EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (12 page)

Part Four: 20Th Century American Psychopathic Killers

Baby Face Nelson

John Dillinger was sitting in the passenger seat as Baby Face Nelson, drove across St. Paul to collect their associate, Homer Van Meter, from his hotel. Nelson, never what you would describe as the most patient of men, went through a red light and scraped the bumper of an oncoming vehicle. The two cars stopped and the driver of the other one got out and approached Baby Face’s car, berating him for his bad driving. Baby Face calmly pulled out his .45 pistol from under his jacket and shot the man between the eyes. When Dillinger protested, saying, ‘You didn’t have to do that!’ Baby Face replied, shrugging his shoulders, ‘Hell, why not?’ He pushed the corpse away from the car, jumped in and drove off.

Of all the ruthless killers that the Depression era spawned in America, there were few as cold-blooded as Lester Gillis, aka Baby Face Nelson. Baby Face – a name he loathed – quite simply loved to kill. Other gangsters of the time such as Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, would kill to get out of a tight spot or to evade capture; Nelson killed for fun, because he liked it. Even his close associates were scared of him.

Born in Chicago’s down-at-heel southwest side in December 1908, Nelson was a small man with the face of a spoilt brat. Five feet four inches in height, his parents were poor immigrant Scots who had moved south from Nova Scotia and had never adapted to the harsh realities of city life. Their son Lester had no trouble, however, in fitting in and making his way through the hustle and bustle. His father worked as a packer in an ice house on Canal Street while his mother, a devout Christian, tutored French. The parents were always working while their sons wandered the streets, learning how to be tough guys.

He had to be tough because his diminutive size made him easy meat for the neighbourhood bullies. Before long, however, he had learned to fight back and what he lacked in height he made up for in sheer vindictiveness. People began to avoid him and the switchblade he had learned to use.

He gradually began to become involved in petty crime, mugging drunks, robbing stores and stealing cars. He became familiar with the local police station and the local police began to look out for the sandy-haired boy in the alleys near his house. He was sure to be doing something wrong because that was the way he lived.

He left school early and began hanging around with a gang, the Halsted Street Boys. In 1922, aged fourteen, after being arrested for car theft, he was sent to a boys’ home for two years. Released in 1924, he returned to the streets but after only five months of freedom, he was locked up again after breaking into a department store.

In 1926 he was out again, working for the gangster who ruled Chicago, Al Capone. Capone was coining it from Prohibition. The Volstead Act had banned alcohol production and sale in the United States but it had become no more than a license to print money for the mobsters of the time. They manufactured their own booze or imported it from Canada and other places and sold it in speakeasies.

Capone was a New York gangster who had come to Chicago in 1919 and through corruption of police officers, politicians and city officials, had created a crime empire that floated on a sea of illicit alcohol. He creamed money off the unions and ran brothels and protection rackets.

This world, where violence was never far away – there was always someone who resisted or failed to pay on time – was tailor-made for Baby Face Nelson. Capone had delegated to his top man, Jack McGurn, the task of creating an army of ‘convincers’, men who would be paid good money to enforce Capone’s rule. Nelson signed up. But he proved too bloodthirsty even for these bloodthirsty men. Too many ‘clients’ were ending up dead as a result of his methods which usually involved a pocket knife, a .32 calibre revolver, a Thompson machine gun or a baseball bat. He was upsetting too many people, especially as some of the union men he ‘disciplined’ were well-connected, either with politicians or the local Mafia. Capone began to get nervous, telling McGurn to let Baby Face Nelson go his own way.

Nelson opted for a new career – armed robbery. He stole a car and robbed a number of Chicago jewellery shops. It was a lot of risk for not a lot of money especially as the most he got away with was a measly $2,000. Then, he hit paydirt towards the end of 1930 with a $5,000 heist from a successful jeweller in Wheaton, Illinois. As Wall Street was collapsing, Lester Gillis was doing alright. He even had a girlfriend, eighteen-year-old Helen Wawzynak who he planned on marrying.

It all went wrong in January 1931 when he was arrested in the course of a robbery. He was sentenced to one year to life and went to Joliet penitentiary. He was also charged with the robbery at Wheaton and when that came to court, his lawyers reckoned, he would be looking at twenty-five years inside, at least.

He was married now and Helen visited often but he was not inside for very long. On 17 February 1932 he was taken to a pre-trial hearing at the Wheaton Civic Building, handcuffed to a plain-clothes detective. On the way back to Joliet he pretended to be ill and was freed from his handcuffs to use the toilet. He immediately launched himself on the detective, sending him sprawling. Nelson sped out of the carriage and jumped onto the station platform before running down an embankment and onto the running board of a waiting car which sped away.

From Chicago, he travelled with Helen to Reno, Nevada, working there for a while in a succession of odd jobs. From Reno, he moved on to California, one step ahead of the cops who followed his footsteps to Reno, but arrived too late.

In California he came under the protection of Sicilian gangland boss, Joe Parente who employed him as a jack of all trades. He was a bodyguard, barman and sometimes a parking valet, a lowly job that he hated. Nonetheless, he kept his nose clean, got on with the job and gained the respect of Parente who promoted him to bootlegger.

It was at this time that Lester Gillis changed his name to Baby Face Nelson, or rather, George Nelson, a name borrowed from a boxer of the time. It was Parente who added the epithet ‘Baby face’, the nickname that Nelson loathed but which stuck with him.

His job was now to get local speakeasies to sell Parente’s illegal alcohol. With numerous villains ploughing the same furrow, it took a special skill to force a bar-owner to change allegiance. Baby Face Nelson possessed that skill in spades and if not-so-gentle persuasion did not work, there was always the machine gun or the pipe bomb to fall back on.

He gained a reputation as a man that was crossed at your peril, a man for whom ruthless violence was an easy option.

Around this time, Nelson met John Paul Chase, another of Parente’s men. Chase would become Baby Face’s right-hand man – he worshipped the pint-size terror. The two of them planned and schemed, linking up with another couple of Parente’s men: Tommy Carroll, a former boxer and Eddie Green, a bank marker or ‘jug maker’. A jug maker was a man who scouted banks to find out which was most suitable for robbery. Green was one of the best. They were both highly experienced bank robbers who had hit numerous banks across the Midwest states.

Tired of Parente and his bootlegging work, Nelson, Helen and Chase left Chicago and drove to the Midwest, stopping at Long Beach in Indiana, a favourite place for bad guys in search of easy work. Nelson sought out Homer Van Meter, John Dillinger’s top man, asking to enlist in Dillinger’s gang. Van Meter gave him short shrift, however, despite Baby Face’s glowing CV. Not long after, however, he bumped into Green and Carroll again and they decided to get together to rob banks.

They hit lots of small town banks in Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska, stealing piles of cash. They would run in, spray the ceiling with bullets, overcome the guards, gather the customers and tellers into a corner, get the cash drawers and the vault open and roar off in their getaway car. If anyone tried to stop them, Baby Face would do what he did best with his machine gun. Chase would drive the car and Helen would sometimes be hiding in the back seat.

He loved the publicity he garnered. It became his gang in newspapers that had somehow found his nickname. Baby Face Nelson became famous. The only thing that really annoyed him was when one of his robberies was credited to another gangster – to pretty Boy Floyd or Dillinger.

He lived in the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco, hanging out in its speakeasy with stars and celebrities such as Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Harry Houdini and Charlie Chaplin. He was having a ball and it got even better when Homer Van Meter invited him, at last, to join the Dillinger gang. Van Meter and John Hamilton were the only members of the gang still at large. The others, including Dillinger, himself, were locked up, but they were planning on getting Dillinger out of Crown Point Jail in Indiana soon.

A couple of weeks after Van Meter’s approach, Dillinger did, indeed, break out, being introduced to Baby Face Nelson in St. Paul. Their partnership got off to a bad start, however, Nelson trying to lay down the law to Dillinger. ‘Before we go any further,’ he snarled, ‘I want you all to know I don't take no orders; I walk into a bank, open fire, kill anything that moves, I grab the money and am outta there! If you don't like it, find yourself another patsy!’ Apparently, Van Meter, sick of this aggressive little man, went for his gun at this point, as did Baby Face. They both had to be restrained.

Their first job was to rob the Security National Bank at Sioux Falls. When they entered the premises, however, announcing their intentions, someone set off the alarm. Nelson went ballistic, screaming at the assembled customers and tellers, threatening to kill them all. Dillinger reminded him that he was the lookout and ordered him over to the window. Outside he saw a police car arrive. Climbing onto a desk, he opened fire through the plate glass window and a police officer just getting out of the car, fell to the ground, badly wounded. Nelson was excited and Dillinger began to wonder what he had got himself into. He had always avoided shooting policemen, realising the trouble it brought down on you.

Eight days later, they hit a bank in Mason City, Iowa. This time Dillinger kept Nelson outside, in the getaway car. The robbery did not go well. The bank manager locked himself in his office with the keys to the vault and there was a guard in a steel cage taking pot-shots at them and dropping teargas canisters on them. A police officer in a building across the road shot Dillinger in the arm and they only just escaped, surrounded by hostages, one of whom Baby Face would have shot for swearing at him if Dillinger had not nudged the hand in which he was holding his gun.

The authorities were clamping down on them, however. J. Edgar Hoover headed up a department dedicated to taking gangsters such as Dillinger, Floyd and Nelson out of circulation. They almost got Dillinger in St. Paul but he escaped after a gun battle. Baby Face and Helen, meanwhile, hid out in a rented cabin in the wooded area of Iron County, Wisconsin. The others disappeared for a while, but Eddie Green died in a gunfight in St. Paul in April after agents located him at his girlfriend’s apartment.

Dillinger was now Public Enemy Number one with a reward of $20,000 on his head. This was much to Baby Face’s annoyance. He was only Public Enemy Number Two with a reward of only $10,000 on his head.

When they got together again to plan their next move, in April 1934 at a lodge in northern Wisconsin, they came under the scrutiny of the local police, curious as to why a group of smooth, suited city slickers would be spending time there in the off-season. They passed their suspicions to the FBI and they had soon worked out that the men at the lodge were the Dillinger gang.

On the evening of 22 April, a convoy of vehicles rolled towards the lodge with their lights extinguished. It began badly when three innocent men, emerging from the lodge, were shot, one fatally. Hearing the gunshots, Dillinger, Van Meter, Carroll and Hamilton fled into the woods behind the lodge. Nelson had been asleep with Helen in a cabin outside the main building. Characteristically, he emerged from the building, gun in each hand blazing. He then slipped into the cover provided by the forest. The agents followed. Dillinger, Hamilton, Van Meter and Carroll escaped in stolen cars. Nelson found himself in a clearing on the edge of which were small fishing cabins. There was a car in which the keys had fortunately been left in the ignition. As he climbed in, however, ready to make his escape, another car drove into the clearing. He hunched down, realising immediately that the three men in the car were FBI agents looking for him. He jumped out, pointed his guns at the three men and opened fire, emptying his weapons into them. One died instantly and the others were seriously wounded. He pulled them from the vehicle and sped off into the night.

He finally made it to Public Enemy Number One a short while later when Dillinger was killed by a gang of agents as he left a cinema in Chicago. He had been hiding out at an Indian reservation near lake Flambeaux in Wisconsin but returned to Chicago where he was reunited with Helen. It was his intention to put together a new gang and to that end he met up with Chase. However, Eddie Green was dead and Tommy Carroll had been gunned down by police officers in Waterloo, Iowa. The authorities were beginning to win the war against crime. John Hamilton was killed, as was Homer Van Meter, dying in a hail of bullets in St. Paul. Baby Face moved back to the west coast.