CRIME: Two for One

“We’re going to get that fellow. Nobody can kill one of our men and get away with it.”

Such was the sentence passed last spring by Director J. Edgar Hoover of the U. S. Department of Justice’s Division of Investigation on Lester M. Gillis, 25. Since he was 13, pink-cheeked little Gillis had been in & out of reform school and prison as a smalltime automobile thief, hold-up man. bank robber. But he did not become a headline lawbreaker until last year when, under the name of George (“Baby Face”) Nelson, he turned up in the gang of the late John Dillinger. There he won himself a reputation as a “crazy killer” with a paranoiac hatred of police. After he had killed Federal Agent W. Carter Baum during an ambush at the Little Bohemia roadhouse at Spider Lake, Wis. the Department of Justice marked him down for certain death.

One day last week the Justice Department got a tip that Nelson, who had been hunted in the Chicago area for some six weeks, was heading for a house near suburban Barrington, Ill. Two by two. in fast new Hudsons. agents of the Department’s Chicago division rolled out for the chase. Together went pleasant, round-faced Inspector Samuel P. Cowley, 35, and clean-cut Herman E. Hollis, 28. Both were graduates of Washington law schools, both participants in the catching & killing of Dillinger. Cowley had also been in at the death of Charles (“Pretty Boy”) Floyd (TIME, Oct. 29). Hollis had been at Spider Lake when Nelson killed Agent Baum.

Near Barrington about mid-afternoon Agents Cowley and Hollis spotted Illinois license No. 639-578 on a Ford containing two men and a blonde woman. Recognizing that as Nelson’s number they gave hot chase. The proprietress of a filling station saw the two automobiles come roaring down the highway at 70-odd m. p. h., each one spitting bullets. Near the filling station, the agents pulled abreast of the fleeing outlaws. Tires shrieked as the Ford swerved into a side road. The Federal car screeched and skidded about 100 ft. down the highway before Agent Hollis could bring it to a stop. By that time Nelson’s woman had leaped out into a ditch. Screened by their engine hood, Nelson and his male companion were pumping machine gun bullets at the Federal men. From behind their own automobile the agents opened fire, Cowley with a machine gun, Hollis with an automatic shotgun. Each one had emptied his gun before he fell, riddled with bullets. The outlaws ceased firing. One of them, shot in the legs, was limping badly. Their woman ran to the Federal car, drove it back to pick them up. As the automobile disappeared westward a State policeman who had been hiding in the grass, uncertain which side to take, popped a rifle ineffectually.

With part of his skull shot away, Agent Hollis died at the Emergency Hospital in Harrington.* In a hospital at Elgin, Agent Cowley refused an operation until he could assure his famed chief, Melvin Purvis, that his opponent had indeed been “Baby Face” Nelson. Few hours later Cowley, too, died.

Out from Washington flew Inspector Hugh H. Clegg to direct the hunt of thousands of Federal, State and local officers for the only man who had ever lived to kill more than one Department of Justice agent. Early next morning the dead agents’ automobile was found abandoned in suburban Winnetka. The front seat was caked with blood. Soon after in Niles Center a bundle of blood-soaked men’s clothes was picked up.

A mysterious telephone call to a Chicago undertaker gave police directions which took them to a muddy ditch outside a cemetery in Niles Center. There, wrapped in a blanket, they found a small, naked corpse. There were eight bullet wounds in its legs, one big one in its belly beneath a wad of bloody cotton. A downy mustache was on its upper lip and four finger tips had been scarred by file and acid. But by prints of the unscarred fingers police quickly assured themselves that the round, blank face, now horribly contorted, was that of “Baby Face” Nelson. In Cook County’s morgue his body was stretched on the same rubber slab which had held John Dillinger just 130 days before. Newsreels touched a gruesome low by displaying the corpse uncovered to show all nine wounds.

In Washington, Attorney General Cummings spluttered triumphantly to newshawks: “Our men got him! Our men got him!” Chief Edgar Hoover was grim. “Yes, we got the guy but he killed two of our men. It was two lives for one.”

Because its own agents are ineligible for its rewards, the Department of Justice announced that its $5,000 offer for Nelson’s capture would gounpaid.

Almost certain were Federal agents that Nelson’s woman companion had been his 21-year-old wife Helen. A one-time Chicago salesgirl, she has borne him a son aged 5, a daughter aged 4. Last week as a “no quarter” hunt was supposed to be closing in on Helen Nelson, her terror-stricken father appealed to her through the Press: “Give up rather than face Government bullets.” But Federal Agents announced that they had already captured her the day after her husband’s death.

Having made good its sentence on Nelson, the Federal Government had nearly finished one of the most spectacularly successful manhunts in U. S. history. The hunt had cost the lives of three Federal agents, six local officers. But it had made the Government feared by criminals throughout the land. As 1934 began John Dillinger was leading as ruthless a gang of desperadoes as the Midwest had ever known. The Government met ruthlessness with ruthlessness. First Dillinger man to godown was Jack Klutas, shot near Chicago on Jan. 6. Herbert Youngblood followed him to death in March. Federal men got Dillinger himself in July. One month later Homer Van Meter was shot down in St. Paul. As 1934 drew to a close the only Dillinger gangster of any importance left at large was John Hamilton, 35-year-old bandit who killed a sheriff while helping his chief escape from jail at Lima, Ohio.

*Never officially revealed has been the actual killer of John Dillinger. But on news of Hollis’ death last week a Federal agent in Chicago blurted: “Damn them! Hollis killed Dillinger, and now they get him.”