 |
| (Gustave Marx. Buffalo Times. November 23, 1923) |
The car barn bandits were every Chicagoan’s worst nightmare. Four bored boys, armed and out for thrills and let the consequences be damned.
A string of robberies had plagued the city since early March
1903. Then, in July, the bandits killed two men while robbing Benjamin La
Gross’s saloon on North Ashland Avenue.
Toward the end of August, three boy bandits raided the city’s
car barns, killing two men before escaping with almost $2300. Since then, the
police had beaten the streets for nearly two months with no results.
Detectives had dug up a few leads, but nothing they could sink
their teeth into.
The first actual break in the case came in late
November when detectives captured Gustave Marx.
In early October, Assistant Police Chief Herman
Schuettler received a tip about Marx. He had been seen waving two magazine
revolvers and flashing large amounts of cash at a local saloon. Marx reportedly
told patrons he was “ready for any policeman who attempted to arrest him.” The
magazine guns made Schuettler figure Marx was in on the car barn job.
Detectives John Quinn and William Blaul had
been searching for Marx since then. And then they found him entirely by
accident.
While making their rounds, Quinn saw Marx
standing by the bar at Greenberg’s Saloon at 401 Addison Avenue. He turned to
his partner and said, “There’s the fellow who has been doing the hold-ups with
the magazine gun. Go around the back way, and we’ll get him.”
When Marx saw Quinn, he started for the back
door. But he was too late. Blaul blocked the only way out.
“Hello, Gus,” whispered Quinn. “I want you.”
And just like that, Marx jerked out his
revolver and let loose a deadly barrage of shells. Quinn fell to the floor. But
when Marx turned to shoot Blaul, the detective had his gun pointed at him. He
put one round in Marx’s leg and another in his shoulder.
Marx fell to the floor, still shooting until
Blaul kicked the gun out of his hand. Both men were taken to Alexian Brothers Hospital. Detective Quinn died several hours later. Marx was
patched up and taken to the police station for questioning.
It didn’t take long for detectives and
reporters to discover Gustave Marx was a different breed of a murderer than the
city had seen before—bold, brash, and proud. He seemed to gain energy, bragging
about the gang’s crime spree.
Emil Roeski
“The murder and hold-up business is a science,” Marx told the reporter for The Inter Ocean. “Successful robbery means cool heads and steady hands. Only a cool-headed man could do what I have done.
“The street hold-up man is a dirty coward. In
our business, we must sometimes be murderers. We can’t always get the money
without a fight.” And then, after taking a moment to think, he added, “When
we fight, we fight to kill and don’t take time to worry about it afterward.”
The facts certainly backed him up. During their
short crime spree, the car barn bandits had killed eight men, wounded five
more, and robbed nearly a dozen businesses.
Marx explained his philosophy of life, death,
and, more importantly, what motivated him to kill.
“A bandit—that’s what they call me—has
always gotta be ready to die. When I went into the business, I made up my mind
that it was death to me or the other fellow. That’s why I killed Detective
Quinn. I expected to be killed, but this is a game where you kill as many as
you can before they kill you. I never shot a man to scare him. It is always
shoot to kill with the first shot. If your man doesn’t throw up his hands, get
him on the spot.
“Of course, murder isn’t a hold-up man’s
object, but it is a business where murder figures and you can’t cut it out.
What’s the difference, anyhow? There are too damn many people walking around
town. They ought to be glad to be put out of their misery. Still, I always told
the other boys that shooting was a bad business, for it might put the police
after us.”
Marx looked around the cell again as if drawing
energy from his words. Then he threw a quick smile at the reporter and
continued.
“I’m caught. That’s all there is to it. If they
let me out in the street with a good gun, I’ll show you a pile of dead
policemen that will open your eyes.”
Whatever else you can say, Gustave Marx wasn’t
sorry for his crimes—only for getting caught.
And then, to prove there is no honor among
thieves, Marx quickly sold out his associates, saying Harvey Van Dine, Emil
Roeski, and himself robbed the saloon on the corner of Otto Street and Ashland
Avenue. Roeski shot a man in the back. Peter Niedemeyer lost his cool and did
the shooting at the car barns.
There was more, but that information allowed
the police to close several open cases. It also gave them everything they
needed to round up Marx’s companions.
Harvey Van Dine
Gustave Marx was a mere boy. He had a slim, muscular build, stood about five feet ten inches tall, and didn’t look like a criminal. His companions, Van Dine and Niedemier, were handsome, clean-cut young men from respectable families.
Van Dine had an athletic body, red hair, and a long face.
Niedemier was shorter, rough talking, with an unintelligent look on his face.
One reporter believed his mouth was “cruel and bitterly vicious.”
Roeski was nothing more than a dumb brute. He was “medium height
and weight, red-nosed, weak-featured, and watery-eyed.” His hands twitched
whenever he spoke.
None of the boy bandits had much of an education. They attended
Hamilton School for a few short years, then were allowed to run wild. Van Dine
(age 24) served in Cuba during the Spanish War, rising to the rank of first
sergeant.
They called themselves the “Automatic Trio” because of their
rapid-fire magazine-loading weapons. The guns gave them a leg up over their
prey and the police.
Marx explained why he betrayed his confederates. They’d agreed
that should one of them be captured, the others would bust him out. “The others
were to raid the jail or police station, shoot the officers, and release the
prisoner from his cell. We swore to stand by each other.”
Van Dine and Niedemier hadn’t kept their promise, so he turned
on them and fed the police information detailing their crimes and whereabouts.
After Marx’s capture, the
action shifted to the Indiana sand dunes.
Henry Riechers, a schoolteacher at Clark
Station in Lake County, Indiana, spotted a group of strangers on a trip to the
grocery store. One of them looked like a kid he had seen in the papers, so he
went back inside and took another look.
The next thing he knew, Riechers found
himself following the men down the Baltimore and Ohio tracks to a cave in the
sand dune country. When he returned to town, Riechers wired the chief of police
in Chicago.
The chief sent a dozen detectives led by
Captain Sheehan to follow up on the tip. He had little confidence that Riechers
had spotted the boys he’d been looking for. There’d been dozens of sightings
over the past few months, and none had panned out. This was likely another dead
end, but he had to run it down.
The detectives followed Riechers to the
dugout, then spread out around it. As they closed in, Detective Driscoll called
out, “It doesn’t look as though there is anybody in there.”
“Don’t anybody fire,” hollered Sheehan,
“until we know if they are the right people.”
Driscoll hurled a chunk of wood at the
dugout. Bang! A shot tore through his abdomen, and he fell to the ground. One
officer dragged him out of the way while the other six opened fire on the
dugout.
The three bandits hiding inside rushed out
and raced for cover. Niedemier ran a short distance, threw himself on the
tracks of the Michigan Central Railway, then opened fire with his rapid-fire
pistols. Roeski split off from the pack and ran for the brush.
Van Dine’s movements were slow and
deliberate. He took aim at Detective Zimmer, who was concealed behind a tree,
and put a bullet through his head. His second shot tore a hole through Zimmer’s
arm.
Van Dine told detectives that was all he
could see, so he “hit all there was of him.”
The bandits ran for it in the confusion
after the detectives were shot. In about a mile, they came to the tracks of the
Pennsylvania Railroad. There was an engine with a car behind it. They ordered
brakeman L. T. Sovea to uncouple the car from the locomotive, but he tried to
play the hero and grabbed Niedemier’s gun. The bandit put a bullet in Sovea’s
head, killing him instantly.
Van Dine, Niedemier, and Roeski jumped on
the locomotive and ordered the engineer to put on steam. After the train had
traveled about two miles, the engineer slowed the train down, jumped off, and
raced into the woods.
They picked the worst spot to leave the train.
The terrain was rough, sandy, and cut up with gravel pits, making travel almost
impossible. And the fresh snow made them easy to track for farmers who were
used to hunting rabbits.
Niedemier took a charge of buckshot in his
head. Blood streamed down his forehead into his eyes, making it nearly
impossible to see. Another shot tore a chunk of hair from Van Dine’s head, and
the one after that struck his leg, almost toppling him to the ground.
Peter Niedemier
“The posse was closing in on all sides,” said one reporter. “There was no escape. The time had come either to surrender or to fight to the death.”
Van Dine said they could have fought on, but
what good would it have done?
“I could have killed no end of them,” he
bragged. “They came walking along like a drove of quail. I could have covered
the ground with them. I had plenty of cartridges, and I generally hit what I
shoot. It wouldn’t [have] done me any good, though. I don’t shoot unless it is
necessary.”
Posse member Hugo Kemp recounted the details of
Sovea’s killing and the capture of Niedemier and Van Dine.
“I heard a man command Sovea to throw the
switch or die. Sovea grappled with his assailant and attempted to wrest a
revolver from the desperado’s hand. The bandit threw the switch himself. Then,
he “shot [Sovea] in the face, instantly killing him.
“I ran towards the bandit. He fired several
times at me with a revolver. I succeeded in shooting him in the right cheek
with birdshot but not seriously injuring him.” Then the bandits jumped on the
train and sped off towards Liverpool.
The farmers walked about a mile and a half
towards Liverpool until they saw a trail of bloody footprints in the snow that
led into the corn shocks. Fred Miller, the posse leader, warned his men to move
back and fire into the corn shocks.
“We were preparing to shoot,” continued Kemp,
“when we heard a voice from within the corn shock say, ‘We surrender.’”
“Throw your guns out and come out with your
hands up,” Miller ordered.
The bandits tossed out three magazine rifles
and a revolver. Then Van Dine stood with his hands in the air, pleading for his
life. “For God’s sake, boys, do not shoot me. I want to see my mother before I
die.”
Niedemier stepped out a moment later, saying he
knew the men would do the right thing and turn them over to the police. He
wanted to see his mother, too. And then he turned on his friend, pointing to
Roeski’s tracks in the snow.
Not long after that, Roeski was caught sitting
on a bench in the Wabash Station at Aetna, Indiana. He probably would have made
a clean getaway if a posse member hadn’t remembered his face from earlier in
the day.
The Chicago police didn’t waste any time after
the rabbit hunters turned the men over. They swooped in, loaded the prisoners
on the train, and rushed them back to the city. They didn’t want to take any
chances that Indiana authorities would claim them for their own.
After their capture, the boy bandits spoke
freely of their crimes.
Niedemier killed his first victim in Canada in
1896 when he was fifteen. The man caught him sneaking a ride on a train outside
Portage, Ontario, and ordered him off.
“I fired and gave it to him four times,” said
Niedemier. “I searched his pockets and couldn’t find a cent. Afterward, I
overheard the trainmen say they found $40 on my man. It made me sore to have
missed it.”
Around the same time, he killed two men while robbing
a stagecoach near Colorado Springs. And then a section foreman who gave his
life for a few dollars and a gold watch.
Marx, Niedemier, and Roeski pulled their first
robbery on Sheffield Avenue. They pulled their second job at a saloon on
Ashland Avenue and Otto Street. “We killed the saloonkeeper and only got
$3.35,” growled Marx.
It didn’t matter. “The humdrum of ordinary
working for a living,” said Marx, “appeared too monotonous. So, we decided to
live a life of crime.”
They robbed Peter Gorski’s place at 2611
Milwaukee Avenue. “We got about $9 in that one,” added Marx, “and killed or
shot no one.”
Van Dine and Niedemier robbed a saloon on North
Forty-seventh and West North Avenue. They killed two men because the men
wouldn’t put their hands up. They got about $8.00, or $4.00, for each man they
killed.
The next place they robbed was Greenberg’s
Saloon on Roberts and West Madison Street. “We made that Jew look funny,” said
Marx. “We told him to throw his hands up, and he did and told us the place was
ours.”
They got little money there, either. That got
them thinking they needed to pull a bigger job. So, they started investigating
the car barns and quickly decided on the ones on Sixty-first Street and
Sixty-ninth Streets. If things went well, they could take them both the same
night.
Ironically, they rode the State Street car to
the job, got off at Sixty-third Street, and walked the remaining six blocks,
reaching the car barns at about 1 a.m.
Marx went in first. He pulled his gun and
ordered the two men in the reception room to put their hands up. Van Dine
smashed the red glass over the cashier’s desk with a sledgehammer. Then Marx
told him to bust the door down.
Niedemier busted the outside window and opened
fire on the cashier’s station. Cashier Frank Stewart crumpled to the floor,
dead. Clerks James Edmonds and Henry Biehl fell to the floor in the confusion.
Van Dine whispered to Edmonds to roll over and play dead. Biehl hid in a
closet, trying to stop the blood dripping from his side.
Motorman James Johnson slept on a bench,
waiting for his shift to start. When he opened his eyes, Marx shot him in the
head.
Van Dine jumped over the counter, opened his
sack, and bagged up the money. Some of it fell on the floor, and Niedemier
swore at him for being such a klutz.
When they were done, they crept out the window
and hurried into the darkness. They met a short time later at Jackson Park,
opposite the Field Museum, and hid in some bushes. At daylight, they divvied up
the money and headed out. Each man got about $750.
The police expected the bandits
to spend the money foolishly on booze and women, making them easy to find. But
they doubled down and invested their take in better weapons.
Marx and Niedemier traveled to Cripple Creek,
Colorado, to buy dynamite. Van Dine visited Cincinnati and picked up some
magazine guns.
All their talk made Emil Roeski sick. He had
nothing but contempt for his fellow criminals.
“I was the only one who could implicate them in
the car barn case,” he said. “They would have killed me today. But I knew it
and watched them. I had to protect myself against their murderous designs.”
The trial bored Marx. He preferred death to
time in jail. Besides, he expected to be hanged.
For Niedemier, the trial was a stage. “The
conceited, arrogant, good-looking Niedemier doesn’t think about being hanged,”
noted the correspondent for The Inter Ocean. “He counts the trial as a
show at which he is the chief attraction.”
Van Dine was the exact opposite of the other
two. He showed a keen interest in the trial, following the prosecutor’s every
move. When something caught his attention, he would tap his attorney on the
shoulder and whisper in his ear. The reporter believed Van Dine “appeared more
human than the other two.” It could have been his red hair or the fact that he
showed an interest in the proceedings.
The jury deliberated for thirteen hours before
returning a guilty verdict against Marx, Niedemier, and Van Dine. It looked as
if Van Dine might get off with a life sentence, but the jurors determined he,
too, should die, and fixed the penalty for all three men at death by hanging.
A death sentence didn’t seem to shut the young
bandits up. If anything, it loosened their tongues. Peter Niedemier and Gustave
Marx remained game almost to the end, bragging about their misdeeds and the men
they had killed.
“I have killed 23 men,” Niedemier told
reporters in March. I will furnish the list of my victims for $16,500.
“I should write the story of my life,” he
exclaimed. “It would be the most remarkable story of a young man’s life ever
written. The exploits of Jesse James will no longer seem as remarkable. My
story would surpass them. I have killed twenty-three men and wounded
seventeen.”
Marx said he killed five men and wounded a
dozen, but the main thing he wanted people to know was that he wasn’t a coward.
“I haven’t got religion yet,” said Marx. “I
don’t know whether I will get it or not. Lots of preachers have been after me.”
When he realized he would die, Marx found
religion. Niedemier was on a fast track to hell, and religion was a speed bump
on the road. He didn’t have time for it until a few days before his date with
the hangman. Then he asked to see a priest, but only if no one told his
friends. He didn’t want to appear weak.
Of the three, only Van Dine was at peace with
himself. “I reckon this verdict means I’m going up to heaven,” he told
reporters.
The car barn bandits were hanged in the Cook
County Jail on April 22, 1904. Peter Niedemier met his maker at 10:26, Gustav
Marx at 11:17, and Harvey Van Dine at 11:55.
Niedemier spent his final night laughing and
joking with the death watch, and even though he was weak and pale from two
failed suicide attempts, he smoked the night away.
Marx and Van Dine slept peacefully through the
night. They rose at 6 a.m., enjoyed a hearty breakfast, and said their prayers.
Van Dine visited with his girlfriend, Mamie Dunn. Then, the two men walked to
the chapel and said prayers with the Sisters of Mercy.
Niedemier ate breakfast alone in his cell,
refusing God and prayers. When it was his turn, he refused to walk to the
gallows. The guards carried him.
Witnesses said he was “pale and trembling and
refused to stand on the drop.” He sat on a chair that fell with him. Nine minutes later, he was dead.
Marx walked to the scaffold unassisted and
waited quietly while they fixed the rope and hood. He died saying his prayers.
The doctor pronounced him dead six minutes later.
Van Dine stood erect with his head held high,
making it easy for the executioner to attach the rope and hood. Like Marx, he
died reciting his prayers. Van Dine’s neck snapped, and he died almost
instantaneously.
The three primary architects of the car barn
robberies were dead, but Emil Roeski escaped the hangman’s noose with a life
sentence.
“Roeski was never present at any robbery or
murder,” said Marx. He waited across the street when he shot Quinn. Van Dine
said Roeski was nothing but a stooge or an errand boy. He had killed no one.
Emil Roeski was transferred from the Joliet
Prison to the Chester Hospital for the Insane in December 1913.
The car barn bandit’s reign of terror was over.
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