eatery. 

Jake Milders had been a sports promoter before the 1913 flood picked up his Hamilton Coliseum and floated it two miles downstream before crashing it into the Columbia Bridge. Symmes Corner was a stop on the traction line to Cincinnati, and their restaurant was popular with Reds players and a destination spot for people who would come in from as far away as Indianapolis, sometimes waiting three hours on a busy weekend night for a steaming plate of “Mom” Milders’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes with creamy gravy.

They were keeping a close eye on the traffic on the Mt. Pleasant Pike, on the lookout for a liquor truck that was supposed to be heading down that way around 8 p.m. They were planning to hijack it.

Jacobs’s head turned toward the Pike when a brown sedan passing by. The two men quickly paid their tab, left their meal unfinished, and got in Jacobs’s brand new Nash sedan that parked on the Symmes Road (now Nilles Road).

Anna Smith, 22, was walking west along the crossroad to meet a friend when the Nash passed her by. She saw a second sedan behind it traveling at high speed, and caught up with the first car containing Jacobs and Zwick about 50 feet from the brick schoolhouse. The first car came to a stop and as the brown sedan pulled alongside and someone leaned out of the window and launched a machine gun assault, pumping round after round into the green Nash. 

The brown car took off heading west, passing the Miss Huffman, who was driving her uncle’s car, heading east. She slowed down, horrified at the sight of the bullet riddled car just as Bob Zwick managed to roll out of the Nash’s door and in front of her car. She slowed further to keep from striking him and he jumped on her running board.

“Get off!” Huffman screamed hysterically.

“They’re after me,” the man said, a revolver dangling from his right hand and blood pouring from his left where three fingers has been ripped to shreds and dangling. She stopped the car and screamed hysterically until Zwick pointed the gun in her face. “Take me up the road,” he demanded, and she complied, driving right past her friend, who stood paralyzed by the side of the road having witnessed the assault. As Huffman approached the Milders Inn and the intersection, he jumped from the car and stumbled inside.

The brown sedan had driven about 100 feet down the road and turned around just as Zwick jumped onto Huffman’s car. It slowed down again and pumped another blast of machine gun fire into the Nash.

“Hide me!” he pleaded to Mom Milders. She took him through the kitchen and out the back door to the privy. He locked himself in and Mom Milders went back inside and saw the brown sedan speed past the restaurant. Jake and Mom Milders and their daughter Helen saw four heads bob up in the air like jumping jacks as the car bumped over the CH&D Railroad tracks. It then disappeared around a curve.

After the car passed, Zwick left the outhouse and walked north toward Hamilton and stopped at Phillip Beiser’s grocery store, pushing his blood spattered face against the glass of the front door, scaring the wits out of Mrs. Beiser, who was luckily locking up for the day. He continued out to the Mt. Pleasant Pike and flagged down a Studebaker that was headed north toward Hamilton, a high school boy from Mt. Healthy on his way to a church festival in Hamilton. Zwick got in the back seat.

“He said he’d been in an accident, that he was with another woman and his car had hit a pole and they were both hurt,” the young man said. “He said he didn’t want his wife to know about it. I asked him where the other woman was and he said he left her at Milders’s... There was a wound over his right eye and his face was covered with blood. One finger on his left hand was almost cut off and was hanging by the skin.”

“We drove to Central Avenue, then to Fifth Street, to East Avenue, to Maple Avenue and then crossed the canal to Hancock Avenue, turned into an alley and went about a block and came to a small, one-story frame house. As we crossed Walnut Street, he ducked his head as though he didn’t want to be seen.

“When we stopped at the house, he got out and a woman, a big woman with bobbed hair came out and said, ‘My God, man, what have you been doing?’ She seemed to be mad.’

The boy would later identify the woman as Anna Jacobs, Turkey Joe’s wife, but she denied ever seeing him or Zwick that night. When showed a picture of the fugitive Bob Zwick, the boy said, “That’s the man.”

When he arrived at the scene, Coroner Edward Cook estimated that 35 to 40 bullets in the automobile. Jacobs, slumped over the driver’s seat, was shot in the left eye, in the left ear and in the left jaw, several more in his head, his left arm and wrist, a total of 18 wounds.

Two hats, one felt and one straw, were lying on the front seat. Jacobs had worn the felt hat. Jacobs had a .38 caliber revolver in his belt, unfired. Fifteen .45 caliber automatic bullets, loosely wrapped in a sheet of paper, lay on the back seat. Rear seat pockets contained 25 more .45 shells, a loaded .45 revolver hidden, tucked beneath an adjustable armrest, its numbers filed away. Police found bullets that had passed through Jacobs’ skull embedded in a shed 75 feet back from the road.

Hamilton police were already certain that the assassination was in reprisal for the murder of George Murphy, so Chief Calhoun took charge of the investigation even though the incident was four miles outside city limits. He personally led squads of detectives and officers on five raiding expeditions trying to find the wounded Bob Zwick, with little effort directed toward finding the assassins.

The Milderses, the Studebaker driver, Blanche Huffman, and others identified Jacobs’s companion as the man wanted in the murder of Marshal Peter Dumele in North College Hill, the murder of Hamilton gang chief Jack Parker, the murder of George Murphy and numerous hijackings of liquor trucks in Southwest Ohio.

From witness accounts, police surmised that Zwick had been shot four times, a graze on his forehead, one in the hip, one in the arm, and a devastating shot to the left hand that took his little finger and damaged several others. The wounds may have been fatal, so they alerted all area hospitals and physicians.

Police would later discover that a Hamilton taxi picked Zwick up at the Evans house and at around 9:30 p.m. delivered him to Dr. J.M. Digby a Newport, Kentucky, physician, who sewed his finger back on, gave him three stitches in his scalp wound and removed a bullet from his hip. The wounded man told the doctor he had been wounded at a beer camp. Dr. Digby would tell the newspapers that such occurrences are not unusual in Newport.

The search for Zwick turned to the north, toward Dayton, Detroit and Canada based on a tip saying that the fugitive had moved to Middletown, where someone else took him through Dayton to Columbus, but the trail soon grew cold.

Officials allowed Turkey Joe’s brother, George Jacobs, a furlough from prison, where he was serving time for burglary, to attend the funeral Friday afternoon. Although Turkey Joe was deeply embedded in the local gang culture, the event was strictly a family affair. Most of the 50 people in attendance who were not police or press were women, there to console his mother, his wife, and his five children. The pallbearers were mostly cousins, though one man was the son of Jack Parker, the local gang leader who met a similar fate a year earlier in Lebanon.

By the weekend, the waters of the Great Miami River had receded some and Hamilton County officials resumed dragging the river in search of Pauline Wilson, George Murphy’s missing girlfriend, whom they believed had been shot and thrown off the Venice bridge. The search was for naught as the body turned up on the farm of Theodore Baughman of East River Road near New Baltimore, five miles below the bridge. The body was fully clothed, wearing a fur coat, a sorority pin, a ring with a black oblong stone, and a wrist watch--stopped at 12:45.

When word of the discovery reached Hamilton, officials rushed the Hamilton County morgue with Murphy’s gold watch with the photo of the girl, but found it difficult to make a positive identification as the body had been badly decomposed from its two weeks in the swell. The eyes had been eaten from the body, the flesh discolored. Nothing indicated that the body had been weighted. The corpse bore one bullet wound that entered just below the left eye and exited the back of the skull on the right side. The only other wounds were scratches and scrapes caused by its five-mile odyssey in the Great Miami River.

Her watch proved to be the positive identification, and police traced her to Atlantic Avenue apartments in Cincinnati where neighbors identified the woman they knew as “Mrs. Murphy.” Dr. A.L. Huston said that the Murphys lived in the building for several months but left in February, saying they were headed to Florida and would return in the spring.

“We did not know what Murphy did for a living,” Dr. Huston said, “but they appeared very quiet and lovable. Never, as long as I was there, did I hear a loud voice or see them that they were not smiling and happy.”

On Wednesday morning, June 5, police discovered an apartment at 831 Carthage Pike where “Mr. and Mrs. George Wilson” lived after they vacated the Atlantic Avenue apartment. The kitchen was spotlessly clean, the living room neatly, tastefully and expensively furnished.

Then they opened a chifferobe. It was a “yegg kit,” with two ounces of nitroglycerin carefully wrapped in cotton, a dozen dynamite detonating caps, and other tools used to blow open safes. They also found a high-powered automatic rifle with a silencer in the apartment and a set of silverware in the process of having a monogram removed.