Bloody Williamson (32 page)

Their trial opened in the United States court at Quincy on the last day of January, 1927, with Judge Louis Fitzhenry presiding. Since both Newman and Birger were expected to testify, interest
ran high. The authorities, fearing gunplay, scattered deputy marshals and detectives around the courtroom; spectators were searched as they entered.

Newman, the government’s first important witness, held the stand—and the spotlight—for three hours. Small, trim, dapper, hard, he sat in the witness chair with legs crossed and hands clasped over one knee, an embodiment of self-assurance. Whenever he mentioned the Sheltons in his story of their former friendship his voice dripped with contempt.

Early in January 1925, he related, Carl Shelton had asked him if he wanted in on a good thing.

“I said sure, but when he told me it was a mail robbery, I backed out.”

He heard nothing more until the morning of January 27, when Carl telephoned him at his home in East St. Louis. That was the day Ora Thomas was to be buried, and Shelton wanted Newman to drive him and his brothers to Herrin for the funeral. Newman demurred.

“I told him I was tired and that he would get in trouble going there.”

“Well,” Shelton answered (so Newman said), “we pulled that Collinsville job this morning and we must have an alibi and it’s up to you to give it.”

Newman yielded, and started for Herrin with the brothers in his car. At Marion, however, Delos Duty dissuaded them from continuing. In the afternoon they loafed around the county seat and then returned to East St. Louis. Late that night Newman dropped in at Shelton’s saloon. There, in a back room, were Carl Shelton and Charlie Briggs, with bundles of money on a card table before them.

“See you later, Art,” Carl said in a greeting that was a command to leave. Newman left.

The witness swore that it was at least nine a.m. before he took Shelton’s telephone call, and that the party had not started for the funeral before nine thirty or ten. The Collinsville robbery
had taken place at seven a.m. Since Collinsville is only ten miles from East St. Louis, the Sheltons had plenty of time to make their way to the latter city, even by a devious route.

Newman was followed on the stand by a weak-chinned, ferret-faced ne’er-do-well named Harvey Dungey, who was actually one of Birger’s liquor runners, although that fact was not known at the time. Dungey testified that in January 1925 he was driving a taxi in East St. Louis, and that on the early morning of the robbery he took several passengers to Collinsville. At about six thirty, while approaching his destination, he saw a stalled Buick. Carl Shelton was looking at the engine, Bernie sat at the wheel.

Dungey’s testimony was of critical importance, since he was the only witness to place the defendants near the scene of the crime at the approximate time it was committed. But the crowd in the courtroom paid only perfunctory attention to what he said. They had come to see and hear Charlie Birger.

The gang leader entered with the nonchalance of a veteran actor. Instead of his outdoor costume he wore a freshly pressed gray suit, and his wavy black hair was carefully brushed and parted. Ignoring the Sheltons, he bowed slightly to the jury, took the oath, and then awaited interrogation with a faint but confident smile on his swarthy face.

“Did you have any conversation with the defendants about the Collinsville robbery?” District Attorney Provine asked.

“Yes, sir, I did,” Birger replied. “It was in January 1925, at Nineteenth and Market streets, in East St. Louis. Carl said he had been thinking about starting to haul whisky up from Florida. He had a payroll job in Collinsville, he told me, and when he got through with that he was going to start hauling whisky.”

“And the next time?”

“That was at my house five or six days after Ora Thomas’s funeral,” Birger continued. “Carl, Earl and Bernie and Charlie Briggs split $3,600 in my dining-room. When I looked in, Carl said: ‘This is some of Uncle Sam’s money, but we won’t need you for an alibi because we were at Ora Thomas’s funeral.’

“I asked Carl how much they got,” Birger went on, “and he said about $21,000. He told me Bernie drove the car up to Collinsville, and that he and Earl and Briggs went up with him. Briggs got out and grabbed the sack, and fell down getting back into the car.

“That,” the witness concluded, “was about all they ever said about the job.”

After twenty minutes, his story unshaken by cross-examination, Birger walked from the courtroom, again without even glancing at the defendants.

The Sheltons denied all the assertions made by the government witnesses. The day after the appearance of Birger and his henchmen, Carl, tall, taciturn, soft-spoken, took the stand in his own defense. When asked by his attorney whether he had any connection whatever with the mail robbery at Collinsville he replied in a level, emotionless voice:

“No, sir.”

“Mr. Shelton,” came the next question, “did you ever talk to Art Newman about any robbery?”

“No, sir.”

“Were you ever in the dining-room of Charles Birger’s home at Harrisburg, Illinois, when a robbery was discussed and the proceeds of a robbery talked about or divided?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you friendly with Charles Birger?”

“No, sir.”

One phase of the District Attorney’s cross-examination relieved the tension of the proceedings. When asked where he lived in East St. Louis Shelton leaned back in his chair, studied the ceiling, turned to smile at the judge, then stared at the floor. Finally his lawyer came to his rescue with an objection, which the court sustained.

“How long have you lived in East St. Louis?” he was asked.

“About one year. Since December 1925.”

“What is your present business?”

After a long pause Shelton replied:

“Collection agency.”

Guffaws from the spectators disrupted proceedings for several minutes.

Earl and Bernie, following Carl on the stand, corroborated his testimony. So did a succession of other witnesses—Joe McGlynn, an East St. Louis lawyer who had accompanied the brothers on the morning of January 27; Delos Duty, who confirmed their statement that they had called at his office in Marion before noon; an East St. Louis taxicab operator who denied that Harvey Dungey was in his employ at the time of the robbery; Mrs. Mack Pulliam, who created something of a sensation when she related that Birger had told her husband, in her hearing, that he intended to pin the robbery on his former friends. And defense attorneys, in their closing arguments, hammered on the obvious animus of Birger and Newman.

The jury, however, preferred to believe the accusers. Five hours after receiving the case the jurors brought in a verdict of guilty. The defendants took it without the twitch of a facial muscle; their wives, seated in the spectators’ section of the courtroom, were equally stoic.

The next day the three Shelton brothers were sentenced to twenty-five years in the federal penitentiary.

The proceedings at Quincy threw light on many aspects of the gang war; others were clarified, more or less, by Art Newman’s “inside story,” which the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ran simultaneously with its reports of the Shelton trial.
^*

Newman dated his acquaintance with the Sheltons from the
time when S. Glenn Young and his wife were shot in the Okaw Bottoms. On the representation of a friend that the brothers were “high-class boys” who were broke and in trouble, he gave them free board and room at the Arlington Hotel, the disreputable East St. Louis establishment of which he was then proprietor. Despite some friction, all remained on good terms until Newman shot and killed a friend of his three free boarders in a barroom brawl. (He was acquitted on the usual plea of self-defense.) After the killing he spent a year in Memphis. When he returned he discovered that the Sheltons were still his enemies, so he joined forces with Birger.

(Ironically, it was Carl Shelton who had introduced him to Birger in the first place. “Boys,” Carl had said to Newman and Freddie Wooten, “I want you to meet a high-class man. If you ever need any help in Williamson County he’s the one who can give it to you.”)

The first killings in the gang war had taken place before Newman returned to Illinois, but he told the reporters what he had heard about them. Walker and Smith, who died in August 1926, were killed by a gangster whom he refused to name, “but that wasn’t hardly a gang shooting—it was just a drunken brawl.” On the other hand the attack on Holland and Pulliam, in which one was killed and the other wounded, was the work of Birger’s men, who expected to find Carl Shelton in the company of the two victims. The Sheltons retaliated with the murder of “High Pockets” McQuay, Birger’s bartender, and “Casey” Jones.

Newman still sorrowed over the death of Jones. “We gave him a mighty fine funeral,” he assured the reporters. “It cost $498. Charlie Birger paid for it because Casey was a good man and
Charlie issued orders that he was to have plenty of flowers.”

Newman admitted that the Birger gang had threatened Joe Adams and that they had taken $750 in a raid on his roadhouse, but he knew nothing about the murder. On the afternoon the corpulent mayor was killed, he and Connie Ritter were in Marion, Birger was at Shady Rest, Wooten at East St. Louis.

“Of course,” Newman said, “we didn’t shed any tears about Adams getting killed. We all had a drink on it and if we had known who shot him we would have bought them a drink too.”

With the arrest of the Sheltons for mail robbery, and the death of Joe Adams, Birger concluded that the war had ended in his favor. He no longer needed to keep an armed garrison at Shady Rest. The men left, and thus only Steve George, the caretaker, and his wife were at the resort on the night it was destroyed. (Four bodies, in fact, were found.)

The three gangsters told Sam O’Neal that they planned “to get the hell out of these parts” as soon as the Shelton trial was over; that was why they were willing to tell their story.

The verdict in the Shelton trial caused a sensation; so did the revelations of Art Newman. But the biggest sensation of all made headlines on February 5. The body of Lory Price had been found.

That morning a farmer walking across a field near Dubois, a little town in the southeastern corner of Washington County thirty-five miles north of Herrin, had come across a partly clothed dead body. Several bullet-holes were visible. Evidently it had lain there for several days, since animals had gnawed the hands away. County officials, summoned at once, identified the dead man as the missing state policeman.

Reporters broke the news to the Sheltons, in jail in Quincy awaiting removal to Leavenworth. Bernie said: “Oh”; Earl was silent; Carl asked whether they had also found the body of Mrs. Price.

“I hope she’s living so she can tell who did it. That’s what I hope.”

The remark seemed to be significant, and the reporter pursued it.

“Have you any idea who killed Lory Price?” he asked.

“Well, this is my theory. You know he used to hang around Charlie Birger’s place, and the papers said he was there a few nights before it was burned down, and Birger, you know, is always suspicious of spies. I always figured he did away with Price on the theory that Price was spying to inform those who destroyed it of a good time to do it. I never had any trouble with Price, and I don’t know his wife.”

Art Newman, still in touch with the
Post-Dispatch
men, would say only that “Slim”—the dead officer’s nickname—“was a friend of our crowd and the Shelton gang must have got him.”

Birger could not be located.

Southern Illinois simmered with speculation about the murder of Price and the fate of his wife, but nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except a trial—strictly speaking, two trials—to which few, in the prevailing excitement, paid much attention. The principals were only minor hoodlums charged with robbery, and neither their status nor their crime was important enough to attract notice.

In January Sheriff Oren Coleman had raided a whorehouse in Herrin, where he found several articles that had been stolen in two separate robberies not long before. He arrested the proprietor, a young woman who went by the name of Jackie Williams; Pearl Phelps, a girl who was present; and three young hangers-on of Charlie Birger. A fourth was picked up subsequently.

The four men were tried at Marion early in March for one of the robberies, and freed when the jury failed to reach a verdict. The next day three of them went on trial for the second offense. This time they were convicted, and sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary.

The principal witnesses for the prosecution were the two women. At the time of their arrest they had been on intimate terms with two of the defendants, but during the weeks they
spent in jail—the sheriff had held them on a liquor charge—they became convinced that their lovers had thrown them over. On the stand they testified with venom. They swore that the defendants had brought the stolen property to Jackie’s place and left it there, that they had forced them at gunpoint to indulge in abnormal sexual practices, and that they had threatened them with death if they ever revealed what had happened. The second jury believed them.

One of the defendants thus convicted was Harry Thomasson, nineteen years old. With five brothers he had been orphaned at an early age, and had spent his boyhood in orphanages and foster homes. A year before his conviction, he and his brother Elmo, two years his senior, had become attached to Birger, who took them into his gang when he assembled it. Harry had not seen Elmo since the night Shady Rest was destroyed, and by the time of his trial he had become convinced that his brother was one of the four people whose bodies were found in the ruins.

While Thomasson was being held in the Williamson County jail awaiting trial on the robbery charges, State’s Attorney Roy C. Martin of Franklin County, in which Joe Adams had been killed, worked on a clue. In his possession was the note that the murderers had handed their victim before they shot him. It read: